A Tale of Two Police Departments

By George Chidi

Atlanta police and DeKalb County police are somehow side by side and miles apart.

While Atlanta police were racing the clock looking for a suspected child killer last Monday night, I found myself sitting behind an Atlanta community patrol cop in a van full of volunteers looking for homeless people.

At the end of a long, late night, seemingly as an aside, officer Donte Booker invited me to an event Thursday night — Clippers and Cops — that was restarting in person get-togethers. Honestly, I probably would have blown it off if one of the police public information officers had sent me the invitation (sorry, John), but as it happens, I had been planning to attend a town hall by the DeKalb County police department that Tuesday. The comparison might be interesting, I thought.

After watching both, I will say that the Atlanta police department can connect with the public in an open, honest way, and DeKalb either cannot or will not do so. It troubles me.

A few comparisons, to start. A third of DeKalb’s 760,000 or so residents have coverage by municipal police departments like Brookhaven and Dunwoody, so Atlanta and DeKalb police cover about 500,000 people each. Atlanta has a police budget of about $230 million after significant increases over the last two years; DeKalb’s is about $127 million. Atlanta has almost twice as much property value to tax as DeKalb.

On paper, Atlanta has an authorized strength of 2,000 officers; in practice it fields about 1,600. DeKalb is authorized about 860 officers. It isn’t immediately clear how many they actually employ today; more on that later. APD pays recruits $48,500 a year; DeKalb pays about $42,500. Both departments will pay more for experience or college degrees and both are planning competitive pay increases.

Atlanta had 159 homicides in 2021; DeKalb had 135, beating the 2007 record of 108 for the second year running. That’s made more remarkable by the relative decrease in population after the incorporation of Dunwoody and Brookhaven: DeKalb had about 100,000 more people to cover in 2007. DeKalb’s homicide rate has now increased about 63 percent since 2019, almost exactly the same increase as Atlanta.

I went to Studio 6 Barber Lounge on Atlanta’s Westside in between Crest Lawn and The Works expecting five guys hanging around a little neighborhood shop. I did not expect a slick modern salon the size of a restaurant. I did not expect catered food with a DJ. I did not expect a packed audience. And I did not expect to see Mayor Andre Dickens and Chief Rodney Bryant holding court. Booker sandbagged me. I heartily approve.

Dickens fielded questions — including some gnarly ones — from anyone who had something to say. He spoke passionately about parenting, and training, and mentorship to prevent shootings like the rifle drive-by at Loca Luna and another shooting that killed a six-month-old last Monday.

“They find themselves in despair, or hopelessness where all they see is multigenerational poverty, and all these kids and their dad and their brother and their uncle get into these type of scenarios, and they are going to continue to think they don’t have another option,” Dickens said.

Historically, most violence is predictable and (for lack of a better word) explainable. Robberies and drug deals occasionally lead to murders. An unchecked domestic abuse situation can turn lethal. Murders can usually be predicted based on a population’s size and its socioeconomic composition.

And then two women get into an argument in front of a hip restaurant and two men spray the parking lot with rifle fire, and nothing makes sense any more. Sunday night, 20-year-old Zyquan Lee died and three others were wounded in gunfire outside of an Atlanta restaurant late at night, the sixth of seven such shootings over the last week.

Bryant has increasingly attributed violence to a kind of free-floating anger that short circuits the basic schoolyard-level ability to resolve a conflict without shooting someone. “Currently, 50 percent of the gun violence we’re seeing are people lacking conflict resolution,” he said, the buzzers clipping away in front of him at heads with more hair than either of us have had in years. “It’s an escalating argument that turns into gun violence. Not drugs. Not domestic violence. … If we don’t make changes now, in 20 years this room will look very different.”

The pandemic seems to have robbed some people of their chill. People are pissed at each other. Dickens and Bryant seem to recognize that people being pissed at the cops too won’t help solve the violence problem, and they are offering very specific advice to the public to get things under control.

Work in your neighborhoods to reduce violence, Dickens said. If you have a nonprofit you want to connect to antiviolence work, great: the city is taking names and making microgrants and city-owned space available to operate. Dickens is working to build a network of local support focused on reducing gun violence. But it’s at least as important to work on one person at a time close to home, he said.

This is what effort looks like when public opinion matters. Dickens and the Atlanta Police Department have been scrambling continuously since his inauguration — and, really, for months now — to connect to the public in the wake of the 2020 protests and the public outcry over increasing violent crime.

I spoke to both Dickens and Bryant as they left the event … because I could. They were approachable, as were the police officers at the event, and not just by me. I left with actual information and a lead on a couple of stories.

The contrast between this and DeKalb’s “open house” could not have been more stark.

Don’t get me wrong: Clippers and Cops is an event. It was produced. It was coordinated, in all the ways that ensure media relations people can justify their employment. But it wasn’t managed. A woman talking about her son being abused in police custody was real, unplanned and impactful. The questions weren’t planted. It was not a top-down presentation.

I don’t know what the hell DeKalb’s Zoom call was supposed to be.

For about an hour, DeKalb’s department heads took turns reading canned scripts that they probably didn’t write themselves to describe their operations. Some of the questions were specifically about neighborhood problems here or there — celebratory gunfire near Marbut Road, for example — which suggests that they had some kind of audience in attendance. They also received questions about career development and pay that had prepared answers plainly being read from scripts. That tells me most of the audience were other cops.

Until prompted, they elided over the actual figures for homicides in the county last year.

Most of my questions went unanswered. Chief Mirtha Ramos said attendees could send her questions and that they would be answered. I sent these questions a week ago and have heard nothing so far. You tell me how offended I should be:

Attrition for staff remains a problem in every law enforcement agency. It’s a national problem. Where does DeKalb stand in terms of personnel shortfall, today? That is: officers staffed vs. officers authorized. What was your total hired vs. total lost in 2021?

How many officers are deployed as beat cops in each zone during the evening watch?

What is your recruiting strategy, given the aggressive recruiting position the city of Atlanta is expected to take? Are there changes to this strategy that you’re making in response to the tightening employment environment, other than the pay raise mentioned in the call?

What happened, exactly, with the Extra Duty Solutions initiative to turn over the administration of second jobs to a third-party provider? What prompted exploring this idea? Why was it abandoned?

What’s missing, in your view, with regard to social services response to public safety in DeKalb? What does the policy conversation look like there? Is there a working group on such things? Coordination between the police department and the DeKalb Continuum of Care for Homeless, and the Community Service Board for mental health? With school resource officers?

I heard Chief Ramos’ answer on bodyworm camera footage and its release. I believe that answer was incomplete. Ramos said it was a decision made “when we can do so without impeding the investigation, and after consultation with the DA’s office and the investigating agency.” This is, as a functional matter, indistinguishable from outside from “whenever we feel like it.” When I’ve asked the other agencies why bodyworn camera footage is being withheld, those questions are always — always — pointed back at it being a decision by the DeKalb County police. Either those agencies aren’t making a call to withhold release, or they’re lying to the public about it.

What factors, specifically, “impede an investigation?” Will you tell us what these factors were once bodyworn camera footage is released, or will we be left to interpret that? Because conditions as they stand erode trust, and I am inclined to take a forceful public stand against this position without clarity.

How does DeKalb County have an 80+ percent homicide clearance rate? The national rate is 61 percent. Outperformance should be explainable. Are the factors leading to a 20+ percent higher clearance rate in DeKalb County internal or external to the department? Is it a competency you have that other departments lack? How is that measured? If it is external … what is it? Please treat this as the technical management, criminology-science question that it is and not an opportunity for cheerleading, because there are some very wrong answers to this question and propaganda will make me wonder if I’m being lied to. I want evidence for the claims made. “We don’t really know” is an acceptable answer if that answer is true.

And last: why, exactly, have you refused to schedule an actual interview with meaningful dialogue?

Now look. I get it.

DeKalb is fighting a violent crime problem every bit as significant and lethal as Atlanta’s with about half the police staff. DeKalb’s violence flies under the radar because Atlanta has been taking all the flak. Perhaps the department thinks that’s sustainable as long as they stiff-arm serious observers.

DeKalb’s police department has taken to ignoring my requests for communication unless they’re couched as a demand under the Georgia Open Records Act for information. My sense of things, after speaking to other news reporters, is that this is a broad problem. I’m worried that it will eventually become a liability for the county.

Consider that a protest against Atlanta’s proposed police training facility — which is in DeKalb County — was broken up by DeKalb police officers in a particularly brutal fashion over the weekend. When cops push around someone with a camera, I tend to take notice.

I emailed the department asking someone to explain this nonsense to me. I have yet to hear a reply.

Community relationships are like trees. They take time to grow. Sooner or later, given the staffing issues DeKalb wrestles with in the field, they’re going to get caught out. A shooting will inevitably go bad, or something equally horrible, and the department will be looking for the public goodwill that they’re burning for firewood today.

Read the original story on TheAtlantaObjective.

Related Portfolio