The cost of ignorance can be quite high—deadly, in fact.
If you doubt that, consider what is happening in Montgomery, where a convergence of several types of ignorance is driving up violence and simultaneously eliminating any meaningful response to it.
To be clear, Montgomery is not Alabama’s most violent or deadly city. Depending on the day, it’s not even in the top five, sometimes outside of the top 10. But it continues to draw the attention of lawmakers, media and politicos who have a vested interest—one way or another—in portraying Alabama’s capital as a crime-ridden hellscape where lawlessness runs unchecked and good people are cowering in fear.
This image is mostly due to two things: a lot of white people have to come into this majority-Black city, and a lot of conservative lawmakers have found it politically expedient to paint Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed as a villain and the city itself as a consequence of electing a Black mayor.
Few of these people have any real interest in addressing the issues that actually cause crime or helping the people most affected by the crime or acknowledging basic facts about the crime.
The way you know this is true is that the entire problem has been boiled down to a series of either-or equations in which only one thing can be true. Montgomery can’t have an overall reduction in violent crime, they say, because seven people were shot last weekend. The mayor can’t be serious about addressing the problem, they say, because he fought against legislation that would have allowed the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency to take over the Montgomery Police Department. Police officers don’t want to work for the current mayor, they say, because MPD is so understaffed.
And on and on.
It’s ignorance. Plain and simple. Perpetrated by people who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in solving Montgomery’s crime issues and every interest in helping themselves.
Chief among them is Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who, in a desperate attempt to save his failing U.S. Senate campaign, waded into the Montgomery rhetoric earlier this week. “The excuses run out,” Marshall said. “The people running Montgomery continue to point fingers at everyone but themselves.” He also suggested that city officials have “rejected” help for the problems.
Those are interesting comments from him for a couple of reasons. First, Marshall knows full well that there is currently a multi-agency task force operating in Montgomery that has been quite successful, and a second multi-agency task force that recently wrapped up a successful operation—an operation his office issued a press release praising. So, no one has rejected any serious offers of assistance, and Reed made it clear on our podcast – Alabama Politics This Week – that he’s willing to meet with, talk with and accept help from literally anyone.
But more importantly, when it’s time for pointing fingers over a lack of action, several should be pointing at Marshall, who has spent his time in office pandering to the far right base and doing little to address real issues that affect real people, like those who live in Montgomery.
For example, other states’ AGs, like the Republican in Georgia, have assisted major cities in their states by forming statewide gang task forces that work with city PDs to dismantle gangs – a task that is made difficult for local PDs because of the multi-jurisdictional aspect of such policing.
Other states’ AGs, like the one in Tennessee, have implemented programs that assist local prosecutors in over-worked cities, providing resources and manpower to bridge the gap.
Other states’ AGs, like the one in Illinois, have implemented gun tracing programs to track illegal weapons from the source and remove those weapons.
Our AG has left the good cops who are doing what they can in Montgomery to mostly fend for themselves as he lobbed insults and critiques in between campaign stops and press releases about fighting something that Biden or Obama or Hillary did one time.
Marshall isn’t alone in such pandering, however. The Republicans in the state legislature have also seemed far more interested in headlines than helpfulness.
Case in point: A bill this last session that was backed by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, the Montgomery Police Department, the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office and city leadership from both sides of the aisle would have carved out Montgomery County from the state’s permitless carry law. It would have required firearm owners to have registration in the county—a tool law enforcement officials said had the potential to remove thousands of illegal weapons from the streets.
The bill never even got into a committee for discussion.
That’s because a whole bunch of people in this debate over Montgomery aren’t interested in actually solving the problems. They’re only interested in the public fight, and the pandering they can do that paints their childlike suggestions as actual solutions to multi-generational, multi-faceted problems. They want you to believe that Montgomery, and other cities, are plagued not by decades of systemic failures on multiple fronts but are instead merely the result of Black Democrats leading.
Which is, of course, the height of ignorance. I mean, are we to believe that the color of a person’s skin combined with their physical location on the globe has combined to produce some inexplicable tendency towards violence? Or that the mere presence of a Black person in office has led to more violence?
Or might there be a more complicated answer here? Maybe even multiple complicated answers? Maybe, just maybe, this problem isn’t a product of electing a Black mayor, but instead a product of decades of neglect, discrimination, ignorance and indifference.
Maybe the previous white mayor had years upon years of the exact same problems with growing violence and an understaffed police department. Maybe the white mayor before that white mayor had similar problems too. Maybe with each mayor those problems have grown worse, not because of race or location, but because of underlying, systemic issues.
Maybe there are issues of educational opportunities, extreme poverty, broken homes and Jim Crow that have led to these problems.
I suspect you – person with the ability to reason – know that this is true. That these problems are complex and complicated, and that there are no quick fixes or tough-guy solutions. So, why don’t you demand that someone treat those problems as such? Why do so many choose to listen to purposefully stupid people knowingly offering purposefully stupid solutions that make no sense? That’s the real problem here.
The ignorance is killing people.
