By Adam Pagnucco.
As the defund the police movement approached its peak in 2019 and 2020, the county executive and the county council held a competition to appeal to police critics. The executive’s contribution was his Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, which recommended abolishing half the police officers in east county among other things. The county council passed a number of bills restricting police authority and established a Policing Advisory Commission to provide input on more such policies. The defunding effort culminated with the FY22 budget, which abolished nearly 30 positions in the police department.
Fast forward to today. Despite rising resident complaints about crime, the Policing Advisory Commission persists and earlier this year tried to solicit opposition to traffic enforcement. (This backfired as attendees at its forum demanded more traffic enforcement.) The commission has also survived the establishment of a state-mandated Police Accountability Board, which duplicates its advisory function but has more authority as well as full-time staff. (Its executive director is a former politician who once worked for Council Member Will Jawando, a defunding advocate.)
The duplicative nature of the commission (created by the county) and the board (created by the state) led Council Member Dawn Luedtke to introduce a bill to eliminate the commission. Some might believe it’s pure common sense to limit duplication in government, right? But when I first heard of her bill, I recalled another doomed bill to limit advisory committees, this one introduced by former Council Member George Leventhal in 2011. Like Luedtke, Leventhal wanted to limit bureaucracy, duplication and waste. The failure of Leventhal’s bill (no one else sponsored it and it died quietly) points out the county’s Iron Law of Advisory Bodies – they are easy to create and difficult to destroy. That’s why the county has dozens of them.
Luedke, a council freshman, may not have known about the Iron Law before but she knows about it now. Just as the repeal bill was introduced in May, the commission’s chair wrote to council public safety analyst Susan Farag, “I think the PAC [Policing Advisory Commission] should figure out how it wants to wind down in the next few months.” The chair promptly changed course, referring to his initial position as an “impulse of the moment,” and opposition from the Silver Spring Justice Coalition and the county NAACP convinced Luedtke to abandon the bill.
Next, she introduced another bill to rename the commission and change its composition. This one is also under attack, with opponents opposing the bill’s inclusion of representatives of the police department, the police union and the business community as voting members and also opposing any effort to reduce the commission’s scope of work. The bill’s racial equity statement opined that it would set back racial equity and that “current BIPOC members on the PAC could likely be replaced by White members.” Luedtke responded with amendments. So have Jawando and Council Member Kristin Mink. And so it goes on and on.
This discussion has now produced two bills, two hearings, two committee sessions and at least one forthcoming full council session. It has consumed untold hours of staff time.
Meanwhile, the police department has an existential staffing crisis. It is already reducing its presence in the county’s two largest municipalities and rising vacancy rates could cause it to cut staffing elsewhere. More than 40% of our police officers are eligible to retire. Our 911 call center had a 36% vacancy rate in February. (What is it now?) Average call response times have risen steadily in the last decade while the media regularly reports on rising violent crime and carjackings. Referencing the county’s police staffing problems, the council’s public safety analyst told them, “This is the canary in the coal mine. The canary is dead.” And what draws the council’s focus? The appropriate composition of an advisory commission.
I don’t fault Council Member Luedtke for trying to eliminate duplication. She had good intentions. But the council’s resulting attention on pleasing a handful of activists rather than on protecting a million residents from criminals is appalling and so, so MoCo. The whole thing has turned into the dumbest county council debate of the year and one of the dumbest I have seen since I started writing in 2006.
This is the government you pay for.