Review of police data follows September 8, 2023 shooting behind the Garden Inn
Police calls for service at nearly all of the troubled 198 Hotels remain high three years after a commitment from Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman to address nuisance issues at the establishments. Starting with the Garden Inn, Russett Reader reviewed three years of police call data for the hotel and found that not much has changed since Pittman met with community leaders three years ago (pictures below).
The review follows a series of troubling incidents along the 198 Commercial Corridor the past few months including a shooting and attempted carjacking in September behind the Garden Inn.
Pittman visited the troubled hotels including the Garden Inn with community leaders in the Summer of 2020 after residents organized a petition drive to express concerns about the hotels. The petition drive yielded over 700 signatures. Pittman's failure to deliver on promises to hold the hotel owners accountable has left him open to charges that he hasn't acted in good faith with the community and only worked marginally to address serious and potentially life threatening issues at the hotels.
Data from the Anne Arundel County Police Department shows that from July 2020 to September 2023, over 1,300 calls for police service alone were placed to the Garden Inn. It's an astonishing tally and represents over one call per day just for police to the Garden Inn, each day, for the past three years. The most serious calls to the Garden Inn for the past three years were for sexual assaults and child neglect. A large number of calls involved conflicts classified as disorderly conduct, domestic violence, fights, threats, or a disturbance of some kind. A copy of the raw data file for police calls is attached to this story for reference.
Pittman Administration officials have offered that a number of the calls are for "Periodic Checks" or "Community Initiatives" which they claim are calls initiated by the police directly. Devin Tucker, who led the petition drive, countered that any calls initiated by police are still a major red flag. "Mr. Pittman knows pretty well that we cannot be in the business of subsidizing security for these hotel owners. It's a drain on resources. A call to the same establishment over and over again impacts emergency service in other parts of the community so it's a concern. As I've said ad nauseam this is not a police issue. It's a policy issue that fails to hold these hotel owners accountable and I don't know if we've seen any meaningful improvement to give us enough confidence that this team will seriously resolve it anytime soon," said Tucker. Tucker added that Pittman's team initially discounted the community's concerns in a briefing shared with community leaders. He said that the concerns laid out in the petition drive at least kept the issue on the radar.
"The briefing is worth reviewing by the community. It should be published so that people can read it for themselves. It totally discounted our concerns and said that the issues at the 198 Hotels didn't rise to a 'critical' level despite the volume of calls for first responders across the board to the hotels. It's pretty insulting that despite our concerns we didn't merit a more serious response. Our neighbors are very concerned and many no longer walk the trails along 198. It's not good at the moment and they have to take these concerns more seriously considering other, recent public safety issues along the 198 Commercial Corridor in general." said Tucker.
(Below: Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman in July 2020 meeting with community leaders to discuss the 198 Hotels.)
