Rising crime has been a perennial issue in Montgomery, recently highlighted by a late-night shootout downtown that left two dead and 14 injured. Mayor Steven Reed has tried to blame the violence on the state’s “lax” gun laws, but State Rep. Reed Ingram (R-Pike Road) said it’s due to the mayor’s inability or unwillingness to prioritize public safety.
On a recent episode of “1819 News: The Podcast,” Ingram explained how Mayor Reed has refused to enforce a recently enacted anti-loitering law and neglected to recruit more police officers.
“Steven is the only city [mayor] in the state that's not enforcing it because he's scared of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Ingram said. “We've had 17, count it, 17 people get run over last year, standing in the middle of the road asking for money and drugs and everything else. We had nine get killed last year in Montgomery, in Montgomery alone, that were pedestrians that they were standing there soliciting money or either walking in the road.”
Ingram said law enforcement did not appear to be a priority for Reed, as evidenced by the city’s police force, which has now dwindled from over 500 to around 200.
“It's not important for them to recruit. They put on a show that, hey, we're trying to get police officers,” Ingram said. “They may have three graduate from the academy. They may have 10 that retire because of conditions that so bad. They don't want it to be a good department.”
He continued, “Public safety should be number one, especially getting back to what you were talking about on a local level. It starts locally, you know, and public safety is number one for every citizen in this state and America as a whole because if you don't have public safety, you can't have economic development, you can't have safe schools, you can't have a safe workplace, etc. And you can't raise a family and reproduce, and you know, worship God and do everything that we need to be doing every day without the fear factor of your wife going to Dillards or your wife going to the grocery store or the wife getting gas, you know, it's a lot more crime out there that's being uh reported. And for them to say that it's down 27% on violent crime, it's not possible. There's no way… every day there's a shooting or a killing. And you call 911, and you may not get them on the phone to report that crime, or you may not even get a police officer to respond.”
Ingram said Reed either lacked the “passion” needed to fix the crime problem or it was a part of an intentional plan to drive out anyone opposed to his agenda.
“I think it's a theory so he'll run all the good voters or conservative voters out of Montgomery so he can control the legislature and the county commission and the city council and everybody,” Ingram said. “So if everybody moves, if he has a bad town, then he can say, ‘Oh, let's go back and regroup. Now that we've got control of everything, we can get more money in here. We can put on an occupational tax,' which I've stopped.
“We can stop him [Reed] from taking over the airport, which he can get more money if he hires the contractors and does all that. He wanted all the appointments on it. He wanted all the appointments on the water authority. And you see what that did in Jackson, Mississippi. They just want to run everybody out so they'll leave and go to Pike Road or Elmore County or Wetumpka, where you are, so that they can control everything. They get fat cats that way.”
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