By Adam Pagnucco.
Is Montgomery County a safe place to live?
That depends on how you define “safe.” If your definition of safe is that there is zero crime, good luck finding a safe place to live. Even Antarctica has crime.
My definition of safe compares our crime rate to other large jurisdictions in this region. Do we have lower rates of violent crime and property crime than most of our neighbors?
Another factor is the COVID pandemic. In its early days, many crime rates fell but domestic violence rose as people stayed in their homes. Closings of offices and schools probably affected crime at those locations. As the pandemic receded, crime picked up again.
Finally, there have been major changes in how the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) collects crime data starting last year. According to NPR:
This year, the FBI changed the way it collects crime data — and many of the nation’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies were slow to get on board.
The data collection system, called the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), has been around for years — but it requires departments to log crimes in greater detail, and wasn’t their only option for doing so before.
In 2015, the FBI announced that it would be switching from its previous system to only using NIBRS beginning in 2021, meaning that as of this year, departments had to submit data via NIBRS or not at all.
As it turns out, many chose the latter. The 63% of law enforcement agencies that submitted data for 2021 marks the lowest level of participation the FBI has reported in decades, and only 52% of them submitted a full 12 months of data.
So crime data is pretty messy, both at the local level and the national level. Any analysis of it will have problems.
Here is my attempt to compare MoCo to its neighbors. My source is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which relies on reports of violent and property crime from local law enforcement agencies. This data is not perfect. For example, while Montgomery County’s reporting agencies include the county police department, the park police, the sheriff’s office and the police departments in Chevy Chase Village and Takoma Park, they do not include the police departments in Rockville and Gaithersburg. Therefore, MoCo crime may be underestimated compared to its neighbors.
To deal with the pandemic issue, I pulled crime data for both 2019 and 2020.
Finally, I used population data from the 2020 U.S. Census data to calculate violent and property crime rates per thousand residents.
Let’s start with violent crime rates for the area’s largest jurisdictions in 2019 and 2020.
Now let’s look at property crime rates for the area’s largest jurisdictions in 2019 and 2020.
Let’s concede that because of the limitations of the underlying data, this analysis is rough. But for what it’s worth, MoCo’s violent and property crime rates are lower than Baltimore City, D.C., Baltimore County, Prince George’s County and Alexandria and are higher than Fairfax and Loudoun counties. That means we are not the best but we are definitely not the worst. We also compare better to our neighbors on violent crime than property crime. However – and this is a big caveat – the data is a couple years old.
MoCo is such a large and diverse jurisdiction that generalities are often not useful for us, and that goes double for crime. We will start examining crime rates inside different parts of the county next.