How does DC homicide count in Nov 2025 compare to same months in 2020-2024?
Executive summary
Washington, D.C.'s homicide totals fell sharply in 2025 — the Metropolitan Police Department reports 127–128 homicides for the year versus 187 in 2024 and 274 in 2023 — a decline that implies most months in 2025, including November, were lower than comparable months in the peak-pandemic years (2020–2023) and 2024 overall [1] [2]. However, the sources provided do not publish month-by-month November tallies; therefore any definitive statement about the precise number of homicides in November 2025 versus November 2020–2024 requires querying the MPD or the DC open data incident-level dataset [3] [4].
1. Why the year totals matter — and what they show about November by implication
Citywide year-end totals reported by MPD and compiled by local outlets show a steep two-year decline: 274 homicides in 2023, 187 in 2024 and roughly 127–128 in 2025, a roughly 32 percent drop from 2024 to 2025 [1] [2] [5]. If homicides were distributed roughly evenly across months, November 2025 would almost certainly be below November counts in 2023 and 2024 and below many months in 2020–2021 when homicide rates surged nationally — but that inference is probabilistic, not a month-specific fact drawn from the cited sources [6].
2. What the available datasets can and cannot tell a researcher right now
The MPD “District Crime Data at a Glance” page posts year-end figures and is the official municipal summary, and the DC Open Data “Crime Incidents in 2025” dataset supplies incident-level records that can be filtered by date to generate a precise November count [3] [4]. None of the news reports or summaries supplied here, however, publish the isolated November 2025 tally or a table of Novembers 2020–2024; therefore a direct month-to-month numeric comparison cannot be verified from these sources alone [3] [4].
3. Context: national trends and local explanations that shape November comparisons
Nationally, 2025 saw a substantial drop in murders — roughly 20 percent fewer than 2024 according to the Real-Time Crime Index — a trend mirrored in many big cities, and local officials cite improved clearance rates and arrests as contributing factors in D.C. [7] [8] [2]. Those dynamics mean lower November counts in 2025 are plausible compared with the COVID-era spike months in 2020–2021 and compared with 2024’s higher monthly averages, but this is an inferential context rather than an exact month-by-month accounting drawn from the supplied reporting [7] [6].
4. Disputes over data integrity and how they affect confidence in a November comparison
Skeptics and some political actors have questioned MPD statistics and raised allegations of misclassification or politically motivated presentation of crime totals, a debate cited in national coverage and local commentary; federal scrutiny and partisan accusations mean independent verification from incident-level open data is important before drawing firm conclusions about a single month like November 2025 [8] [9] [10]. The open-data route (MPD incident feeds and the DC open dataset) is the recommended method to resolve those disputes because it allows month-and-year filtering and cross-checking against published year-to-date summaries [4] [3].
5. Practical next steps for a definitive November-to-November comparison
To produce an exact comparison of November 2025 to November 2020–2024, extract homicide incidents from the DC open-data crime incidents dataset filtered by offense type and by date for each November in 2020–2025; corroborate totals against MPD’s monthly or year-end breakdowns if available and note any differences that could stem from post-hoc reclassifications [4] [3]. Given the large, documented annual declines in 2025, the most likely outcome of that query will be fewer homicides in November 2025 than in Novembers of 2023 and 2024 and likely fewer than the pandemic surge months, but the exact counts require the incident-level query described [1] [2] [6].