Thursday, May 21, 2009 | News, Opinion
SP ATLANTA CITY COUNCIL, THE POLICE, THE MAYOR AND A BASEBALL BAT

I don’t know what kind of hay will be made out of the baseball bat comment, but let’s face it:  Anyone who’s spent any time at City Hall is bound to feel the same way, and not just about Mayor Franklin. I could have sworn I saw a Rawlings logo on some of the council members’ foreheads.

 

I stood outside the City Council Chamber yesterday at Atlanta City Hall with about 60 police officers and I heard Councilman H. Lamar Willis tell them, with a straight face, “The city has never had any money.”

I do not usually bite my tongue and I did not do so then.

“No money? No money?” I asked. “You had almost $30 million you spent on the Brand Atlanta campaign. How many police officers would that have paid for?”

As a matter of fact, the Brand Atlanta campaign, Mayor Shirley Franklin’s advertising campaign that was meant to attract more conventioneers and tourists to Atlanta with clunky slogans and stilted hip-hop jingles, cost $8 million in tax revenue. That’s in sales taxes generated by taxi cab fares and hotel rooms. It cost another $12 million in funding raised from private and corporate sources. It was originally budgeted at $28 million, but City Hall finally cut the cord on Brand Atlanta last March when it failed to produce results.

So, $8 million in tax dollars, especially if those tax dollars come from out of town, isn’t much. But budgeting, whether in my house or City Hall, is a matter of priorities. What if that money had been slated for the police instead? When Mayor Franklin cut the hours of police last December, the city’s chief operating officer said the cuts would save the city $6 million. When the city cuts insurance coverage for police in the Fiscal Year 2010 budget, the move is expected to save the city $2 million.

So, there’s the $8 million in tax funding the mayor and City Council blew on the Brand Atlanta Campaign. It could have preempted the police furloughs and cuts to the officers’ insurance if it hadn’t gone into the pockets of public relations people and hip hop artists.

Priorities were the theme of yesterday’s contentious budget meeting between the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers and the City Council. Between Councilman C.T. Martin’s race-baiting and Councilwoman Felicia Moore’s write-more-traffic-tickets approach to revenue generation, I hardly knew where to begin in writing this blog.

IBPO Local 623 President Scott Kreher not only enumerated the problems with the police budget for the council, he actually brought them two ideas for new streams of revenue: 1) Enforcing the city’s business license law—actually checking to make sure businesses have licenses and fining unlicensed businesses accordingly and 2) A city-run towing enterprise. These would bring in millions for the city, he says.

Kreher began his presentation like this: “At the end of this administration, we kind of felt it was important to look back from 2002 to the present and see what Mayor Franklin’s administration has done for the police department…are we better than we were in 2002 or worse? We believe we are a lot worse.”

When Mayor Franklin came into office, she promised the police officers that she would raise their salaries by 40 percent and that she would hire 2,000 officers by 2007.

“Instead, our officers have seen a loss of about 40 percent in their income thanks to the loss of step pay and the increase in insurance costs,” Kreher said.

Additionally:

“Now, the city needs $56 million” to balance its budget, so the mayor has proposed a 3 millage-point tax, Kreher said, but “Giornelli told us that the furloughs of the police would save $6 million. That’s not fair. It’s not right to say you’re raising taxes to end the furloughs and the public deserves to know the truth.”

He also couldn’t help but notice that the city settled a $7.5 million lawsuit with the International Brotherhood of Police Officers in November 2008 and the following month the mayor cut the officers’ pay by 10 percent via the furloughs. In essence, the city was determined to wring money out of the APD by any means necessary.

For my entire tenure as a reporter in Atlanta—14 years of covering the city, county and state governments, with some emphasis on the APD and City Hall—I have seen how the mayor, whether Campbell or Franklin, has used the APD to balance the city’s budget. The nips and tucks and cuts are carried out regardless of the impact on the department.

The department, Kreher explained to the council, suffers a staggering 10.7 percent attrition rate.

“Of those leaving, 50 percent had less than five years on the force,” he said.

Mayor Franklin has cut 85 unfilled positions from the APD so that she could make the department eligible for a federal grant that can only be used by fully-staffed police forces. In the meantime, the APD remains woefully understaffed, its officers spread dangerously thin, with an uncertain future and a City Hall that has shown over and over again that it has no respect for the police and the absolutely necessary job they do.

As bad as the officers have it, the effect is felt even more keenly among the city’s residents.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t have to pull two or three cars from the beats,” Kreher told the council, “because I just don’t have the officers. So, when you have someone calling because their house is broken into, it takes longer to respond. I don’t have to tell you what the response time looks like. Let’s fill every single beat car before we fill mounted patrols and foot patrols. I am tired of my beat officers going out on the streets without enough protection. You want neighborhood policing, but we have so few officers that they are too busy going from call to call to call to get to know the neighborhoods.”

An officer can’t finish a report before he’s being pushed by dispatch to another call, he said.

“And you all say how much you support the police and you care about crime, but I haven’t seen one of you out there riding with the police officers in my zone—you could see for yourself,” Kreher told the council.  

Councilwoman Moore interjected: “I think there is some credit that can be given [to the Franklin administration]…”

To which Kreher replied, “Thank you for giving our money back to us,” referring to the, hopefully, impending end of the furloughs.

“If you’re going to be smart,” Moore retorted, pointing out that the officers could help themselves and the city by writing more traffic tickets.

Moore was not alone. Councilman James Maddox, Councilman C.T. Martin, and Councilman Ceasar Mitchell spoke up for the concept.

“You’re telling a sergeant in the police department to go find you some money?” Kreher asked Mitchell incredulously.

The idea that the police must somehow support themselves and the city by writing tickets was bandied about among the council as though such a thing is ethical. It is not. Where I come from, cities that rely on traffic tickets to support themselves are called speed traps, and cities that use their police to squeeze the citizens for money are known throughout the world as corrupt stinking hellholes. Khartoum comes to mind.

And yet, the idea that the function of the police is to generate revenue for the city enjoys quite a bit of support on the council of an American city that ought to know better. And so, the picture of Atlanta that emerges from yesterday’s budget meeting is one of a city that places its faith in a federal grant to hire more police officers—a grant it may or may not get; a city that hopes to build its budget by using police officers in the same way medieval English kings used their sheriffs to force money from the pockets of the citizenry; a city where there are not enough police to begin with; a city where crime is ever more brazen and violent with each passing day; a city where bloviating ideologues like Councilman Martin, when faced with a budget concept they don’t  understand, i.e. a budget in which expenses do not exceed revenues, screams racism because the president of a police union is white, although the union itself is made up of a diverse body of officers.

Mark Lawson, the former IBPO president, who is black, is very supportive of Kreher, who is white, and the union. He sat behind me at the meeting yesterday and made his irritation with Martin known. “He is talking to a generation of officers who have no connection to the civil rights era,” Lawson told me. “They are about their money. What he is saying is just a distraction from the real issues.”

Like so many other distractions the council conjures up.

For me, because of the story I just did about how the city neglects the medical responsibilities of police officers injured in the line of duty, there was an infuriating undercurrent to the proceedings.

Kreher probably felt it more than I did.

“And this latest fiasco with the disabled officers,” he said shaking his head, “These five officers were injured in the line of duty…I want to beat her [Mayor Franklin] in the head with a baseball bat sometimes when I think about it. I cannot believe Mayor Franklin’s administration would allow this to happen. This administration should be ashamed of itself.”

I don’t know what kind of hay will be made out of the baseball bat comment, but let’s face it:  Anyone who’s spent anytime at City Hall is bound to feel the same way, and not just about Mayor Franklin. I could have sworn I saw a Rawlings logo on some of the council members’ foreheads.