Franklin, Pennington at D.C. summit on gangs

By Bob Keefe

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Crime is down and gang-related arrests are up. But Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin acknowledged Monday that metro Atlanta’s gang problems are still growing and that the city needs to do more to address social and economic problems that often lead to gang activity.

“We may have been able to get our crime stats down ... but the problem is, how do you sustain it?” said Franklin, part of a group of big-city mayors and police chiefs who took part in a Washington summit on gang violence Monday hosted by the Obama Administration. Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington also attended.

“Arrests are only part of it,” Franklin said. “Certainly you can take people off the streets for a short period of time, but how do you make a community safe and sustain it?”

Amid rising criticism after a string of high-profile violent crimes, Franklin and Pennington announced in July they were significantly expanding the police force’s gang task force. Today, the police department’s gang task force includes 24 officers, Franklin said, up from 10.

Earlier this month, the city announced that crime declined nearly 10 percent last year. And in a recent opinion piece in the AJC, Pennington wrote that the city’s overall crime rate is at 1969 levels, down 66 percent from its peak in 1989. He also wrote that his department has enough police officers and other resources, despite tightening budgets and declining city tax revenues because of the recession.

Where Atlanta — like other big cities across the country — is lacking is in gang prevention and family building programs, rehabilitation programs for gang members and more interaction among communities, police officers and kids, Franklin said in an interview outside the White House.

That’s why she and other mayors were at the conference, hosted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Vice President Joe Biden.

“Ultimately, we cannot get smart on crime in isolation,” Holder told attendees at the closed-door conference, according to prepared remarks. “It requires the exchange and evaluation of experiences and exposure to new ideas.”

Franklin said one of the biggest gang issues in Atlanta and, increasingly, its suburbs involves young people who aren’t necessarily connected to organized gangs, but nonetheless try to emulate them. The trend was detailed in an AJC story Sunday.

“We are seeing these loose formations of young people (that) are acting like gangs, but they don’t necessarily have the traditional hierarchy,” Franklin said. “These are high school students, or high school dropouts, they’re the unemployed, they’re people who don’t believe they have access to other social and economic networks.”

In order to keep those people from joining gangs, the city has to do more to address social and economic issues, Franklin said. Among other things, she said, the city, state and federal governments need to do more to create job opportunities, stronger families and more closely knit communities.

Among the more intriguing ideas Franklin said she heard from other mayors at Monday’s conference were programs such as “pastor’s walk” that resembles a community watch-type program led by religious leaders; initiatives designed to get more community leaders into schools and programs to help former gang members find jobs and places to live after they’re released from prison.

“Those are the fundamentals,” she said. “Policing is part of it, but the social network and education are just as important. Pretty much every mayor said that today.”