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.
Two categories moved in Union Station this August, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a multi-month structural shift. The shape of the month is narrow but consistent: both signals point downward, across theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft, and both fall inside a broader 12-month decline pattern across the neighborhood.
Theft from vehicle is the stronger one-month signal, with 330 incidents over the current 12 months against 431 in the prior year, down 23.4%. Motor vehicle theft tells a longer story: 179 incidents in the current 12 months versus 428 in the prior year, a 58.2% reduction that has accumulated across multiple months, not just August. Aggravated assault moved the other direction, up 11.8% year-over-year, and is the one category outside the downward pattern worth tracking into September.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 330 incidents — about 37% below the 523 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 179, down 58% from 428 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
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 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.”
Columbia Heights
303 incidents over the past 12 months — 27 below Union Station's 330.
Open page →Edgewood
236 incidents over the past 12 months — 94 below Union Station's 330.
Open page →Petworth
232 incidents over the past 12 months — 98 below Union Station's 330.
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.