Park Police Merger: An Expensive Way to Save Money
When the Montgomery County Organizational Reform Commission begins developing recommendations to reduce inefficiencies and cut duplicative programs, its members will probably find that many proposals that look like no-brainers at first glance won’t save any money. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, there is always a well-known solution to every budget problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. One example is the proposal advanced during this year’s budget debate to merge the Parks Department’s police force with the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD).
The Parks Department is part of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), which is technically a state agency even though its members are appointed by the County Council (much like the school system is under the control of the state board of education even though the County Council is responsible for most of its budget). The Parks Department runs a police force that currently includes 72 sworn officers (although its full strength is theoretically 101), who have primary responsibility for public safety in the county’s parks.
The county police sometimes answer calls in the parks, the Park Police sometimes make arrests or issue tickets outside the parks, and they both back each other up. So why not roll the Park Police into MCPD and save the overhead associated with running two separate police forces with overlapping responsibilities, as County Executive Ike Leggett has proposed?
The first problem, of course, is that public safety in the parks would suffer. MCPD is a highly professional police force, but it is forced to respond to service calls of every type throughout the county. As outgoing Park and Planning Commission Chairman Royce Hanson wrote in a letter to Council President Nancy Floreen in April, the Park Police focus on the parks, which allows them to address problems before they pose a serious threat to public safety.
I joined a park police officer for a ride-along on an overnight shift early this year and saw firsthand the steady stream of nuisance crimes in the park system that often do not even come to the attention of most park users or neighboring residents. In making rounds from one park to the next on the east side of the county, we encountered minor offenses at almost every stop.
The weather was cold, so we did not find many of the teenagers-hanging-out-and-drinking-beer kinds of issues that I often see in Woodside Urban Park, across the street from my house, during the summer months. By far the most frequent offense was public indecency, i.e., young adults (presumably without a residence where they could find more privacy) having sex in parked cars. We also responded to a report of a theft from a pizza deliveryman, and in driving from one park to another we saw a driver make an illegal left turn in front of us across three lanes of traffic (he was stopped and issued a ticket after a brief investigation revealed no signs that he was under the influence of alcohol).
Park Police crime reports show that my experience during the ride-along was fairly typical. None of the offenses was especially serious by itself, but nobody wants their neighborhood park to be a magnet for public sex, drinking, or drug use. If you call MCPD about these kinds of issues, they will respond, but the nature of their role requires them to be reactive. The Park Police monitor what is going on in the parks and often detect offenses before anyone has reported a problem. With 34,600 acres of park land divided among more than 410 separate sites, maintaining the quality of the parks and stopping illegal activity from getting a foothold is a big job.
Fine, you might say, but at a time when we are slashing spending in every part of county government, a separate police force for the parks is a luxury we can’t afford. Unfortunately, the prospects for achieving savings through a merger are dim. This Council has ordered the Park Police to integrate their dispatch and communications functions with MCPD, a step that accounts for about one-quarter of the $2 million in savings that the County Executive projected with a full merger. Even this step is unlikely to save money right away, because integration of dispatch procedures (for example, MCPD’s radio dispatch system uses separate channels for each of the county’s six police districts, while the Park Police use a single county-wide radio channel, and the two forces use different codes when communicating with officers in the field) will require training and perhaps technology upgrades in order to work effectively.
A decision to follow through with a full merger next might well increase costs, because MCDP officers are more highly paid – the total annual personnel costs associated with each Montgomery County police officer are $117,000 to $123,000, and these figures include part-time crossing guards. Park Police officers make less money, and the total cost of each officer is about $101,000 a year. (These estimates come from Hanson’s letter to Floreen, and the County Executive has not disputed them). MCPD officers are required to have at least two years of college, while Park Police officers need only a high school diploma. This issue could be finessed by grandfathering Park Police who lack the necessary educational credentials, but the two forces are represented by different unions. After a merger, all police officers in Montgomery County would presumably become part of a single bargaining unit. Does anyone seriously believe that compensation levels will be brought down to the level of the Park Police rather than brought up to the levels negotiated by the Fraternal Order of Police for MCPD officers?
No area of activity should be off limits to the Reform Commission, but it will take more than political courage to come up with a list of ideas for restructuring and streamlining Montgomery County’s government that can deliver on the promise of substantial savings. The Commission should look at the Park Police, along with every other part of our government, to analyze not just what cuts to propose but how they can be made in a way that yields real benefits in terms of cost while preserving key services.
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Casey Anderson is a lawyer with more than two decades of experience in law, politics, and journalism.
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