Not known, not knowable, or unsharable?

Oh, what a difference a year makes. A year ago, we were fussing over the details of golden-shower prostitute parties in Russia, who said what on a call with a counterpart in Ukraine, whether anything we do now might make a valuable 0.1 degree temperature difference a century from now, whether words were as violent as actions, whether we actually have boys and girls as sexes, and other similar topics of interest in the academic lounge and of virtually no relevance to the daily well-being of the nation in practical terms.

You could engage with those jesuitical discussions or not as your sense of risk or future turns of the ideological table indicated, but they were also imminently ignorable in the here and now.

And today? Well, living in Atlanta, I am kind of curious as to whether we even have a police force on the job to protect person and property. Would seem to be the kind of empirical question that ought to lend itself to either a binary answer or at least a brief clear one.

But that does not take into account the absence of news.

On Wednesday, June 17th, with the politically motivated indictment of a police officer for an event which has not yet been deemed a crime because the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) has not yet concluded its investigation, there were numerous reports circulating about masses of Atlanta Police Department (APD) police officers not reporting for duty, walking off shifts, or not responding to calls unless it was in support of another officer.

Was that happening? Was it true? Reports were scanty and mixed.

APD says there are no walkouts or no-shows.

APD says there are more crimes being committed so the system is under stress but can handle it.

The Mayor gives a non-answer, says police are demoralized despite all the money she has given them (30% over three years to bring them up to the national median).

The Mayor says things are under control because we can call on surrounding police agencies as she did three weeks ago with the riots. Ignores that after she fired two of her own officers and criminally charged four others for an incident, multiple surrounding agencies removed their officers, unwilling to put them at risk without immunity from callous political pandering.

The police union says that there is an active no-show protest going on but that it is not organized.

Individual officers are saying so as well.

OK. Friday morning, City of half a million in a metropolitan area of 6.5 million. Tenth largest metropolitan area in the nation. At least 36 hours since the indictment.

Do we have a police force on the job? Well, I can't tell from the mainstream media.

The most recent reports, of which there are few, is from CNN Thursday evening. From Atlanta police shortages continue for second day by Steve Almasy, Ryan Young and Devon M. Sayers. It suggests the police force is suffering from no-shows but does not provide much of an estimate.

The morning after an unusual number of police officers called out sick, only two sergeants and one officer showed up in one of Atlanta's six police zones, according to police officers who don't want to be named.

The shortages come in the wake of the Fulton County district attorney bringing charges against two officers who were involved in the deadly shooting of Rayshard Brooks.

On Wednesday, multiple sources within the Atlanta Police Department told CNN that officers were not responding to calls in three of the department's six zones.

Though the department denied that was the case, a police union director backed CNN's sources' accounts and said that, in some instances, officers were refusing to leave their precincts unless a fellow police officer required backup.

The police department said an unusual number of officers working the late shift had called out sick. The mayor said the city would be OK.

"There's a lot happening in our cities, and our police officers are receiving the brunt of it, quite frankly," Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said.

The city has shown its commitment to the officers through a pay raise, and "we expect that our officers will keep their commitment to our communities," she said.

However, she thinks morale is down tenfold, she said.

"We do have enough officers to cover us through the night," she said. "Our streets won't be any less safe because of the number of officers who called out, but it is just my hope again that our officers will remember the commitment that they made when they held up their hand and they were sworn in as police officers."

The mayor didn't say how many officers had called out.

In its statement, the Atlanta Police Department said reports that multiple officers from each zone had walked off the job were inaccurate.

"The department is experiencing a higher than usual number of call outs with the incoming shift. We have enough resources to maintain operations & remain able to respond to incidents," the statement said.

Some officers were staying past their shift to make up the difference, Bottoms said, and the city can call on partners in other departments across the metropolitan area if needed.

Vince Champion, the southeast regional director of the International Brother of Police Officers, presented a different account: He received calls throughout the night saying officers were calling out and walking off their shifts.

"Some were just refusing to leave the precincts unless an officer needed help, so it was different things," Champion said.
While he didn't have hard numbers, he has heard officers are planning to call out on Thursday, he said.

"They're just fed up. I mean, their mayor has come out and said everything that they used to do with use of force is not valid -- 'Don't do it' -- so I don't know how we defend ourselves when people want to fight us," he said.

The callouts are not organized, he said, and he wouldn't consider them a strike. The union had no knowledge of the officers' actions beforehand, he said.

The staffing at Zone 6 was so sparse that when the department heard that several protesters were planning to take over the precinct, the remaining staff removed critical equipment from the building and relocated to another zone, according to Atlanta police officers who didn't want to be named.

There was severe staffing shortages in Zone 1 overnight, the officers said.

Of course it is a little disconcerting that the Mayor wouldn't say or didn't know how many officers are off the job even though she is confident they have enough to cover the job. Sounds more like a hope than an empirical assessment.

And I take note that possibly the Zone 6 has lost its command post. I live in Zone 6.

Two days into an apparent police protest and a major city can't reveal whether there is a protest or if there is, how big it is. We have six zones. It is six calls to six majors. The news businesses ought to be able to report this with ease.

Instead there seems to be a blanket of obfuscation drawn down on citizens. It is not clear whether or not there is a protest, whether or not it involves a material number of officers, and whether or not citizens are at any elevated risk.

I understand not wanting to panic people. But leaders hiding information and providing misleading information hasn't worked out so well in the Covid-19 crisis. Doesn't seem like it would be worth repeating as a strategy again in the current possible crisis.

We are left with the irony that there is reams of data to frighten the public with a possible event a century in the future but there is no data to provide the public with a possibly imminent threat today.

I don't think there is any cause for panic. I doubt that the safe neighborhoods are going to be materially less safe. They are 95% Democrat but they are Southern Democrats. The number of guns per household would, I suspect, astonish their, for example, San Francisco brethren. They are bright, accomplished, self-organizing citizens.

But I remain astonished that a simple empirical fact such as police coverage is not known, or not knowable, or is deemed not sharable.