Southwest Waterfront Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Southwest Waterfront covers the mile of redeveloped Wharf-anchored riverfront south of the National Mall, including Fort McNair at the Potomac and Anacostia confluence and Buzzard Point on the western edge. The cluster blends the Wharf's restaurant and concert district with mid-century cooperative housing and the federal Southwest Employment Area along Independence Avenue.
Three categories moved in Southwest Waterfront this August, all pointing in the same direction. One registered a single-month below-trend signal in theft from vehicle, while two others, theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft, show multi-month structural shifts downward. The overall shape is a neighborhood where vehicle-related crime has been declining not just this month but across a sustained window.
Theft from vehicle is the clearest story: 47 incidents over the current 12 months against 138 in the prior year, a 65.9% reduction. Motor vehicle theft is similarly down, 75 incidents versus 138 the year before, a 45.7% drop. Burglary also edged lower, down 28.6% year over year. On the other side, aggravated assault climbed to 31 incidents from 16, up 93.8%, and robbery rose from 28 to 37, up 32.1%. Both sit at low absolute counts, but the direction runs counter to the vehicle-crime trend and is the detail most worth tracking into September.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 47 incidents — about 73% below the 171 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 47, down 66% from 138 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 75, down 46% from 138 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 August 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 Southwest Waterfront 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.”
Douglas
50 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Southwest Waterfront's 47.
Open page →North Cleveland Park
51 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Southwest Waterfront's 47.
Open page →Glover Park
54 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Southwest Waterfront's 47.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Southwest Waterfront, 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.