D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier and Mayor Vince Gray touted at a news conference today that the District experienced the fewest number of homicides since 1963. But at the same time, other categories of violent crime are on the rise.

Eighty-eight people were murdered in 2012, the Metropolitan Police Department reported earlier this week. That’s down by 20 from 2011’s total of 108, and the first time the tally has been in double digits since 1963, when 95 were slain. In the past five years alone, the homicide tally has fallen by 58 percent; 142 were killed in 2008.

Speaking at a high-tech command center at MPD headquarters, Lanier also said the Metropolitan Police Department showed marked improvement in the percentage of homicide cases it closes, with 82 percent according to the Uniform Crime Reporting standard that D.C. and most other major cities use. The standard, developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, includes actions on homicide cases from prior years.

Still, the total number of violent crimes, which includes sexual assaults, robberies and assaults with deadly weapons, ticked up by three percent from 2011. Overall, violent crime accounted for 19.6 percent of all crimes reported last year, while property crimes such as non-violent theft made up the remainder.

In the first half of 2012, though, the District appeared to be on pace for a drastic increase in robberies, especially as the theft of personal electronic devices seemed to reach new levels. However, robberies remained nearly even to 2011 by year’s end, as reports of such crimes tapered off in the months after the Lanier announced MPD was stepping up enforcement on robberies targeting smartphones and laptop computers.

But assaults with deadly weapons and sexual assaults both increased in 2012. Fewer of those assaults with deadly weapons were carried out with illegal handguns—Lanier riffed that she has seen reports in which a suspect “throws a brick” at a person and misses—but still up overall. Trends in sexual assaults were more overt. The number of incidents in which a sexual assailant was known to a victim increased by 108 percent over 2011.

Lanier touted several of her department’s measures against sexual assault, such as coordination with nonprofit groups like the D.C. Rape Crisis Center and Men Can Stop Rape, as well as the deployment of a smartphone app called U ASK, which allows sexual assault victims on college campuses to more easily report violations.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do with advocates,” she said.

Lanier also said that the number of violent crimes categorized as hate crimes also decreased by four percent, though she acknowledged that crimes against some groups did increase.

The chief also played up MPD’s expanding use of new technologies, especially its online message tip line, use of which has increased by 600 percent since its 2008 debut. Similarly, 2,326 crime reports were filed on the department’s website. Lanier also announced that D.C. police also signed up for another social networking platform: Pinterest.

As far as hardware is concerned, Lanier hinted that MPD would embrace more technologies over the next three years, starting with an increased focus on closed-circuit television including a system that will allow officers to better review gunshots as they are recorded.

When asked about the December 24 shooting death on Capitol Hill of 28-year-old Jason Anthony Emma—after which two “persons of interest” were captured walking by a security camera—Lanier said she was not ready to publicize any new information.

Gray and Lanier, however, were most proud of the historically low homicide total, which put Washington well ahead of most other major U.S. cities. Of some two dozen cities that Lanier’s presentation compared D.C. against, only New York and New Orleans showed declines in their homicide rates, suggesting that those three cities are going against a nationwide increase in murders. Chicago, for instance, eclipsed 500 homicides in 2011, while New York, with nearly three times as many residents, recorded 414.

That a city growing as rapidly as D.C. continues to lower its homicide total makes the statistics even more remarkable, Gray and Lanier said.

“We want people to feel safer and be safer,” Gray said.