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 in August 2026, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a multi-year structural shift. The month's shape is narrow but meaningful: robbery ran below its historical pace, and motor vehicle theft has been declining long enough to register as a sustained shift rather than a one-month anomaly.
Robbery is the stronger signal this month, with 72 incidents in the current 12-month window against 94 in the prior year, down 23.4%. Motor vehicle theft tells a more structural story: 133 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 273 the year before, a 51.3% reduction that reflects a multi-year repositioning rather than a single quiet period. Every other tracked category, including aggravated assault, burglary, and other larceny, finished within a few percentage points of the prior year.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 72 incidents — about 47% below the 136 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 133, down 51% from 273 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 August 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
75 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Congress Heights's 72.
Open page →Edgewood
65 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Congress Heights's 72.
Open page →Petworth
81 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Congress Heights's 72.
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.