A two-year audit of the Montgomery County Police Department identified “major gaps” in the department’s data collection systems, finding the county’s process for tracking and analyzing use-of-force and crisis intervention “woefully inadequate.”

“The Department has the potential and an opportunity to become a data-driven organization leading to better training, performance, accountability, and transparency, but realizing these benefits will require improved data collection and analysis to fully meet the Department’s and County’s needs,” reads the report, conducted by the outside consulting firm, Effective Law Enforcement For All (EFEFA.)

The lengthy report also identified other major areas for improvement, including the department’s procedures for handling use-of-force incidents, its system for flagging officers exhibiting patterns of bad behavior, and its handling of mental health crisis calls.

“There’s serious flaws in what we collect in the way of information and our ability to analyze it and categorize it,” said County Executive Marc Elrich at a press conference announcing the final audit last week. “We don’t have the inputs right now to be able to analyze that as much as we should.”

According to the report, the department’s public arrest database does not include the race, ethnicity, or gender of arrested individuals, and the data disappears within 30 days. Interviews with members of the department also revealed that many didn’t understand the data system that manages information gathered at stops, searches, traffic collisions, and field interviews — making it difficult for either the department or the public to identify patterns of harassment or over-policed communities.

“Inadequate data hampers any understanding of the real problems around use-of-force incidents,” reads the report, which recommends that the department acquire a new system for logging data, that it regularly analyze this data for the public to “increase transparency and trust with the community,” and publish public, anonymized use-of-force data.

The audit reviewed a total of 60 use-of-force incidents, interviewed eight formal internal affairs investigators, and watched more than 500 body-worn camera recordings . The review of use-of-force incidents found several different kinds of violations, including officers aiming their guns at people, excessively swearing, inappropriately using K-9s during an interaction, and individuals’ reports of injury and pain during an interaction, among others. The department also lacks clear guidelines for when an use-of-force incident should be elevated for a formal investigation, according to the audit.

“We are working with the police department to improve the investigations of use-of-force,” David Douglas, a member of the ELEFA audit team, at last week’s press conference. “There’s an opportunity to improve investigations and improve public trust by investigating all uses of force independently, and to develop a force investigation team with special expertise in investigating use serious uses of force.”

In 2021, the department adopted a new “Response to Resistance and Use of Force Policy,” which the audit considers “more comprehensive” than the previous policy, but that still fails to address use of K-9s and deployments in use-of-force events. According to the audit’s review, the department saw a 25% increase in use-of-force incidents from 2020 to 2021, with the most occuring in Silver Spring and Wheaton. Of the 593 use-of-force incidents reviewed in 2021, people of color (indicating in the report as Black and Latino) were 3.5 times as likely to be involved compared to white people.

The county commissioned the audit in July 2020, amid a wave of attempts at reforming and increasing accountability in local police departments, following the murder of George Floyd. ELEFA first released preliminary findings in June 2021, which Police Chief Marcus Jones said the department has acted on in the last year — including creating a de-escalation and use-of-force training unit and working on building a response model for mental health calls with the county’s behavioral health and crisis services programs — but the audit notes that the department still maintains “notable deficiencies” in numerous areas needed for reform.

The Silver Spring Justice Coalition, a community organization formed in 2018 after Montgomery County police shot and killed 41-year-old Robert White while he walked in a residential neighborhood, said the audit will do little to solve the racism and harassment in the county’s policing.

“The fixes proposed by ELE4A will do little if anything to address the discriminatory policing faced by people of color, and specifically Black men in mental and/or behavioral health crisis,” said Bob Veiga, co-chair of the coalition, in a statement on Monday.

In its statement, the coalition said that despite the more than 160 recommendations in the audit, “there is no evidence that the changes proposed will actually result in keeping people safe from harm by police, and certainly not soon enough.” Most notably, the group disagrees with the audit’s recommendation to expand the Crisis Intervention Team program, and instead calls on the county to invest in non-police mental health teams to respond to crisis calls.

The release of the report comes months after the county settled a use-of-force incident against a five-year-old Black child. The county paid $275,000 to the family of the kindergartener who was berated and handcuffed by county police in January 2020, after the child left East Silver Spring Elementary School and walked .2 miles away down a residential street. In body-worn camera footage, officers were recorded repeatedly yelling at the boy as he sobbed and coughed, saying he should be beaten.

In the summer of 2021, the county paid $400,000 in a settlement with a man who was kneed in the back of the neck and slammed into pavement by an officer in Aspen Hill. The officer, Kevin Moris, was found guilty of assault and acquitted of a misconduct in office charge, and was allowed to retain his position with the police department.