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.
Columbia Heights recorded four sustained shifts in June 2026 — no one-month spikes, no rare events, no streak breaks. The pattern is structural: multi-year baselines have moved, not just a single noisy month. Two categories ran sharply below their prior-year totals while two moved in the opposite direction, making this a mixed month rather than a broadly improving or worsening one.
Robbery and burglary are the clearest downward moves — robbery is down 58.1% against the prior 12 months (95 incidents vs. 227), and burglary is down 51.8% (41 vs. 85). Aggravated assault is the counterweight: up 67.9% over the same window, 89 incidents against 53 the year before. Motor vehicle theft also fell 52.2%, adding to the downward pressure on property crime, but the aggravated assault shift is large enough that the neighborhood's overall trajectory is not simply one of improvement.
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 95, down 58% from 227 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 119, down 52% from 249 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 41, down 52% from 85 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 89, up 68% 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 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 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.”
Douglas
63 incidents over the past 12 months — 26 below Columbia Heights's 89.
Open page →Union Station
60 incidents over the past 12 months — 29 below Columbia Heights's 89.
Open page →Congress Heights
122 incidents over the past 12 months — 33 above Columbia Heights's 89.
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.