Image by Alan Cleaver licensed under Creative Commons.

According to the Trump White House, murder is up 50% in DC. That was true for 2015, but the District’s murder rate has been more or less flat since 2010, and it’s way down from where it was in the 90s and early 2000s.

The current version of the Trump White House website contains this reference to DC’s homicide rate:

The Trump Administration is committed to reducing violent crime. In 2015, homicides increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. There were thousands of shootings in Chicago last year alone.

This statistic lacks important context. In 2016, total homicides in the District decreased 16% compared to 2015. 135 murders occurred in 2016 versus 162 in 2015, according to data from DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

Image by the author.

Taken together with data from recent years, the overall trend in homicides for the city as a whole appears to be essentially flat. Since 2010, the murder rate increases or decreases by a moderate amount, changes which tend to offset each other over time. Over a longer term, the murder rate is still far below its peak in the early 90s.

A notable exception to these trends is the 50% surge in homicides in 2015. Federal and city governments acknowledged at the time that violence in the city had risen to unusual levels, driven by a combination of factors including “synthetic drugs, petty disputes, historic neighborhood rivalries and repeat gun offenders.”

This rapid rise in violence, while troubling, does not on its own constitute a break from the previous trend. We simply need more time to determine if 2015 is the first signal of a structural change in violent crime in DC or an anomaly. Though not conclusive, the decrease seen in 2016 points to the latter.

According to the MPD, violence within DC tends to be concentrated in a few areas. In 2016 nearly half of all murders in the District occurred in just six out of the District’s 39 city-defined neighborhood clusters. Just as with the city as a whole, the level of violence in these areas is down from previous highs, and recent trends are usually flat (there are signs of some exceptions, such as Bellevue, which despite having the highest absolute number of homicides in the city has seen a large decrease since a recent high in 2008).

Image by the author.

Trends within neighborhoods over short periods of time are difficult to assess given the small magnitude of numbers involved. When a neighborhood sees eight murders in one year, a “large” swing of 50% or so should not be considered remarkable. Over the long term, each of DC’s neighborhoods is below highs in the early '90s.

At a city level, DC seems to be approximately aligned with national trends. According to the FBI, violent crime is up slightly in recent years, but still near historic lows. Other brief upticks in the violent crime rate have occurred in the last 20 years, but otherwise the trend has been a decreasing one.

While crime remains a serious problem in some areas, there is no indication the situation is becoming substantially worse on a large scale.

For data and code represented above see here.