Police in Montgomery County, Maryland, have been largely compliant with the 2020 law requiring the agency to share information related to whether law enforcement is being carried out equitably.
That’s according to an analysis carried out by Susan Farag, a legislative analyst who presented a report to the Montgomery County Council’s public safety committee.
According to the report, there were 193,306 calls for service in 2022 and 9,532 arrests.
While Farag found that the department is providing most of the information that the law requires, she did find that use-of-force numbers have gone up — from 542 in 2018 to 1,415 in 2022.
Farag cautions in the report that making year-to-year comparisons can be challenging due to changes in reporting and training policies. But, she said that “a percentage of the total use of force that involves Black subjects has increased over the past few years to the highest we’ve had in the past five years” — they’re almost 60% of the people against whom force is being used.
“That in itself is a very harrowing kind of statistic,” Farag said, adding that more qualitative analysis is needed.
Montgomery County police Chief Marcus Jones agreed that raw numbers alone don’t tell a complete story.
“The race of the individual involved, we don’t control that,” Jones said when asked about disparities in arrests and citations involving students when police are called to schools. “So when we talk about disparities, I think it has to be a deeper analysis.”
Farag also noted that Montgomery County police have provided the required data in the majority of the 47 categories called for under the 2020 community policing bill. However, she noted that the format of much of the data isn’t “user-friendly” — something she and the police attending the committee meeting attributed to staffing and technology issues. She recommended creating a “front-facing” data dashboard, such as one used by Baltimore County police.
Jones noted that the police department is trying to update its records management system.
“It’s been a very lengthy procurement process,” he said. “And it’s still in the process of being developed.”
Farag noted that the police department has a single staff member “who is considered a database architect, who creates reporting systems, dashboards and fulfills open records requests.”
She recommended that the Council take a hard look at whether the police department has “appropriate time, talent and technology to make full use of the data.”
