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 categories moved in Capitol Hill this September, two as sustained multi-year structural shifts and one as a single-month below-trend signal. The overall shape is downward, concentrated in robbery and motor vehicle theft, with the rest of the tracked categories running close to prior-year levels.
Robbery is the clearest story: 24 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 52 in the year before, a 53.8% reduction, and that drop registers both as a single-month signal and as a sustained structural shift, meaning the change is not a one-month aberration. Motor vehicle theft shows the same structural pattern, down 52.3% year over year, 94 incidents against 197. Aggravated assault ran in the other direction, 21 incidents over the current 12 months against 17 in the prior period, a 23.5% rise, though it did not clear the threshold for a signal this month. Everything else, burglary, theft from vehicle, other larceny, and sexual assault, landed within range of prior-year counts.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 24 incidents — about 75% below the 96 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 94, down 52% from 197 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 24, down 54% from 52 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 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.”
Fort Stanton
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Capitol Hill's 24.
Open page →Fort Totten
22 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Capitol Hill's 24.
Open page →Adams Morgan
27 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Capitol Hill's 24.
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.