Jan. 11, 2009
By Stephanie Ramage
On Aug. 31, 2008, The Sunday Paper published the cover story, “City Under Siege.” In it, I detailed how violent crime in the city was becoming increasingly brazen.
I manually dug through police reports because the Atlanta Police Department failed to respond to my open records request for the specific report on the attack on Midtown resident Scott King. The report never showed up in my search.
King survived being bludgeoned with a brick by a guy who had demanded that he give him his shirt. Because of head trauma, part of King’s skull was removed and he had to undergo speech therapy. No arrest was ever made.
In the same story, East Atlanta residents expressed their anguish as violent home invasions and attacks in their area raged.
Since the story was published, such incidents have continued. Public outcry rose to a crescendo after last week’s murder of 27-year-old bartender John Henderson at his workplace in the Grant Park area. Henderson had complied with robbers’ demand for money, but they shot and killed him anyway. As of press time, no arrest has been made.
According to the APD, violent crime was down in 2008 following an increase in 2007. Public Affairs Officer Eric Schwartz says homicide was down by 18 percent. Aggravated assault, he says, was down 10 percent, and rapes were down 17 percent.
Why then, I asked him, does it appear that more violent crimes are happening more frequently? Has crime shifted into previously safer areas where residents are more likely to speak out about them? If violent crime is down overall, as the APD claims, but we have citizens in certain areas who are being terrorized by crime for the first time, wouldn’t the crime reports reflect more crime in one zone as compared with less crime in another? The records should reflect such a shift. Do they?
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I don’t track that. My job is public affairs.”
Traditionally, the public affairs department is the liaison between the police and the public. If the public is scared, vulnerable and outraged by crime, it’s the job of the APD’s public affairs department, with support from the records unit, to communicate the changes in crime trends that may be responsible.
Atlanta’s citizens are not paranoid or easily frightened. It may indeed be the case that there is not more crime, but there has certainly been a change in the tone of crime that is more disturbing than an increase in crime-as-usual. The latest wave of crime is astonishingly blatant in a way that suggests that criminals no longer fear arrest by the police—and that is the absolute worst position that any city can be in.
And while violent crime overall in 2008 may have been down, statistics from October, the latest available stats on the APD Web site, show that murder in that one month increased by 140 percent over the number of murders reported in the same month in 2007, rising from five to 12. Rapes increased by 600 percent from one to seven, and residential burglaries increased by 20 percent from 654 in October 2007 to 784 in October 2008. The Sunday Paper has submitted an open records request to the APD for crime statistics from November and December to see whether October heralded an upward year-end trend.
Without effective public affairs and records departments, police officers are limited in their ability to anticipate and address crime. It’s harder to work with citizens because everyone, even the officers themselves, rely on police records to know what is going on citywide, and they rely on public affairs officers to be able to make sense of the information and get it out to the public in a meaningful way.
The APD’s ability to wrangle such information has been stymied.
When he talked to me in August, Public Information Officer Ron Campbell said there were 1,700 APD officers, about 300 less than Chief Richard J. Pennington would like to have. Since January, 72 civilian employees have been laid off to help alleviate the City of Atlanta’s budget crunch. Police officers have had to pick up the paper-shuffling and other non-policing duties left behind, and there is no particular strategy for dealing with the new paperwork burden.
Might there be a connection between the paperwork reassignment and 2008’s surprisingly low crime stats? Is the APD accurately reporting its stats?
“You are talking about a department that has a proven, documented track record of manipulating the numbers, so you have to consider that the police department might be doing it again,” says Louis Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of the APD who now teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University. “The amount of public concern is completely at odds with the numbers, and that’s troubling.”
Chief Richard Pennington came here in 2002 trailing clouds of glory. The city’s optimism now seems to have been misplaced. FBI statistics show that violent crime in Atlanta did indeed fall during the first three years of his tenure, but rose steadily from 2005 through 2007.
This isn’t only Atlanta’s problem. Those who live outside the city should be aware that crime tends to spill into surrounding areas. If you live in a suburb, if you commute into town to work, if you come here for restaurants or bars or entertainment, if you use Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, if you’re a legislator who comes into town for the session, you, too, should be raising as much hell about recent shocking incidents as the citizens of Atlanta are.
Atlantans have dealt with crime problems and international scrutiny that would send the residents of other cities scurrying to the ’burbs. By contrast, Atlanta’s citizens and business owners have shown remarkable courage in moving into troubled areas, cleaning them up, forming associations, looking out for their elderly neighbors and feeding the homeless. They deserve a police department that’s worthy of them. They pay Chief Pennington $200,221 annually. It’s time the city considered someone who could do a better job for less.
SP
Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.