MC 18-22
Montgomery County Delegation, Maryland General Assembly
Delegation Members:
Silver Spring Justice Coalition and Takoma Park Mobilization support MC 18-22, which will allow Montgomery County to assign automated traffic enforcement program implementation to the county Department of Transportation. We thank Delegate Charlotte Crutchfield for taking the lead on the legislation and the nine delegate members of the Montgomery County Delegation who have signed on as co-requesters.
Silver Spring Justice Coalition, formed after the killing of Robert White by a Montgomery County Police Officer in 2018, is a coalition of Montgomery County community organizations and residents that works to eliminate harm by police while empowering community and individuals. Takoma Park Mobilization (tpmobilization.org), an SSJC member, is an advocacy organization with over 2,500 followers. We're active in climate action and other environmental concerns, immigration, police and justice reform, and economic equity concerns. Our groups, in turn, participate in the Police Out of Traffic Enforcement working group of the Montgomery County Defund and Invest Coalition, which is led by Young People for Progress and supports this legislation.
Why “police out of traffic enforcement”? Because “driving while Black.” Because police traffic stops are racially biased, including in Montgomery County, as documented in Office of Legislative Oversight Report 2020-9, Local Policing Data and Best Practices. And stops are often pretextual, constituting harassment and intimidation and beyond that a manufactured opportunity for escalation. Consider Sandra Bland. Too often traffic stops devolve into police violence against Black and Brown drivers.
We support Montgomery County’s policy of shifting traffic enforcement to automated means, to speed and red-light cameras. And we believe that those cameras would be best operated by a single agency, one whose job is transportation safety rather than inclusive of tasks that are seen as requiring firearms.
Montgomery County needs this legislation in order to have the option of moving automated traffic enforcement to the county Department of Transportation. We note that County Executive Marc Elrich and all nine Council members support MC 18-22, just as they and you, the members of the Montgomery County Delegation, unanimously supported last year’s HB 564, which ran into a Senate end-of-session time crunch.
MC 18-22 is a simple, straightforward, hyper-local enabling bill that will advance us toward meeting Vision Zero goals for a safer community for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motor-vehicle drivers and passengers. It will do this by consolidating responsibility for roadway design and automated transportation enforcement in a single agency, in the right agency for the job where the sole focus is transportation.
Please move MC 18-22 forward.
Silver Spring Justice Coalition and Takoma Park Mobilization
Submitted by Seth Grimes, Takoma Park, MD
seth.grimes@gmail.com