Montgomery County police said they have moved “a number of additional officers” to fight a surge in gang-related violence, with two gang-related stabbings and gang-related shootings at the Shady Grove Metro station and a Rockville grocery store since Halloween.
Capt. John Fitzgerald told The Examiner that all of the recent incidents are believed to be gang-related, and that leaders are taking a similar approach to the one they used to combat the sniper shootings of 2002.
“We are fairly nimble to [be able to] say, ‘If we have a problem right now, let’s pay attention to it, see if we can have an impact on it,’” Fitzgerald said. “We take officers that already do similar work, pull them together and say, ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do, let’s increase our staffing on this problem now.’ Once we feel like its de-escalated we take them off.”
Fitzgerald said the newly assigned officers were on the streets Wednesday and that the decision to allocate additional staff to target the gang problem was made Tuesday. He declined to say how many officers were reassigned to focus on gangs, saying he did not want gang members to know the specifics of the plan.
“What we’ve done is assemble a number of additional officers to join with the gang task force,” Fitzgerald said Wednesday. “We will be doing intense police work in the Gaithersburg area as wellas other areas, and our work will be both high-visibility and very invisible; we will use a variety of tactics.”
Officials are investigating the possibility that the stabbings and shootings are related.
Police say the number of known, active gang members in Montgomery County rose 20 percent between June 2006 and July 2007. That would mean that the county saw the number of active gang members go from 931 to 1,117 in a year. Last month, Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said most of the increase had come from association with smaller groups.
