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 surfaced in Petworth this June — one single-month below-trend move and two sustained structural shifts. The structural story dominates: both theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft have moved well below their multi-year baselines, not just this month but across the trailing 12 months, signaling a durable change rather than a quiet stretch.
Theft from vehicle logged 200 incidents over the current 12 months against 324 in the prior period — down 38.3% — and sits substantially below the multi-year baseline of 406.34. Motor vehicle theft tells a similar story: 127 incidents versus 240 a year ago, a 47.1% reduction. The rest of the tracked categories were within normal range this month, though aggravated assault's 12-month total of 50 against 35 in the prior year bears watching in future briefings.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 200 incidents — about 51% below the 406 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 127, down 47% from 240 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 200, down 38% from 324 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 June 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
194 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Petworth's 200.
Open page →Takoma
191 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 below Petworth's 200.
Open page →Howard University
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 above Petworth's 200.
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.