With a hat tip to Martha K., the following story was reported on Friday by Michael King of 11 Alive News in Atlanta:
ATLANTA — A murdered convenience store clerk might be alive if not for a slip-up the last time his alleged killer was arrested. ...
On Tuesday, I wrote about the debate that’s raging over incarcerating convicts or releasing them to “community sentencing” programs of one type or another. Proponents of community or alternative sentencing argue that we save tax dollars when people convicted of crimes get to stay at home for therapeutic or rehabilitative interventions instead of being removed from the community and sentenced to prison terms. ...
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Parolee With Long Record Wanted in Child Molestation.” Does anybody keep track of recidivists in Georgia?
A parolee with an extensive criminal history is wanted in Smyrna allegedly for molesting a 15-year-old girl and exposing himself to woman at a car wash. ...
Atlanta is designed to be a neighborly city — so neighborly, in fact, with its vast downtown neighborhoods of suburban-style houses with yards, that it is entirely possible to get to know the criminals who cycle through the court system and end up in your driveway over and over again, rifling for change in your car. For years, I watched one such person wander the streets of my neighborhood, and I chased her away from my own car more than once — the worry wasn’t losing pocket change from the console but having to replace a broken window or jammed door lock, which can run to hundreds of dollars.
She acted like a stray dog, and so I came to treat her like one, shouting at her out my window to get off my lawn. Of course I pitied her. She was small, wizened and jerky from dyskinesia, and I knew the streets and her addiction must be hard on her. She dressed to look like a male — less as a statement of sexual identity than as an effort to protect herself from sexual attack, I suspect. Homeless women and women in the criminal “lifestyle” are very vulnerable to rape. ...
LAST MAY, the wired world was treated to an unpleasant, yet hardly unique, slice of Atlanta’s public transportation system via “MARTA GIRL,” a video that showed a deranged young woman berating and threatening an elderly train rider. The older woman dealt with the barrage of threats by doing what any sane consumer of public transportation knows to do instinctively: stare straight ahead and pretend that some screeching lunatic or addict isn’t threatening to harm you. ...
THE average citizen hardly needs to be persuaded that crimes will be committed more frequently if, other things being equal, crime becomes more profitable than other ways of spending one’s time.
–James Q. Wilson, “Thinking About Crime” Atlantic Monthly, September, 1983 ...
WHAT a difference a month makes. Or does it?
A few short weeks ago, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington and Mayor Shirley Franklin were working overtime to insist that residents’ concerns over crime were overblown. “The city is safer now than it has been in decades,” the Mayor callously announced when the brutal murder of bartender John Henderson mobilized residents to demand more police on the streets. ...
The problems created by crime are so vast, and crimes are so numerous, and the arena of agencies created to address them are so dysfunctional and interwoven, that it is maddening to look at the police chiefs and the courts and the lawyers and the mayors and the prisons and the prisoners and the legislators and not just throw up your hands and say: “There’s nothing I can do.”
This type of despair is what drives us to crumple on the couch and switch on the Nancy Grace and pretend that what we are doing is watching somebody doing something real about “the problem of crime.” ...
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, never one to shirk at the job of preserving her reputation, wrote recently in the AJC that people should not complain about things like violent home invasions because crime used to be worse in Atlanta. ...
Introduction
What follows is a preliminary effort to piece together Shamal (aka Jamal) Thompson’s long and troubling journey through Georgia’s broken criminal justice system prior to February 17, 2009, the day he murdered* an innocent cancer researcher named Eugenia Calle. Ten months earlier, a DeKalb County Superior Court Judge named Cynthia J. Becker let Thompson walk free from what should have been a ten-year sentence for burglary. She did so on the grounds that he was a first-time offender. ...