Atlanta officials learn, again, it’s hard to hold a crime spree down
Credit: Ben Hendren
Last week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reached out to Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta police to ask about a big drop in homicides so far this year.
Both Dickens, who is up for reelection, and Police Chief Darin Schierbaum were happy to talk about the city’s 32% reduction in homicides from the same time last year — down to 49 from 72. Atlanta’s drop was nearly twice the national reduction of 17%.
The chief said his department has focused on “guns, gangs and drugs.”
The mayor touted his social programs, getting jobs for 6,000 teens, as well as summer camps and other activities. Idleness is mischief’s bad uncle.
The chief, though, put an asterisk on the good news, saying many people still don’t know how to temper their inner rage.
“There is still of work to be done around why people are mad,” Schierbaum said last Wednesday.
His admonition was prescient.
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In the next four-plus days, at least 36 people were shot in Atlanta. Five of them fatally.
Most notable was a Monday morning shooting in the Edgewood Avenue nightlife district. At about 1:30 a.m., more than an hour after the bars closed, three young men and a young woman approached a group on the street.
“We don’t know why the triggers were pulled,” Schierbaum said hours later in a hastily called news conference with the mayor.
But the triggers were pulled.
In all, at least 34 shots were fired on the crowded street. Ten young people were wounded and another was killed. The mayor and chief again spoke about the efforts they’ve been undertaking to prevent such carnage.
Schierbaum talked about “conflict resolution,” trying to dissuade hotheads from airing out their grievances with bullets.
Dickens spoke about something called the Mayor’s Office of Violence Reduction, where ex-gang members and retired criminals try to keep a lid on this generation’s potential wrongdoers.
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The idea is to have “an ear to the street to see what beefs are cooking up and be able to squash them,” the mayor said, using his best street-wise lingo.
“But you can’t be everywhere at all times,” he added. And that, of course, is the point.
Between last Thursday and early Monday, there were at least 12 shooting incidents. That’s at least a dozen people making very individual decisions, often in the moment. The chief noted that one dispute started with a car getting booted. Another was a nephew allegedly shooting his uncle. Also, a 16-year-old and 17-year-old were shot at 3 a.m. at an Airbnb they were somehow renting.
On Monday, the chief said there were now 57 homicides this year, down from 76 at the same time last year. That leaves Atlanta’s drop at 24%.
The mayor noted the number of shootings had dropped about 20% from last year, although this administration has taken down many such statistics from the police department’s online site.
I’ll take Dickens’ word for it. But the numbers the city still released show that violent crime is up 16% this year, even though homicides have dropped. That’s because aggravated assaults have jumped 18%, with 1,545 reported by July 19.
Obviously, there have been many more since.
Crime overall is down 9% citywide this year, largely because Kia and Hyundai figured out how to stop enterprising youths from stealing their vehicles.
I called Volkan Topalli, the chair of the criminal justice department at Georgia State University and a fellow who studied gangs, gun violence and other mayhem. He knows about crime firsthand, catching a stray bullet in the arm in 2021 after shopping at a Home Depot.
“The statistic I’m most interested in is aggravated assaults,” he said. That crime jumped more than 50% in Atlanta after COVID, then dropped substantially in 2023 and 2024. This year it’s headed up.
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With COVID, “we had a fundamental shift in human interaction,” Topalli said. Drug dealers socially distanced and moved inside. People who were stuck inside got more ornery. It changed the nature of crime.
For instance:
— The 506 robberies in Atlanta last year were half what they were compared to pre-COVID 2019, largely because people weren’t outside to rob, Topalli said. And now that folks are back outside, they’re no longer carrying cash.
— The 1,704 burglaries last year are down one third from 2019 because more people are working at home. And burglars no longer want the bother of fencing other people’s stuff.
— The number of guns stolen from cars, averaging more than 2,000 a year in Atlanta, have doubled since pre-COVID. That’s because ne’er-do-wells shift their crimes to what works best. Guns are like gold in the criminal black market. And Georgians like to leave their weaponry in the vehicles.
All those guns in the wrong hands feed incidents like those last week.
Usually in the summer, there are a couple of weeks where people lose their minds.
“There are so many factors beyond the control of the police or the city,” Topalli told me. “Rates of violence go up and they go down.”
Every mayor and police chief wants to claim they made a dent.
Violent crime in Atlanta has dropped more than 7% in Dickens’ first three years in office, according to city statistics. But, overall, crime remains about the same.
So, in future months and years you’ll have news conferences to explain crime sprees, drops and all sorts of crazy stuff in between.
That’s just how the crime waves roll in the big city.
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
