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.
Three categories moved in Dupont Circle this August, and the shape is almost entirely downward. Motor vehicle theft registered a single-month below-trend signal, while both theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft also show sustained multi-month structural shifts, meaning the declines are not a one-month dip but a longer repositioning of the baseline.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal: the trailing 12-month total is 30 incidents against 67 in the prior year, down 55.2%. Theft from vehicle follows the same direction, 170 incidents vs 274, down 38.0%. Aggravated assault moved the other way, up 11.1% over the same window, 20 incidents against 18, the one category running counter to the neighborhood's otherwise broad property-crime decline.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 30 incidents — about 67% below the 92 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 170, down 38% from 274 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 30, down 55% from 67 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 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
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Dupont Circle's 30.
Open page →Mayfair
29 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Dupont Circle's 30.
Open page →Adams Morgan
28 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Dupont Circle's 30.
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.