Speaker at council hearing says Montgomery County police data report omits required details on crisis responses and training

At a public hearing on the Montgomery County Council’s 2024 police statistical data report (required by Bill 45-20), a longtime community advocate said the published report omits data required by county law and leaves outstanding questions about responses to mental‑health and substance‑related calls.

Rob Landau, who said he is associated with the Silver Spring Justice Coalition but was testifying on his own behalf, told the council he and colleagues reviewed the department’s last three years of data and found persistent gaps. “Calls for service related to substance abuse and mental health remain stubbornly high,” Landau said, and the report does not show how often the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team (MCOT) or other alternative responders were dispatched to those calls.

Landau also told the council that officer overtime has been “dramatically and disturbingly increasing,” and he warned that rising overtime raises risks of exhausted officers and mistakes. He said several reporting requirements in county law 35‑6a were not met in the statistical report and that the published data did not reconcile with Data Montgomery (the county’s open‑data portal).

Landau complimented Assistant Chief Frank for meeting with members of his group to discuss the issues and said those meetings produced some clarifications and additional MCPD commitments. Still, Landau urged the council to request further explanation and links to detailed data so the public can reconcile the reports and review training and deployment metrics required by statute.

The council closed the public hearing after the testimony; no formal council action on the statistical report was recorded at the meeting.