Atlanta police to beef up campus police presence

By Bill Rankin

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

To combat crime at local college campuses, the Atlanta Police Department will put an increased presence of uniformed and undercover police officers at the Georgia Tech and AUC campuses, police chief Richard Pennington said Tuesday.

Pennington  said the city is responding to recent assaults and robberies on college students, including the shooting of a Morehouse student shortly after 1 a.m. Tuesday as he walked home from the college library.

Pennington said the student was released from Grady Memorial Hospital Tuesday morning after being treated for a gunshot wound in  the arm.

Over the weekend, two Georgia Tech students were robbed as they were walking near the campus. The assailants hopped out of a white vehicle, robbed the students, got back in their car and drove away, Pennington said. Both cases are under investigation, he said.

Pennington said APD will put four uniformed officers at AUC and four more at Tech. There will also be an undisclosed number of undercover officers at both campuses, he said. These officers will help AUC and Georgia Tech campus police.

The Atlanta officers will be paid overtime and work shifts from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher said. He estimated the officers working overtime will be paid about $30 an hour.

After 30 days the APD will evaluate the effectiveness of the deployment and decide whether to continue the increased presence, Dreher said.

"We're going to do everything we can to make our college campuses safe," Pennington said at a press conference at City Hall.

Pennington noted that many of the attacks on college students have come in the late night or early morning hours a few blocks away from the campuses. Students, he said, need to be mindful of their surroundings and to try to walk in groups. "Some of these areas are still not safe at that time of the morning," the chief said. "We hope these students will be a little more careful. ... I think they have become easy targets for some of the criminals."

Robbers are targeting students to get their computers, iPods, backpacks and and cellphones, the chief noted.

Mayor Shirley Franklin noted the thiefs re-sell these items on the street and urged citizens not to buy such items from unauthorized sellers. "It's a cycle," the mayor said.

At the press conference, Franklin announced that the city will begin posting weekly crime statistics on the city of Atlanta's website. The statistics will date back to 2007 and give readers a comprehensive view of city crime over the past three years, the mayor said.