Historic Anacostia Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Historic Anacostia is the Southeast neighborhood along the bluff above the Anacostia River, organized around Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and the historic Anacostia Metro station. The neighborhood is anchored by the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site and a small commercial district that retains pre-war storefronts.
April 2026 produced a single structural signal in Historic Anacostia: motor vehicle theft has shifted down at a multi-year level, not just a quiet month. One sustained shift, no spikes, no rare events — the overall picture is narrow but meaningful on the one category that moved.
Motor vehicle theft is down 52.1% over the trailing 12 months against the prior year — 23 incidents vs 48. The rest of the tracked categories were within range, with the notable exception of other larceny, which is up 40.0% over the same window (63 incidents vs 45), and theft from vehicle, which is down 66.7% (12 vs 36). Robbery ticked up 23.1% year-over-year on low absolute counts — 16 vs 13 — while aggravated assault and burglary both ran below their prior-year levels.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 23, down 52% from 48 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
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
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 Historic Anacostia 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.”
Cleveland Park
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Historic Anacostia's 23.
Open page →Friendship Heights
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Historic Anacostia's 23.
Open page →North Cleveland Park
21 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Historic Anacostia's 23.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Historic Anacostia, 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.