Steven Reed should let them have it.
For the past few days, the Montgomery mayor has made his case against yet another piece of Republican-sponsored legislation that purports to assist the Capital City with policing efforts—but in reality only serves to take power away from a Black mayor whom those Republicans have turned into a scapegoat for decades of their failed policies.
Reed should stop fighting them and hand their mess back to them.
Because they can’t fix it. And in a year or so, when their clumsy, childlike ideas of out-macho-ing the problems fail spectacularly, he can take it back and we can maybe put to rest this notion that crime flooded Montgomery when Reed took office and that the answer to solving the gun violence that’s rampant among the youth in the city is “lock ‘em up.”
The simple truth about Montgomery is this: It is a glowing example of how conservative policies absolutely crush a city with high poverty rates.
Everything that conservatives strive to create around the state, they had in abundance in Montgomery for decades.
A talk-tough, mostly racist mayor? Check.
A police force that locked ’em first and investigated later? Check.
A school system that catered to the rich and white? Check.
City infrastructure policy that prioritized the “good side of town?” Check.
For most of 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Montgomery did everything that conservatives want out of city leadership. It had the most private schools in the nation for a period of time. It took great pride in its redlining and keeping “the undesirables” on their side of town. It always found reasons to cut social welfare programs and always found extra money for “economic development” in the better parts of town.
In the county school system, a sizable portion of students—those with means—enrolled in private schools. Another sizable portion went off to the separate magnet schools and still do, by the way. What was left were schools filled to the brim with high-poverty, at-risk students, but public schools that officials still judged on the same measuring stick as the state’s wealthiest districts.
And then, just for fun, they decided to fund those schools worse than any other district in the state for more than three decades.
As any family with means fled the schools, those schools became increasingly poorer. They had trouble attracting teachers. They had classrooms overflowing. They had buildings in disrepair.
Those families who couldn’t afford private schools landed in school systems in surrounding counties. As those counties’ populations grew, their tax bases grew, attracting police officers trained in Montgomery. And that problem has only continued to grow.
Left with poor educational opportunities and decreasing life opportunities, crime began to grow in Montgomery. The city answered by isolating certain parts of town. Leaders convinced the “good people” that the problem was just “bad people” killing each other. Nothing to see here. Don’t worry about it.
Those city leaders cut everything that would have helped. Community centers, where kids could get off the streets, get tutoring, find a caring mentor and maybe even get a meal, were systematically shuttered. The city once funded a thriving middle school sports program that served thousands of kids at their most at-risk point in life. Until the day in the early 2000s when leaders just decided to stop funding it, sending those thousands of kids into the streets instead.
Every year, crime rates grew. Revisionists will tell you otherwise, but they’re lying and they know it. Murder, assaults, property crimes—all steadily got worse and mostly outpaced national averages year after year. It happened under every mayor since the 1950s.
Gang membership grew. The violence ratcheted up.
But so long as it stayed confined to certain parts of town, and if the mayor and city leaders talked real tough about it, people mostly overlooked it. The murder rate today is about what it was a dozen years ago. The crime rate has increased no more under Reed than under any other mayor, maybe even less, but those crimes have now spilled outside of those “certain parts of town.”
Because that’s the thing about marginalizing and failing, purposefully, an entire segment of a population. The problems you create with that neglect only grow and compound. They eventually affect everyone in the city.
That is the city that conservative ideals built in Montgomery.
Now, in an effort to score cheap political points and pretend that they’re above it all, they want to lay the results of several decades of failed conservative policies at Reed’s feet. They want to pretend that they suddenly have the magical answers to these problems—these problems that they created, that they couldn’t solve or even lessen while they were in charge.
It’s BS. And Reed should call them on it.
