Assaults with knives and other weapons drive D.C.’s first rise in violent crime since 2023, police data show

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — Violent crime in the District is running about 12 percent ahead of last year’s pace, the first year-over-year increase since 2023, and a Washington Inquisitor analysis of police records shows that one category accounts for virtually all of it: assaults with a dangerous weapon that did not involve a gun.

Homicides, robberies and sexual abuse are all down so far in 2026, according to the Metropolitan Police Department’s District Crime Data at a Glance report, current as of Oct. 20. But assaults with a dangerous weapon, a felony category that covers attacks with guns, knives, cars, bats, bottles and other objects, are up 41 percent, from 746 to 1,050. That jump is larger than the net rise in violent crime overall, from 2,050 to 2,294.

The Inquisitor downloaded more than 105,000 incident records from MPD’s public Crime Incidents datasets for 2023 through mid-October 2026 and sorted every homicide, robbery, sexual abuse and assault with a dangerous weapon by when it began, what weapon was involved and where it happened. The records show the 2026 increase is concentrated in knife and other non-gun assaults, began in earnest in March, and has spread across nearly every ward. Gun violence, by the same records, is down.

The timing matters because of what MPD has acknowledged about its own numbers. A department Internal Affairs investigation completed this spring found that supervisors had for years downgraded serious crimes, including assaults with dangerous weapons, to lesser offenses that did not count toward violent-crime totals, 7News reported after obtaining the 554-page report. Interim Chief Jeffery Carroll has since required crime-classification training for all members. The records cannot say how much of this year’s rise reflects more violence and how much reflects more accurate counting. They do show where the change is.

The numbers

To compare equal periods, the Inquisitor counted incidents that began between Jan. 1 and Oct. 18 of each year. The totals track MPD’s own year-to-date report within about 1 percent; small differences reflect cutoff dates and the department’s continuing reclassification of cases.

Even with the increase, violent crime this year is running at roughly half of 2023’s level.

Knives and “other” weapons, not guns

MPD records the weapon in each incident as a gun, a knife or “others.” Gun assaults rose modestly this year. Knife assaults rose by half, and assaults with other weapons more than doubled.

Non-gun assaults rose by 241 incidents, almost exactly the 242-incident net increase in violent crime. Across all four violent categories, incidents involving a gun fell 15 percent, from 1,013 to 858, led by a 38 percent drop in gun robberies.

That pattern fits two explanations, and the data cannot separate them. One is a real increase in stabbings and beatings. The other is that cases once logged as simple assault, threats or “injured person” reports are now being classified as the felonies they are. The Internal Affairs findings, as described by 7News, included assaults with guns and knives recorded as simple assaults and shootings and stabbings logged as “injured person” cases. Carroll told NBC4 Washington in July that the department completed virtual classification training in March and was developing in-person training, and that a significant share of the category involves domestic violence. Greg Pemberton, president of the D.C. Police Union, told the station that assaults with dangerous weapons were “the number one category of crime that the department was manipulating.”

When it started

Month by month, the records show a modest increase in January and February and a sharper one from March on, the month MPD says its classification training was completed.

From March through September, the count was 45 percent higher than in the same months of 2025. In January and February it was 26 percent higher. The comparison is also complicated by the National Guard deployment and federal surge that began in August 2025, which changed policing in parts of the city midway through the comparison year.

Where it happened

The count rose in every ward. In Wards 1 and 2, which include U Street, Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle and downtown, the count nearly doubled. Wards 7 and 8 still account for the largest numbers.

After dark

A third of the city’s violent crime this year began between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., a share that has edged up from last year but remains below 2023. Late-night incidents on weekends, from 10 p.m. Friday to 4 a.m. Saturday and the same hours into Sunday, rose 29 percent.

The late hours matter most in the city’s nightlife corridors, where last weekend’s shootings happened: a National Guard member was wounded on Barracks Row late Sunday, and a 22-year-old man was killed and a woman wounded in the 1300 block of Connecticut Avenue NW early that morning, according to MPD. The Inquisitor matched incidents to the blocks of seven corridors with dense concentrations of bars and clubs. The counts are small, so year-to-year swings should be read with caution, but the share occurring late at night is far above the citywide figure of about 34 percent.

On the Dupont Circle stretch of Connecticut Avenue NW, the 1100 through 1900 blocks, six in 10 violent incidents since 2023 began between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., and four in 10 on Friday or Saturday nights. The U Street and 14th Street corridors have seen the steepest declines since 2023. Barracks Row has averaged a handful of violent incidents a year; the three recorded in 2026 all began late at night.

What the city says

MPD’s year-to-date report warns that its figures are “preliminary” and “subject to change due to subsequent determinations related to amendments in classification, unfounded cases or changes in offense definitions.” The department told NBC4 Washington that it created an Office of Data Integrity and Analytics after the classification findings. The U.S. Attorney’s Office reviewed the matter and found no criminal activity, 7News reported.

The Washington Inquisitor sent requests for comment to the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice; the D.C. Office of the Inspector General; the D.C. Criminal Justice Coordinating Council; the D.C. Police Union; and the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research group that tracks city crime trends, on Wednesday afternoon, before publication, asking how to read the 2026 increase. This story will be updated with any responses.

How we did this

The Inquisitor downloaded MPD’s Crime Incidents layers for 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 from the District’s public GIS service on Oct. 21, removed duplicate case numbers, and kept the four offenses MPD counts as violent crime: homicide, sex abuse, assault with a dangerous weapon and robbery. Each incident was dated by its recorded start time, converted to Eastern time; a few incidents with start dates years before their report date were assigned to the year they began. The data list one offense per incident, not per victim, and reflect D.C. Code classifications, not FBI reporting categories. Simple assaults are not included. Locations are block ranges, not exact addresses, so corridor counts include incidents on the street itself and not on side streets. October 2026 is a partial month and is excluded from Table 3. The 2026 year-to-date totals in Table 1 differ slightly from MPD’s published figures, which run through Oct. 19 and use the department’s internal cutoffs.

Photo: Metropolitan Police Department squad cars in Washington. Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.