Sunday, May 24, 2009 | Opinion, Politics, Atlanta
SP THE POLICE AND CITY HALL

Everyone on the Atlanta City Council is up for reelection. Some of them should be voted out.

By Stephanie Ramage

Last week, the Atlanta City Council grilled Atlanta Police Department Sgt. Scott Kreher for nearly two hours. Near the end, he brought up the plight of five former police officers who were all seriously injured in the line of duty, mostly by bullets from criminals’ guns—four of them paralyzed, one of them brain-damaged—and how the city has withheld medical care from them (as detailed by The Sunday Paper on May 17), and he lost his temper.

 “And this latest fiasco with the disabled officers,” Kreher told the council, 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.”

Prior to that remark, Kreher, who is president of the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, had given a presentation succinctly enumerating the problems with City Hall’s treatment of the police department and outlining some possible solutions.

And yet, when the City Council members, all of whom are up for reelection, were given time to ask questions, the vast majority chose to expend their breath on political grandstanding, as if they had not heard a single word Kreher said.

Councilman C.T. Martin conducted himself in a particularly shameful way. Faced with more than 75 police union members of various races and backgrounds, Martin chose to focus on Kreher, who is white, and the two other union officers, also white, beside him at the presentation table. Martin wanted to know where all the black officers were. Kreher explained that the two on the union leadership team were on duty, so they couldn’t be there. Kreher’s predecessor, a black man named Mark Lawson, who supports Kreher, sighed wearily behind me.

“What he is saying is just a distraction from the real issues,” Lawson said of Martin’s comments.

The real issues are having enough police officers to deter crime in Atlanta and paying them the money they are due.

The officers filed out of the room in protest of Martin’s comments. Someone loudly remarked that should the council members need a police officer, they shouldn’t waste their time calling 911. That gave Councilwoman Joyce Sheperd something on which to waste 10 minutes.

Oh, the drama, the hand-wringing, the air of injured indignation wafting off these council members who behave as if they are the ladies’ auxiliary, chatting over tea about their gout and carbuncles; the citizens, with their pesky complaints of break-ins and assaults, be damned. There is a distant past of fabled glory to discuss instead—just ask Martin, who discusses it often as he saunters about the Council Chamber, apparently unaware that he is like nothing so much as the old white Southern racists whose oppression he claims to have struggled against: self-aggrandizing, self-involved, arrogant and obsessed with days long passed.

(Martin, incidentally, who represents District 10 in the city’s southwestern corner, is running unopposed for reelection.)

Did Martin and the others hear what Kreher had to say, other than the baseball bat remark? 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. “Now, the city needs $56 million” to balance its budget, so the mayor has proposed a 3 millage-point tax, Kreher noted, but “[COO Greg] 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 pointed out that the mayor cut the officers’ pay by 10 percent via furloughs in December 2008, just one month after the city settled a $7.5 million lawsuit over unpaid overtime with the IBPO. In essence, the Franklin administration was getting its money back, even if it meant endangering the citizens.

“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.”

Councilwoman Felicia Moore said officers could help themselves and the city budget by writing more traffic tickets. Martin agreed. 

The idea that the police must somehow support themselves and the city by writing traffic tickets was bandied about by 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. Cities that use their police to squeeze the citizens for money are known throughout the world as stinking hellholes of corruption. Mogadishu and Moscow come to mind. SP

To run for City Council, a citizen must pay a qualifying fee of $1,184. The qualifying period is Aug. 31 through Sept. 4. For more information, call the Clerk of Council at 404-330-6033.