The Silver Spring Penguin

People in Silver Spring’s residential neighborhoods plan to powwow over crime and how they can scrape it off the streets, a rep for the area’s civic groups announced.

The “crime summit”, a series of meetings scheduled to start Sunday in Woodside Park, aims to spit out an action plan that’ll put the kibbosh on crime now and in the future, Tony Hausner, a rep for Silver Spring’s civic organizations, explained to the neighborhoods committee Monday night.

“The county executive’s budget is calling for a reduction in new police recruits,” Hausner said. “We feel the police department is already understaffed, so what can we as a community do to reduce crime in the area?”

According to the most recent crime statistics available on the MoCo PD website, crime in the third police district increased 8 percent between the first quarters of 2007 and 2008. Things like burglary, assault and robbery experienced a year-over-year decrease. But auto theft and larceny increased by 12 and 22 percent, respectively, in the same period.

“My neighborhood had a doubling of crime,” Hausner, an Indian Spring resident, said.

The PD doesn’t break things down by specific neighborhoods, but the H1 sector includes residential neighborhoods beyond downtown Silver Spring. In that sector, burglary and theft from vehicles increased within the month of October, from three burglaries and three vehicle break-ins in the first half of the month, to 10 burglaries and seven vehicle break-ins in the last half.

In the G1 sector, which includes downtown Silver Spring, burglary rates remained low (two for the month of October). However, 27 vehicle break-ins were reported that month, compared with 10 in the H1 sector.

On top of theft, the crime summit hopes to examine education-based neighborhood watches, active community patrols, gang-busting efforts, and what Hausner described as “quality-of-life offenses like crude, offensive behavior”.

But talks on crime should be rooted in cold, hard facts, not just perceived conditions, Megan Moriarty, the neighborhoods committee’s newly elected chair, said. “People’s perceptions and actual incidents of crime are sometimes different,” she told Hausner.

Moriarty also suggested reaching out to downtown Silver Spring’s apartment dwellers, who are not represented by the civic organizations involved in this crime summit. Silver Spring’s citizens advisory board might co-sponsor the summit, but only three of its 18 members — Moriarty, Evan Glass and Lucinda Lessley — live in downtown apartment buildings.

The Silver Spring Crime Summit takes place on Sunday at the St Luke Lutheran Church (9100 Colesville Rd), starting at 7:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

Photos courtesy of Flickr user TiareScott.