WASHINGTON — As we enter the halfway point of the year, crime data managed by DC Police shows that overall crime is down in the District this year compared to last.
The downward trend is good news for the District considering that crime data released by the Department of Justice earlier this year showed that last year D.C. had the biggest spike in violent crime compared to any other major city in the country.
Let's break down what the numbers say, and we'll start at the top with D.C.'s homicide rate.
Last year, the District had 274 homicides – the most of any year since 1998.
Fast-forward to June 3, 2024, and so far this year, the District has seen 76 of our neighbors lose their lives to violence. At this time last year, D.C. had 96 homicides. That's a downward trend of 21%, according to DC Police crime data.
Last year, D.C. had a 35% spike in its homicide rate compared to 2022.
Sex abuse crimes is the only category on the list to have gone up so far this year, with 78 reported cases compared to last year's 75 at this same time – a 4% increase. Overall last year, reported sex crimes totaled 185 – a 1% increase from 2022's 184 reported crimes.
Crimes of assault with a dangerous weapon are down 27% this year so far, with 427 reports filed compared to 583 last year at this time.
Robbery is a crime category that had a massive spike from 2022 to 2023. There were 2,076 reported robberies in 2022 and 3,470 in 2023 – a whopping 67% increase.
Meanwhile, so far this year there have been 829 reported robberies compared to last year's 1,163. That's a decrease of 29%
All this data together shows that violent crime in D.C. is down 26% overall so far this year – while last year's total numbers were a 39% increase from 2022.
While the needle on violent crime appears to be moving in the right direction for the moment, crime data released by the Department of Justice earlier this year, and recently put out by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, shows how that 39% spike in violent crime in 2023 stacked up against the rest of that nation, and the numbers aren't good.
From 2022 to 2023, Washington, D.C. had the biggest spike in violent crime of any major city in the United States.
WUSA9 compiled the data and attempted to make fair comparisons of what D.C.'s data says compared to cities that are similar in size (525,000-800,000 people).
On the list of 19 cities we looked at, which includes two regions in the D.C. area that are larger than the given size parameters, data shows overwhelmingly that the District had the biggest violent crime spike of any other city of our size when looking at 2022 and 2023.
It's not even close.
Our whopping 38.6% increase in violent crime is more than triple the percentage increase of the city with the second largest spike – which was Memphis with a 10.7% increase between those two years.
We included Montgomery County, Maryland and Fairfax County, Virginia on the list despite that they outpace our 800,000 population cap for this story. But we wanted to mention them because they're local.
They placed third and fourth for worst violent crime spikes on this list with Montgomery County having a 10.41% spike from 2022 to 2023 and Fairfax County had a 7.63% spike.
Other cities of a similar size to D.C. showed that it's possible to move the needle in the right direction.
Detroit had a slight decrease in violent crime – down 1.47% year over year; Baltimore's violent crime went down 2.75%; Boston was down 5.32% in violent crime; Seattle was down 6.18%; Denver was down 6.35%; Las Vegas was down 8.35%; this reporter's hometown of Fresno, California was down 8.39%; Tucson, Arizona was down 11.91%; Portland, Oregon was down 12.58%; and the city with the biggest decrease in violent crime was Sacramento, California – down 18.37%
Here's what that graph looks like:
What does this 2022-2023 data mean today? Well, it's hard to square that data with 2024 since this year's data is still in progress, but there's a major factor that has changed in the time since that massive crime spike and our current downward trend.
A 39% increase in violent crime in 2023 compared to a 26% decrease so far this year is a huge deal. And while it's highly unlikely that any one person can make that big of an impact on the District's overall crime rate, we can't let it go unnoticed that in late 2023, D.C. confirmed a new police chief in Pamela A. Smith after Chief Robert J. Contee III left the department for a job with the FBI.
Can Chief Smith keep D.C.'s violent crime trending down? Only time will tell.