Columbia Heights Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Columbia Heights sits on the rise above downtown along 14th Street NW, anchored by the DC USA retail complex and the Columbia Heights Metro station. The cluster extends west into Mount Pleasant's quieter rowhouse streets and north through Pleasant Plains and Park View, knitting Howard University's eastern edge into the neighborhood's residential fabric.
Three categories shifted structurally in Columbia Heights this September, all sustained shifts rather than single-month noise. The pattern is mixed: robbery and motor vehicle theft are running well below where they stood a year ago, while aggravated assault has moved in the opposite direction over the same multi-month stretch.
Robbery is down 45.1% against the prior 12 months, 100 incidents versus 182. Motor vehicle theft fell 40.8%, from 206 to 122. Against both of those declines, aggravated assault stands out: up 92.5% year-over-year, 102 incidents in the current 12 months against 53 in the prior period. That counter-trend in violent crime is the signal that carries the most weight this briefing. Everything else, burglary, theft from vehicle, and other larceny, ran within a narrower range and did not cross the sustained-shift threshold.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 100, down 45% from 182 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 122, down 41% from 206 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 102, up 93% from 53 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 Columbia Heights compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Congress Heights
118 incidents over the past 12 months — 16 above Columbia Heights's 102.
Open page →Union Station
65 incidents over the past 12 months — 37 below Columbia Heights's 102.
Open page →Deanwood
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 41 below Columbia Heights's 102.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Columbia Heights, 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.