(The Center Square) — Arlington County’s crimes against persons, property and society increased by 6% from 2022 to 2023, after a report from Alexandria also showed an increase earlier this year.
Though a 6% increase is a significant improvement over the previous year, in which the county’s police department reported an increase of 17.8%, it likely indicates an increase for neighboring localities as the region’s numbers typically trend in the same direction.
Over the last decade, crime rates for Northern Virginia’s cities of Alexandria and Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties tend to rise and fall together, even if by different margins.
From 2021-22, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments reported a spike for all Northern Virginia Council jurisdictions for Part A offenses, including homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft. Jurisdictions experienced an average rise of 26.7% that year.
Though Alexandria saw the smallest change in Part A offenses in 2022, with only a 5% uptick from the prior year, the city reported a nearly 34% increase for 2023.
Among Arlington County’s Group A offenses – a much broader category than Alexandria’s and the Council’s Part A offenses – the county saw the greatest increase from 2022-23 in its crimes against society. Crimes against society include narcotics, gambling and prostitution offenses, as well as weapons law violations. Arlington’s crimes against society rose 14.5%, mostly due to drug offenses, which grew by almost 20%.
There were 182 incidents involving opioids in Arlington County in 2023, 31 deployments of Narcan, and 22 fatal opioid overdoses. The number of deaths by overdose quadrupled from six to 20 from 2019-20 and has stayed around 2020 levels since.
Arlington County’s crimes against persons increased 8.3%, a change Police Department Chief Andy Penn attributes mostly to simple assaults, which jumped from 1,287 to 1,433, and intimidation offenses, which grew from 81 to 122.
Simple assaults are “assaults or attempted assaults where no weapon was used or no serious or aggravated injury resulted to the victim,” as defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The definition includes offenses like stalking, coercion and hazing.
Finally, crimes against property grew by 4.8%, “primarily driven by increases in robbery and larceny offenses.” Carjacking nearly doubled from 13 incidents in 2022 to 24 in 2023. Robbery offenses, which include “taking, or attempting to take, anything of value under confrontational circumstances from another person by force or threat of force or violence and/or putting the victim in fear of immediate harm” and do not always involve weapons, surged from 167 to 255 in 2023.
