Emerging Trends in Mid-County Crime, or

Territoriality and Racism Escalate from Harassment to Violence

With the recent restoration of the 911-calls-for-service logging feed to crimereports.com we see a change in pattern developing.

For one thing, while the incidence of "theft from vehicles" remains about the same, there appears to be a significant increase in reports of Assault. In the Aspen Hill area, of course, crime tends to be concentrated in and around the so-called "BelPre-Hewitt Focus Area", which is a designated grant recipient area under the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention's Collaborative Supervision and Focused Enforcement ("CSAFE").

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Noted in passing, the Governor's Crime Control and Prevention office ("GOCCP") homepage has a link to crimereports.com on it. The GOCCP officially supports such mapping as an excellent tool promoting public safety and citizen awareness.)

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Life in this part of the country is predictable in many ways, and unpredictable in many other ways, because of a varity of cycles imposed by forces originating outside of the area.

Obviously, there are the influences of weather. The hot and humid Dog Days of mid-August often bring a peak in certain types of crime, notably those caused by momentary surges of passion, when tempers flare in the intolerable heat. And in deep winter we tend to see increases in robberies and thefts of valuables, especially around the Holidays, and especially near shopping centers. Nothing says "Christmas" like a pile of toys you didn't have to pay for because you stole them, eh? The people who repair windows see high volumes of business at this time of year, especially from people who leave their shopping bags in the passenger compartment of their vehicles, rather than securing them out of sight in the trunks of the cars.

Other cycles are less definable. Some of these come from downtown in the District, or for that matter may originate at the Pentagon. Wars, and rumors of wars, deployments abroad and redeployments back home can cause significant disruptions in the area. For example, the original National Guard call-ups immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001 resulted in a near decimation of uniformed police officers, moreso in some districts than in others. A very high percentage of police are also subject to National Guard or Army Reserve call-ups. Somewhat surprisingly, various units of the Maryland National Guard are in instant high demand when hostilities erupt abroad. The Astute Reader can of course discover the reasons for this... but the end result is that shots fired overseas leave less police on our streets. One of the best ways to increase crime in Aspen Hill is to fire up an insurgency in Iraq.

And then there's "PCAT", or the "police community action teams". For short time periods, comparatively quite large numbers of officers can be concentrated in fairly small areas which are seen as hotspots of criminal activity.

Most of the PCAT personnel are sworn officers from Montgomery County. However, in the same way that large sporting events can see the temporary redeployments to arena grounds of officers from several local jurisdictions or even several nearby States, sometimes PCAT can field a lot of personnel who aren't merely not from Montgomery County, but who also aren't technically police.

"CSAFE" is "collaborative supervision and focused enforcement", and in the original conception, the idea was to reduce the incidence of crime by reducing the ability of recidivists to return to their previous criminal habits. By adding funding for overtime hours of parole and probation officers, more surprise home visits could be made, more spot checks of actual presence at alleged employers could be made, in general there was more opportunity to supervise those whose criminal nature was already a matter of court records of convictions of offenses.

Yet law-enforcement is not exclusively the province of police nor even the bailiwick of sheriffs. There are other forces in play, and some of them are more than a little bit scary.

For instance, there was the infamous 2004 Aspen Hill case of the Bounty Hunter Rampage in which out-of-control bounty hunters kicked in doors and held uninvolved third-parties prisoner at gunpoint. Allegedly they were seeking a Brazilian illegal alien who had escaped from a previous capture.

There are other possible players who tend to pop into the area on a recurrent basis. For example, on a schedule not easily understood -- the better to surprise the targets -- the Department of Homeland Security occasionally launches mass-raids seeking the apprehension of Criminal Aliens under their Secure Communities Initiative.

Sometimes you might have the occasional agent from the FBI investigating curious diversions of taxpayer funds and you might also have the occasional NCIS investigators tracking down stolen laptops.

Most of these occasional irruptions of massed law-enforcement presence are single-instance, but now and then you get cycles of varying length all occuring at the same time.

Imagine, if you will, that PCAT picks Aspen Hill as their operational venue for the month. At the same time, DHS decides that it's time for a sweep for mass-arrests of criminal aliens.

DHS's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are very well aware that the official policy of Montgomery's Department of Police come about as close as is possible without active violation to a policy of aiding-and-abetting illegal aliens to remain and work here, insofar as they aren't actually arrested for handgun violations or certain crimes of violence.

So, in our hypothetical scenario, DHS ramps up for a significant sweep in the area, and goes out of their way to not inform the local police. Further, to make up for the manpower they would ordinarily "borrow" from the local forces, they bring in a lot of US Marshals and professional bounty-hunters.

And locals like me find themselves wondering WTF is going on and who the hell are all of these out-of-towners dressed in plainclothes -- generally like panhandlers or sketchy biker types -- and clearly concealing weapons about their persons? And why are they just as clearly setting up operations centers at various local stores?

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I've seen this sort of thing appear and disappear on a number of occasions.

Once, in perhaps 2003 or so, I was at a meeting where a high-ranking police official was present, and I asked them if there was a PCAT action going on or something comparable. Keeping in mind that I am not even in my own imagination a law-enforcement officer nor anyone who could reasonably expect full disclosure of sensitive operational information, I'm keeping also in mind that street-level publicity of PCAT sweeps is seen by many police as a very good way to suppress crime, or to at least make a lot of criminals so noticably wary that their increased furtiveness is as good as a flashing beacon in terms of attracting attention.

The response I got was something to the effect of "nope, no PCAT, nothing I can tell you about". I was feeling like being an asshole or something, so I muttered "so at least now I know whose government these guys are not from..."

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Now and then, I need to add, various organizations which are decidedly not law enforcement set up shop in the neighborhood.

For example, it's well known that in the same way that the old New York Italian Mob frequently had top-level management meetings disguised as dinner parties in restaurants, the transnational gangsters of Mara Salvatrucha ("MS-13") almost always have their meetings in public parks in the guise of a friendly game of soccer.

Aspen Hill's "Aspen Hill Local Park" has an ongoing problem with nearby homeless camps. In previous years, we've seen what appears to be MS-13 clique meetings taking place in this park, with significant attendance and with many of the attendees leaving these meetings along paths leading to the homeless camps.

And then there are the party or parties unknown who were associated with the "Dust Wars" of 2007, in which large numbers of out-of-state and out-of-county vehicles circulated widely engaging in very counterproductive activity that was starting to resemble the outbreak of a widespread terrorist attack using weaponized dusts by the time it ended. It is unknown at this juncture what started this, or who and what ended it. My most reasonable conjecture is that this was some sort of illegal vigilante squad or squads engaging in harassment and "area denial" activity.

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Vigilante activity may be understood to be, possibly, both a reaction to and a cause of increased reporting of assaults, particularly in the BelPre-Hewitt Crime focus area monitored under the GOCCP/CSAFE grants and programs.

The 2004 "Bounty Hunter Rampage" may reasonable be viewed as a result of a widespread perception and expectation that lawlessness in the area of their activity was such that they bounty hunters themselves could, with reasonable expectations of impunity, act more than a bit outside the bounds of law and order.

This is one of the worries that develops as crime increases in any given area: that people start organizing their own "vigilance committees". In many of the countries from which we draw our wonderful diversity, such organizations take the place which in the US is reserved for duly authorized organizations for law-enforcement. And this is nothing more than another way of saying "where we pay taxes to support police, in other countries they pay tithes to gangsters, to provide public safety".

It's my opinion that we are at the same crossroads, confronted by the same dilemma, as we had in 2000 or so when we first formed the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative and pursued funding from the GOCCP and CSAFE (at that time, the Hot Spots program).

So-called "problem people" are being illegally excluded from access to local commercial facilities.

It's extremely illegal -- at Federal, State and County levels -- to discriminate against people for disability, real or imagined, of whatever kind. It's also illegal to exclude people on the basis of race, perception of race, religion, perception of religion, etc. Yet it seems that at several shopping centers in the vicinity of Aspen Hill, illegal vigilantism is specifically targeting individuals -- and groups -- for exclusion. The preferred method for enforcing a ban appears to be clandestine application of violence and in some cases the application of violence isn't even all that clandestine.

Over the next week or so, I'll try to give more detailed dissertations on the subject of "how Aspen Manor became the official ghetto scum shopping center" and of how the same battle -- which in the case of Aspen Manor resulted in racist near-warfare to exclude everyone who was neither Korean or "hispanic" -- is presently being waged at Plaza del Mercado shopping center, where "vigilance committees" are operating outside of any discernable legitimate police sanction, and in contravention of at least three layers of law.