Athens Georgia Criminal Lawyer – Atlanta City leaders fiddle as crime fears flare

City leaders fiddle as crime fears flare

By Alan Judd

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution – posted at http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/city-leaders-fiddle-as-142738.html

Atlanta’s mayor and police chief stood before a bank of television cameras July 30 to address the apparent resurgence of crime in what once was the most violent city in America. A few days earlier, a champion boxer had been shot dead in the street. A City Council member had been carjacked at gunpoint. A local television station had tagged Atlanta with an apocalyptic new epithet: “City Under Siege.”

Four dozen police officers watched as Mayor Shirley Franklin and Chief Richard Pennington unveiled a new public safety strategy: a show of force that would put more cops on the streets.

Then those officers got back to work.

Inside police headquarters.

The moment’s irony represented a triumph of the status quo over promises of change. More important, it embodied the dysfunction that plagues Atlanta’s police department — a dysfunction that has turned crime into the city’s most intractable civic dilemma, an examination by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

The department’s leaders and top city officials stood by as budget cuts, high turnover, low morale and a de-emphasis on routine patrol left the police force battered and weakened in its fight against crime, the AJC found by reviewing public records and interviewing criminologists, police officers, city officials and residents.

Even the achievements Pennington and Franklin cited for the cameras lose their luster under closer examination:

● Atlanta’s rate of reported crime has dropped sharply over the past decade — but still ranks among the highest in the nation.

● The city has hired hundreds of police officers this decade — but still fields a force no larger than it had three years ago.

● The police department has assigned hundreds of officers to special units that fight street gangs, deter drunken drivers and suppress drug trafficking, among other tasks — but often can’t spare an officer to answer a citizen’s call.

Now, with concern over crime dominating the fall’s city elections, candidates at all levels offer what, at first glance, seems to be an obvious answer: a larger police department. The more officers, the thinking goes, the less crime.

But the AJC’s analysis of crime statistics and police staffing suggests the problem is far too complex for a facile answer. How many officers Atlanta has may be less important than how it uses them.

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