By Adam Pagnucco.
Bill 33-19, lead-sponsored by Council Members Nancy Navarro and Craig Rice and passed unanimously in 2020, requires annual reports from the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) on a variety of demographic and activity statistics. The council has now received a report covering 2022. Here are three facts from that report about county police officers.
MCPD officers don’t look like the county’s population.
The chart below shows the demographics of MCPD officers compared to the demographics of the county’s population from the Census Bureau’s 2021 one-year American Community Survey. MCPD is dominated by white people and men. Other groups are significantly under-represented.
About half of MCPD officers don’t live in the county.
Of the 1,181 officers, 591 (50%) live in the county. The report does not state where else officers live but Montgomery County is clearly more costly for housing alone than several of our neighboring jurisdictions.
Complaints, discipline and use of force are miniscule compared to the total volume of police work.
The report does not tabulate the number of interactions between officers and the general public but let’s do a little crude math. If those 1,181 officers encounter an average of just 10 residents each per day, the total number of interactions per year would exceed 4 million.
Against that hypothetical total, consider these data points on complaints, discipline and use of force in 2022.
Number of officers against whom complaints were made: 234
Use of force in response to resistance that resulted in an injury to a subject: 209
Number of civilian complaints: 102
Complaints filed against officers for discrimination/harassment: 14
Complaints filed against officers for a use of force: 11
Officers disciplined with written reprimand: 12
Officers disciplined with loss of leave: 9
Officers disciplined with oral admonishment: 3
Officers suspended with pay: 3
Officers suspended without pay: 0
Officers disciplined with loss of pay, demotion, monetary fine or dismissal: 0
Number of use of force policy violations: 0
Relative to the total volume of police work conducted by an 1,181-officer department, the rates of use of force, complaints and discipline are microscopic. These statistics paint a very different picture than the claims of defunding advocates and cellphone videos of police misbehavior.
Check out MCPD’s report for yourself here.