Gaithersburg Police Department
law enforcement agency for Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States
The Gaithersburg Police Department (GPD) is the municipal police force of Gaithersburg, Maryland.
History
1963–1986: Founding
The Gaithersburg Police Department was founded on April 1, 1963, when a resolution creating it was signed into law by the mayor of the city at the time, Merton F. Duvall.
The town budget for fiscal year 1964 included "police protection" salaries for the solitary officer amounting to $4,000 (equivalent to $41524 today), and equipment purchases of $500 (equivalent to $5190 today).
It was under the administration of Chief DeVries that the Gaithersburg city police began to operate under its current system of dispatch through the Montgomery County Police Department. As a former Montgomery County Police lieutenant, DeVries was in a position to work with the County Police in a way that had previously not been possible.
1986–1998: Expansion and modernization
The Gaithersburg Police Department grew from an authorized strength of three sworn officers and one civilian clerk in the early 1970s, when the city's population was 7,000, to its current complement of 57 sworn officers and nine civilians. The majority of that growth occurred from 1986 to 1998 under the direction of then-chief Mary Ann Viverette.
In 1983, the GPD formed a traffic unit.
Viverette was the GPD's chief from 1986 until her retirement in May 2007. John King succeeded Viverette and served until 2010.
The public source identifies “Gaithersburg Police Department” as law enforcement agency for Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gaithersburg, Police and Department.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q38214166. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1986, 1964 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gaithersburg Police Department” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.