By Adam Pagnucco.
I have a collection of MoCo political literature going back to the 1980s, providing a rough guide for hot issues in our elections. Education is a permanent issue. Transportation is a permanent issue. Once upon a time, some Democratic politicians in the west and north of the county used to say that they were the best candidate to defeat the Republicans, but since Republicans stopped getting elected here 20 years ago, they no longer bother to make such claims. One issue that usually did not show up in the literature was crime. Perhaps voters didn’t care much about it.
Well, they care now!
Almost every day, media outlets report on the newest shocking crimes in the county. A 16-year-old boy shot in Germantown. Two people injured in a shooting in Gaithersburg. A missing woman’s body found in a park in Colesville. A man charged with armed robbery of a mail carrier in Silver Spring. A double stabbing in a Rockville hotel.
And that was just last week.
This leads me to ask two questions.
How bad is crime in Montgomery County?
And is it getting worse?
Those questions are actually not easy to answer. The county’s police department releases annual crime reports but they have at least three problems. First, their categories of presentation have changed over the years, raising questions of comparability over time. Second, they contain contradictory numbers. For example, the 2021 report lists 22,329 crimes against property in 2019, but the 2019 report lists 21,977 in the same year. And third, they may not adjust for crime definition changes such as the 2015 change in defining rape. For these reasons, I question whether the data in these reports can be used to identify trends.
The Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services has county-level crime data going back to 1975. I used this data to write a 2019 column for Bethesda Beat showing that crime in MoCo was then at its lowest levels since the 1970s. However, the most recent year I had at the time was 2017 and at this writing the most recent year available is 2020. Clearly, this data is not sufficient to examine recent crime trends.
Finally, there may be problems with police data collection that have not been quantified. In July 2021, the county council’s Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) issued a report on traffic enforcement that included the following statement:
Since 2001, Maryland law has required police officers to report data about every traffic stop (limited exclusions) conducted in the state and requires reporting of the data to the Maryland Statistical Analysis Center. In 2007, the County Executive and the Fraternal Order of Police, Montgomery County Lodge 35 (FOP) signed an agreement that is still a part of the FOP’s current collective bargaining agreement with the County. While the agreement specifically states that “[a]ll traffic stops must be documented,” it also states: “In the event the officer does not issue a written document [during a traffic stop], the officer will provide the citizen with the officer’s business card and verbally inform the citizen of the reason for the stop.”
Based on this provision, Executive Branch representatives report that an unknown number of reportable traffic stops performed by MCPD officers from 2007 to January 2021 have occurred where data have not been collected, recorded, and reported to the State, as required by state law.
OLO repeated this statement in October 2022. If this is the condition of traffic enforcement data, are there other data collected by the police department with similar problems?
The data may be iffy but I am not giving up. In this series, I analyze the county’s crime database, which contains more than 300,000 records from police incident reports dating back to 2016. Each record contains data on incident type, geography, place type, date and more. The county comments:
Updated daily postings on Montgomery County’s open data website, dataMontgomery, provide the public with direct access to crime statistic databases – including raw data and search functions – of reported County crime. The data presented is derived from reported crimes classified according to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) of the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and documented by approved police incident reports. The data is compiled by “EJustice”, a respected law enforcement records-management system used by the Montgomery County Police Department and many other law enforcement agencies. To protect victims’ privacy, no names or other personal information are released. All data is refreshed on a quarterly basis to reflect any changes in status due to on-going police investigation.
A note on this data. It is MESSY. To do geographic cuts, I relied on zip codes to construct local areas similar to my primary election analysis. I faced two problems in doing this. First, thousands of zip codes were missing. Second, address blocks often had multiple zip codes. Some of this was legitimate because those blocks were close to zip code boundaries but some zip codes were inaccurate. I put in many hours to clean up these issues but I am sure that I did not catch everything.
So this data is not perfect but it’s the best we have. The upside is that because it has hundreds of thousands of records, it enables significant analytical granularity. We can now gain some insight into which kinds of crime are growing, which kinds are receding and what trends apply in which locations.
Tomorrow we shall get started!