Foggy Bottom Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Foggy Bottom occupies the riverfront wedge southwest of downtown, anchored by the George Washington University campus, the Kennedy Center, and the State Department. The cluster also includes the West End to the north, a denser corridor of newer apartment towers and ground-floor retail.
August 2026 produced a single structural signal for Foggy Bottom: a sustained, multi-month downward shift in other larceny. The rest of the tracked categories, aggravated assault, burglary, theft from vehicle, and motor vehicle theft, did not cross any anomaly threshold, making this a focused rather than broad month.
Other larceny sits at 176 incidents over the current 12 months against 287 in the prior year, a 38.7% reduction. That scale of decline, sustained across multiple months rather than a one-time dip, is the defining data point for the neighborhood this briefing. Motor vehicle theft and burglary also show large year-over-year reductions, down 57.1% and 62.5% respectively, though neither generated a formal anomaly signal this month, they reinforce a broadly downward property-crime trajectory.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 176, down 39% from 287 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Foggy Bottom compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Deanwood
174 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Foggy Bottom's 176.
Open page →River Terrace
169 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Foggy Bottom's 176.
Open page →Friendship Heights
202 incidents over the past 12 months — 26 above Foggy Bottom's 176.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Foggy Bottom, 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.