How do homicide rates in the last 60 days compare to the same period in previous years by D.C. neighborhood?
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Executive summary
Data published by the Metropolitan Police and DC open-data portals show homicide totals fell substantially in 2025 compared with 2024 — MPD reported violent crime down about 28% year‑to‑date and multiple outlets report homicides falling roughly 30% in 2025 vs. 2024 [1] [2]. Public DC incident-level open data exists and includes neighborhood-cluster geography back to 2020, but current reporting and political disputes over MPD’s methods mean neighborhood-by‑neighborhood comparisons for “the last 60 days” require careful, localized extraction from the open dataset rather than a single authoritative table in the reporting reviewed here [3] [1].
1. What the official summaries say about recent homicide trends
Federal and local summaries describe large year‑over‑year declines: the Justice Department said homicides were down 32% compared with 2023 in its January 2025 release [4] and MPD data cited by news outlets show violent crime down 28% year‑to‑date and homicides down roughly 30% in 2025 relative to 2024 [1] [2]. These are citywide aggregates and do not break the latest two‑month window into neighborhood clusters in the articles reviewed [1] [2] [4].
2. Where neighborhood breakdowns live — and their limits
DC’s open-data portal provides incident-level records with geographic fields including Neighborhood Cluster, Ward and Census Tract starting from calendar changes in 2020; that is the raw source you would need to compute homicides in any rolling 60‑day span by neighborhood [3]. The MPD “District Crime Data at a Glance” and local aggregators compile year‑end and year‑to‑date tallies, but the summaries in my sources do not publish a ready 60‑day neighborhood table [5] [6].
3. How to get precise 60‑day comparisons yourself
Use the open dataset “Crime Incidents in 2025” to filter incidents by date (last 60 days), by offense type (homicide), and by Neighborhood Cluster or Ward to compute counts and compare to the same calendar window in prior years; that dataset’s documentation states geography assignment methodology changed in 2020 to improve accuracy, which matters for historical matching [3]. None of the news reports or GOP oversight coverage in the sources provides those neighborhood‑level 60‑day queries directly [1].
4. Political controversy and why it matters for comparisons
A House Oversight report and subsequent coverage allege manipulation of MPD statistics; Republicans framed that as hiding true crime rates, while MPD has released data indicating sharp declines — the dispute primarily concerns methods and presentation of citywide trends rather than the raw incident records accessible via open data [1] [7]. That political fight means journalists and analysts should prefer open, incident-level queries from DC’s data portal when constructing short-window neighborhood comparisons [3] [1].
5. Broader context: multi‑year patterns and uneven geography
Multiple analyses and reviews show DC’s violent crime and homicide counts fell from the 2023 peak into 2024 and dropped further in 2025, but declines have not been evenly distributed across the city; commentators note continued concentration of violence in certain wards and clusters [4] [8] [9]. The Council on Criminal Justice and other analysts document peaks in specific months between 2018–2025, underscoring that short windows can over‑ or understate broader trends if not compared to multi‑year baselines [9].
6. Practical takeaway for your original question
If you want to know “how do homicide rates in the last 60 days compare to the same period in previous years by D.C. neighborhood,” the authoritative path is to run date‑range queries against the DC open incident dataset (filter homicide and neighborhood cluster for the last 60 days, then repeat for the same calendar 60‑day window in prior years) because public reporting in the cited articles gives only citywide or year‑to‑date aggregates and does not supply a neighborhood 60‑day breakdown [3] [1] [2].
Limitations and next steps: my sources confirm open, geocoded incident data exists [3] and that citywide homicide totals fell substantially in 2025 versus 2024 [1] [2] [4], but none of the provided reporting publishes a precomputed, neighborhood‑by‑neighborhood 60‑day comparison — you must extract that from the opendata feed or ask MPD for a tailored timeframe breakdown [3] [5].