Every morning at 6 when Malinda Adams get set to leave her Grant Park condo and go work out, she gets in her car and locks it, starts the engine and only then does she open the garage door.
Adams, 50, hasn't been a crime victim, but she worries.
“I do feel safe and I want to feel safe in my home, but I take a lot of precautions,” the network television producer said. “You have to be careful, because something can happen anywhere.”
Which brings up the question, what is real and what is perception when it comes to crime in Atlanta?
While crime has gone down in the city, high-profile incidents continue to make the news and influence perception. In 2008, there were 46,381 major crimes in Atlanta. By 2010, that number had shrunk to 36,549, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
“If you go strictly by numbers, crime is down across the board. Last year we had a 10 percent decrease in the most serious crimes," Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said. "But perception means everything. Until our citizens feel safe, our work is not done."
According to a survey the Atlanta Police Foundation will release Monday, 72 percent of Atlanta residents feel crime is still a “very serious problem.”
The survey, conducted in January by the Schapiro Group, asked 600 Atlantans for their thoughts on crime, the APD and 911.
Among the key findings:
-- 34 percent of respondents thought crime in their neighborhood was at least somewhat higher than it was five years ago.
-- While 96 percent of respondents felt somewhat safe in their homes, only 59 percent felt safe walking in their neighborhood at night.
-- At least 49 percent of Atlanta residents occasionally worry their car might be stolen and 43 percent worry about getting mugged.
-- 56 percent felt good about the job the APD was doing, while another 36 percent said the department was doing fair. In addition, 71 percent of respondents had at least some confidence in Turner.
-- 71 percent of respondents had confidence in the 911 system.
"It confirmed our belief that the perception of crime is a little worse than the reality of crime," said Dave Wilkinson, president of the police foundation. "The value of this is that it gives us an accurate measure of what the crime perceptions are and what we need to do to go forward. We can use this as a baseline for improvement."
A part of the survey of interest to many Atlantans looked at key entertainment districts. Nearly 80 percent of those asked said they felt safe going to Buckhead to be entertained, followed by 77 percent for Midtown and 74 percent for Atlantic Station.
But only 61 percent felt safe downtown, 54 percent in East Atlanta, and only 48 percent felt safe in southwest Atlanta, where most of Atlanta’s black power structure traditionally has lived.
“It is unfortunate and frustrating, and lot of it has to do with people who don’t live here having the wrong perception of southwest Atlanta,” said City Councilwoman Keisha Lance Bottoms, a lifelong resident of that area. “You are not going to find a better area of town.”
Bottoms said "southwest Atlanta" has become a generic term to describe most things in the southern part of the city. She said she recently saw a TV news report about a murder in southwest Atlanta. She said the reporter was actually in south Fulton and was standing next to a Hapeville police car.
That is a problem A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, has been dealing with for years, although crime has dropped 41 percent since 2004.
“I think folks haven’t been able to get their heads around the fact that we are doing a heck of a lot better than people think,” Robinson said. “It is frustrating. People who come here from all over the world feel safer than people who live in the region and who haven’t visited downtown in five or 10 years. But most people who make their living here or go to school down here feel safe. Old habits are just hard to break.”
The task for city leaders is changing perceptions to match reality. Along those lines, Atlanta has hired 250 police officers over the past year, and when they are all trained it will be the most police officers the city has ever had. Turner also has created a new Community Oriented Policing Section to build closer bonds in neighborhoods.
"These officers will be out there, working closely with our residents and our business owners proactively on quality of life issues [to] prevent our communities from becoming breeding grounds for crime," Turner said. "It will also increase our visibility.”
But city residents are also looking out for themselves. David Eckoff and Greg Gongola co-founded VHConnect.org, an independent website dedicated to informing their neighbors about what's going on in Virginia-Highland through text messages and email alerts.
“A lot of people have looked at Virginia-Highland as an epicenter for crime, but I feel safe here and safer here than other parts of the city,” Eckoff said.
Back in Grant Park, when Adams started noticing more break-ins in the neighborhood, as well as the high-profile slaying of bartender John Henderson in 2009, she took action. She bought a gun.
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