MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) – A state lawmaker is calling out the city of Montgomery to prioritize public safety

Republican Rep. Allen Treadaway of Jefferson County chairs the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee. He released an opinion on the city’s crime Thursday. In it, he accuses Mayor Steven Reed of blaming Montgomery’s violence on a constitutional carry law passed two years ago.

Reed issued a statement in response, saying the city is working to improve public safety and that officer pay and safety has increased during his tenure.

Both statements are printed in full below.

Rep. Allen Treadaway

The Legislature has Prioritized Public Safety, It’s Time for Some Cities to Do the Same

We’ve all seen the headlines coming out of Montgomery in the last few months.

Someone gets killed or seriously injured, the mayor holds a press conference blaming everyone but himself, until the next violent incident, where it just repeats itself.

We’re only halfway through 2024, and there have already been at least 35 homicides and hundreds of shootings in Montgomery.

Mayor Steven Reed wants you to believe that there just isn’t anything he can do.

According to him, the violence Alabama’s Capital City is experiencing stems from the Legislature passing a constitutional carry law two years ago.

As a retired police officer and chairman of the House Public Safety Homeland Security Committee, I have a few issues with that statement.

The first is that the criminals who are killing people would have never gotten a pistol permit to carry what is, in most cases, a stolen firearm. Law-abiding gun owners aren’t the ones firing off 1,000 rounds over a disagreement at a party.

My next issue is, how can we expect law and order when the Montgomery Police Department, which Mayor Reed is responsible for, is so poorly run that its attrition rate is among the worst in the state? I know from my 31 years as a law enforcement officer that the fastest way to run off good police officers is by not supporting them. When officer morale is as low as it is in the City of Montgomery’s Police Department, due to either a lack of leadership, support from its elected officials, or its critical staffing level, you end up with a department incapable of combating Montgomery’s crime.

Finally, Mayor Reed argues that police officers cannot determine who is or isn’t lawfully carrying a firearm because the Legislature removed the requirement for law-abiding citizens to pay for their Second Amendment rights.

That’s totally false, and he knows it or should know it.

When we passed the constitutional carry legislation, the Legislature also passed a bill creating the Firearms Prohibited Person Database – the first in the nation. This tool enables law enforcement officers across the state to learn of a person’s inability to possess a firearm when running suspects’ information after making contact. I wonder if Montgomery PD is even utilizing this new law to protect citizens and police officers.

Back when concealed carry permits were still required, law enforcement relied on an antiquated system to track these permits that simply did not work as it should.

The first issue with the former system was that law enforcement had to contact the issuing authority to verify the permit’s validity, which was almost impossible to do outside of regular business hours. It wasn’t like verifying someone’s driver’s license – permits were issued by the counties and often had no security features.

The biggest and most dangerous issue that this new law solved is that we had no way of nullifying someone’s permit if they were convicted of a crime that prohibited them from owning or carrying a firearm.

For instance, if an individual is convicted by our courts or receives a protection order, they lose their right to carry a firearm under federal law. Prior to the Firearms Prohibited Person Database, we had no way to track this from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The facts just aren’t on Mayor Reed’s side. Law enforcement can now determine in minutes whether someone is prohibited from carrying a firearm, which was not the case prior to the Legislature creating the Firearms Prohibited Person Database.

This problem didn’t magically appear when constitutional carry was implemented in 2022. Montgomery had 77 homicides in 2021 and 68 in 2020.

However, it is worth noting that the city averaged 38.5 homicides per year in the four years prior to Mayor Reed taking office in November 2019.

It’s easy to see that the Legislature didn’t cause this mess – local leadership did. You can’t expect your police force to be successful when it’s had a revolving door of police chiefs.

You can’t expect your city to be safe when the culture within the police department runs off good officers.

And you can’t expect people to believe this is anyone’s mess but your own, Mr. Mayor.

Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed

If Representative Allen Treadway is actually concerned about public safety in Montgomery, he can pick up the phone and speak to me. Instead, he chose to make a baseless personal attack, while dragging the name of one of Alabama’s great city through the mud.

Since taking office in 2019 I have invested more money in MPD than any Mayor in history. My first statutory action was to introduce an occupational tax for Montgomery that would have put two officers in every car, effectively doubling the force. That ordinance passed locally but was killed at the state level.

Some MPD officers have received as much as a 40% raise since I took office. I also secured funding to replace the 100 of the departments vehicles that were so old parts are not made for them anymore. When the extremely deadly Glock switch appeared in our community, I invested over 375k in state-of-the-art weaponry to assure that our officers are not outgunned. When I found out our officers had out-of-date taser, I spent 1m to give them new equipment.

Point being, there’s no one thinking about finding a solution to the gun issue more so than me and my Administration.

I have proven multiple times that I will replace any leader within the police department who is not getting the job done.

I want people to remember that the man who boasts of his law enforcement background in any conversation is the same man who voted for permitless carry, against the pleading of every law enforcement group across the state. I would think that a man with his law enforcement background would understand that this law paired with person-to-person purchases robs officers on the street of the reasonable cause they once had to check whether a person is allowed to carry a weapon at all.

Instead, he slinks away from his culpability for the recklessness of his legislative actions and increase in shootings so as not to offend gun manufacturers. He’d rather defend them than the lives of friends and family affected by gun violence.

It turns out facts aren’t on your side, Mr. Treadway.

Sign up for the WSFA Newsletter and get the latest local news and breaking alerts in your email!

Copyright 2024 WSFA. All rights reserved.