Arrests for assault in Lexington rose 53% in a recent three-year period, with most related to domestic violence.
Officers made at least 131 total arrests from Jan. 1, 2023, to Dec. 31, 2025, according to a Lexington Observer-BU journalism school analysis of police department records. The number of people Lexington police arrested for simple and aggravated assault crept up from 15 in 2023 to 23 in 2025, even as charges for other crimes stayed the same or decreased slightly.
Aggravated assaults involve serious bodily injury to a victim attacked by a perpetrator either using or threatening to use a weapon. A simple assault is an attack that does not involve a weapon or serious injuries.
“For the past few years, domestic assault and battery has been our leading statistic for arrest,” Police Chief Michael McLean said.
The domestic violence arrests in Lexington resulted in charges including assault and battery on a household member, strangulation and suffocation, harassment and violating court orders, data from the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office shows.
About 30% of those arrested by Lexington police for all crimes between Jan. 1, 2023, and Dec. 31, 2025, were town residents, and nearly all were from Massachusetts. There are exceptions: In August 2023, a Miami resident was arrested for felony, breaking and entering, and trespass at a home on Massachusetts Avenue, while people from New Jersey, Nevada, Maine, Vermont and Pennsylvania were charged with such crimes as breaking and entering, trespassing and operating a vehicle without a license.
More than 20 Lexington residents were charged with crimes ranging from drunk driving and possession of fentanyl and cocaine to disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. In 2025, residents of this town of 34,000 pleaded guilty in Concord District Court to possession of child pornography, drunk driving, negligent operation of a vehicle, leaving the scene of property damage and criminal harassment, court records show.
While a 2018 state law requires all 470 Massachusetts law enforcement agencies to report monthly arrests to state officials, the arrests are not labeled as domestic violence, and police reports on those incidents are not publicly available.
FBI data shows that in 2020, there were 25,374 incidents of domestic violence reported to Massachusetts law enforcement, including murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, assaults and intimidation. By 2024, those numbers rose to 26,297, according to a report from the state Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, which offers recommendations to the governor and Legislature to improve protections for victims.
McLean said arrest statistics represent only part of criminal activity in a community, a sentiment echoed by an advocate from Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence.
“Arrests are just a small piece,” said Nithya Badrinath, Jane Doe’s policy director. “It doesn’t give us a picture of the violence that’s happening in communities. It gives us a picture of how law enforcement is responding.”
One domestic violence advocate who works with victims said the arrests are an encouraging sign.
“What you’re seeing is people trusting their police enough to reach out,” said Jacquelin Apsler, executive director of the Domestic Violence Service Network, a regional organization that works in partnership with communities.
“Every town, every community, every culture, every grouping of people, has a pretty high level of domestic violence across the board,” Apsler said. “There’s no one community or culture or population that corners the market on it at all.”
Boston University Professor Maggie Mulvihill and graduate student Gabrielle Gagnon contributed to this story, which was produced in Mulvihill’s Data Journalism course in a partnership between the Lexington Observer and the BU Department of Journalism’s Newsroom program.