Union Station Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
The Union Station cluster covers the rail terminal and the H Street NE corridor extending east through Stanton Park to Kingman Park along Lincoln Park. The neighborhood mixes federal-office buildings near Capitol Hill with rowhouse blocks and a streetcar-served commercial strip on H Street.
September 2026 produced a single signal in Union Station: motor vehicle theft has sustained a structural downward shift over the trailing 12 months. This is not a one-month anomaly but a multi-month pattern baked into the year-over-year comparison. Every other tracked category came in within normal range.
Motor vehicle theft is down 51.3% against the prior 12 months, 193 incidents vs. 396 in the year before, the sharpest move in the neighborhood's current data. Robbery and burglary also declined on a 12-month basis, 24.2% and 18.8% respectively, though neither crossed the threshold for a formal signal. Aggravated assault ran the other direction, up 30.0% year-over-year at 65 incidents vs. 50, and is worth watching as the one category moving against the broader downward trend.
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 193, down 51% from 396 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 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 Union Station 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.”
Ivy City
145 incidents over the past 12 months — 48 below Union Station's 193.
Open page →Petworth
134 incidents over the past 12 months — 59 below Union Station's 193.
Open page →Congress Heights
130 incidents over the past 12 months — 63 below Union Station's 193.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Union Station, 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.