Dupont Circle Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Dupont Circle is the Northwest neighborhood organized around the namesake traffic circle and Metro stop, with diagonal Connecticut Avenue cutting through a dense mix of embassies, bookstores, and pre-war apartment buildings. The cluster extends along Connecticut Avenue and the K Street corridor, blending residential blocks into the office district to the south.
Two categories moved in Dupont Circle this September, one a single-month below-trend reading and one a structural multi-month shift. The overall picture is a neighborhood running well below its prior pace on vehicle-related theft, with the rest of the tracked categories close to flat.
Motor vehicle theft is the stronger of the two signals: the trailing 12-month total stands at 33 incidents, down 41.1% from 56 in the prior year. Theft from vehicle has shifted structurally in the same direction, 183 incidents in the current 12 months against 262 before, a 30.2% reduction that spans multiple months rather than a single quiet period. Robbery and aggravated assault both ticked up modestly, 8.2% and 5.3% respectively, but neither crossed an anomaly threshold.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 33 incidents — about 64% below the 91 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 183, down 30% from 262 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 Dupont Circle compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Navy Yard
32 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Dupont Circle's 33.
Open page →Adams Morgan
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Dupont Circle's 33.
Open page →Fairfax Village
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Dupont Circle's 33.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Dupont Circle, 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.