Mawuli Mel Davis was in a DeKalb County Wal-Mart buying toiletries when he got a frantic call from Khari, his then 13-year-old son, who was sitting with his 15-year-old brother, Kobie, in the car outside.
The two teens had just had a pistol thrust in their faces. The reason: A pack of similarly young teens wanted Kobie’s iPhone.
“There are a lot of kids running around with guns kicking in doors,” said Davis, a lawyer who represents his share of juvenile criminals. “My youngest was really shaken by it. For a while, when anybody would approach our car in a gas station, he would be saying, ‘Let’s pull off.’ ”
DeKalb is a hot zone for burglaries and robberies in metro Atlanta; police say juveniles commit the vast majority of the former and a good share of the latter, often crossing borders to victimize homeowners in Clayton, Fulton, Gwinnett and Rockdale counties.
DeKalb dwarfs its neighbors in burglaries with 50,500 between 2008 and 2012, compared with nearly 41,000 in the runner-up, Atlanta. Atlanta barely led in armed robberies — which usually involve older teens or adults — with nearly 2,300 in 2012, edging DeKalb by fewer than 500 incidents, according to the latest numbers compiled by the FBI.
Police detectives blame a gang culture in which scores of young boys claim allegiance to loosely affiliated groups such as Savage the Block that have turned burglary into a high-volume business. And it is not just the “underprivileged” kids creating the crime wave, but also ones from the middle class drawn to the “gangsta lifestyle,” lionized in music and film, they said.
“What these kids do is orchestrated,” said Donald Cloudt, a longtime burglary detective in DeKalb. “When they leave at 10 in the morning, they know where they are going, and it’s not just to one house. They’ll be using the same stolen van all day long.”
Opinions are mixed on whether the overhaul of the state’s juvenile crime system that took effect this month — which directs less dangerous offenders into community programs instead of locking them up at a cost of hundreds of dollars a day to taxpayers — can solve problems like Savage the Block. Some of the overhaul’s supporters warn that it will take a long-term commitment by the community to have an impact.
In October, DeKalb’s south precinct alone had 255 residential burglaries — nearly nine a day — 30 commercial burglaries and 63 armed robberies. Detectives said most robbers started out as burglars.
DeKalb Detective Andre Williams, who has worked in both gang and burglary units, said Savage the Block has little structure but an estimated 200 members. They range in age from 11 to 18, with most of them between 13 and 16, he said.
They have specialities, such as car theft or armed robbery, but the bulk are burglars, with some developing skills such as using an acetylene cutting torch for commercial break-ins, Williams said.
“Nine times out of 10, if you are in the Block gang, they came to you because of your criminal activities,” Williams said. “You have a trade and you are good at it.”
Block gang car thieves have sold luxury vehicles to Latin American gangs who ship the cars overseas. Burglars unload flat-screen TVs, laptop computers, jewelry, iPhones and guns to fences — dealers in stolen goods. The drop-offs occur throughout the day, making the merchandise hard to recover, Williams said.
The young gangs have made the world more lucrative for the adult criminals who buy the stolen goods. Detectives said $30 to $50 was the going rate for many stolen televisions and laptop computers. The burglars only net a few hundred dollars for a day’s worth of break-ins, which helps explain the large number of crimes.
Clayton County Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steve Teske said the youth criminal gangs couldn’t exist without adult career criminals, who give them their shopping lists.
“These juveniles can’t move this stuff,” said Teske, a nationally recognized expert in combating juvenile crime. “They have to have adults move it.”
DeKalb detectives say the juvenile justice system fueled the crime wave because it wasn’t set up to deal with teens who had become professional criminals before they’re old enough to drive. Kids have to get multiple convictions before they are committed to a juvenile prison, and the ones who do end up incarcerated often come out of the system worse, detectives said.
“The juvenile justice system is teaching them to be better career criminals,” said Robert Peaco, a DeKalb detective. “We’ll have a kid who starts out doing burglary and … because the juvenile system is so lenient, he learns how the system works and he graduates to doing armed robberies.”
Police are skeptical that the overhaul of the juvenile justice system that takes effect next year will help them curb crime because it steers burglars to community-based programs rather than a youth prison. Teske, whose work served as the template for the new law, said new state funding would allow DeKalb to hire more probation officers to more thoroughly monitor the juveniles and even put the entire family under the microscope. If parents — many of whom police say connive if not conspire in their offspring’s crimes — don’t cooperate, they will be jailed for contempt of court, Teske said.
“Have I put parents in jail? Yes I have,” Teske said. “I assure you that most of these kids committing these burglaries lack family supervision — they need somebody teaching the parents how to function as a family.”
Volkan Topalli, a gang and juvenile crime expert, said juvenile courts in DeKalb and Atlanta have too many offenders to adequately deal with them. He said the new law might turn that situation around, but only if taxpayers — and state leaders — are willing to commit to it long-term, rather than for an election cycle.
“The juvenile courts have a lot of power over kids, but they don’t have the resources,” said Topalli, a professor at Georgia State University. “The only solutions I have seen that seem to have an effect are wide-ranging holistic approaches that are expensive. They do work, but a community has to be committed to doing them, and it is difficult to get the community to buy in when schools are strapped.”
Clayton County has seen a decline in the number of juvenile offenders, which Teske credited to more intense monitoring of youths on probation. After years in the triple digits, the number of juveniles arrested on burglary charges as of Dec. 20 was 82, down from 204 in 2010, according to juvenile court numbers. Meanwhile, the FBI reported a drop in burglaries — not just those committed by juveniles — from nearly 4,300 in 2010 to about 3,100 in 2012.
Teske said he took a hard-line approach toward burglary — insisting that offenders spend at least a night or two in lockup before being sent home. Longer stays behind bars, however, generally resulted in the juveniles returning to crime when they got out, he said.
“There are studies out there that confirm that detention and especially the length of detention contributes to delinquency,” he said. “It becomes a no-win situation. … If we use detention, they are going to come out worse because detention facilities are the best training grounds for delinquency.”
Davis, the lawyer whose sons became victims last year, said it is easy to be conflicted when it comes to juvenile crime. Many kids are lost to the underworld, he said, but it is still important to remember they’re kids who have made bad choices, sometimes for greed, sometimes for excitement and sometimes to fit in.
“I represent a young man now, 16 years old, whose parents I would describe as solidly middle class, who is facing serious charges of armed robbery,” Davis said. “We’re trying to get him back to juvenile court and get him some rehabilitation so at 16 he doesn’t have his whole life wrecked. But then you have these victims who are scared out of their wits.
“Like my sons.”
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