Colin Campbell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Like many visitors to downtown Atlanta, Mayor Shirley Franklin thinks things have been “deteriorating”
She sees trash, homeless people -- even hints of crime -- she said late last week in a long interview on the quality of downtown’s street life. She also thinks press coverage of the criminal squalor around Peachtree and Pine streets has “touched a nerve” with frustrated residents and business people.
What was most surprising, though, about the telephone interview was her agreement that the Atlanta Police Department still suffers from low morale and low productivity even after a year under her handpicked chief, Richard Pennington.
She described Pennington, who came to Atlanta from New Orleans last July, as trying “to invigorate and improve police performance.” But she said the department still has serious problems and needs a “cultural change.”
She spoke from Denver, where she was attending the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Franklin sounded reluctant to discuss the police in detail. But when asked why the department still seems very slow to react to glaring problems -- and why it took several newspaper stories before it cracked down on a notorious bunch of drug dealers and prostitutes at Peachtree and Pine -- she spoke of the department in fairly sweeping terms: “It needs a cultural change.”
She praised Pennington’s innovations. “The COBRA system that was put in place in January,” she said, “is a whole new approach to policing in Atlanta.” She was referring to Atlanta’s name for a system that tracks crime hot spots and redeploys officers.
She also mentioned Pennington’s use of highly visible foot patrols on Peachtree, where dozens of rookies straight out of the police academy have been assigned to walk the streets. Some Atlanta cops criticized the deployment. Franklin said, “Police visibility can impact, does impact, some crimes -- not all.”
The problem with the police, Franklin said, is to tap into the reasons young people become cops in the first place, which are often to help people and serve justice.
“But when you’ve been in an organization,” she went on, “that [was] maybe run from the outside -- some say run by the former mayor -- when you’ve been in an organization that has had a fortress mentality, and resistant to change, it takes very dynamic leadership, and it takes a hands-on approach. The chief could give you several examples.”
Pennington was out of town could not be reached for comment.
Lack of enterprise?
Franklin was asked again about the department’s sluggish bureaucracy and lack of enterprise. Surely the department’s expert consultant, John Linder (a different man from the Georgia congressman), who is being paid by the new Atlanta Police Foundation, had told City Hall by now what an unhappy and inefficient place the police department is.
“John Linder has spoken about it,” Franklin said carefully. “It’s one of the biggest challenges that we face in the Police Department.”
Linder has worked with top cops from New York City to Los Angeles. He also worked with Pennington in New Orleans. In January, Pennington said of Linder, “I want him to look at everything, to tell everything wrong with the department.”
What has Linder discovered? He has yet to say.
Franklin thinks Atlanta needs 400 more cops, which would bring the total to 2,000, but she isn’t certain.
“We’re doing a beat realignment,” the mayor said. “That hasn’t been done in 18 years. The city has continued to grow, and our beats have not been reassessed in almost two decades. So we don’t know how many officers we need.”
Why hasn’t she just closed the homeless shelter at Peachtree and Pine that spills onto the streets? The police and the neighbors consider it a nuisance, and its permits from the city don’t allow it to sleep more than a tiny fraction of the hundreds of men who sometimes bed down there.
“I am committed to enforcing the law at every facility, including Peachtree-Pine,” Franklin replied. “It has to meet the code requirements.”
The shelter is run by the nonprofit Task Force for the Homeless. For years, the city has tolerated the overflowing facility because nobody has opened an alternative.
Franklin sees the city’s litter and crowds of homeless people all the time because she gets around. “This city has been dirty since 1996,” she said. “I remember this city right before the Olympics. We cleaned up the kudzu. Our parks were blooming with flowers. . . . It has deteriorated since 1996, and we have to do this a day at a time.”
She thinks her “pothole posse” and “trash troopers” are a start, and that the new commissioner of public works will help enormously.
Her Commission on Homelessness has promulgated a plan to “end homelessness in 10 years.” Why not insert a plan to clear the streets of criminals and vagrants in six months?
“It all goes hand in hand,” Franklin replied. “The city has deteriorated over a period of years. We have to rebuild the capacity to respond. . . . You can’t sprinkle dust over downtown and all the problems will go away. . . .
“That’s not how it’s going to work. . . . American cities have not been cleaned up overnight. . . . My role in this has been to kind of give it flight, to give us license to talk about these things.”
Big supply of demands
The people, meanwhile, keep making demands. “We’ve now done two [surveys],” Franklin said, “over a period of two quarters, which say that the public is not satisfied.” The Fire Department comes off well, but, in general, “people do not believe they’re getting the services they expect.”
She thinks her busy, methodical, low-key approach will eventually bear fruit. “I spend a lot of time on this,” she said. “We’re beginning to see results.” She has been delegating authority to experts. The Commission on Homelessness, for instance, is working faster than most people realize on its first seven projects to address the problem.
“We still have people sleeping under bridges, sleeping in doorways,” Franklin said when asked what else she saw as she walked and drove around the city. “I see people who don’t appear to have anything else to do. . . . If I walk through Woodruff Park, [poor people] want to engage me in conversation about what it is they need. . . . Other people ask me for jobs.” She takes notes and occasionally finds someone a job.
One good thing, she said, about her recent focus on the homeless is that it has softened a growing sense of Atlanta’s inequality. Clergymen have told Franklin that this city suffers from “a widening disparity between the haves-and the have-nots,” Franklin said. “We’re talking racial now. . . . The haves were beginning to despise the have-nots.”
The Commission on Homelessness, she said, shows that City Hall wants to help “people who are not prosperous,” even if they aren’t homeless.
Does she hear complaints from government officials who live near Peachtree and Pine? “Absolutely,” Franklin said. “Nancy Boxill complains,” she said, referring to the Fulton County commissioner who lives a few blocks away. Franklin’s Planning Commissioner Charles Graves lives across the street. They and many other residents of downtown and Midtown worry that the current police crackdown will simply make the druggies wander a few blocks away. “This can’t be just a dispersal of the homeless or the crack dealers,” Franklin said of the crackdown.
“That’s the classic problem Atlanta has had,” the mayor said. “What we’ve got to do is to be sure we’re getting people off the streets who are criminals, and [that] those who are in need of care have a place to go.”
Will Atlanta’s seedy parks be cleaned up the way so many parks have been cleaned up in New York? Franklin said another start in that direction would be launched Monday -- when she’ll start a 100-day program to revitalize downtown.
Will downtown be cleaned up by the time the new $200 million aquarium opens? “Absolutely!” Franklin replied. “Absolutely! Absolutely!”