Brookland Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Brookland is the Northeast neighborhood organized around 12th Street NE and the Brookland-CUA Metro station, with the Catholic University campus and the Basilica of the National Shrine forming its institutional spine. The cluster extends east through Brentwood and Langdon, predominantly single-family residential blocks that face the Hyattsville border.
Five categories moved in Brookland this September, two running below trend in the current month and three showing structural shifts across the trailing 12 months. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime, with no spikes and no rare-event signals in the mix.
Theft from vehicle and burglary are the two single-month below-trend signals, with theft from vehicle down 39.7% over the past 12 months, 141 incidents against 234 in the year prior. Robbery rounds out the top three as a sustained multi-year shift, 27 incidents in the current 12 months against 64 in the prior period, a 57.8% decline that goes well beyond a quiet month. Motor vehicle theft shows a similar sustained move, down 56.5% year over year, while aggravated assault, at 29 incidents against a prior 17, is the one category running in the other direction.
Notable signals 2
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 141 incidents — about 54% below the 304 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 24 incidents — about 46% below the 44 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 73, down 57% from 168 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 141, down 40% from 234 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 27, down 58% from 64 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
How Brookland compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable theft from vehicle levels.”
Ivy City
139 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Brookland's 141.
Open page →Georgetown
151 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 above Brookland's 141.
Open page →Shaw
154 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 above Brookland's 141.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Brookland, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from DC Open Data — MPD's per-year Crime Incidents layers on the DCGIS ArcGIS Hub — mapped to 8 UCR Part 1 categories (vandalism and arson are not exposed in MPD's public feed and are excluded). The feed covers 2018-current and updates daily. Aggregated to neighborhood cluster × category × month, with each cluster page identified by its colloquial lead constituent (Adams Morgan, Petworth, Capitol Hill, etc.) rather than the numbered 'Cluster N' identifier.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.