Sunday, August 31, 2008
News, In this Issue...

City Under Siege

Atlanta’s climbing crime rate is visible and frightening

Crime on the rise

According to The Sunday Paper’s manual search through Atlanta Police Department reports, the night of Aug. 15 and the morning of Aug. 16 was a busy shift, but not extraordinarily so for a Friday night. APD officers dealt with at least 50 incidents in that period. Most were for possession of marijuana and damage to vehicles—half a dozen each. The rest varied from a missing person’s report to serving warrants (five) to a stolen cell phone, to two disputes involving guns, and an array of the petty crimes that punctuate life in the city. The only report we found from King’s neighborhood was about an incident on the corner of Fourth and Juniper Streets, a place the APD calls “a very well-known location for the purpose of … prostitution.” That incident ended with the police chasing, on foot, several alleged hustlers/hookers, one of whom turned out to be the subject of a warrant.

Detective J.A. Simmons, who is handling King’s case, says she doesn’t know why his incident report wasn’t in with the other reports. There’s nothing new to say about it, though. “We don’t have much to go on,” she says.

At present, according to Public Information Officer Ron Campbell, there are 1,700 APD officers, about 300 less than Chief Richard J. Pennington would like to have. But since January, 72 civilian employees have been laid off to help alleviate the City of Atlanta’s budget crunch. And police officers have had to pick up the paper-shuffling and other non-policing duties left behind. The APD has been short of officers for years, and there is no particular strategy for dealing with the new burden, he says, adding, “You do what you have to do.”
There’s reason to wonder if that’s enough.

Crime has been on the rise in Atlanta since 2005. When the FBI’s finalized 2007 Uniform Crime Report is released to the public on Sept. 15, it will show that overall, the city suffered 527 more violent crimes in 2007 than in 2006—a total of 8,075. Violent crimes include murder (or non-negligent manslaughter), rape, robbery and aggravated assault. The FBI's preliminary report came out last May.

According to the APD’s own statistics, which are listed on the department’s Web site, from January through April of this year, officers handled 2,243 violent crimes. Numbers are not yet available for summer, traditionally the highest crime season.

Crime in plain view

I wasn’t exactly plugged into all this until the night of Sunday, Aug. 10, when my 11-year-old son and I were returning home from a show at the New American Shakespeare Tavern. Walking out to our car wasn’t a problem. There’s a homeless shelter at the end of the Tavern’s block on Peachtree Street, but aside from the usual, relatively polite panhandling down at the corner, there was nothing that caused me concern. There were a lot of people around in a well-lighted area. Oddly enough, it was many blocks away, driving east on North Avenue within plain view of Atlanta Police Department headquarters, that Atlanta’s crime problem was shoved in my face.

My son was in the back seat talking on my cell phone with his dad, recounting the more hilarious parts of the show, when some movement to our right, on the sidewalk, got our attention. A man wielding a rather large tree limb was beating a woman who was trying to retrieve her purse from where she appeared to have dropped it. She was screaming and holding her arms over her head trying to protect herself. My son stopped in mid-sentence as I reached back for the phone to call 911. 

Just then, a police cruiser started up the hill toward us, and as it passed, I saw its lights come on. I assumed that its driver was responding to the beating on the sidewalk, so I allowed my son to continue talking with his father. It has bothered me, nonetheless. I can’t be sure the officer saw what we’d seen. Last week, when I dug through a stack of APD reports from the past month and a half, I couldn’t find one reflecting such an incident.

Other folks, however, have been worried about crime for months.

“David,” who doesn’t want to use his real name for reasons that will become clear, got his first taste of the crime rate in March, when two men drove up next to him and demanded his iPod as he jogged near his home in East Atlanta.

“They came from behind and swooped in with their car, hitting the curb at a 45-degree angle in an attempt to corner me. When I saw the muzzle of the pistol, I immediately ran to the back of their car and then down a side road,” he writes in an e-mail to SP. “I was acting on instinct, sorta, as I've long been ingrained with the statistic that the longer you stay in a situation with a gun pointed at you—even if you're complying with the gunman's orders—the worse your chances.”

David managed to get away, and although that was his most recent brush with violent crime, it was not the last time this year that he would be victimized by criminals. He works from home, but one day in July when he stepped out for an hour to run errands, his home was burgled. His laptop was stolen, and on it was not only the literary piece he had been working on for four years, but all of his personal financial information as well. He is afraid that if he uses his real name for this article, the criminals might make the connection and abuse his credit. 

According to one of David’s neighbors, Mike Bynum, there have been about 10 such burglaries in the area in recent months. Only last week, there were 11 car break-ins, something that prompted the APD to meet with anxious East Atlanta residents. But some were not reassured by the officers’ reminders to lock their doors and report any suspicious activity. 

“It’s really gotten bad in the last six to eight months," says Bynum, who bought his house 18 months ago. “It’s like free pickings [for criminals] down here. It’s absolutely insane. People are fed up and they are buying guns and going to the firing range.”

That might seem like an overreaction to property crimes, but Bynum says that violent crime has come along with the thievery. Not long ago, he heard about a neighbor who was assaulted and his female companion raped by thugs who walked up on their property in plain view of any police officer who might have happened by. (The Sunday Paper did not find a report of such an incident at the APD.) 

    “I don’t understand it,” he says. “I know the police say they’re short-staffed, but it only takes two to respond.”

Still, he says he and his wife have put too much into their fixer-upper to give up on the neighborhood just yet.

Meanwhile, David says he already has a concealed carry permit, but carrying a gun is not very practical while jogging.

“I've thought about Xeroxing and laminating the permit and keeping the copy in my shoe and then wearing a small pistol in an under-the-shirt holster,” he says. “If my neighborhood—and Atlanta—continues its present course, that may not be far off.”

The kind of attack Scott King survived in Midtown, an aggravated assault, was actually on the decline in 2007, down 87 from 2006’s 4,308. Not that it makes much difference to King. He plans to take a cab home at night now. He says he used to feel safe.

“At least I thought I could take care of myself,” he adds. “I guess I never thought about someone not even having basic human decency.” SP