Montgomery County tied its 1994 homicide record of 34 this week, with the brutal stabbing death of a man in a stairwell at the Shops of Wisconsin in Bethesda. Last night, the County's record was broken with a homicide reported at 6:35 PM in the 19300 block of Circle Gate Drive in Germantown. The record was smashed just as it was revealed that the County police force has shrunk by 56 officers since February 2021. Response times have suffered, and the annual number of police traffic stops plunged from 106,075 in 2019 to only 39,412 in 2020.
Defunding of the police department by the County Council accounts for only 27 of the 56 lost officer positions. The others have resulted from retiring officers not being replaced, and from reduced morale. Perhaps the only relief for County officials who have to own the new record of 35 homicides, is that there are only seven more days in 2021.
16 comments:
Just curious, which of those 34 homicides would have been prevented if those old cops had not retired?
Also I couldn't find a report about the Germantown homicide on your Sam Eig blog.
There's one on there now.
my understanding was that, of the 27 positions eliminated by the County Council, 23 were School Resource Officers. Also the police department's budget was increased by 1.6M, it was not "defunded."
Jawando and other anti-police politicians have been noticeably silent lately on this issue.
I wonder if their efforts to demonize police are actually paying off.. with higher crime rates.
Dems have promoted an anti-police pro-criminal attitude which has resulted in nationwide increase in crimes of every sort. MoCo is a subset of that. You can't keep telling a group of people that they are being oppressed by another group without some retaliatory acting out as a consequence. I have no confidence that the Dem stranglehold on power in this county will end. Which is why I'm moving.
The 27 SROs were transferred to other departments. They were not fired. MCPD's vacancy rate would be worse but for those reassignments. Luckily we aren't nearly as bad off as some other local departments (Leesburg VA has a crazy 25% PD vacancy rate, for example), but we need to do a better job recruiting talent. Increasing our bottom-tier entry salaries would be a good start.
Our population size is 250,000+ higher than in '94 so it's not exactly a relevant comparison. Fingers crossed the pandemic/crime spike subside by mid-next year.
Why did this national crime spike begin under Trump (highest spike in violent crime in modern history) if it's the fault of Dems? That's moronic. Obviously it has to do with the pandemic rather than some gibberish about politicians being "pro-criminal." Not to mention criminal justice reform - releasing tens of thousands of incarcerated criminals - was literally Trump's second biggest legislative victory. You're pointing the finger at the wrong party if you seriously want to make this political.
8:21 PM Needs to put down the waterpipe and turn off CNN like most other liberals have already done. Prosecutors in Democrat controlled cities have managed to bless their constituents with No Cash Bail and aggressive prosecution of police trying to keep the peace all while setting homicide records across the country.
But then again, liberals never accept any responsibility when their own policies come back to bite them. Ask police-defender, Illinois state senator Kimberly Lighford how that's working out.
@8:21 PM: Oh, ok... So Trump should have been more of an authoritarian about arresting and quelling the Democrat Leftists who were rioting, looting and committing crimes across the country. You would have been ok with Trump doing that? Give me a break.
9:43 AM is spot-on, and it's the reason that I own and carry legally a firearm. I refuse to be a victim of these woke policies. The leftist democrat leadership have an anti-police policy platform that created and fostered the permissive environment under which these crimes happen with impunity... and if the perpetrators are caught, no cash bail provisions can put them right back on the street which endangers the community. In the absence of enforced law, law-abiding people will necessarily take measures to protect themselves, and I have.
10:18 AM - "police defunder" Kimberly Lighford is a huge hypocrite but like most Democrats in Democrat controlled cities calls for massive police investigation when it happens to them. The true victims are the "constituents".
The sad thing is the Hoods coming in and committing the armed robberies see the streets are rather deserted In Bethesda due to Covid and the Holidays and they come right in and start doing their armed robberies right after dark. They don’t even wait until late at night…….The fact that 2 locations south of Downtown Bethesda were both hit twice by armed incidents is downright scary.
The solution to all this is pretty simple. Put more police and put more police cars on the street. The mere act of putting a marked police car in front of the Walgreens will be a deterrent to the criminals robbing the Walgreens. This is what it takes to deter and prevent crime.
@8:57, all we have to do to be safe is put police cars in front of every business and house in the community? And I thought parking was difficult now...
@1:29 PM: The fact that you're attempting to use a "Reduction to the Absurd" response here completely ignores that it would work to deter/prevent crime to the extent that it's employed in the general area overall. You probably didn't mean to do that, but you're probably more of an advocate for other feel-good "prevention" strategies that don't actually work. I also support "Stop and Frisk" which is an effective gun control measure, but you're probably against that too by using a "Reduction to the Absurd" response: "Now all we have to do is stop & frisk everyone and we'll be safe".
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