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: ...
I am still trying to puzzle out why District Attorney Paul Howard and Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington keep insisting that they do not need more resources to fight crime and prosecute criminals, while they also keep holding press conferences to warn the public that today’s criminals are more numerous, dangerous and better organized:
“We don’t have one person breaking into a store,” Howard said. “We now have eight people.” ...
From a City Journal article by Heather Mac Donald. How the murder of 17-year old Lily Burk could have been prevented:
The recent arrest of a vicious murderer in Los Angeles vindicates—tragically, only after-the-fact—several policing and sentencing policies that anti-law-enforcement advocates have fought for years. . . ...
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. ...
In the Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby has other criticisms of The Sentencing Project’s anti-life sentence report:
OF THE 2.3 million people in prisons and jails in the United States, roughly 140,000, or 6 percent, are serving life sentences. Of that number, about 41,000 – 1.8 percent of all inmates – were sentenced to life without parole. Both numbers are at an all-time high. ...
It ought to take more than 25 seconds and two mouse clicks to find evidence that the media and The Sentencing Project are making stuff up. It ought to, but it does not.
The Sentencing Project is a well-funded, powerful, anti-incarceration advocacy organization. They pose as a think tank that publishes objective academic research on crime and punishment. ...
In Chicago, 225 people were shot in July, and 42 of them died from their wounds. In one night alone, a dozen people were shot; on another night, six men were murdered.
In Baltimore, last Sunday, 18 people were shot in five different incidents. In the Baltimore Sun, Peter Hermann and Arthur Hirsch profiled an emergency room nurse on duty throughout the carnage: ...
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. ...
As Atlanta prepares for the none-too-soon departure of the current mayor and police chief, it’s worth considering the example of cities where reasonable, engaged crime-fighting policies seem to be working:
Washington D.C. is experiencing the lowest murder rate in years. Why? D.C.’s fairly new and interesting Police Chief, Cathy L. Lanier, attributes the drop in murder rates to intensive use of communication tools and intensive planning to anticipate trouble at certain events and between certain gangs: ...
Back in the 1980’s, when I was living in upstate New York and deciding where to go to college, New York City beckoned as an obvious choice: the schools, the libraries and bookstores, the Village. I went down to Fordham for a campus visit. The next day, I returned home, appalled. The grounds were beautiful, but the neighborhood was so dangerous that security guards would not allow students to leave campus in groups smaller than 12. Fordham was gated and patrolled like an embassy on enemy soil. The streets a few blocks away looked like a war zone, and the subways surrounding it were filthy, subterranean toilets filled with more or less aggressive lunatics trying to catch your eye.
I know, I know: I was a wimp for not wanting to become one of those tough city denizens, Blondie-tough, the type who didn’t blink as they negotiated the human detritus piled up in the streets. I was also a serious long-distance runner, and I couldn’t imagine living in a place where you needed to recruit 11 other people just in order to walk down the street. And then, parks were off limits for runners at any hour of the day. Even in the nicer parts of Manhattan, normal people went about their business only by studiously pretending they were not stepping over some zoned-out junkie passed out in a pool of vomit as they made their way from the subway to the street. ...
Atlanta needs real change.
For a city that claims to stand for change, the stagnation in leadership is pretty astonishing. I lived there for 20 years, and during that time, other major cities learned from their mistakes and transformed themselves, raising the quality of life for their residents. ...
Thanks to Paul Kersey:
Every weekday, I receive a useful summary of crime, policing, and justice news stories called Crime and Justice News, compiled by Ted Gest at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Considering that there are so many relevant articles from which to choose, Gest and his assistants do a good job of spotting national trends.
But, sometimes, reading through the report is singularly depressing, not only because crime is depressing, but because the trends in crime prevention that crop up regularly these days seem doomed to failure. ...
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. ...
Seven teens were shot last week outside a school offering summer classes in Detroit. Three were in critical condition. A week earlier, another girl was shot in the chest outside another school.
Now the police are having trouble getting anyone to cooperate with them. “The taboo against snitching is worse than the taboo against shooting,” the Detroit Free Press reported yesterday. ...
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. ...
I, for one, think newspapers are being rejuvenated by their current financial crisis. The old-fashioned, insular newsroom, with its disturbing status quo on crime reporting (defendants are victims of society; victims are society, and thereby guilty of something) is becoming a thing of the past.
Over the holiday weekend, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran this must-read story by Bill Torpy, in which he examines the real costs of retail burglaries for small business owners: ...