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 signals emerged in Petworth this April — one single-month below-trend result and two sustained structural shifts, both pointing downward. The shape of the month is not a noisy blip: the dominant story is a multi-year contraction in vehicle-related property crime, confirmed across two separate categories.
Theft from vehicle is the clearest case. The trailing 12-month total stands at 217, down 38.5% against the prior year's 353 — and the current 12-month volume sits well below the baseline of 408.42, reflecting a sustained shift, not just a quiet April. Motor vehicle theft tells a parallel story: 132 incidents over the current 12 months against 248 in the prior period, a 46.8% decrease and also registered as a sustained shift. Everything else in the tracked categories — robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, other larceny — fell outside the anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 217 incidents — about 47% below the 408 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 132, down 47% from 248 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 217, down 39% from 353 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 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.”
Takoma
222 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Petworth's 217.
Open page →Capitol Hill
195 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below Petworth's 217.
Open page →Edgewood
195 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below Petworth's 217.
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.