Ferguson: Could it happen here?

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Not here, surely.

Here in “the city too busy to hate,” racial conflicts are handled “the Atlanta way,” through negotiation and compromise. Atlanta is home to legions of civil rights heroes. It has a long and distinguished history of black leaders at City Hall.

“It hasn’t always been easy,” in the words of Andrew Young, among the most distinguished. “But it has always been rational, intelligent and nonviolent.”

Even so, the answer to the question, “Could it happen here?” is more complex. For one thing, “here” is more than the city of Atlanta. It is dozens of counties and cities across the region, many of which are much like Ferguson: they’re gaining non-white residents fast, but their political leadership and police forces are still overwhelmingly white.

The region and its largest city are also marked by racial segregation and stark disparities in education, income, wealth, unemployment and incarceration rates – all the factors cited as the roots of violence like that which flared in Ferguson.

And even though Atlanta has a black mayor and a black police chief, the word on the street in some mostly black city neighborhoods is that being stopped and questioned by police is simply a fact of life.

“I try to tell people, ‘You’ve got to be careful (with the police),’” said Terrence Corry, 30, who lives in the English Avenue neighborhood where Atlanta police shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson during a no-knock drug raid eight years ago.

Corry said he was stopped two months ago by the police, not for the first time. “Here goes my ID, and I’m not the one you’re looking for,” Corry said he told the officers. They let him go on his way.

Nearby, a brick building on James P. Brawley Drive bears a graffiti-scrawled pronouncement: “(Expletive) The Police.”

What the numbers say

Numbers tell only a part of any story. They do not capture intangibles like leadership and relationships and the nuances of place and history.

But numbers tell a solid if partial truth – for starters, about how well elected leaders and police forces mirror the people they serve.

For this story, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution requested the rosters of the major metro Atlanta police forces. Some did not respond to the request in time. To determine the makeup of the various elected bodies, we referred to photos on their websites. (Admittedly, not 100 percent foolproof.)

It’s worth noting that, the farther you travel from the center of Atlanta, the more pronounced the disparities become:

In Fulton County, according to 2012 census estimates, 59 percent of residents are non-white. So are five of seven county commissioners and 61 percent of the top-ranking officers in the Fulton County Police Department (from chief down to lieutenant).

In Gwinnett County, 56 percent of residents are non-white. The commission chairman and four county commissioners are white. From the rank of chief through sergeant, the Gwinnett County Police Department is 83 percent white.

And in Marietta, 57 percent of residents are non-white. The mayor, five of six council members and the city manager are white. From the rank of chief through lieutenant, the city police department is 82 percent white.

Other numbers tell stories about opportunity and prosperity. And even in metro Atlanta, long a proud bastion of the black middle class, the tale they tell is not pretty.

This year, the national Urban League published a look at the gaps that persist between people of various races and ethnic groups in America’s metro areas. Here are some highlights for the 29-county Atlanta region:

Blacks’ median household income was 62 percent of whites. The unemployment and poverty rates for blacks were more than double those for whites. Blacks were three times as likely to be locked up in prisons or jails.

Inside vs. outside

Numbers may answer the question: “Is x greater than y?” They don’t answer a question like: “Could it happen here?”

For that, the AJC sent reporters across the region to talk to people who have thought a lot about such matters. And an interesting thing happened.

First, let’s be explicit about the question. It wasn’t just about police shooting a young man of color in questionable circumstances. It was about the ugly aftermath: the ham-fisted response by white officials and the spiraling rage in the community.

There was a sharp divide among the responses, but it wasn’t necessarily between black and white.

It was mostly between recognized community leaders, who in many instances have devoted much of their lives to healing racial wounds, and people outside the power structure.

The outsiders recognized and honored the insiders’ efforts at inclusion and bridge-building; they just weren’t as confident that those efforts would be enough to avert a blow-up in the face of a spark like the killing of Michael Brown.

‘A black-and-white-together city’

For the insider view, listen to Young, a sort of insider’s insider:

“It shouldn’t happen in Atlanta, unless people get awful lazy and trifling,” said the former Atlanta mayor and ambassador to the United Nations. “We have been working on race relations here in Atlanta since the 1940s. It has been a black-and-white-together city.”

Here’s today’s mayor, Kasim Reed: “Do I believe that an 18-year-old can be shot six times with four eyewitnesses in the City of Atlanta? I believe that can happen anywhere in the United States.

“What I believe would not happen is that officer not be called to account … and that five, six, seven, eight days would go by without an explanation to the parents. I don’t believe that would stand in Atlanta.”

That was the view, too, of DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Clarence Seeliger, who has been on the bench for nearly three decades.

“The people in DeKalb County and the city of Atlanta are sophisticated enough to know they’d have to do a quick investigation and they’d have to disclose what they did know as soon as possible,” he said.

Besides, he said, demonstrations are nothing new here. “I remember Hosea Williams seemed to have a demonstration once a week.”

Know thy history

DeKalb County Police Chief Cedric Alexander just returned from Ferguson. He went there in his capacity as a vice president with the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.

He said Ferguson’s white leaders made bad calls based on an ignorance of black history. “When the issue of a curfew came up, I advised against it,” Alexander said. The reason: the heritage of “sundown towns” – all-white municipalities in which signs were posted warning people of color to leave come nightfall.

“That’s why you saw so much anger over the curfews,” he said. “I don’t believe it was done with ill intent, but it shows the dangers of not knowing your history.”

For interim DeKalb CEO Lee May, the images from Ferguson hit close to home. As an adolescent, May lived in Florissant, just north of Ferguson.

Among the insiders, May was the least ready to say Atlanta has evolved beyond violent confrontation. It would be “foolish,” he said, to think his county is immune to racially charged eruptions.

“As long as there are preconceived notions about race, color, religion or gender, the potential exists for volatile situations.”

Outside looking in

Dr. Liz Frye, an Atlanta psychiatrist who works with the low-income and homeless, feels their pain every day.

“Pretty much anywhere in the U.S. it’s possible any of these events could happen, particularly in places where people feel disenfranchised, powerless, vulnerable, fearful,” she said.

“With regard to Atlanta though, it is unique in the sense that we have a history steeped in nonviolent social change.” As a result, she said, “I think probably people are more likely to feel heard.”

But Maurice J. Hobson, an African American Studies professor at Georgia State, turned Frye’s take – and the question itself – on its head: “I would like to ask the question: When will it happen again in Atlanta?”

Hobson ticked off the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, in which dozens died; the Summerhill uprising of 1966, when thousands rioted after the police shooting of a black man, and the disturbances in 1992 after four white L.A. police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.

“Society is always a hair away from absolute turmoil,” Hobson said.

‘Waiting for the other shoe to drop’

State Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, arguably an insider, casts himself as an outsider. And he’s not a big fan of “the Atlanta way.”

Hearkening back to the early black-white collaborations, he said, “the African-American leaders were treated as junior partners. It was not a meeting of equals.”

Bernice Liddie-Hamilton, an associate professor of social work at Georgia State, said some minority leaders have lost touch with people at the grass-roots level, and, along with it, their credibility.

“They don’t know,” she said. “They move up and move out.”

Of course, the movement of minorities out to the suburbs is the story of present-day Atlanta, as Liddie-Hamilton noted. Many outlying areas have just begun to grapple with the issues that come with racial and ethnic diversity: poverty, increased demand for transportation and other services.

“They’ve not addressed these at the rate that needs to be,” she said. “We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

A tinderbox

Fred Brooks, associate professor of sociology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State, has studied the rise of poverty in the suburbs and organized civil protest.

He was succinct: “Yes it could happen here.”

Across the region, “politics has not kept up” with population shifts, he said, feeding a sense of alienation on the part of minorities.

Add to that the well-documented fact that people of color took the worst hits during the economic downturn. “Black unemployment is much higher. Black youth unemployment is off the scale,” Brooks said. “That’s a tinderbox for all this.”

Cobb County Police Chief John Houser said he gets it that there’s a trust issue, and his department has stepped up to meet it.

“One of the key things in preparation for an incident like Ferguson is what is done in advance of that event: relationships with community leaders, relationships with the citizens,” Houser said.

“We do work with NAACP, SCLC, other community groups that are concerned, the Hispanic community. A lot of times there are trust factors that we have to overcome and a lot of work has been done to overcome those. But it’s a constant process.”

Houser said he’s also working to attract minority officers, redesigning recruiting materials and distributing them in a greater diversity of places. “We believe our efforts are paying off,” he said in an email. “Our recent pool of applicants has been increasingly diverse.”

‘Not have blinders on’

In India, it’s customary to get out of the car and approach a police officer who stops you on the road, says Donald Sequeira, who chairs the Gwinnett Human Relations Commission. That’s not the case here, and the commission has been helping Indian immigrants adjust to such cultural differences.

Sequeira said his group is in the trenches, working to head off missteps that could have tragic consequences.

“The potential is there because we live in a very diverse society,” he said. “It’s very important to constantly keep in touch.”

In Gwinnett, where whites have gone from being an overwhelming majority three decades ago to being in the minority today, no one from the police or sheriff’s department would comment. County Commission Chairman Charlotte Nash, however, summed up the stakes nicely: “We don’t want our police department viewed as the enemy.”

In nearby Loganville, part of which lies in Gwinnett and part in Walton County, Loganville Assistant Police Chief Dick Lowry said that, like many forces, his small department struggles with mistrust born of bad history.

The animosity of some officers toward minority groups in earlier decades “didn’t really do us any favors in that regard,” Lowry said.

Loganville’s population is 30 percent minority, but only about 10 percent of applicants are minorities, he said. That’s one reason the force of 26 has just three black officers and no other people of color.

“There’s a lot of work to do on a lot of fronts in law enforcement,” he said. “The best thing all of us can do is not have blinders on. If we identify a problem in our community, we have to address it.”

The enemy within

Even in parts of Atlanta, police are often seen as the enemy, said Xochitl Bervera, co-director for the Racial Justice Action Center.

“Racial profiling in both the Latino community and the African-American community is a serious problem,” Bervera said. She cited an ACLU study of marijuana arrests in Fulton County, which found blacks arrested at twice the rate their share of the population would warrant, given that national studies show marijuana use nearly equal between the races.

Bervera concedes that the frustration that comes with such disparities may not be widely understood outside minority and low-income communities.

“I think there are probably communities that would be shocked to find out that (other) communities are occupied and harassed, and that it’s a regular occurrence, so regular that people begin to expect it.”

Over near English Avenue in Atlanta, Victor Awol, 37, and Derrick Johnson, 43, stood talking near John F. Kennedy Middle School, which Johnson once attended and is now shuttered.

Johnson said his mother was on the front lines of the civil rights movement. The images of the Ferguson police on social media remind him of photos from those long-ago battles.

“It’s like a slap in the face,” he said.

As the two men chatted, blue APD vehicles rolled through the neighborhood.

Awol, who works in the area and lives in East Atlanta, said he’s seen police stop young men for no apparent reason.

“What are you doing?” is a frequent question they ask, he said, along with asking for ID.

He would like to see officers on foot patrols, but an APD spokesman told the AJC that’s not the department’s strategy.

Awol said he started an ice-bucket challenge on Facebook to encourage people to stop the violence.

A few blocks away, on Joseph Lowery Boulevard, is a billboard with a photo of Travyon Martin.

“It’s time to change America,” the billboard says.

Email Victoria Loe Hicks or Eric Strigus