By Steve Visser
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — Cory Streiff believed he did his homework before renting a house in Home Park, the neighborhood next door to Georgia Tech.
He knew about the home invasions and the street stickups, the car larcenies and the burglaries that had hit students last spring. But his landlord told him the house never had a problem, and police officers had stepped up patrols.
“Safety isn’t one of the things I worry about,” Streiff, 20, said. “I probably should. I probably should be a little more scared.”
Crime is down 18 percent since the beginning of the year in Atlanta Police Zone Five, which encompasses Georgia Tech and parts of downtown and Midtown, according to Atlanta Police Department statistics. But while it is down 28 percent in middle Midtown beat, and 30 percent in downtown beat, the declines are more modest in the areas nearest Georgia Tech --- 13 percent in Home Park and 10 percent along West Peachtree Street.
“Anytime you have a crime that is committed on a college student it is a big deal,” said Atlanta police Capt. James Whitmire, the assistant commander for the Zone One, which encompasses the Atlanta University Center. “I can’t say the campuses are a sacred area but that is how you perceive them. When you send your kids to school you feel like they are in a protected environment, and normally it is.”
Except when it isn’t. High-profile robberies and shootings of college students in Atlanta during the past two years bruised the reputation of the city and its police despite the department’s full-court press on crime around campuses. Criminals --- police suspect many are from street gangs --- gravitate to campuses each year in search of wallets, laptops and iPods.
But police say they have been taking steps to improve security around campuses:
Georgia Tech, Georgia State and Spelman, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta and Morehouse School of Medicine police forces are coordinating more tightly with Atlanta police. Since last spring, Atlanta Police Chief George Turner has met monthly with representatives of campus police departments and Midtown Blue, the private security force for the Midtown Alliance, to discuss strategy.
Georgia Tech police are patrolling neighborhoods off campus (state law gives them jurisdiction 500 yards from campus property) in conjunction with Atlanta police. Atlanta police Maj. Khirus Williams said his officers are doing more foot patrols and slow-driving patrols with flashing blue lights to increase visibility.
Georgia Tech and Georgia State are supplementing each other’s forces a few days a month. “It is just to have a bigger presence so people who are out see more cars,” Tech Police Chief Teresa Crocker said. “If you have 14 cars out running around, that is a big difference from nine.”
Morehouse Police Chief Vernon Worthy said his department is teaming up with Spelman, Clark Atlanta and Morehouse School of Medicine police to coordinate patrols on and off campuses.
The Midtown Alliance bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle to patrol Home Park and Midtown and two Segways to patrol Midtown.
Laura Schultz, a 21-year-old graduate student at Tech, said she feels safe on campus but takes extra precautions when traveling to and from her off-campus residence. “I generally don’t go out after 8 p.m.,” she said. “I don’t think it is that safe to go out after dark. I think that is true in any city.”
Atlanta University Center students said they now see different college police cars on the Clark Atlanta campus, which has the Robert W. Woodruff library that the colleges share. Students may no longer hang around at night in front of dorms and have to carry student identification. College police move nonstudents off-campus.
“They definitely stepped up security,” said Tashay Reid, a 21-year-old Clark Atlanta student from Cleveland, who was standing near the library at the intersection of Parsons Street and James P. Brawley Drive where a Spelman freshman was killed last September. “We use to just see Clark Atlanta patrol cars but now you see Morehouse cars, and Spelman just rolled by.”
Students said AUC now has a better shuttle service. Georgia Tech also encourages students to use its shuttles. But while the shuttles will deliver students safely to off-campus housing, they only pick up on-campus. They won’t be any help for students partying at Atlantic Station or even at Rocky Mountain Pizza, right off campus, outside of which three student customers were robbed last October.
“They locked us down last spring,” said Keenan Minor, 27, the bartender at Rocky Mountain Pizza, of the police heavy response in the Home Park neighborhood. “I think everybody might be scared to come out at night.”
A lot of students didn’t return to live in Home Park this year. In late August, dozens of “For Rent” signs dotted the neighborhood. Kathy Boehmer, public safety chair for the Home Park Neighborhood Improvement Association, said she thinks that is due as much to students rejecting shoddy rental housing in favor of new apartments on Northside Drive as fear of the neighborhood.
The APD’s Williams said he used overtime pay to put more officers on the streets around Georgia Tech after robberies in the spring, and he believes it had a residual effect. The APD crime maps showed only a commercial burglary, an auto theft and car break-in for the neighborhood --- and nothing on Tech’s campus --- in the first two weeks of August, compared to a handful of larcenies, burglaries and one robbery around the AUC campuses.
“It has been pretty quiet in our neighborhood this summer with most of the students gone,” Boehmer said. “The students, I think, are kind of a magnet when it comes to criminals. They are not always showing good sense when it comes to walking around at night.”
Tech did issue a safety alert this past weekend, though, after two female students reported that an unknown male had entered their dorm rooms early Saturday and asked for sex. Neither student was injured.
The APD beefed up patrols around campuses in 2009 and last spring in response to high-profile crimes, most notably the murder of Jasmine Lynn, a Spelman freshman killed by a stray bullet while walking by the Woodruff library last fall. After Lynn’s death, Atlanta police said eight uniformed officers would patrol the neighborhoods near Tech and AUC, but the patrols ceased when the department decided it couldn’t afford the overtime pay.
Williams said one of his main tactics is to increase the perception of a greater police presence by doing blue-light patrols. Whitmire said officers patrolling at AUC use the same tactic.
“Visibility is a huge thing for us,” he said. “Auto larcenies are a big driver of crime downtown and I can remember when we had 200 car break-ins a week and now they probably have 40 or 50, which is a huge decrease and a lot of that revolves around visibility.”
Williams said he believed that several gangs were responsible for the armed robberies in the past as well as some high-end larcenies --- such as the recently stolen ATM in Atlantic Station.
He said there were four home invasions --- two in Atlantic Station and two in Home Park --- since the first of the year. But he also blamed the behavior of some of the victims, saying the crime was tied to their associations and drug use.
“A lot of this crime is brought to us by the homeowner or the renter in these locations,” he said.
Copyright 2010 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution