By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One introduced the concept of depolicing. Part Two explored police data released by Montgomery County government since the late 1990s. Part Three looked at data from Gaithersburg and Rockville. Part Four looked at data from Takoma Park. Today, we will compare these jurisdictions.
The county and the three municipalities listed above report different statistics on police activity in their comprehensive annual financial reports. But there are a few commonalities.
The chart below shows FTEs for police (in Montgomery County and Gaithersburg) and public safety (in Rockville and Takoma Park) from 2009 through 2022. To make this an apples-to-apples comparison, I indexed these numbers using 2009 as a base year of 100.
None of these jurisdictions are significantly cutting their police positions. In fact, Gaithersburg and Takoma Park have substantially increased their police forces since 2009. So any declines in police activity are not reflections of fewer positions. Vacancy rates may be another matter.
The chart below shows traffic citations for the county and Gaithersburg, traffic violations for Rockville and traffic stops for Takoma Park from 2009 through 2022.
All four jurisdictions have shown declines on this measure since 2009. Over the entire period, the drops have been 11% in Rockville, 29% in Gaithersburg, 69% in Takoma Park and 70% in the county.
Finally, the chart below shows arrests in the county, Rockville and Takoma Park from 2009 through 2022.
Once again, there are significant declines in this measure. Over the entire period, the drops have been 48% in the county, 61% in Rockville and 79% in Takoma Park.
COVID could certainly have played a role in these stats from 2020 on. But the pandemic began to ease in 2022 and some of these stats were still down. Furthermore, there were significant pre-pandemic declines in the following series:
Gaithersburg traffic citations
Rockville physical arrests
Montgomery County traffic citations
Montgomery County warrants served
Takoma Park dispatched calls/events handled
Takoma Park physical arrests
Takoma Park traffic stops
Takoma Park warrants received for service
Those declines in police activity coincided with rising crime in both the county and Takoma Park.
None of this proves the existence of depolicing. But large, unexplained declines in police activity that preceded the pandemic certainly exist in some of this data. They raise the question of whether depolicing is in fact occurring. This should draw concern from public safety policymakers as well as the public at large.