Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 8:57 PM
News, Opinion, Politics
By Stephanie Ramage
THE APD'S VERY BAD IDEA
Members of the Atlanta City Council’s Public Safety Committee were on their game today. Things were moving along at what council meeting veterans might call a less-sluggish-than-usual jog. Then the Atlanta Police Department’s Deputy Chief Shawn Jones once again (he did this at the last public safety meeting) raised the topic of the much rumored “Zone 7."
The topic of “Zone 7” makes my blood boil so much, and its origins are so shrouded in mystery, that I am beginning to wonder if the APD brass didn’t cook it up over a blazing pentagram with beat-officer voodoo dolls roasting on a spit.
The meeting, as I said, started off well enough. Some useful topics were covered before “Zone 7.”
Committee members C.T. Martin, a veteran of the council, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was elected in November, are coming off a tough week of citizen outcry over the perilous state of public safety in the Atlanta Police Department’s Zone 4. When the APD’s Deputy Chief Shawn Jones stood up to explain a grant award from the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, Martin had a lot of questions, and they were good questions.
The question that should have been put out there, though, was this one: “This grant is for almost $93,000, but the city has to ‘match’ it with its own $139,230. Is it worth it to the city to cough up that money to get this grant for the DUI task force?”
On the meeting agenda, the money was identified as being for the “Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic.” But, Jones explained that it will be used by the DUI task force, for the training and salaries of the 5-officer unit.
Although all officers can pull someone over for suspected DUI, Bottoms said she had heard there are delays in waiting for the DUI officers to arrive at a scene, which makes sense because there are only 5 of them. Jones responded, however, that the DUI officers are specially trained in the process and are therefore more consistent. That’s important in making DUI cases stick.
And that brought up one of the best conversations at PubSaf I have heard in years, a tense little dialogue on the city’s traffic/municipal court.
WHAT DOES THE CITY’S COP SHORTAGE HAVE TO DO WITH COURT REVENUE?
Martin asked Chief Municipal Court Judge Deborah Green if the court is on track to make its budget projections. She said it was not.
“The previous administration set what we believe to be an unrealistic goal for revenue,” she said. A substantial number of cases were dismissed because police officers did not show up to give testimony. Green said it was a police manpower issue; the police were needed somewhere else. The number of traffic citations has also decreased.
(And so it is that once again Atlantans get to see how an inadequate police force costs them money. There are other ways as well, for example, in insurance rate hikes due to repeated break-ins, in foreclosed homes because the owners need to sell but can’t find buyers in crime-ridden neighborhoods, and, now, from the mouths of city officials themselves, in court revenue.)
Martin asked about who was handling tracking down and collecting fines from FTAs (the acronym for “failure to appear”). The traffic court FTAs, said Green, have been partially privatized. Martin wanted to know who signed that contract. Green said it wasn’t her, that the mayor’s office signs contracts.
“But the FTAs, there are boxes of them down in the basement,” said Martin. “And they have been there for quite sometime.”
Judge Green had originally stood up to introduce the new municipal judge, Judge Gaines. She had said she was “beside [herself] with joy” to introduce her, but her joy was visibly fading as Martin and the rest of the committee addressed how the court’s revenue has sunk from about $20 million to about $8 million over the past several years, thanks to a reconfiguration under Mayor Shirley Franklin.
Councilman H. Lamar Willis explained that several years ago, the city got out of the business of doing jury trials. Those are bound over to Fulton County State or Superior Court. Felonies, of course, would go over there anyway. However, there are many smaller issues, misdemeanors, DUIs, etc. that the city used to handle in its court. But, Mayor Franklin changed the court’s set-up so that Atlanta’s municipal court became a place only for bench trials, which is exactly what most cities in Georgia have. Willis admitted that the former state of affairs—in which the city had jury trials—was an anomaly, but as the largest city in the state, it made sense.
The problem was, he said, at least in part, that the court had total control of its roughly $20 million in revenue. The revenue, he said, tended to get locked up in the court’s budget, it couldn’t be used for other things even though as part of the city’s criminal justice system, the money might have been spent on, say, police officers’ salaries.
“But the judges would have fought you tooth and nail,” he said, “because they wanted that money to sit right there.”
So, Franklin’s administration—that includes the City Council—in essence destroyed a piggy bank in trying to get to the money inside. Jury trials came to a screeching halt. Fulton County picked them up, and the revenue that came with them.
“We pay for the officers to make the stop, to make the arrest, we make all the expenditure, but then the revenue goes to Fulton County,” Willis said.
But it’s not all good, because as Committee Chair Ivory Lee Young Jr. pointed out, Atlanta’s disavowal of jury trials has also exponentially increased the burden on Fulton County courts. He said Atlantans are regularly harmed by the Fulton County courts’ rotating door, through which repeat offenders are put back on the street to commit more crime, but Atlanta helped create that door by shoving its jury trials off on the county.
Willis dissented, however, from Young’s view, noting that serious criminal proceedings would go to the county anyway. If Atlanta’s lack of jury trials is contributing to more case load at Fulton County, it’s only in petty criminal matters, misdemeanors, DUIs, etc.
At that point, the committee moved on to item no. 10-0-0120, which is an amendment adding almost $1.4 million to the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, colloquially known as the “JAG grant.” Deputy Chief Jones explained that the department plans to use the money to “refresh” the police fleet—not the officers, but their cars. He said about one-third of the fleet is replaced every year, with lieutenants’ and sergeants’ cars being changed out every-other year. The department, said Jones, doesn’t like to see cars accumulate more than 100,000 miles. He said the APD plans to replace 27 cars with the grant.
And with that, we found ourselves at the unsavory topic of redrawing the zones and beats, and adding another zone, “Zone 7.”
THE HIDEOUS TRUTH ABOUT “ZONE 7”
At the last Public Safety Committee, newly elected Councilwoman Yolanda Adrean probably expressed it best when she said that what the city needs is more police officers, not a new police building. Zone 7’s precinct house and its accoutrements will cost, Jones says, about $20 million.
None of that is for more officers.
I will try to write this next part without my fingers cramping up from sheer rage: How the hell can an additional zone help anybody if we have the same number of cops? I asked Assistant Chief Peter Andresen that question and he replied that there is a problem with response time, so the beats could be made smaller.
But, dear reader, the City of Atlanta is the size it is. No matter how you slice it up, the city’s cops will still have to cover the very same geographical area.
We have, at present, about 1,650 officers, and that doesn’t take into account sick days or vacations. That number is shameful. It is far too small for a city of Atlanta’s size. We probably need about a thousand more. Response times are abysmal because we are trying to send too few officers to far too many calls. That will not change by adding an additional zone.
“Zone 7” may make things worse because a new zone will mean yet another major—that’s a big salary—and more lieutenants (bigger salaries than those of beat officers and sergeants), and they will all come out of the existing police force, costing more money for fewer officers and taking more officers off the streets, cramming them in endless meetings and hiding them behind desks. The APD doesn’t need anymore brass, what it needs is more beat officers.
Why can’t the APD understand this? Is “Zone 7” really only a glorified “friends and family plan”? Yet another way to offer sweetheart deals in exchange for loyalty to the chief?
I actually like some of the officers in the APD’s command staff. Some of them I consider my friends, and I can’t imagine that they came up with this idea. Was it Acting Chief George Turner’s idea? When I asked Andresen this, he said that there were several options the brass has been looking at and this was only one of those.
But we never hear about the other options. This is the second public safety committee meeting at which Deputy Chief Shawn Jones has brought up the Zone 7 plan, with its $20 million price tag.
If the APD knows where to look for $20 million, the money ought to go to the step pay increases owed to rank-and-file officers. Officers are leaving the APD every day and just paying them the money they are owed would help us keep them. To pay them that increase this year will cost about $5 million. The remaining $15 million could be used to hire additional officers that the citizens so desperately need to protect their neighborhoods. If the APD is looking for a new way to spend $20 million, that would be the way to spend it.
In view of the pathetic starting salaries paid to cops and the perilous conditions of our neighborhoods where citizens are afraid to come home at night because they might walk in on a burglar who will shoot them, the whole notion of Zone 7 is inappropriate, irresponsible and out of touch.
As Councilman Martin said, we need to come up with a solution for Zone 4 before we come up with Zone 7. SP