The Silver Spring Penguin

MoCo council member Valerie Ervin wants colleagues to consider residents’ public-safety recommendations cooked earlier this year in Silver Spring.

In an Oct 9 letter to the council’s public-safety committee, the District 5 Dem asked that Silver Spring residents receive status updates on crime in and around the central business district. Specifically, the county should set up a community-relations council to stream info between the police and residents. That’s on top of the county’s existing police-district advisory boards.

“Frequent and consistent communication between residents and the police department increases awareness of the community’s needs and facilitates trust between the police and residents,” Ervin wrote.

The letter also asked county officials to evaluate community policing, including the use of neighborhood listservs in crime prevention. Ervin encouraged the PD to work with the area’s civic and homeowners associations, which run a lot of these listservs, to develop neighborhood watch programs.

Ervin’s recommendations were spawned from a public-safety wishlist developed by Safe Silver Spring, a group of Silver Springers focused on keeping crime in check. In a doc that went along with Ervin’s letter, Safe Silver Spring emphasized youth programs and a facility around the central business district — maybe ye olde library on Colesville Road — to give the kids structure.

The organization also wanted to hook up parts of downtown Silver Spring with street-level retailers, particularly in parts south of Wayne Avenue. Rollin Stanley, director of planning for MoCo’s planning board, argued previously that when pedestrians flow through neighborhoods, the area becomes less attractive to criminals and more attractive to people looking for places to live, work, and shop, Greater Greater Washington reported.

Other items on the Safe Silver Spring wishlist:

• Periodic assessments of the hood’s physical condition. For example, if there’s trash on the ground, someone should pick that shit up. If a street light goes out, someone should change the bulb.
• More security cameras in the central business district. That kind of surveillance is a tricky thing and brings up privacy issues, Tony Hausner, one of Safe Silver Spring’s organizers, admitted previously.
• Community input into how Live Nation handles business at its future Colesville Road music hall. That means keeping a check on booze service and consumption, as well as whether other substances are being smoked, snorted, mainlined or otherwise ingested.

The wishlist also sent love to the Long Branch area, which could use more bilingual police officers trained not to intimidate undocumented immigrants, the organization noted.

During a Safe Silver Spring conference in May, one Long Branch resident told The Penguin that cops in that neighborhood sometimes ask crime victims and witnesses “where they’re from.” The question may sound innocuous enough, but for an undocumented immigrant, it could feel like an inquisition and dissuade further cooperation with police, the Long Brancher said.

County policy doesn’t require a cop to investigate the immigration status of a crime victim or witness. However, some violent offenders do get checked against a national immigration database.

As for what happens next with the wishlist, council member Ervin wrote she was already working on some items. As chair of the council’s education committee, she asked the county’s office of legislative oversight to look into school truancy rates. She’s also working with the state’s attorney’s office on how to keep kids in school, her letter to the public-safety committee read.