Sunday, June 28, 2009 | News, In this Issue..., Politics, Atlanta
Atlanta's Bill of Rights

They pay taxes, and they’re probably about to pay more. What should residents expect in exchange?

By Stephanie Ramage

The problem was a pit bull belonging to a group of “dope boys.”

Last week, the dog menaced the Capitol View neighborhood in the southwest corner of Atlanta, jumping a fence and leaving one resident’s dog more dead than alive.

“It took 20 minutes and several blows with a two-by-four to get its jaws off the dog’s throat. So this was a bad pit, completely unafraid of humans,” says Jelani Cobb, a history professor at Spelman College who lives in the neighborhood. “I told the Atlanta Police Department that I know pits and this one was definitely likely to attack or kill a child in a heartbeat.”

Cobb says it took officers from the APD’s Zone 3 precinct more than an hour to show up.

“And then they only came because I had a half-dozen people call, then I walked to [Councilwoman] Joyce Sheperd's house and had her put in a call to the zone major,” he says. “It took animal control two and a half hours to show up. I'm told there was one animal control officer serving the entire city that night.”

The dope boys, he says, actually argued with the councilwoman and the police.

“And they were intimidating the woman whose dog was mauled,” he says. Animal control eventually gave the dog’s owners a warning, and allowed them to keep the dog that they clearly can’t or won’t control.

I’ve interviewed Cobb before. His neighborhood is like many in Atlanta—struggling to overcome a past of poverty and crime, where refurbished homes share hedges with crack houses or hazardous industrial sites. And like many other Atlantans, Cobb is ferociously intent upon not giving up the slender scrap of stable ground his sweat equity has won. He and others like him are furious at a city government they feel has failed in its responsibility to them. Their rights, they say, have been trampled.

“There are about a dozen things wrong with how the City of Atlanta operates,” says Cobb. “Most specifically, we deserve police who actually respond. We have the right to live without fear in our homes. We have the right to city services like animal control that do not take two and a half hours to show up. And we have a right to clean, safe neighborhoods.”

Coming as they do a little more than a week before our country celebrates its independence and the shining vision of responsible governance that independence heralded, Cobb’s comments reverberate, especially since they’re only one set of many that have crashed angrily into my inbox, voicemail and ear lately.

A confession: This won’t be an oom-pah-pah patriotism piece, because I hate the Fourth of July.

All the pomp and circumstance, the banners and barbecues, make me feel like I’m at a party where I don’t know anybody. Why? I suspect it comes from 14 years of  covering Atlanta’s government and seeing its citizens ignored and walked on too many times to count. So the words of the preamble of the Constitution—the foundation of our country, laid after the colonists’ blood bought our freedom—leave me sad and perplexed: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

What is all that mumbo-jumbo? A more perfect union. Justice. Domestic tranquility. A common defense—like soldiers and the police? And what are those blessings of liberty, anyway? I see people exercise their freedom by doing stupid, harmful things. Bah, humbug.

No wonder the newly minted American citizens decided to add 10 amendments right off the bat to clarify their most basic expectations for government. Those basics became known as the Bill of Rights.

Last week, an onslaught of resident complaints forced me to search for some shred of the spirit of behind our Constitution. And there it was, lots of it, living on in disgusted people from Capitol View to Kirkwood to Midtown to Buckhead, all of them demanding a responsive city government in exchange for their taxes.

But it had better happen soon. Because if it doesn’t, people can always go somewhere else.

27 BULLETS LATER

The sun is bouncing off the pavement on Clay Street in waves of white heat when my front tire hits the mother of all potholes and rattles my front bumper. I’d gotten a call from Kara Southall, who lives in Kirkwood with her husband Brent and their toddler daughter, and she’d mentioned a hole but hadn’t said exactly where it was, just that a kid could easily stand with one leg hip-deep in it.

I figure I’ve found it.

Inside the Southalls’ meticulously kept Craftsman bungalow, Brent is pacing with their daughter in his arms, trying to coax her into taking a nap. For the Southalls, the pothole is a minor concern. They’d love for the city to fix it, but they’ve got bigger worries in Kirkwood: bullets and burglaries. So why live there?

“We moved here five years ago because we had seen what Candler Park was like and I—I know you’ll think this is crazy—I could see that happening here,” says Kara, pushing her long brown hair back from her shoulder. She glances at her husband with a smile before adding, “I didn’t have a wedding. Instead, I wanted to put that money into this house, where we would raise our family.”

Brent nods and motions toward their hallway: “We were married right there.”

Kara continues, “I saw Toomer Elementary and I thought how great it would be to be able to walk my daughter to school every day. I had to ride the bus growing up, so can you imagine having your mom walk with you? Without thugs bothering you?”

Recent events in Kirkwood aren’t supporting Kara’s serene Candler Park vision. In the wee hours of June 20, police picked up 27 bullets and shell casings after a shootout at the nearby Bixby Court apartments left one man injured.

That only served to loudly punctuate an ongoing deluge of burglaries.

The Southalls walk with me down their street and point out one house after another.  “That one was broken into once, that one was broken into twice, that one was broken into once …” All the break-ins were within the past few months. There are fewer than a dozen houses on the street, which is within a few minutes of the APD’s Zone 6 precinct office.

We turn onto a trail scratched into some kudzu. The Southalls say it hooks up with a bike path the burglars use as a getaway route. Kara points toward Bixby Street, and then swivels in the opposite direction and says, “And over there are the apartments where the guy shot his baby’s mama because she wanted ice cream money.”

Kara mentions that she could pay the Kirkwood Security Patrol’s $150 annual fee for an off-duty police officer to drive by and check on her house, but—and Brent chimes in simultaneously—don’t they pay taxes for security already? Isn’t that what the police are for? The Southalls are not wealthy. Brent works in business management for a medical practice and Kara stays home with their daughter. Every penny counts.

“We pay a lot in taxes,” says Brent, explaining that despite that, he’d pay more if it meant getting the services he expects as a citizen. “We have a right to good police protection, to good trash pickup, to safe streets and adequate streetlights. That’s what I pay taxes for.”

I drop by the Zone 6 precinct and see seven police cruisers and various other APD vehicles parked alongside. It’s only 1:30 in the afternoon. Shift change isn’t until 3 p.m., so I’m curious why so many cars aren’t out on patrol.
 
Maj. Renee Propes, the zone commander, explains that there aren’t enough police officers to drive the cars. Then, too, she says, the zone keeps some extras around because there’s always a car or two in the shop, and some of the cars are used by “discretionary teams”—special details—who won’t show up until later. I pass on the Southalls’ worries about Bixby Court. Propes says the APD is working with the property owner to put some security measures in place, like car stickers.

“It’s often people who do not live there, who are visiting, who cause the problems,” she says. Nonetheless, she adds, the APD is in talks with the city solicitor’s office to see about bringing action against the property owner if changes aren't made.

What about Crim High School? I ask. The Southalls and their neighbors have complained that the so-called students there spend more time roaming the neighborhood than they do in class. Here, the APD’s hands are tied by the school system: Crim is an open campus, which means students—many of whom were discipline problems at more traditional schools—can come and go as they please. Under the circumstances, establishing truancy is almost impossible.

FLIGHT FROM THE CITY

Back at the office, there’s an e-mail from Lynn Irvin, wife of former state Rep. Bob Irvin, a Republican, who’s agreed to contribute some perspective from Buckhead. In fact, she and her husband, who serves on the board of the Fulton County Taxpayers Association, forwarded me their e-mail exchange from the previous night, when Bob had been flying on business from New York to San Francisco.

Lynn had crafted a mission statement of sorts that included this: “I want my city government to be rock solid solvent. I want transparency (beginning with the budget) in my city government so that citizens and neighborhood leaders who want to understand the city finances have enough information to do so. I want my city government to create a police department where the officers feel that they are an important part of the city government and not victims of its corruption, ineptitude and disinterest. I want a city government that takes care of the safety personnel (including those who are disabled in the line of duty) because we should take care of them the way they are taking care of us. I want my money being spent wisely on essential government services.”

Her husband responded: “Sweetie, a shorter version is: I want an Atlanta city government that works as hard, as efficiently, as effectively, and as honestly as its citizens do. Love, Bob.”
 
That evening, I’m lying on my stomach on a sidewalk in Midtown. Mark Edge, a Midtown resident, is standing over me as I photograph the cover of a water meter. The water meter covers mean a lot to him. We’ve just hiked from Seventh Street to 14th Street looking for them, especially for those that are cracked, at his insistence. The sweltering heat is making my clothes stick to me, and down at ant level the city looks every bit as bad as it does 5 feet, 4 inches higher up.

“None of them fit,” he says. “That’s why they snap whenever pressure is applied to them. The older ones, the ones that were put here at the turn of the century, fit. It’s as if someone at the city ordered a half-million new ones without even measuring first to see if they were correctly sized. The covers are a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with Atlanta’s city government.”

So far, we’ve seen half a dozen newer covers, and none of them fit the meter compartments. Sometimes there’s no cover left at all; it’s in dozens of pieces at the bottom of a meter that’s half submerged in stagnant rainwater.

(At least, I hope that’s rainwater.)

Edge, a jewelry designer, has an eye for form following function. That’s why Atlanta’s city government disappoints him so much, and why he wrote a letter to Mayor Shirley Franklin in March that read, in part: “I’m literally scared to walk down the street alone at night to walk my dog or go to dinner. I am fearful for my guests who visit me from other parts of the city thinking that they will be safe in Midtown. … The fact of the matter is that we need to hire 1,000 additional police and that we need to pay them a proper wage as they are fundamental to our city functioning properly. In my opinion public safety is a fundamental right that we should receive in exchange for our hard-earned dollars that we pay in the form of taxes.”

The pricey water department, he says, the broken sidewalks and streets, the city’s profligate financial management, and most of all the crime, will, he fears, prompt a revival of some unpleasant history: an exodus from Atlanta. And this time, he says, it won’t be just whites who are fleeing; it will be anyone who has worked hard and expects responsibility on the part of their government.

“We’re going to see flight from Atlanta again, just like we saw in the 1970s,” he says. “I don’t want it. But these are exactly the things that were happening then.” SP