Capitol Hill Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Capitol Hill is the rowhouse-and-Capitol-grounds neighborhood east of the U.S. Capitol, with Eastern Market and the Barracks Row commercial strip along 8th Street SE forming its commercial center. The cluster includes Lincoln Park, the namesake park ringed by Victorian and Federal-era houses to the east of the Capitol complex.
Three signals surfaced in Capitol Hill this June — one below-trend drop and two sustained structural shifts, both pointing downward. The month's shape is one of consolidating declines rather than fresh volatility: no spikes, no rare events, and the movement is concentrated in robbery and motor vehicle theft.
Robbery is the clearest story. The trailing 12-month total stands at 23 incidents against 65 in the prior year — down 64.6% — and that compression registers as both a single-month drop signal and a sustained structural shift, meaning the decline isn't a one-month anomaly but a durable change in baseline. Motor vehicle theft shows the same structural pattern: 106 incidents over the current 12 months vs. 216 in the prior period, a 50.9% reduction. Aggravated assault moved the other direction — 22 incidents in the current 12 months against 14 prior, up 57.1% — but did not cross a signal threshold this month, so it sits as context rather than a lead signal.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 23 incidents — about 77% below the 98 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 106, down 51% from 216 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 23, down 65% from 65 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 June 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 Capitol Hill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Mayfair
22 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Capitol Hill's 23.
Open page →Adams Morgan
25 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Capitol Hill's 23.
Open page →Fort Totten
25 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Capitol Hill's 23.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Capitol Hill, 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.