Published on: Thursday, February 02, 2012

By Brian J. Karem

Among the issues facing the county is a recent proposition by County Executive Ike Leggett, County Council President Roger Berliner and Police Chief J. Thomas Manger to increase police staffing in the county.

“We’re not moving to a point to where Montgomery County turns into a police state – I promise you,” said Berliner recently.

The move apparently comes, according to county officials because of the observation that recent staffing changes in Silver Spring helped to cause the crime statistics to “plummet” in the area.

Manger offered that crime statistics on the whole are going down around the county, but in certain areas are increasing.

Leggett promises to include a request for an increase in police staff in his March budget proposal.

Let’s take a look at this issue from the broadest perspective.

One should never dismiss a request of this type out of hand. Those who rage against a “police state” the loudest are also those who usually howl the loudest when their car or house is broken into and the police take longer than 30 seconds to respond.

But, it is interesting Berliner used the term “police state.” 

Montgomery County plays host to at least a half a dozen policing entities that have the ability to arrest people. You have park 

police, city of Rockville and Gaithersburg police, county and state police and Metro Transit Authority police. Plus there are the odds and ends of federal agencies that drive through the county with very visible patrol cars. Then there’s the county sheriff’s department. While the primary responsibility for all of the other police departments may not necessarily be conducting a patrol through your neighborhood, the mere sight of them in the area certainly is a deterrent to crime.

So when Manger says the ratio of police to residents in the county isn’t what he’d like it to be, one should also consider all of the other police departments in the area that help deter crime-especially if the county is asking for more patrol officers.

If it is asking for more brass, then one would have to be more skeptical, because as some officers note, there is no shortage of brass in the police department. 

If  Manger wants more investigators, then where are the crime statistics to back up such a request? Manger himself says crime, overall, is going down in Montgomery County.

What we seem to be faced with, if we look at the statements of county officials and at the crime statistics, is an increase of some crimes in selected areas of the county.

Many of these are due to the socio-economic impact of the local population.

Faced with similar problems in the past, police departments across the country, including San Antonio, TX, Louisville, KY and Kansas City MO, have opted to attack the problem in a more specific way.

They all concentrated on neighborhood policing efforts by putting more feet on the street in areas that needed them, and by hiring multi-lingual officers who also attended local civic functions to assist neighborhood businesses and residents.

This would be well within in the ability of the county police department and would not be nearly as expensive as hiring a large number of new police officers.

It is no secret Montgomery County is a very diverse community and becoming more so each year.

It is a curious place with pockets of residents who grew up and have been here for many generations. It is also a place of transients where government and media workers come and go every few years.

Some of us, like me, came, liked it and stayed.

It also attracts a large variety of immigrants. The Asian and Hispanic communities are very large, as is the African-American population.

Policing this wide variety of people takes a great deal of imagination and thought. 

It also takes a police department that respects and works with its community, and one that makes use of all of its resources to assist its community.

It may or may not take more money, but in this era of fiscal restraint, more money should be the last recourse – especially when the police department is already doing a great job keeping the crime rate down.