Congress Heights Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Congress Heights is the far-Southeast neighborhood at the city's southern tip, organized around the Congress Heights Metro station and the Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue commercial strip. The cluster extends through Bellevue and Washington Highlands, residential blocks that step down toward the Maryland line.
Two categories moved in Congress Heights this September briefing, one a single-month below-trend signal in robbery and one a structural multi-month shift in motor vehicle theft. The combination points in the same direction: violent and property crime are both running lower than prior-year periods, though the scale of the motor vehicle theft change is the more significant structural story.
Motor vehicle theft is down 49.6% over the trailing 12 months, 130 incidents against 258 in the year before, a sustained shift that reflects a multi-year repositioning rather than a single quiet month. Robbery, the top signal this briefing, recorded 76 incidents over the current 12 months against 81 in the prior period, down 6.2% year over year. Every other tracked category, including homicide, burglary, and aggravated assault, remained within its normal range for the month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 76 incidents — about 44% below the 135 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 130, down 50% from 258 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 Congress Heights 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.”
Howard University
74 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Congress Heights's 76.
Open page →Ivy City
74 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Congress Heights's 76.
Open page →Edgewood
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below Congress Heights's 76.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Congress 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.