Aziz Tackles Crime In The County
Chief Will Be Implementing A New Law Enforcement Action Plan Beyond The Badge
By Tiffany Young
Malik Aziz is the Chief of Police for the Prince George's County Police Department, which is the fourth largest law enforcement agency in Maryland. More than 1,500 police officers and 300 civilians provide a full range of law enforcement services to nearly 900,000 residents and business owners. Prince George's County Police Department is proud to provide service to a diverse demographic and geographic area. Aziz addressed The Greater Prince George’s Business Roundtable on July 13.
Prince George’s Suite: How has police recruiting changed over the years?
Aziz: We're right in the middle of a staffing study right now to address some of our concerns but I think we always need as many offices as we can or as needed to get the job done. In 2013, we peaked at 1695 and it's been on a continuous decline. The actual strength as of July 1st, 2022, is 1465. 52 of those positions are being held by our recruits. That's 1413 active officers who are out in the field. Leaving us about 321 officers reduced from the authorized strength and certainly around 150 that are needed to actually get the job done in a more adequate way. We're hiring for all positions. Police, civilians, and school crossing guards also.
Prince George’s Suite: What is the crime rate in the county?
Aziz: Our homicides, 2022 we had 48. I always say that there's no such thing as having-- When you have a reduction, we say, "Oh it's great to have a reduction." One murder is too many. One homicide is too many in our county. One homicide is definitely-- When you talk to the families who get affected by that, a reduction in numbers don't mean much to them when their loved one has been killed through a murder, through a homicide. I know those numbers come to 46, but two of those, we investigate from the municipalities. They don't go into our overall numbers, but we've had 48 murders in the county. The ones that we are investigating, we had 44 adults and two juveniles. That's a 29% decrease from 2021. In this month, July, if we look at the numbers from last year 2021, then the homicides for this month last year July 2021 we had 15 homicides and we're doing everything possible that we can in the collective environment to keep that number as low as we can and we've already had two murders this month. We are trying almost halfway through the month attempting to look into a new direction. In 2021 there were 65 homicides. At this particular time we finished the year 136, 126 of those were adults and 11 were juveniles. 11 juveniles committed homicide in our county last year.
Prince George’s Suite:: Can you tell us who is committing these crimes?
Aziz: Perplexing number for young people committing such a violent crime.I have to say this often, I say because the vast majority of our juveniles are doing what's right. They're going to school every day. They're working, they're young people, they're just trying to live out their lives in a meaningful way. Then we have a small group of young people who are committing some of the most violent crimes in our county. In 2021 year to date for carjacking was 134, so you can see the type of increase that we've had even though our success rate of apprehending suspects went up and our clearance rates went up. We are still experiencing a high volume of carjacking across the county which is alarming people. Juvenile suspects identified in 11 out of the 17 cases. The largest string to date was eight known cases and they were committed by the same group of suspects, the same group of juveniles. Again, the vast majority of our juveniles are doing what's right. A small group of juveniles committed these carjacking, and they said that, in our interviews with the ones that we apprehended, just young minds, real arrogant and against the system, were saying that they were going to continue doing what they were doing and that was carjacking.
Prince George’s Suite:: Can you talk about the increase in carjackings?
Aziz: We're seeing carjacking increase in this region and in the DMV they're increasing in all major cities especially right across from our counterparts in DC, we work collaboratively with them with our Washington area of vehicle enforcement squad and our carjacking and addiction unit which I set up last late August which has shown some benefits with a 80% clearance rate from the carjacking unit. As you can see those numbers, we've had a 63% increase from 2021 and arrests. We've had 92 arrests year to date, so far 92 people have been arrested in conjunction with carjacking across our county. Adults are 32 and juveniles are 60.
Prince George’s Suite:: What other crimes have increased in the county?
Aziz: We've had elderly people attacked. We've had people getting into an exchange of gunfire or being shot or even what they considered being hit with a pistol or pistol whip as they call it. We've had all kinds of things across our county associated with carjacking. Auto thefts to this date for property crime because I gave you the violent crime that are driving our numbers for violent crime, but even though we've had a decrease in violent crime over the last 30 days, we've went down from 16%, so it's headed into a positive direction. All of our numbers are trending outside of carjacking, overall by the is trending negative in the last 30 days, overall property crime was trending in the last 30 days on a reduction, so we're looking with what we've instituted, it's coming to fruition, even in a perplexing and challenging environment for staffing and deployment.
Prince George’s Suite: There is a rise in ghost guns. Have you seen them in the county?
Aziz: Ghost guns have made a big impact here across the United States. In 2016, was the first mention I ever heard of a ghost gun from a special on TV, about a late Michael Williams from Baltimore. He talked about unserialized weapons and was over in the Philippines. Since then we've seen ghost guns rise here. The arrest associated with those weapons, we've had 686 adults arrested for those weapons, for a handgun, and 58 of those have been juveniles, 58 are carjacking trends.
Prince George’s Suite: What county agencies are you working with to decrease the crime rate?
Aziz: We have a collaboration with the State Attorney's Office Department and juvenile services and the judges, they have proven to be beneficial since last November, when our county executives spearheaded the first meeting that we've had to come together and our federal partners and our municipalities, we're working with them closely and they've played a major role in us addressing these kinds of issues.
Prince George’s Suite: When these carjackings are happening, what has been stolen?
Aziz: Airbags continue to be at high volume but we have several crews operating from the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Prince George's County. We have identified patterns where they're making their rounds and they're taking these airbags out of vehicles. Then the resale value is really high and they're putting them back into the black market that are reinstalling these airbags back into vehicles where people believe they're getting legitimate airbags. Catalytic converters are skyrocketing across the country nationwide because of the palladium and rhodium and precious metals that are inside of catalytic converters because they're often not covered. I can say it and drive a Toyota Prius car, you're going to be a target of a catalytic converter as number one. You should get the pan installed over your catalytic converter. It's very inexpensive to do but it'll save you having to spend literally a couple of thousand dollars dealing with a catalytic converter and what's associated with it but those numbers are rising across the nation.
Prince George’s Suite: What is the department’s plan to address school threats?
Aziz: Regarding our school-related threats, I've spent a lot of time talking about what happens in our schools. I thought Dr. Goldson was on, we have a great working relationship with her and her staff. We associate with the security department addressing these needs daily but we have legitimate threats that come out with young people who make threats in schools every year. I've listed some of them as you can see what happens in the schools. Usually, we have enough to file a case on them. We deal with the cases where we've had arrests. We can get threats 141 but we make 46 of those that we thought were legitimate reasons. What happens after that? We're only one part of that wheel but we do seek to bring the legitimate cases of a threat that have caused disruption or they may have the ability to carry those out. In this environment as we've seen what's happened across the nation like in Uvalde, in my home state of Texas, we don't want those acts or someone to go into a school and then commit an act of violence or of that type of that nature. It would be tremendous so we take all threat stuff very seriously.
Prince George’s Suite: Can you share the community engagement efforts made by the police department?
Aziz: We have a lot of activities going to address some of these issues, not just enforcement as crime prevention, but enforcement as community engagement. We have the award-winning police athletic activities week. They're playing baseball right now. Our beautiful Carl Richards is the first of its kind in the nation to be on police department property. We've verified their relationship, we've established the relationship with the Boys & Girls Club, and we have full intentions of having them in that same facility and offering programs to our young people, our young adults so that they can have some things to do so we can have a better outcome in dealing with some of those issues. Our officers walk and talk. We are doing community walks. The officers that are sitting out their car engaging with the citizens when they have that type of time. We're doing other things, like the leadership camp, the speed and agility camps, and loud music. We have the police band that's been paying all around the county NMBC. We have National Night Out coming out August 2nd, and we just finished with a bike rodeo. We planned. We are engaging, as much as we can, to get on the other side of what I just mentioned, not just the enforcement part of it, but the community engagement part, the entire community part, removing one of the elements from the equation of person and place and behavior, and surrounding our community and exchanging information with intelligence, with investigations and having a better outcome to fight this crime that we're having in a very different way. Again, I talked about this already, because that's just one element of crime reduction.
