One District ward accounts for just over 1 in 5 of the city's car thefts this year

Car theft in the District has spent 2026 moving in opposite directions at once. Measured against last year, it has dropped sharply. Measured month to month within this year, it has climbed.

From January through June, the District's motor vehicle theft rate ran far below the same months of 2025, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice (Council on Criminal Justice). The drop was steeper than the average among the cities the group studied (Council on Criminal Justice), where reported vehicle thefts also fell from a year earlier (Council on Criminal Justice).

Inside the year, the trend runs the other way. Police recorded 161 motor vehicle thefts in January, 20.9% below the January-through-September monthly average of 204 thefts per month, according to Metropolitan Police Department incident reports.

September was the high point. Police logged 297 thefts that month, 45.9% above the average.

No other full month of 2026 reached September's total. October's count is still coming in: police logged 144 thefts from Oct. 1 through Oct. 20, a partial month that is not compared with the average here.

Where the thefts are reported

Of the 1,976 motor vehicle thefts reported across the District from Jan. 1 through Oct. 20, just over 1 in 5 came from a single ward. That ward logged 401 reports, or 20.3% of the citywide total.

The next wards on the list were nearly tied, at 15.6% and 15.4% of thefts. Each of the remaining wards accounted for a smaller share than those.

For drivers, the ward totals measure where reports were filed, not where any particular street or parking spot carries the most risk. The ranking does show that the burden is not spread evenly across the District.

Lower than last year, higher than 2019

The steep decline from 2025 began from a high base. Among the years the council examined, the District's vehicle theft rate in the January-through-June stretch was highest in 2023, and the 2026 rate for those months was far below that peak (Council on Criminal Justice).

It was still above where it stood before the pandemic. The District's rate from January through June was higher than in the same months of 2019, while the study cities on average were slightly below their 2019 levels (Council on Criminal Justice). Of the offenses the council tracked for the District, motor vehicle theft was the only one that increased over that span (Council on Criminal Justice).

A related vehicle crime fell even faster. Carjacking posted the largest decline from 2025 to 2026 among the District offenses in the analysis, ahead of motor vehicle theft (Council on Criminal Justice).

The council cautions that the figures it used may be revised by local jurisdictions (Council on Criminal Justice). The police counts in this story are also preliminary, and the September high could move as reports are updated.

About the data

We used Metropolitan Police Department incident reports for motor vehicle thefts from Jan. 1 through Oct. 20, 2026, counting them by ward and by month. Each full month from January through September was compared with the average across those full months, and October's partial count is reported on its own without that comparison. Comparisons with 2025, 2023 and 2019 come from the Council on Criminal Justice's analysis of January-through-June data.

• Police incident data for 2026 are preliminary and may be revised as reports are reclassified or added.
• The counts include only thefts reported to police, so they understate the true number of vehicles stolen.
• Ward totals are raw counts and shares, not rates per resident or per registered vehicle, so they do not measure an individual driver's risk.

Motor vehicle theft: a police category for the theft or attempted theft of a car, truck, motorcycle or other vehicle, counted separately from carjacking.

Sources

• The publisher's ArcGIS open-data service (named with each dataset): Crime Incidents - 2026, latest period 2026-10-20; retrieved Oct. 20, 2026. Data