WASHINGTON — Reported assaults with knives and other non-gun weapons in the District have climbed sharply this year, and they now outnumber shootings and gun assaults in the city’s assault-with-a-dangerous-weapon category for the first time in at least four years, according to an Inquisitor analysis of Metropolitan Police Department incident records.
From Jan. 1 through Nov. 6, MPD’s public crime incident data lists 345 assaults with a dangerous weapon involving a knife, up 54% from 224 in the same period of 2025, and 279 involving some other weapon, up 102% from 138. Gun assaults in the category rose more modestly, to 490 from 436, or 12%. Altogether, the department recorded 1,114 assaults with a dangerous weapon, up 40% from 798.
The rise runs against other violent-crime trends in the same records. Reported homicides fell to 86 from 117 over the same span, and robberies were roughly flat at 1,151 against 1,176. Because assaults with a dangerous weapon are the largest of the four violent categories in the dataset, the increase is enough to lift the city’s total of reported violent crimes to 2,433 from 2,180.
The analysis cannot say how much of the increase reflects more violence and how much reflects changes in how police classify incidents. Since mid-2025, MPD’s crime classification practices have been the subject of investigations by the House Oversight Committee, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the District’s inspector general, and the House committee’s majority staff reported testimony that some assaults were recorded as lesser offenses.
The numbers
The table below compares each weapon type over the same Jan. 1-Nov. 6 window, counted by the date each report was taken.
| Weapon | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Change, 2025-26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gun | 800 | 579 | 436 | 490 | +12% |
| Knife | 239 | 201 | 224 | 345 | +54% |
| Other weapon | 196 | 109 | 138 | 279 | +102% |
| Total | 1,235 | 889 | 798 | 1,114 | +40% |
| Non-gun share | 35% | 35% | 45% | 56% |
Gun assaults are still far below their 2023 level, when the city recorded 800 in the same window. Knife assaults, by contrast, are now 44% above their 2023 count, and assaults with other weapons are 42% above it. In 2023 and 2024, guns accounted for about two of every three assaults with a dangerous weapon. This year, knives and other weapons account for 56%.
MPD’s dataset sorts each incident by “method” into gun, knife or “others.” The department’s public files do not specify what the “other” category contains.
When the change began
The monthly counts suggest the shift did not start in January. From January through July 2025, MPD recorded an average of about 30 non-gun assaults with a dangerous weapon a month. From August through October 2025, that rose to an average of about 48 a month, and every month of 2026 through October has exceeded the same month a year earlier.
| Month | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 28 | 22 | 39 |
| February | 28 | 28 | 46 |
| March | 27 | 32 | 63 |
| April | 37 | 33 | 51 |
| May | 37 | 30 | 78 |
| June | 30 | 25 | 57 |
| July | 32 | 40 | 72 |
| August | 28 | 47 | 58 |
| September | 29 | 50 | 76 |
| October | 30 | 46 | 69 |
Those months overlapped with two developments. On Aug. 11, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a crime emergency in the District and requiring the mayor to make MPD’s services available to the federal government. The White House said at the time that “the surge in violent crime in our Nation’s capital is a national disgrace that threatens public safety and Federal operations,” and cited a 2024 homicide rate above 27 per 100,000 residents. On Aug. 25, 2025, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform opened an investigation into reports that MPD had manipulated its crime statistics.
The committee’s Republican majority staff released an interim report on Dec. 14, 2025, based on transcribed interviews with MPD’s district commanders. It said commanders testified that they were pressured, and at times instructed, to reclassify incidents into “lesser intermediate offenses” so they would not appear in the department’s public daily crime report. One example the report cites is the reduction of an assault with a dangerous weapon, in a shooting where nobody was hit, to “endangerment with a firearm,” a charge that does not appear in the public statistics. Then-Chief Pamela A. Smith had announced her resignation six days before the report’s release.
Committee Democrats issued their own staff report five days later, titled “Exposing the False Claims Justifying the Trump Administration’s Attacks on the Metropolitan Police Department,” which argued that evidence showed a significant reduction in crime since 2023, according to the District inspector general’s citation of both reports.
The inspector general’s findings
At Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request, the District’s Office of the Inspector General examined MPD’s crime-reporting controls and issued its inspection report on July 28, 2026. The office said it did not try to duplicate the congressional and federal prosecutors’ inquiries and instead looked at whether MPD had the systems in place to keep its data accurate.
“We found that MPD’s crime reporting controls broke down significantly during the period we examined,” the report said. It found that an independent unit that reviewed crime reports for accuracy was shut down in 2013 and never replaced, that the records system “lacked basic controls over who could access and change data,” and that policies went years without updates.
MPD agreed with all five of the inspector general’s recommendations. The department told the inspector general that in March 2026 it began setting up an internal function, independent of operational units, to audit police reports, and that it is consolidating its data work into a new Office of Data Integrity and Analytics within the chief’s office.
Those findings matter for reading this year’s numbers. If incidents that would once have been recorded as lesser offenses are now being classified as assaults with a dangerous weapon, part of the increase would reflect stricter counting rather than more attacks. The public data cannot distinguish the two, and MPD has not published an estimate of how much reclassification has affected the category.
Where the increase is concentrated
Every ward recorded more non-gun assaults with a dangerous weapon this year than last, but the increases were uneven.
| Ward | Knife 2025 | Knife 2026 | Other 2025 | Other 2026 | Non-gun change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 23 | 60 | 20 | 28 | +105% |
| 2 | 17 | 38 | 11 | 29 | +139% |
| 3 | 9 | 11 | 3 | 6 | +42% |
| 4 | 25 | 19 | 16 | 25 | +7% |
| 5 | 28 | 45 | 15 | 29 | +72% |
| 6 | 24 | 29 | 12 | 26 | +53% |
| 7 | 35 | 66 | 25 | 65 | +118% |
| 8 | 63 | 77 | 36 | 71 | +49% |
Ward 7 east of the Anacostia River recorded the largest increase in raw numbers, to 131 non-gun incidents from 60. Ward 8 still has the highest total, 148. Wards 1 and 2, which include the city’s busiest nightlife corridors, more than doubled. Ward 4 was nearly flat.
By police district, the Sixth District, east of the Anacostia River, recorded 141 non-gun incidents, up from 55. The Third District, which includes the U Street and Adams Morgan nightlife areas, rose to 96 from 45. The Second District, which covers much of Northwest Washington west of Rock Creek, nearly doubled to 63 from 32.
The single block with the most non-gun assaults with a dangerous weapon this year was the 1900 block of D Street SE, with six. The D.C. Department of Corrections lists its Central Detention Facility, the D.C. Jail, at 1901 D St. SE. The Inquisitor reported last week on the jail’s contraband and visitation records.
When the assaults happen
The MPD data records the police shift during which each incident was reported. Non-gun assaults increased across all three shifts: to 261 from 143 on the midnight shift, to 236 from 142 on the evening shift and to 127 from 77 on the day shift. Taken together, about 80% of this year’s non-gun incidents were reported during the evening and overnight shifts, about the same share as last year.
| Shift | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day | 77 | 127 | +65% |
| Evening | 142 | 236 | +66% |
| Midnight | 143 | 261 | +83% |
The police service areas with the largest counts this year were PSA 603, with 35 incidents against 11 a year earlier, PSA 607 (27 against 18), PSA 302 (25 against 10), PSA 602 (24 against 11) and PSA 604 (22 against 6).
How this fits with gun crime
The Inquisitor reported on Nov. 2 that guns were involved in a falling share of D.C.’s reported violent crime. The shift toward knives and other weapons in the assault category is a large part of that change. Gun homicides and gun robberies fell again this year in the MPD data, while gun assaults rose by 54 incidents.
About this analysis
The Inquisitor downloaded MPD’s 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 crime incident files from the District’s open data service on Nov. 9 and counted incidents by the date the report was taken, from Jan. 1 through Nov. 6 of each year, so that every year covers the same days. The files cover the nine offense categories MPD publishes in its public crime data; they exclude lesser offenses such as simple assault and endangerment with a firearm. Figures are preliminary and can change as MPD updates or reclassifies reports. Ward, district and police service area are as assigned by MPD. Percentages are rounded.
The data do not identify victims or suspects, and this analysis does not report on any individual case.
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