Friendship Heights Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Friendship Heights anchors the Wisconsin Avenue retail district at the Maryland border, mixing high-rise condos with department-store anchors and the Friendship Heights Metro stop. The cluster extends east through American University Park's single-family streets and south into Tenleytown, a transit-oriented residential neighborhood centered on the Tenleytown-AU Metro.
April 2026 produced a single signal in Friendship Heights: a streak break in homicide, the first recorded incident in the category after a long quiet gap. Every other tracked category was within normal range — no spikes, no drops, no sustained shifts registered this month.
The broader property crime picture continues to trend downward. Theft from vehicle sits at 79 incidents over the current 12 months, down 30.1% against the prior year's 113. Burglary is down 69.2% year-over-year — 4 incidents vs. 13 in the prior 12-month window. Robbery is the one counter-trend, doubling from 6 to 12 incidents over the same period, though raw volumes remain low. The homicide streak break stands as the month's only anomaly in an otherwise structurally declining neighborhood.
Notable signals 1
Homicide
First incident since January 2024 — a 2-year gap ended this month.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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
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 Friendship Heights compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month homicide 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 homicide levels.”
Dupont Circle
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Friendship Heights's 1.
Open page →Edgewood
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Friendship Heights's 1.
Open page →Fairfax Village
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Friendship Heights's 1.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Friendship 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.