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.
Four tracked signals shaped August 2026 in Brookland: one below-trend month for theft from vehicle and three sustained structural shifts, all pointing downward across property and violent crime categories. The sustained-shift signals are the more significant story here, each reflecting a multi-month change in the underlying rate rather than a single quiet period.
Theft from vehicle is the strongest individual signal, down 42.0% over the trailing 12 months, 142 incidents against 245 in the prior year. Robbery is also in sustained decline, 28 incidents in the current 12 months versus 64 in the year before, a drop of 56.2%. Motor vehicle theft has followed the same direction, off 58.7% year over year. Everything else tracked in Brookland this month fell within its normal range.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 142 incidents — about 53% below the 305 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 69, down 59% from 167 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 142, down 42% from 245 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 28, down 56% 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 August 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.”
Shaw
153 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 above Brookland's 142.
Open page →Takoma
153 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 above Brookland's 142.
Open page →Ivy City
128 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 below Brookland's 142.
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.