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On Wednesday, state representative Allen Treadaway, R-Morris, was honored as the “Crime Stopper of the Year” by Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama. The organization describes itself as a “nonprofit organization dedicated to making Metro Alabama safer by serving as a bridge between law enforcement and the community.”
In an interview with APR, Treadaway said he was “very humbled and honored to receive the award.”
He pointed to his support of Aaron’s Law, a unanimously approved bill preventing people convicted of sex offenses involving children from receiving pardons, laws against exhibition driving, and a law against “organized retail theft” as potential reasons he may have been honored.
Treadaway was also recently appointed to a new committee on urban crime by Speaker of the House Nathaniel Ledbetter.
The new urban crime committee, Treadaway told APR, contains both Republicans and Democrats, including members of law enforcement, a preacher, and lawyers from Birmingham and Montgomery. Treadaway feels he was appointed because of his time as a member of the Birmingham Police Department and his years on the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee.
“The Speaker of the House is very serious about the increase in violent crime in the state of Alabama, particularly in urban areas,” Treadaway said. The representative singled out Birmingham and Montgomery as “driving that uptick in violent crime.”
Last month, Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed disputed characterizations of Montgomery as a crime hotspot on APR columnist Josh Moon’s podcast, Alabama Politics This Week. Reed called many of the narratives about the city “factually inaccurate” and said state legislatures taking control away from cities is often “about who is controlling the money.”
Recent crime statistics show that while the number of property crimes in Montgomery are up significantly, the number of shootings and murders are actually down relative to 2023—a fact Reed regularly references.
On another episode, Montgomery district attorney Daryl Bailey said violent crime in the city was “nothing new” but it had started spilling out into new neighborhoods and that it was “good that people are paying attention to it.”
Treadaway, though, pointed to issues with staffing that the Montgomery and Birmingham police departments have reported.
“Both departments have lost an alarming number of officers,” he said. “The retention and recruitment efforts have failed up to this point. And if they don’t do something—they stay on the current path—it’s only going to get much worse because they’re already critically understaffed.”
“There are certainly individuals that feel this was a deliberate defunding of the police departments in both of these cities,” Treadaway claimed. “It’s getting hard to argue against that.”
While both cities have had difficulties maintaining the number of police officers some view as necessary, according to the cities’ budgets neither police department has actually lost any funding.
Birmingham budgeted $115 million for its police department’s operating budget in 2024, compared to only $89 million for the 2015 fiscal year (about the same when considering inflation).
Montgomery’s adopted 2024 budget budgeted $59.6 million for the police department. In 2014, the city only budgeted $46.3 million (also roughly equivalent when accounting for inflation). And Reed has said the local Fraternal Order of Police “has an agenda” when it claims Montgomery doesn’t have enough police officers, referencing his personal conversations with Montgomery officers as competing evidence.
The ambiguity around whether the cities are actually experiencing a crime wave or a deficit of police officers hasn’t stopped some legislators from seeking to take some of their autonomy away though.
State Rep. Reed Ingram, R-Pike Road, and state Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, prefiled bills which would let the state attorney general and governor appoint interim police chiefs in cities where the number of law enforcement officers is “30 or more percent less” than the ten year average.
Treadaway said he has to see how things develop leading up to the next legislative session before deciding whether he’ll support their bill. But, if nothing changes he says, he will “be also looking at legislation” of his own.
When asked what advice he would give to the mayors of Montgomery and Birmingham, Treadaway said he would tell them “nothing replaces boots on the ground.”
“The demonization of law enforcement over the last decade has had a profound effect,” he continued. “We’re allowing policies to be driven by individuals and activists. They have no idea what it takes to keep a community safe. It would benefit both of these mayors to not only hire people who know how to do the job, but to fund them.”
And while he was mostly dour about the state of crime in Montgomery, Treadaway repeatedly praised the new Metro Area Crime Suppression Team, or MACS.
A collaboration between the Montgomery police department, Montgomery sheriff’s department, and several state and federal agencies, MACS was described by Attorney General Steve Marshall as “using bodies to saturate areas where there is criminal activity and using the tools available.”
“I commend what’s happening this morning in Montgomery,” Treadaway said. “I commend the mayor, the state, and the county sheriff and ALEA coming together. I would hope the city of Birmingham will do that.”
But he also called MACS “a way to address [problems] immediately, but to sustain it is going to require getting the staffing levels back up, getting police officers back on the ground.”
