Petworth Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Petworth is the Northwest neighborhood organized around the Petworth Metro station and the Georgia Avenue retail strip, with rows of Wardman-era houses radiating out from the central traffic circle. The cluster also covers Crestwood and Brightwood Park, quieter residential streets that step toward Rock Creek Park to the west.
Three categories moved in Petworth this September, one one-month below-trend signal and two multi-month structural shifts. The structural picture is mixed: motor vehicle theft has been running well below prior-year levels for an extended stretch, while robbery has been trending in the opposite direction across the same window. Theft from vehicle rounds out the month as a single-period dip against an otherwise elevated baseline.
Theft from vehicle recorded 249 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 279 in the year before, a 10.8% decline, and September reinforced that direction with a below-trend read. The sustained shifts are the more consequential signals: robbery has climbed to 85 incidents over the current 12 months from 50 in the prior period, a 70.0% increase, while motor vehicle theft has fallen from 232 to 134, down 42.2%. Everything else, including aggravated assault, burglary, and other larceny, ran within normal range.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 249 incidents — about 38% below the 403 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 134, down 42% from 232 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 85, up 70% from 50 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 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 Petworth compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Edgewood
222 incidents over the past 12 months — 27 below Petworth's 249.
Open page →Howard University
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 35 below Petworth's 249.
Open page →Capitol Hill
189 incidents over the past 12 months — 60 below Petworth's 249.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Petworth, 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.