By Adam Pagnucco.
As stated in our summary data, violent crime (crime against person) in MoCo has been on the rise. Violent crime reports in the county’s database were 4,973 in 2017, fell to 4,433 in 2020 (the pandemic’s first year) and stood at 5,375 in 2022 at this writing. This part looks at the geography of violent crime.
First, let’s look at average violent crime rates over the six year time period by region and town. I use a similar methodology here as I used for election analysis. Towns are defined by zip codes. Thousands of zip codes were missing and thousands more were incorrect, so I spent many hours cleaning up the data to the best of my ability.
Germantown, Downtown Silver Spring, Montgomery Village and Wheaton led in violent crime rates over the period. Areas with the lowest crime rates were in the southwest or rural parts of the county. That said, the gaps in crime rate inside the county were smaller than the gaps across the region. For example, in 2020, Baltimore City’s violent crime rate was about ten times the rate in MoCo. That’s a larger spread than the difference between Germantown and Potomac.
Now let’s look at the change in violent crimes by region.
Every region in the county saw a dip in violent crime in 2020 followed by a rebound. From 2017 through 2022, violent crime rose by 17% in Downcounty, 0% in Upcounty and 11% in the rest of the county. Upcounty, however, led the other two regions in violent crime rate largely because of Germantown, Montgomery Village and Gaithersburg’s zip code 20877. (The latter zip code had the highest violent crime rate of any zip code in the county.)
Now let’s look at three towns in which violent crimes rose substantially over the period.
From 2017 through 2022, violent crime rose by 40% in Downtown Silver Spring, 22% in Rockville and 10% in Gaithersburg. Bear in mind that these town definitions are based on zip code, not municipal limits, and both Rockville and Gaithersburg have large unincorporated areas that fall outside the patrol areas of their city police departments.
Finally, let’s look at four large communities where violent crime rates were relatively stable over the period.
Germantown and Wheaton may have had high violent crime rates over the period but they have not seen increases in violent crime. In fact, Germantown has improved a bit.
In terms of geography, Downtown Silver Spring, defined by zip codes 20901 and 20910, stands out. It had both a high rate of violent crime and a large increase in violent crime over the period. Rockville also saw a substantial increase. Other areas were mixed and sometimes had small bases of violent crime leading to substantial percentage changes up or down. For example, Brookeville had a 30% decrease in violent crime, but that reflects a change from 10 crimes in 2017 to 7 in 2022.
Next, we will look at demographics.