Atlanta bucks national trend with jump in violent and property crimes
January 7, 2008 at 4:58 pm by John F. Sugg in NewsAtlanta is going backward with crime statistics. The just released FBI semiannual report on crime stats for January-June 2007 shows that nationwide the number of violent crimes decreased 1.8 percent over the same period in 2006. The number of property crimes declined 2.6 percent.
But not in Atlanta.
Violent crime in the city soared 7.6 percent for the first six months of 2007 compared to the same period in 2006. And, property crime jumped 8.2 percent.
The conventional wisdom among local law enforcement officials — as I reported last month — is that Atlanta has emerged as the drug hub for the eastern United States. Airline security increased after the 9/11 terrorist attack, which forced drug dealers to shift from the airways to the roadways. Atlanta’s network of interstates and highways has become the route of choice for cocaine and meth being shipped in industrial-size loads from Mexico, and then from Georgia to cities up and down the eastern seaboard. The transportation advantage offered by Atlanta also has attracted marijuana growers (who have purchased scores of local homes for “grow houses”), as well as distributors of other drugs such as Ecstasy.
Other cities have lost their appeal to drug kingpins. Intense enforcement over many years in Miami has ended that city’s “cocaine cowboy” days. And, among the refugees driven out of New Orleans by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina were drug gangs. One of those outfits is blamed by cops and prosecutors for much of the spike in crime.
Atlanta has contributed to its own problem, however. In November 2006, corrupt narcotics detectives led a raid based on fabricated evidence, and an innocent elderly woman died from police bullets. Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington was forced to disband the narcotics squad, and it was only reconstituted in recent months. The absence of the squad removed an important component from the multitiered fight against drug dealers.
(Note: There are a lot of caveats in dealing with crime statistics. Even with the recent increases, many law enforcement officials and experts contend Atlanta is making progress. See my article linked to above.)
January 7th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Thought you retired? Glad to see you.
If Atlanta is making progress, I would hate to see the alternative. My wife heard three gunshots outside the building last night.
I can’t park outside and leave ANYTHING in view of the crackheads.
Break-ins occure 24 hours a day.
The local security squad is offering a course in “How To Use Pepper Spray” to the neighborhood residents next Monday night.
A local cop told a victim of “aggressive panhandling” (ie mugging) that if he was going to walk down Pnce near the Krispy Kreme he “should get a gun”.
Four residents at the boarding house two doors down were robbed at gunpoint last week by two hoods.
Glad I am renting and didn’t buy.
January 10th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Why do you never see yards rolled with toilet paper anymore? When I was a young boy it was the highlight of my evenings out in the streets at night to upload eight rolls of TP into someone’s maple trees.
Now, sadly kids are more content to walk around with guns and a crack pipe, stealing my thrice-purchased Neil Diamond Greatest Hits CD from my hifi stereo in my car. While the most complex situation I would have encountered would be sourcing the house of the house I was rolling and judging the risk of using it to soak the paper to stick to the limb and leaves, these kids nowadays have just plain buggered up there head with worries more adult than my own.
Why just last week I saw two boys, each walking a pit bull on a chain leash in one hand and with the other holding up their saggy pants. I thought to myself, “Mr. Peepers, this is disaster just waiting to rear it’s head at any moment.” If one of these mean dogs were to get loose, which do you suppose the boy would reach for first the leash or their waistband?
Man, I will tell you when I was a boy I did not sit around wondering how I was going to kill someone for making fun of me. I went right up to the person and popped him in the nose. Blood spewed, we wrestled around a bit. But at the end of the tussle we both went home and ate dinner with our respective parental units.
You know another thing that get me angrier than a mule eating briars, is how all of these vagrant individuals are walking around asking for money. When I was a boy you would never see these sad sacks moping around. Heck no! They would take a mindless mill job and make enough cash to buy themselves several bottles of Heaven Hill Bourbon and retire for the next few weeks underneath the county bridge to savor their honestly earned gains. In a few weeks they would be back in that mill sweeping up the floors after the third shift. That’s right! An honest day’s drunk for an honest day’s work.
No I cannot even read a periodical in the park without some disheveled miscreant asking me for money to buy themselves a good meal. Well we all know what that money is for. Don’t we? They are not going to buy themselves a good, nourishing meal. They’re going to blow their pittance on some unhealthy snack like a Mr. Pibb and a hot dog.
I could go on and on about how things are so different nowadays with all of this depraved violence, thievery and using of the drugs. It is sad that these people cannot do something as wholesome as rolling a yard or popping some blowhard in the yap when they deserve it, or finding some menial job like working as a TSA screener to earn some money. People just have their notions of modern living and so on, but I say “hooey!” to all of them.
Leave those guns, drugs and bad-fitting clothes at home and get a job picking up nails at a construction site. Buy yourself a sixteen pack and come over to my house at 84 Northyards Blvd., Suite 600, and give my old weeping willow something to cry about. You will be glad you did and walk away with you head held high that you did something good.