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.
Three signals surfaced in Union Station this month — one single-month below-trend signal and two sustained structural shifts. The dominant shape is a broad decline in vehicle-related property crime, with both theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft running well below their multi-year baselines across the trailing 12 months.
Theft from vehicle is the most prominent signal: 309 incidents over the current 12 months against 416 in the prior year, down 25.7%, and flagged both as a single-month drop and as a sustained multi-month shift. Motor vehicle theft shows the same structural pattern — 200 incidents versus 456 in the prior year, down 56.1% — reinforcing that the vehicle crime pullback is not a one-month artifact. All other tracked categories were within their expected ranges.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 309 incidents — about 41% below the 525 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 200, down 56% from 456 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 309, down 26% from 416 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 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
299 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below Union Station's 309.
Open page →Howard University
214 incidents over the past 12 months — 95 below Union Station's 309.
Open page →Petworth
200 incidents over the past 12 months — 109 below Union Station's 309.
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.