Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett wants a significant increase in the number of police officers in the fiscal 2013 operating budget.
“You can’t have effective community policing if you don’t have enough police in the first place to be effective in the community,” Leggett told a group of Montgomery Village residents Wednesday night.
All districts will see increases in funding for police staff in Leggett’s proposal, said Patrick Lacefield, Leggett’s spokesman, though he would not elaborate on the specifics of the plan in advance of the official release of the budget proposal, scheduled for Thursday.
County police department representatives also declined to discuss the specifics of the department’s budget request.
Facing a $135 million budget gap in the coming fiscal year, Leggett’s administration asked all departments to prepare 1 to 2 percent cuts. Those cuts will likely combine with tax increases to cover the costs of additional police staff.
Montgomery County has 1.19 sworn police officers per 1,000 residents, significantly lower than the 2008 national average of 2.5. The Montgomery County Police Department has 1,619 officers and staff.
Between 2000 and 2010, the county’s population increased by 11 percent. As the county’s population increases, so do the number of calls the police receive, Police Chief Tom Manger told members of the County Council in January, and the more urban the county becomes, the more police officers the county needs to patrol.
“We are a very lean department,” he said. “As the county has gotten more urban, we have had to develop a more urban style of policing … that requires more officers,” Manger said.
However, the county should be looking to crime rates, rather than per capita ratios or the density of an area, said Councilman Phil Andrews, D-Gaithersburg/Rockville and chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee.
“I’m a strong advocate for additional staffing in clearly identified areas where either crime is at a high level or where there’s inadequate staffing to do sufficient follow-up work or investigatory work,” he said. “We need to be driven by what the actual experiences of people and what the crime numbers are and really make evidence-based decisions.”
For example, he would expect to see increases in Montgomery Village, where residents have experienced an increase in crime, and in the Bel Pre Road area of Wheaton, which has consistently high levels of crime, he said.
An increase in detectives would help the county close difficult cases, he said, pointing to robberies that have a particularly low closure rate.
In places where the county has increased the police presence — like downtown Silver Spring — crime rates have declined, officials said.
Residents’ perspectives are just as important as actual crime data, Leggett said Wednesday. “If people perceive that they are not safe … you may not go out on the weekend.”
