The number of homicides and traffic fatalities slightly increased in Montgomery County last year amid countywide efforts to reduce both trends, including the ambitious Vision Zero plan.

Homicides in Montgomery County rose 20% in 2025. Twenty-four homicides were counted last year, Shiera Goff, a Montgomery County Police Department spokeswoman, told The Banner, but were still down from a 10-year high of 36 in 2021.

The county recorded 20 homicides in 2024, which was a 31% decline from the year prior. Authorities typically release an annual report around late spring or early summer, and that report is still pending, Goff said.

The total number of homicides could still be revised as ongoing investigations evolve, such as a September fatal shooting that was ruled a homicide in December. A Montgomery Police official was not made available to comment on efforts to reduce homicides.

Council member Dawn Luedtke, who sits on the council’s Public Safety Committee, said she’s pleased with the Montgomery County Department of Police’s efforts to target violent crime. But she expressed concerns that many of the homicide incidents involved people who knew each other, and that many of those incidents could be considered domestic or familial violence.

“These are very targeted incidents with people having personal conflicts,” Luedtke told The Banner.

Of the 24 homicides recorded in 2025, at least 7 of them — 29% — involved family members or intimate partners, according to data available from the county’s public dashboards. At least 16 of the county’s homicides involved firearms.

Within the first eight days of 2026, the county has experienced two homicides — a fatal shooting in Gaithersburg on Jan. 2 of an 18-year-old man, and a fatal shooting of a 43-year-old man in Fairland on Jan. 8.

Pedestrian, bicyclist and other non-vehicle deaths declined from 19 in 2024 to 18, according to data provided to The Banner by the Office of the Montgomery County Council and Vision Zero.

(After this story was originally published, Montgomery County’s Vision Zero coordinator shared three additional non-motorist deaths that were recorded in 2024, including fatal incidents involving a person on a skateboard, a lawn mower and a person on I-270.)

The number of traffic deaths in 2025 differs slightly from the count of 17 that appears on Maryland’s Department of Transportation’s publicly available fatal crash dashboard, a discrepancy caused by the county’s inclusion of an April fatality that occurred in the parking lot of 515 Dover Road in Rockville, said Wade Holland, Montgomery County’s Vision Zero coordinator. State and federal data only count fatalities that occur on roadways.

In addition to fatal traffic incidents, there were 678 pedestrian and cyclist-involved crashes last year, 82 of which involved serious injuries.

Street safety was a testy topic for residents as initiatives under the Safe Streets Act of 2023 came into focus throughout the year, such as the installation of “no turn on red” signs at busy intersections, which angered residents across the county.

“I hear all the time from residents who do not like the ‘no turn on red’ signs across the county. I understand that,” said council member Evan Glass, who chairs the council’s Transportation and Environment Committee and led the passage of the Safe Streets Act. “What I don’t like is more than 650 people being hit on our roads, and two-thirds of them being in crosswalks.

“There is room to improve the policy — recognizing downtown Bethesda is not the same as Darnestown or Germantown,” Glass said. “But at the end of the day, we need to make our intersections safer, and that’s what the Safe Streets Act is aimed at doing.”

The other pillar of that plan is ensuring safe routes to school for students. The ongoing issue gained urgency when 11-year-old Summer Lim was fatally struck by a school bus while riding her bike home from Rockville’s Earle B. Wood Middle School in October.

Plans for Montgomery County’s streets are continuing to evolve into the new year. Glass, who is also running for county executive, hosted a forum on Jan. 10 at the Montgomery County Council Building in Rockville to discuss road safety with local and state officials.

These discussions tend to draw vocal supporters and opponents of the various efforts, and that divide is reflected at the county level. December’s County Council vote to advance the controversial University Boulevard Corridor plan, which would reduce car lanes and widen sidewalks among other measures, passed 7-3 after significant pushback.

One of the topics of conversation at Glass’s forum was the Vision Zero effort, which county officials touted as a pioneering effort nationwide to eliminate serious-injuries and fatal collisions in the county by the end of 2030. Other jurisdictions, such as neighboring Prince George’s County, considered adopting the plan, but Montgomery County has seen minimal changes in fatalities since adopting Vision Zero in 2018. The county’s results mirror a similar stagnation of Vision Zero efforts across the country, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

For Glass and county officials, tragic incidents such as Lim’s death reflect the urgency to reduce the number of fatal incidents.

“I recognize that change is hard, but I also recognize that the status quo is unacceptable,” Glass said. “Too many of our neighbors are being hit and killed on our roads, and we need to make them safer for everybody.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect new data shared by the county on the total number of pedestrian and non-motorist traffic deaths in 2024.