Washington, DC · 2013 to 2025

Frisks in DC's majority-Black districts outpace reported crime, however crime is counted

Stops and arrests there line up with violent crime but not with all crime. Officers also write a smaller share of their tickets in those districts than cameras do.

A common defense of where police concentrate is that they go where crime is. MPD's public incident data makes that testable, because it counts only offenses with victims, such as robbery, assault and theft, so police activity can't inflate it. This report compares each police district's share of stops, frisks and arrests with its share of reported crime.

In the three majority-Black districts (the 5th, 6th and 7th), measured against all reported crime with victims, stops ran 1.44 times the rest of DC per reported crime, frisks 2.73 times and arrests 2.02 times.

Theft makes up most of that crime, and it concentrates in commercial areas. So the analysis also counts violent crime alone, which concentrates east of the Anacostia River. Measured that way, stops (0.75 times) and arrests (0.91 times) fall to or below the rest of the city. Frisks stay higher, at 1.41 times.

Those frisks aren't finding less. In the majority-Black districts, 14.9% of frisks with a recorded outcome found something, against 12.7% in the rest of the city. What differs is how often residents there are frisked for each crime reported.

Tickets go the other way

Traffic cameras ticket wherever they are installed; officers choose where to be. From 2023 to 2025, the majority-Black districts received 51.9% of camera tickets but 42.3% of the 78,301 tickets written by officers. Relative to cameras, officers' tickets were most concentrated in the 3rd District, at 2.61 times its share of camera tickets. Tickets don't record the driver's race, so this compares places, not drivers, and where cameras go is itself a policy choice.

What this does not show

• All crime. Reported crime is not all crime, and reporting varies by neighborhood. If some districts report less, their crime is understated and their enforcement ratio overstated. In July 2026 the DC Inspector General also found weak controls over how MPD classified crime reports, which matters here only to the extent errors differed between districts.
• Calls for service. 911 calls, which MPD cites for where it deploys officers, are not yet tested as a third measure.
• Who is stopped. This compares how much enforcement lands in each place. Who gets stopped and searched once police are there is in the stops report and the searches report.
• Why. The data does not say why police are deployed where they are.
• People. Records count stops, frisks and arrests, not people: someone stopped twice counts twice.

Part of the series Policing in DC, 5 reports.