Little nuggets of information wherever you can find them.

From Amid spike in crime, a question of who owns the streets by Patrik Jonsson, Harry Bruinius, and Noah Robertson in the Christian Science Monitor. A pleasantly old-fashioned article. Much more data than most articles today. Much more original reporting and fact finding. But also somewhat meandering and also mixing some facts and some opinions as if they were in the same category.

But it did provide a couple of answers that my local paper, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution has not. We know by word of mouth that officer turnover in the Atlanta Police Department has risen. AJC has been using 19 as the number for some time but rumors are that it is higher. We also know that the APD has pulled back and that there is a lot less law enforcement than there was. How much less, we don't know.

Jonsson et al answer both questions.

They report:

After the arrest of the officer who shot Mr. Brooks, for example, the Atlanta Police Department saw its chief resign and as many as 50 officers applying for jobs elsewhere.

We have an authorized police force of 2,000 but for years, owing to low salaries and bad political leadership, have not been operating at 2,000. It is very hard to find a concrete number for the actual number of active officers. 1,750 is the assumed number, but no one knows. If we really have lost fifty officers in the month since the Brooks shooting, that is a one month turnover of 2.8%. If that remains steady, we would end up with an annualized turnover of nearly 34%. Nearly a death nail to the department where culture and institutional knowledge are so critical to success.

And reduced policing? The graphic tells the story.

Click to enlarge.

We have only 8% of the policing we had a year ago. If that continues, along with the new policy of not holding people in jail when arrested continues (instituted during the pandemic), it does not augur well for citizen safety.

The city has seen its murder double since the Brooks shooting. We are probably trending towards about fifteen excess murder deaths per month over last year. Annualized, that would mean some 180 more people dying this year in the City than last. And all due to weak to non-existent political leadership but more interested in serving vested interests, protecting their budgets, defending their careers, and arguing ideological points than in actually serving the citizens. Time to throw them all out and start afresh with a new slate.