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All was quiet Saturday night as Officer Elias Samghani strolled up and down the busy pedestrian promenade of Ellsworth Drive in downtown Silver Spring, his eyes scanning the crowd for trouble.

In spite of the relative calm, Samghani and the four other officers working the Third District's special detail in the Silver Spring central business district were not fooled; if not for the extra eyes and increased visibility offered by the detail, problems would quickly arise.

"Since this detail started, it has slowed down a lot from our perspective," Samghani said.

Before the detail was implemented July 15, officers mostly responded to fights and other problems after they happened instead of being on the scene to prevent them as they are now, he said.

"What we're doing right here, being visible in the community, is actually making a huge dent in crime in this area," he said. "We feel like, when they phase it out, those [crime] numbers are just going to go right back up."

After a violent July 12 brawl ended in 16 arrests, anywhere from four to eight officers began working overtime shifts from 8 p.m. until 1 a.m. on a nightly basis in the Silver Spring central business district, reducing crime and reassuring the frightened public. But the extra detail will likely be phased out in the next few weeks due to the burden of paying overtime hours on a cash-strapped and understaffed police department, according to Third District Commander Capt. Donald Johnson.

"The officers that were assigned to work the overtime detail were put there to supplement the patrol, [but] you can't keep going on overtime hours indefinitely," he said.

More than $230 million was set aside for police in the county's 2011 budget, a decrease of 6.5 percent — roughly $16 million — from last year. Furloughs and cuts to officers' cost of living wages made up about $2.3 million of the overall cut, making overtime jobs like the Silver Spring central business district detail attractive to officers, but it remains a short-term solution to the area's need for additional officers.

Fortunately, Johnson has already taken the first steps toward creating a permanent, regular force of officers dedicated to patrolling the central business district on foot or by bicycle.

The department's Management Services Bureau, in the midst of an audit designed to determine which of the county's six policing districts require additional officers, has been informed of the plan for a dedicated central business district patrol, Johnson said.

"The central idea is, how do we get a core group of officers and then be really able to dedicate them to the downtown central business district?" he said. "There are plans in the future to look at different options similar to the patrol they have in Bethesda or even in Wheaton; a group of officers that can work the area in a more concentrated environment just doing bike patrols or foot patrols."

But for right now, the idea remains in the planning stages. The county police academy's 34 recruits are all slated to fill staffing shortages across the six police districts — including eight vacancies in the Third District alone — upon graduation in January, so a dedicated Silver Spring foot patrol could take quite a while to implement, Johnson said.

Many residents and property managers hope the dream of a dedicated force of extra officers will come true.

"We obviously really like having the additional officers down here; they work really well with our staff and our security, and we would like to see it continue," said Jennifer Nettles, manager of Downtown Silver Spring for Peterson Cos., which manages properties on Ellsworth Drive through an agreement with the county. "[As it is now], If something happens in a different area, [officers] leave our area to go handle it, but this would be a dedicated force just for the central business district."

jarias@gazette.net