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.
April 2026 was a narrow month in Dupont Circle — two signals, both in the same category. Motor vehicle theft registered both a one-month below-trend signal and a sustained multi-month structural shift, meaning the decline isn't a single quiet month but a pattern that has built across the trailing 12 months.
Over the current 12-month window, motor vehicle theft stands at 37 incidents against a multi-year baseline mean of 92.92 — a reduction of more than half. The 12-month total is also down 45.6% against the prior year (37 vs. 68). Every other tracked category was within its normal range this month, with robbery and burglary also running well below their prior-year totals at the 12-month level — down 27.8% and 31.2% respectively — though neither crossed the signal threshold in April.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 37 incidents — about 60% below the 93 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 37, down 46% from 68 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 April 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.”
Barry Farm
39 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Dupont Circle's 37.
Open page →Colonial Village
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Dupont Circle's 37.
Open page →Adams Morgan
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Dupont Circle's 37.
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.