How did Washington, D.C.’s homicide counts vary month-to-month in 2024 and 2025 by neighborhood?
Executive summary
Washington, D.C. saw a sharp, citywide decline in homicides between 2023 and 2024 and that downward trajectory continued into 2025, but the published material provided does not contain a complete month-by-month, neighborhood-level breakdown required to fully answer the question as asked [1] [2]. Available sources show large year-over-year drops (274 homicides in 2023 to 187 in 2024) and continued reductions in 2025, and they point to persistent geographic concentration of violence in the District’s eastern wards, but they do not deliver the granular monthly-by-neighborhood series needed for a definitive month-to-month chart [3] [1] [4].
1. Citywide year-over-year trajectory: a dramatic decline from 2023 to 2024, continuing into 2025
Official and federal summaries describe a substantial fall in homicides between 2023 and 2024 — the U.S. Attorney’s Office and MPD reported total violent crime in 2024 down 35% from 2023 and homicides down roughly 32% (187 in 2024 vs. 274 in 2023) — and multiple outlets report that 2025 continued that trend with MPD online data showing homicides down about 31% as of Dec. 30, 2025 versus 2024 [1] [3] [2].
2. Seasonal and short-term notes in 2024–2025 from available summaries
Analysts who looked across mid‑year windows and rolling 12‑month periods flagged a peak in violence in summer 2023 followed by an unmistakable drop thereafter; the Council on Criminal Justice notes large declines in reported violence since summer 2023 and reports the homicide rate fell 19% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, signaling sustained reductions beyond a single season [5].
3. Neighborhood concentration: east-of-the‑river (Wards 7 and 8) remained the focal point
Multiple summaries and secondary analysis point to a persistent spatial concentration of homicide and violent crime in Wards 7 and 8, reflecting longstanding inequality patterns and indicating that declines were uneven across the city even as citywide totals fell [4] [6]. Sources emphasize the improvements have not been equally distributed and that neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River continue to account for a disproportionate share of incidents [4].
4. What the official datasets can — and cannot — tell this analysis
The MPD’s “District Crime Data at a Glance” and the city’s open data portal provide the raw incident-level dataset and year‑end tallies, and the open-data schema explicitly includes neighborhood cluster, ward, and census tract fields for 2020 onward, making month-by-month, neighborhood-level tabulation possible — but those raw files were not supplied here for direct extraction, so this report cannot produce the exact monthly neighborhood counts without querying the opendata.dc.gov files [7] [8].
5. Reconciling numbers and narratives: claims vs. gaps
Federal and local statements (DOJ, U.S. Attorney, MPD summaries) and news outlets converge on an unequivocal narrative of historic declines through 2024 into 2025, with multiple percent‑change figures cited (e.g., 32% drop in homicides in 2024 vs. 2023 and 31% lower by late‑2025 compared to 2024), but those summaries are citywide and quarterly/annual; they do not replace the raw monthly-by-neighborhood time series that the question requests [1] [2] [3].
6. How to get the precise month‑by‑month, neighborhood‑level counts
To answer the question definitively, one must download MPD’s incident-level open-data (Crime Incidents in 2024 and 2025) which include incident date, neighborhood cluster, ward and other geographies, then aggregate by month and neighborhood cluster or ward — the portal documents the post‑2020 geographic assignment method that makes those joins reliable [8] [7]. Because those raw files were not processed here, this article refrains from inventing monthly neighborhood counts and instead points to the primary data source for exact figures [8].