Atlanta’s not the only city where elected officials are getting terrorized by recidivist thugs . . .
Three men are now in custody for the murder of boxer Vernon Forrest. Of course, two are recidivists with state records and histories of getting off easy for multiple crimes, and the third is probably just too young to have accumulated a non-juvenile record yet. The man they killed was a world-champion athlete who founded a charity in Atlanta to help the mentally challenged. How many times does the same sickening story have to play out?
Forrest’s mother told the Atlanta Journal Constitution she hopes the three men never leave prison again: ...
Is the crime rate up or down in Atlanta? The Atlanta Journal Constitution, echoing City Hall, continues to vote “down.” Their editorial board is sticking to the argument that crime is a perception problem, though they have thankfully stopped mocking victims:
[S]tatistics alone don’t stir many souls toward either fear or a sense of security. What does get people going are violent shocks to their everyday world. Things like finding your home’s been ransacked, or facing a gunman on the sidewalk. . . If people don’t feel safe, a computer’s worth of data and spreadsheets likely won’t persuade them otherwise. That’s where human contact and conversation comes in, starting at the top and spreading to cops on the beat. Perception can trump reality if people’s emotions keep them from believing that crime really is on the run. ...
Has anybody else stumbled on the APD’s new website feature:
People in Atlanta deserve better.
Reeling from months (years, really) of life-altering crime in the streets, they finally drag the Mayor and Chief of Police kicking and screaming to some podium, where the two continue to deny that they are not doing the job of serving the people before storming off again. ...
Amazing, the amount of work it takes to get our leaders to the point of appearing to do their jobs. But the job of getting elected officials to do their jobs, alas, is never done. The mayor and chief of police have promised more police on the streets by next summer (and if this promise is not kept, they will be long gone anyway, so accountability is moot). A weekend crime sweep netted 159 arrests, including many for outstanding warrants, which means that enough manpower was deployed to do what is supposed to be done all the time: pick up people with outstanding warrants.
In other words, in the last five days, the mayor briefly did her job by addressing the crime problem while only slightly denying it; the chief of police was spotted in the same zip code as his office, and law enforcement officers were given enough resources for all of 48 hours. ...
I had not been watching Atlanta television news until I tried to watch the press conference yesterday morning. They are sending people to bang on doors, looking for the Chief of Police, and challenging the Mayor on her unwillingness to address the issue. My apologies. The media is alive and kicking in Atlanta.
Yesterday morning, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Police Chief Richard Pennington held a press conference to talk about crime. Here is some of what they said, culled from local news reports: ...
Some days, it’s hard to sound constructive. Thursday blues? For once, I’m not gonna try:
Exhibit A: Somebody should demand that Atlanta Police Chief Pennington surrender his day book, so people can see precisely what he is doing for all that money. How often does he go to the office? Where is he at 5:05 p.m.? At 7:05 a.m.? ...
It is good to see politicians in Atlanta responding to (as opposed to studiously ignoring, or denying) the crime crisis. But now that we’ve gotten their attention (no small accomplishment), how does the city really move forward to make residents safe?
The Atlanta Police Department has a fascinating series of charts on their website, showing fifty years of statistics for various crimes in the city. Go to this page and click on “Part I Crime: A Fifty Year Retrospective.” Immediately, what jumps out is that crime is down since that horrible time in the early 1990’s, when crack cocaine was burning a fat fuse through certain neighborhoods — especially the housing projects. If you compare 1989 to 2009, it is easy to say, yes, crime in the city limits is not as bad now as it was then. ...
July 28, 1979. Rocky II and Moonraker were in the movie theaters. The Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran, and Saddam Hussein took over Iraq. “Good Times,” and “We Are Family” played on the radio that summer (“Message in a Bottle” and “London Calling” if you weren’t into disco). Little boys wanted to grow up to be the next Michael Jackson. Three Mile Island almost melted and Skylab fell out of the sky.
Atlanta’s murder rate was unambiguously the highest in the country. Cops said they were understaffed, and they were understaffed, though, ironically, there were approximately as many cops then as there are now, even though there were far, far fewer residents in the metro area. ...
It must be pretty awful to be a police officer in Cambridge right now. Looking at their faces on the news, I cannot help but wonder how much more of a burden they are going to be expected to carry, not just now, but weeks and months down the line.
Cops don’t have the luxury to play games, like politicians and pundits. They are forced to confront treacherous social fault-lines every day on the job while less serious people sit by the sidelines and judge their efforts. At times like these, powerful people seem to be rooting for the police to fail, and the unfairness of this, and the pressures it adds to their work, will not be acknowledged. ...
From PROTECT, the National Association to Protect Children:
Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway fiasco–where about 70 “registered” sex offenders have been herded under a bridge to live–is being challenged in court by the ACLU. ...
Yesterday, while writing about the Times‘ willful misrepresentation of a child sexual assault conviction, I noted:
[W]hen I see an offender with a record of one or three instances of “inappropriate touching,” I suspect that’s the tip of the iceberg. I suspect the conviction is the result of a plea bargain agreed to just to get the sick bastard away from the child and onto a registry, which is the most victims can reasonably hope for in the courts these days . . . ...
The New York Times is the most important newspaper in America, and that is unfortunate, for in their pages, ordinary criminals are frequently treated with extreme deference and sympathy, even respect. Some types of criminals are excluded from this kid-glove treatment, but that is a subject for another day. For the most part, ordinary (property, drug, violent, sexual) criminals comprise a protected class in the Times. Even when it must be acknowledged that someone has, in fact, committed a crime, the newsroom’s mission merely shifts to minimizing the culpability of the offender by other means.
There are various ways of doing this. Some have to do with selectively criticizing the justice system: for example, the Times reports criminal appeals in detail without bothering to acknowledge congruent facts that support the prosecution and conviction. They misrepresent the circumstances that lead to (sometimes, sometimes not) wrongful convictions while showing no curiosity about the exponentially higher rate of non-prosecution of crimes. ...
Chicago:
In Chicago, something interesting is happening as “twittering” and blogging and e-mail bring in first-hand reports that deviate from official versions. It is hard to whitewash incidents of violence and rioting when people are reporting them in real time and police are going back over their incident reports to compare notes later. ...
Only 199 homicides in Chicago by midnight, June 30. This is, according to a police spokesman, the first time the city has dipped under the magical number of 200 homicides by June 30 in “recent memory.” By one less head of hair, but they did it.
199 homicides is actually two less than the 201 dead by June 30, 2007. So, last week, the city was briefly on track to having fewer than 400 murders by year’s end, before the holiday weekend, that is. “Only” 400 murders is a celebration, these days. But then came the 4th of July, and the Taste of Chicago street festival. ...
From Marcia Killingsworth’s always informative blog, Intown Writer, this story of keeping career criminal Andre Grier off the streets. For now, at least:
[R]ecently, CourtWatch Coordinator Janet Martin and one of our community prosecutors Assistant District Attorney Kimani King alerted us to State of Georgia vs. Andre Grier 09SC77314, a case coming before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy L. Shoob. ...
What can be done about crime in the neighborhoods around Georgia Tech? As reported by the AJC, the youths who have been arrested — and the ones who are yet to be caught — are perhaps the most dangerous type of criminal: immature and armed. As James Fetig, an administrator at Georgia Tech, observed:
“[o]ne concern is the age of the criminals. Police tell us they are between 16 and 19,” Fetig said. “This is not a time when young men tend to consider consequences. We are very concerned that one of these robberies could go terribly wrong and have terrible consequences.” ...
I have been watching the growth of court-watching in Georgia, and it is encouraging to see the practice taking hold. Nothing will change on the streets until public scrutiny is brought to bear on the courts, where evidence abounds that judges have been breaking and bending the intent of Georgia’s sentencing laws with no professional consequences whatsoever.
No consequences for judges, even when they actually violate Georgia’s sentencing laws. No prosecutor dare complain when a judge cuts an illicit deal with an offender — because the prosecutor must appear before that judge, or one of that judge’s peers and colleagues, every single day. You can’t be critical of judges and be effective in the courtroom. So there are no consequences for judges, even when their decision to overlook the law or their failure to do their jobs with appropriate diligence results in preventable murders, like the killing of Dr. Eugenia Calle. ...
Back in the 1990’s, Georgia Lt. Governor Mark Taylor made it a priority to build the state’s DNA crime database. He did this long before other states got on board, and for many years Georgia was rightly viewed as a leader in using DNA to solve violent crimes. Taylor was driven by his strong commitment to victims of rape and child molestation who had been denied justice. He did not heed the civil rights and convict rights lobbies who tried to stir up hysteria over using DNA to solve crimes (ironically, these same activists are howling over the Supreme Court’s utterly reasonable decision last week not to enshrine post-conviction DNA as a blanket, federal right, when 46 states already guarantee it, as even Barry Scheck admits: don’t believe virtually anything you read about this case on the editorial pages).
Taylor’s leadership on DNA databasing yielded an extraordinary number of database “hits” long before other states got their databases up and running. In 1998, only convicted and incarcerated sex offenders were required to submit DNA samples in Georgia, yet 13 repeat-offender rapists were immediately linked to other sexual assaults, and scores of “unidentified offender” profiles were readied to be used if those offenders were finally caught and tested. ...
Sgt. Scott Kreher of the Atlanta Police Department, has been returned to desk duties as Mayor Shirley Franklin continues down the path of using the D.A.’s office to “investigate” him for importune remarks made during a hearing on denying medical benefits to the city’s disabled officers. Stephanie Ramage, at The Ramage Report, has issued another call to restore Sgt. Kreher to his full duties. It’s an amazing plea for forgiveness and the respect the police deserve.
Along the lines of Stephanie’s blog, I’ve been having some interesting conversations with a young police officer at my gym. What always strikes me when I’m talking to police is how they view their jobs as a calling, not just a place to punch the clock. The young officer at my gym told me that he does not do overtime because he recognizes the need to be able to go home and have a life at the end of his shift, because the job is so intense and what is being asked of police officers is so emotionally challenging. ...
I’ve been writing this week about the predictable reactions to the semi-annual release of the Uniform Crime Report statistics.
In Atlanta, much is being made of the fact that violent crime is down. However, burglaries and larcenies are up — substantially. Why might this be? ...
Yesterday, I wrote about crimes that don’t get counted in the official statistics and people who don’t get to live decent lives because powerful people work so hard to deny the terrible daily impact of crime.
A new anti-crime ethic is percolating in the neighborhoods and on-line. This ethic, however, is being slandered because it flies directly in the face of the tired old excuse-making and crime-downplaying that has long been the status quo among politicians and criminologists. ...
As I’ve mentioned several times, most crime is committed by a small number of very prolific offenders. Remove these people from the streets, impose real consequences, and crime rates will drop.
But so long as the courts continue to let people off for their first offense, whatever it may be, and then for their second and their third and their fourth offenses, with a slap on the wrist and time served or probation, then the streets will remain dangerous. ...
I am back home in Florida after a sad trip to Atlanta. No matter where I am, I read the Atlanta Journal Constitution every day, so sometimes it seems as if I never really leave the city. Weirdly, now when I’m actually in Atlanta, it seems like I’m not completely there, too, because I’ve gotten used to reading the Atlanta paper while looking out the window at this:
(my Florida backyard) ...
Blog will resume Monday, June 15.
In transit, due to a death . . .
Helen Rose Trent, 1940 – 2009 ...
Thirty years ago this month, the murder of a young cancer researcher sparked outrage in Atlanta. Dr. Mark Tetalman, a nuclear medicine specialist from Ohio, was attending a conference at the downtown Hilton Hotel when armed robbers shot him to death in front of his wife near the corner of Piedmont and Ponce de Leon Avenues.
The business community accused Mayor Maynard Jackson and Police Chief George Napper of dismissing public concerns about crime. Atlanta had the highest murder rate and the highest overall crime rate of any city, and the numbers were rapidly climbing higher, with a 69% increase in homicides between 1978 and 1979 alone. ...