More law enforcement help for City of Montgomery on the agenda of Montgomery County Commission
The Montgomery County Commission meets Tuesday morning to discuss using ARPA funding to help prevent violence in the city. The Montgomery Police Department is down several hundred officers and violent crime has been on the rise. Since the city takes up about 88% of the county, the county commission is trying to help. I spoke with District 5 Commissioner Doug Singleton about several measures that they will be discussing at their meeting tomorrow. A proposed resolution would reallocate 1.75 million dollars in Covid relief funds to accomplish three things. First, create a violence suppression task force within the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. Singleton says this would pay for more deputies to patrol neighborhoods and have boots on the ground. Second, create programs that would help and support at-risk youth populations. Third, hire two more prosecutors to help the District Attorney’s office deal with a massive backlog of 300 murder cases that are waiting to go to trial. Singleton says this extra man power would allow the DA’s office to try 2 to 3 cases a week more than they are now.
“We wanted to be able to bring in a couple of extra prosecutors to help the District Attorney try these cases as quickly as possible, especially now that we have the judges coming in. We asked and the Supreme Court justices granted us 4 possibly 5 judges to come in, and we’re going to take the 20 oldest murder trials that are pending and divvy those up, about 4 or 5 per judge, and start attacking those cases as soon as we possibly can. When you have people on the streets actively pursuing violent criminals, the more the better. I don’t want to send two deputies out there to do that. Four is a minimum but I’d love to see six, eight, even ten but it will depend on how much funding we will allocate tomorrow,” said Singleton.
Of the 1.75 million, right now the proposed resolution says $500,000 would go towards the Sheriff’s violence suppression task force, $500,000 would be allocated to hire the two new prosecutors, and $750,000 would go towards establishing programs for at-risk children. Commissioner Singleton says those specific amounts could go up or down, depending on what the five commissioners agree on. The Montgomery County Commission meets for an information session at 9am Tuesday morning and the formal session is at 10am at the Montgomery County Courthouse Annex. You can see the full agenda here.
