Crime In DC Is Trending Down Heading Into Summer

A look at crime trends in the nation's capital.

DC had a horrific year in terms of crime (and professional baseball and football and basketball) in 2023, but there were signs of improvement towards the end of the year which have carried over into the start of 2024.

Let’s start with the disclaimer that it’s far too early to say what will happen in 2024 in Washington DC and really any individual city in the US in terms of year-end crime figures. I’ve previously argued that you really want to wait until a month ending in ‘r’ before making YTD comparisons for a city, and that absolutely holds true for this piece.

But you don't have to rely YTD figures to see a clear decline. Rolling counts of crime (measuring the number of incidents over the last X days on every day of the graph) have been heading down in DC since the end of 2023 and that trend has continued so far in 2024.

DC has an excellent website with crime data going back several years and a separate website detailing carjackings. Last year I built a dashboard to show the city’s crime trends over the last decade. If you concentrate on the rolling incidents over time rather than just YTD two things become clear:

1. Most types of major crime in DC appear to be falling rapidly.

2. Some crime in DC — particularly carjackings and auto thefts — remain elevated relative to 2018 to 2022 levels.

3. This summer will be critical for figuring out if this is a blip or a longer term trend for the city.

DC crime trends have some seasonality to them — meaning that more crime occurs in the summer than winter — so it’s plausible that whatever drove DC crime up in the summer of 2023 could do the same in the summer of 2024. The seasonality of crime in DC, however, is not as extreme as it is in places like Detroit or Chicago where far more crime occurs in the summer months compared to the rest of the year.

A higher share of violent crime in DC occurred in October than in June on average between 2010 and 2019 (compared to Chicago where nearly a quarter of all shooting victims between 2010 and 2023 were shot in June and July). In other words, there is seasonality in DC but the impact is not usually that great.

In 2023, by contrast, DC saw an unusually large surge in violent crime in June and July. Between 2018 and 2022, 19 percent of carjackings occurred in June and July compared to 27 percent of 2023 carjackings coming in June and July. About 13 percent of all violent crimes in DC in 2023 occurred in July compared to just over 9 percent on average between 2010 and 2019. So crime usually goes up a bit in DC over the summer relative to the rest of the year, but it’s not usually nearly as pronounced as it was last summer.

Crime in DC has been falling since last summer though.

The below graph shows the number of violent crimes in DC rolling over 90 days. Visualizing the data in this manner clearly shows how unusually large last summer’s spike in violent crime was in DC. Some peaks and valleys can be clearly seen in previous years, sometimes apparently seasonal and sometimes not, but nothing compares to the big increase in mid-2023. Since then, however, violent crime has been falling, with fewer violent crimes over the last 90 days than at any point since early 2021. Homicides have been declining as have robberies through the end of March (click on the buttons to see each crime type).

Violent crime is down more than 20 percent as of April 11. Homicides are down 26 percent (that doesn’t mean there aren’t far too many horrific incidents though), and assaults with a dangerous weapons and robberies are also down substantially YTD. Carjackings (a subset of robberies which are reported monthly by MPDC rather than daily) have also fallen substantially since last summer. There were 84 carjackings reported in DC in April 2023 compared to 15 in the first 14 days of April 2024.

Then there are auto thefts which surged in the second half of 2022 and have been coming down since last summer (they are still more common than they were just a few years ago).

So the trends over the last few months have been positive (reminder that acknowledging a positive trend does not signal approval of the current level) which makes the upcoming months critical for determining if the decline is a blip or a longer term thing.

DC crime should not inherently be overly seasonal in 2024 just as it has not been for most of the last 15 years. There is no reason to assume a big surge like what happened in the summer of 2023 will happen again. At the same time, crime trends often occur for complex, poorly understood reasons, so it would be unwise to discount another surge occurring in 2024 that eliminates the gains of the last few months.

The trends from the end of 2024 and start of 2023 are positive. Positive trends do not mean that the rest of the year will be positive, that crime levels are back to pre-surge levels, or that problems that were clearly apparent during the 2023 surge have now inherently been solved. That said, the crime trend outlook is certainly rosier now than it has been for more than a year as Washington approaches a critical stretch of the year.