Prince George's County crime drops 16% as planners tout safer design
Violent crime plunged countywide, but the harder question is whether CPTED and planning changes are making the county’s toughest blocks safer too.
Violent crime fell sharply in Prince George’s County, with murders down 40 percent, robberies down 48 percent and carjackings down 55 percent, but planners are now pressing a tougher question: whether safer design is changing the county block by block, not just in the aggregate.
The Prince George’s County Planning Department’s Plan Prince George’s 2035 Five-Year Evaluation II, published Dec. 2, 2025, says crime rates fell 16 percent to 2,115 incidents per 100,000 residents. The evaluation measures indicators of success and growth management targets, and it tracks progress since the first five-year review in 2019.
Plan Prince George’s 2035 is the county’s adopted 20-year general plan, approved in 2014. County planning materials say it steers growth through eight Regional Transit Districts and six Neighborhood Reinvestment Areas, a framework meant to concentrate investment where transit, redevelopment and neighborhood stabilization are expected to do the most good.
Planners have tied part of that strategy to Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED, which uses building layout, visibility, lighting and public space design to make crime harder to commit. In June 2019, Hyattsville hosted a one-day CPTED workshop that drew more than 60 participants from municipal and county agencies. In July 2020, a more in-depth virtual certification course reached 36 participants, and all passed the exam and earned American Crime Prevention Institute certification.
Police have also paired that planning language with enforcement. On May 29, 2025, Prince George’s County police said crime was down 16 percent so far that year and announced a summer crime initiative scheduled from June 12 to Aug. 30. Then-Capt. Malik Aziz said the department was using the TAAG system, which divides the county into thousands of hexagon areas, to direct attention to the highest-need locations.
By Dec. 15, 2025, police said the broader decline had continued: overall crime was down 16 percent, violent crime down 19 percent, with 4,755 fewer victims. Detectives had closed 80 percent of the cases they investigated that year, police said, while Chief George Nader stressed that accurate reporting shapes deployment and strategy. County Executive Aisha Braveboy has also said public safety gains depend on community involvement, not police alone.
The numbers point to real progress, especially in the county’s most serious offenses. The open test is whether the neighborhoods planners have targeted for years are feeling the difference on the ground.
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