Despite being one of the safest areas in the city, the greater Foggy Bottom neighborhood faced an uptick in reports of crime between 2022 and 2023, an uptick lower than the jump in crime reported around much of the rest of D.C.
Crime in Ward 2, which includes the National Mall and neighborhoods like Foggy Bottom, West End and Dupont Circle, climbed by 14 percent between 2022 and 2023, the lowest rise in crime among D.C.’s eight wards, according to Open Data DC. But crime within the bounds of the Foggy Bottom and West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission — which includes all of the University’s Foggy Bottom Campus — rose by 54 percent from 2022, the fifth-highest rise in crime among all 46 ANCs.
About 90 percent of crimes reported in Ward 2 and ANC 2A between 2022 and 2023 were property crimes, including robbery, thefts from auto, theft and burglary.
Before last year, crime in Foggy Bottom’s ANC had been steadily decreasing since 2019, when there were 620 incidents, 124 fewer than the 10-year high of 744 incidents in 2015.
Jim Malec, the chair of the Foggy Bottom ANC, said Foggy Bottom and West End are some of the safest neighborhoods in the District despite the rise in crime. He said assessing changes in crime levels by percentage can be “misleading.”
“In a neighborhood as safe as ours, any increase in crime looks enormous because the numbers are so low to begin with,” Malec said in an email.
All eight wards in the District experienced a rise in crime in 2023. Crime in Ward 2 increased the least, from 4,805 to 5,477 reported incidents.
Since 2020, crime has remained lower than pre-pandemic levels in Ward 2 after crime in the area reached a 10-year high of 7,696 incidents in 2016. Crime in Ward 2 rose by about 14 percent between 2020 and 2021, from 4,687 to 5,361 incidents, and dropped between 2021 and 2022 by about 11 percent and from 4,790 to 4,234 incidents.
As crime in D.C. increased in 2023, crime across the U.S. decreased. Between January and September 2023, violent crime dropped by 8 percent and property crime by about 6 percent compared to the same period in 2022, according to FBI data. D.C. was one of the only major American cities in which homicides rose year over year.
Patrice Sulton, the founder and executive director of the DC Justice Lab, a policy research center advocating for changes to the District’s justice system, said homicides could be higher in D.C. than most other major cities because residents can easily travel to nearby states with loose gun laws and return with firearms. She said D.C. lawmakers have focused more on gun-possession penalties than the gun-access issue at the root of homicides in the District.
“We’re going to talk about what the penalties are for having a gun as if a person can’t just get on the Metro and go get another gun,” Sulton said.
Out of all crimes, reports of robbery increased the most between 2022 and 2023 in Ward 2 and Foggy Bottom’s ANC. Last year, robbery rose by 68 percent in Ward 2, from 235 to 394 incidents, and rose by 200 percent within ANC 2A, from nine to 27 incidents.
In American cities where crime is dropping, lawmakers have increased investments in crime prevention and coordinating actions between government agencies — strategies D.C. has ignored, Sulton said.
“D.C. has really failed miserably at both of those things,” Sulton said.
Motor vehicle theft climbed the second-most of all crimes in Ward 2 and the Foggy Bottom ANC between 2022 and 2023, with theft representing the third-highest rise.
There were at least 73 reports of theft on campus in 2023, with 35 incidents occurring around the 900 Block of New Hampshire Avenue, the location of a 7-Eleven.
Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who chairs the D.C. Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, introduced a 90-page package of crime bills Jan. 10 that would create new gun-related offenses like “endangerment with a firearm” that would make it a felony to fire a gun in public, reduce the threshold for someone to be charged with retail theft and increase video surveillance in the District.
While increasing in the Foggy Bottom ANC, theft from vehicles decreased in Ward 2 and was the only crime to decrease in the District as a whole between 2022 and 2023. In that span, assault with a dangerous weapon and burglary decreased in Ward 2 and in Foggy Bottom.
Gary LaFree, a distinguished professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, College Park, said crime tends to go up in places where people don’t think the justice system is “fair,” which could be the case in D.C.
“You have the defund the police movement, a lot of dissatisfaction with policing and with the legal system,” LaFree said.
Since 2010, the number of sworn Metropolitan Police Department officers has declined from 4,010 to 3,316 in 2023. D.C. Police Union officials attributed the drop in officers to forced overtime and police reforms in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests that harmed officer morale.
LaFree said MPD could help reduce crime in the District by gaining trust within communities and arresting more criminals, which could in part prevent repeat offenders.
“So not only do you need much more legitimate belief in the police, but you also have to have a system where a higher proportion of people that commit serious crimes are actually being prosecuted,” LaFree said.
