Tag Archives: Crime

In the last couple of weeks Georgetown has been hit with a rash of smash-and-grab commercial burglaries. At least five stores have been hit over that time. According to GM’s sources the list includes, among others, Wisemillers, Kitchen No. 1, and Sweet Green.

The M.O. for each burglary has been for the robbers to smash a hole through the glass door, squeeze through the hole, grab the cash register and jump into a waiting car. According to GM’s sources, the robbers generally wait until after closing. This is a little odd since most cash registers are emptied out at the end of the night. Thus the robbers are only getting some rolls of coins and some spare cash left for the morning. GM’s sources speculates that this fact indicates that the robbers are probably young and inexperienced.

In addition to the stores mentioned above, there was a burglary on 3200 block of Prospect St., the 3500 block of O St. and the 2700 block of P St., but GM wasn’t able to confirm what specific stores were hit.

This week, GM has been digging into the MPD’s 2009 crime stats for Georgetown and comparing them to last year’s. While there are some troubling trends in crime in Georgetown, GM thought it was important to put those stats in one more context: how do they compare with other neighborhoods?

GM crunched the numbers on Georgetown (PSA 206) and compared them with stats for some neighborhoods in the same general vicinity: Palisades/Kent/Spring Valley (205), greater Dupont (208), Woodley/Cleveland Park/Glover Park (204), Mount Pleasant (301), and Columbia Heights (302 & 304). The results are after the jump: Continue reading →

Yesterday GM raised a bit of an alarm over a spike in crime in Georgetown last month. After digging a bit more into the data, GM can present a slightly more nuanced picture. There was an troubling uptick in crime for July, but a main contributing factor for why the comparisons to July 2008 looked so bad is that July 2008 looked so good. Check out the monthly totals of crime incidents from 2008 and and 2009:

The June and July 2009 crime stats are creeping up to the genuine spike we experienced in February, but the large increases over July 2008 are primarily because crime dropped sharply in July 2008.

But what’s the breakdown for each category? See them after the jump: Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago GM published this post arguing that despite the sense among people that crime was increasing, the overall crime numbers were not really up year-to-date for Georgetown. For July in particular, GM calculated that as of half-way through the month, July 2009 did not have a spike in crime. Now that the month is over, GM went back and re-crunched the numbers and compared July 2009 crime stats to July 2008. They’re not good. Check out the numbers:

The overall numbers are up 30%. Robberies almost tripled. Granted, the change from 2 to 5 isn’t as significant as if it were 20 to 50, but nonetheless it’s troubling.

The only numbers close to level reflect theft, i.e. shop-lifting. These crimes normally represent the majority of crimes in Georgetown, but they don’t directly affect residents very much. If you take out thefts, the overall numbers are up 116% for July.

Many have sensed that there has been a particularly strong crime spike recently in Georgetown. These numbers seem to justify those senses.