Sunday, January 24, 2010
News, In this Issue..., Atlanta
Insecure
Neighborhoods like Mechanicsville can’t afford a private security patrol. So what happens to them?
A boarded-up, abandoned house leans toward its healthier neighbor on Pryor Street. Raymond Hayes stands in front.
Stephanie RamageBy Robert Manfredi
Dwanda Farmer is afraid to come home late at night. If she’s kept out after 2 a.m., she doesn’t come home at all. The Atlanta Police patrols are few and far between in her neighborhood, and there is no privately funded neighborhood patrol. Though her own home is newer and better maintained than most, the area is dicey, with plenty of abandoned buildings—brand new ones stand boarded up, older ones are wide open—where thugs can hide out.
Welcome to Mechanicsville. If you’ve ever been to Atlanta City Hall, the Fulton County Government Building or the state Capitol, you’ve been within easy walking distance of Mechanicsville. If you’re on Pryor Street, the busy thoroughfare that dissects Georgia State University and separates Fulton County courts from the county’s administrative offices, just continue south under I-20 and you’ll emerge next to the Fulton County Juvenile Justice complex and the medical examiner’s office. Keep walking to Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, which the cops call “RDA,” and you’re there.
Farmer, who recently ran unsuccessfully for an at-large post on the Atlanta City Council, and her neighbor Raymond Hayes, a financial advisor and part-time student, are taking The Sunday Paper on a tour of the area. Immaculate homes stand next to peeling, rusting, hollow hulks teetering on the shores of swirling seas of winter-dead kudzu.
Code enforcement doesn’t seem to be a priority. A partially burned house a few blocks away has three loaded-down shopping carts parked almost like cars in front of it, and people moving around inside. Where the carts came from is a mystery. The closest grocery store, a Publix on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, closed down on Christmas Eve. Now, the closest source for groceries is a convenience store with a huge banner saying it accepts food stamps.
Newly elected Mayor Kasim Reed would like to roll the city’s code enforcement office into the police department to streamline the enforcement process. He is also seeking to unclog the bottleneck created by the fact that there is only one city solicitor to address code cases. Last summer, Maj. Ernest Finley, who was in charge of APD Zone 3 until his recent promotion to deputy chief in charge of field operations, told the Department of Justice’s Weed and Seed program the “vacant properties in the Pittsburgh and Mechanicsville communities contribute to the rise in property crime.”
And not just in Pittsburgh and Mechanicsville. Some of Atlanta’s most thieving gangs call the area home. So while other neighborhoods’ private security forces might help deter burglaries, another question is what to do here, where the gangs stash stolen goods in abandoned houses without much fear of being caught. Veteran police officers interviewed on condition of anonymity say places like Mechanicsville probably wouldn’t see much benefit even if they could afford a private security patrol.
“The police respond to the incidents called in by the security patrols, and there just are not enough police, especially in a place where the gangs have got such a foothold,” one officer says.
Hayes describes the whole scene as “blight.”
“It’s a … poor, working-class neighborhood,” he says. “It does have a high rate of unemployment.”
Hayes admits the trend of neighborhoods paying for private security patrols worries him. His neighbors, he says, are struggling as it is, so it’s unlikely they could scrape up money to pay for an off-duty police officer to augment the thin APD patrols in the area. With other neighborhoods paying for private security, neighborhoods like Mechanicsville, without private security, will appear even more welcoming to criminals, he says. Maybe poor neighborhoods will become more vulnerable than ever. And he doesn’t want that. Things are bad enough. They need more cops.
“Without a visible police presence, people tend to do whatever they want,” he says, looking at a dilapidated, abandoned business on RDA.
THE CITY INSTALLS SECURITY CAMERAS
Farmer points out some improvement at Rosa Burney Manor Apartments.
“It was a horrible mess 12 years ago,” she says. “You wouldn’t even want to walk down the street.”
The apartments were rehabilitated, and the environment changed for the better. At least it was a start.
After that, the neighborhood association continued to buy properties over time and rehab them, says Farmer, a former Neighborhood Planning Unit officer. They tore down eyesores and put up nice houses with the help of tax credits. But, says Farmer, the neighborhood has hit a roadblock of combined influences: relentless crime, a city government that seems to ignore their efforts, a problem with resources, and local business owners who, residents say, cater to the criminal element.
According to the City of Atlanta's planning department, public security cameras were installed in Mechanicsville in November. The vendor was paid with an $11,000 grant administered by Atlanta Renewal Community Coordinating Responsible Authority, Inc. (ACoRA). However, according to APD Spokesman Otis Redmond, the APD has no knowledge of the cameras. As of press time on Jan. 21, the two departments had not determined what had become of the cameras.
[EDITORS NOTE: On Jan. 22, the APD tracked down the cameras. The vendor, TeleNavigator, is in the process of installing them. The department expects them to be up and running by the end of February.]
Hayes says he hopes the city doesn’t think of the cameras as a substitute for cops.
“The cameras can’t replace police,” he says. “They can only enable the police to do their jobs more efficiently.”
Still, Farmer says, the ability to monitor the neighborhood is crucial to snuff out the criminal element that keeps the area from attracting young professionals who could help it develop.
“The thing about Mechanicsville,” she explains, “is every time we build a new block … those people become the new target for crime. So when I moved on my block … they robbed us. They stole our cars.”
Every new residential development, she says, presents new opportunities for thieves. “When we did the GE Towers, they robbed them,” she says. “They steal their cars.”
Farmer and Hayes feel their neighborhood is not so much forgotten as ignored. Farmer contrasts it with Buckhead.
“You can’t drive anywhere in Buckhead without someone sitting over on Paces Ferry [who] can watch you everywhere you go,” says Farmer. “You will not be committing a crime and thinking you’re going to get away.”
If neighborhoods get the security they pay for, then poor neighborhoods will be even less safe than their moneyed counterparts. Even if the neighborhood could afford private security, Hayes wonders aloud, if an officer could work for a well-paying business in Midtown, why would he even consider working in a place like this?
“A lot of those officers are, for lack of a better word, spoken for,” he says. “And a lot of them are going to say, ‘Even if I am working a second job, why would I want to come into a crime-infested neighborhood when I can make the same money doing something a little bit easier?’”
ARE BUSINESSES HELPING CRIMINALS?
Most businesses in Mechanicsville appear to be corner stores that allow what Farmer and Hayes describe as the “criminal element” to loiter on the premises. Farmer identifies one problem corner: “This store right here has way too much activity for me. People hang out there all the time.”
Hayes explains: “Part of the problem is they’re complicit in the sense that they don’t take an active role in stopping the loitering, stopping the drug-dealing out front, stopping the prostitution out in front of their places of business, because those people they would run off are also their patrons.”
So the businessmen in Buckhead are paying private security to stop crime while, in some cases, residents believe the businessmen in Mechanicsville and the surrounding neighborhoods are capitalizing on it. To illustrate this, Farmer tells me, the store sells loose cigarettes.
Paying for your nicotine jones one square at a time might well be a way to kick the habit, but here it’s a way for stores to keep small-time criminals anchored to their property, chiseling away at the fragile economic underpinnings of a neighborhood desperately struggling to become something better.
What’s more, selling loose cigarettes is illegal. The prohibition is supposed to be enforced by the City of Atlanta’s office of licenses and permits.
“They’ve [the corner stores] been doing it the 10 years I’ve been living in this neighborhood,” says Farmer.
Generally, getting Atlanta’s bureaucracy to act on anything requires multiple phone calls from persistent residents.
“If you can’t get enough people in the neighborhood that care …," says Hayes. "One of the issues that I see is that if you look at these neighborhoods that have really come up … Grant Park and Inman Park, you have, I feel, a better-educated, a more upper-middle-class type of person moving in town that is going to be more dogged when it comes to calling police, telling about loitering. They’re calling code enforcement all the time.”
Right next door, the neighborhood of Summerhill crouches in the shadow of Turner Field. Here, Farmer and Hayes point out a corner where a fast-food chicken restaurant used to stand. “They closed it down, and they tore it down,” says Farmer. “They didn’t just leave it there to sit in blight. Why?”
The answer, she says, is Turner Field: “Because 80 days a year, 60,000 people are coming to this neighborhood, to this corner.”
A shack made mostly of plastic lining stands in the empty lot next to the former restaurant property. It’s the shelter for the attendant who charges Braves fans to park in the lot.
“Do you see how that impedes the presentation?” asks Farmer. “That’s not even a real structure, come on.”
To Mechanicsville residents like Farmer and Hayes, lack of code enforcement, stealing, and the city’s lax licenses and permits management are all symptoms of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots.
But Hayes says he doesn’t resent the private security other neighborhoods employ.
“I don’t think it’s unfair, because they’re paying for that. It’s not using tax dollars,” he says. “I just wish there was a way that resources could be allocated so that poor neighborhoods could have the same type of benefit of security, the same type of protection.”
The “same type” might mean more cops, but even the cops, says Farmer, can be a bit of a problem. While she would like to see more of them, she also fears them. She’s afraid, when she comes home late, that they might mistake her for someone up to no good. She understands their jumpiness. It goes back to understaffing.
“If we had 750 more police officers tomorrow, we still wouldn’t have enough,” she says. “Atlanta has 1,600 officers, roughly, right now, and we’ve got 50,000 people less than Washington D.C., and they’ve got [about] 3,500 officers! The police are not safe in Atlanta.”
SP
Robert Manfredi is a Sunday Paper news intern. News Editor Stephanie Ramage contributed reporting to this story.