Police in Montgomery County, Maryland, say they are continuing to work with public school officials to keep students safe, after a football game between rival high school teams last week led to a brawl and multiple incidents of school property.
Jordan Satinsky, captain in the Community Engagement Division with Montgomery County police, told WTOP the department is still following a model set in place last year by Montgomery County Public Schools after a similar incident.
Police and school officials “work together quite a bit,” Satinsky said.
Satinsky said that a tiered system is based on historical factors such as rivalries and recent “intelligence,” among other things, is used to identify potential issues that can occur at the football games.
That is used to help to determine staffing.
“That is shared with the commanders of each district, and they make decisions about how they will staff their areas for the pre- and postgame events to hopefully dissuade incidents such as this through presence and education,” Satinsky said.
Commander Amy Daum of the MCPD said there was “significant upstaffing” for the Sept. 1 football game between Walter Johnson and Bethesda Chevy-Chase high schools, but they simply “didn’t have the right officer in the right place at that exact time” when it came to the subsequent off-site assaults and robberies that ended in the arrest of five teens.
According to Satinsky, the upstaffing could not have happened without the proper intelligence, which he said is shared between the police department and MCPS both ways.
“They hear a lot of stuff from inside of their schools, our CEOs, while not inside the schools anymore, they do get intelligence from staff and from the students they do know from various levels, and that is transmitted between all parties. So we make sure we’re on the same page,” Satinsky said.
“We are always updating and adapting our response inside the school perimeter outside the school perimeter for these events based on things we’ve learned based on events you just discussed. If we have intelligence that we feel that something’s going to happen, we will always try to do our best using not only our officers but allied officers from other agencies to upstaff as best we can.”
Satinsky added the department “has no interest in arresting our way out of any problem. We want to help … But realistically, the police can’t be everywhere and do everything.”
WTOP’s Kate Ryan and Dana Sukontarak contributed to this report.
