Public Safety

In the multi-jurisdictional metropolitan Washington region, ensuring safe communities for residents and visitors requires coordination across various agencies on a wide range of issues, including planning, response, resource sharing, and crime prevention. Throughout its history, COG has championed this coordination, such as its ongoing support of regional mutual aid agreements. These agreements allow police, fire, and other emergency resources to be shared across jurisdictional borders and have aided regional responses from the 1968 civil disturbances following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the 9/11 terrorist attacks to presidential inaugurations.

Additionally, COG brings together the region’s various public safety disciplines, including fire and emergency medical services (EMS), law enforcement, emergency management, health, public affairs, and information technology to address public safety issues at the regional scale, ranging from gangs to drunk driving to fire safety as well as emergency communication and scam and fraud prevention.

For several decades, COG has compiled crime data and published annual reports on regional crime trends and now, COG has also launched the first unified, near real-time dashboard for DC, Maryland, and Virginia that aggregates and displays recent crime data from 24 local jurisdictions.