As part of Police Week, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich spotlighted what he said is the progress the Maryland county is making in public safety.
“The results of their dedication are clear. In 2025, Montgomery County saw a 9% overall drop in crime,” Elrich said.
During Elrich’s weekly briefing with reporters, Montgomery County Assistant Police Chief Darren Francke said there are two trends police have been focusing on.
Francke said there’s an effort to continue crackdowns on car meetups where drivers block intersections and videotape themselves doing doughnuts and spinouts.
In a February incident in Chevy Chase, a patrol car was vandalized when police responded to a car rally at the intersection of East-West Highway and Connecticut Avenue. Three arrests were made in that case.
“We’re working on further enhancing our ability to respond to those,” Francke said. “What we’ve seen is at these car meetups, there are guns, there are drugs, there are assaults. That’s not something that we want in our community.”
Francke said police are also working on strategies to deal with so-called “teen takeovers,” similar to those that prompted the extension of curfew zones in D.C.
Without specifying what actions police would be taking, Francke said, “We’re working on planning for that to avoid those kind of situations where, suddenly, 200-300 teens/young adults surge into an area and there’s general mayhem.”
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