Sunday, January 31, 2010
Opinion, Politics

Say no to zone 7

We don’t need another zone. We need more cops.

 An unmanned APD cruiser sits outside police headquarters.
 Stephanie Ramage

Many of the Atlanta Police Department’s beat cops know their neighborhoods. They know where the crime is, they know who’s responsible for it, and they know how to snuff it out. They also have the unwavering support of some of the citizens. However, I wonder if Acting Police Chief George Turner understands how the APD's short-staffing undermines those officers and exposes citizens to crime.

It pains me to say that, because certainly the APD’s brass deserves some praise for reaching out to the neighborhoods of late. But in a single 24-hour period last week, the strange difference between what Turner is saying in the neighborhoods and what his staff is suggesting to City Hall became too glaring to ignore.

On Monday, Jan. 25, Acting Chief Turner and much of his command attended a neighborhood meeting in Sylvan Hills. That’s in Zone 3. The turnout from City Hall was inspiring. Councilwoman Joyce Sheperd had pulled the meeting together with Neighborhood Planning Unit X, and she was joined by Council President Ceasar Mitchell and Councilman Michael Julian Bond, as well as Mayor Kasim Reed’s chief of staff, Candace L. Byrd. The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office and the Fulton County Juvenile Court were also well represented. The cops were there in force; no one can say Zone 3’s officers don’t care. They were joined by their former major, Deputy Chief Ernest Finley. Even more importantly, a lot of neighborhood residents attended.

There was a healthy dialogue, much of it centering on how desperately citizens need more cops on patrol. It is widely acknowledged that the No. 1 concern of the APD is its officer shortage.

Why, then, did Deputy Chief Shawn Jones, the very next day, stand before the City Council’s  Public Safety Committee and talk about, for the second time this month, a proposal to add a “Zone 7” to the APD’s six existing zones?

How can an additional zone help anybody if we have the same number of cops? 

The chief’s staff has said there is a problem with response time, so the beats should be made smaller. But the City of Atlanta is the size it is. No matter how you slice it, the city’s paltry number of cops, about 1,650, will still have to cover the very same geographical area. Response times are abysmal because we are trying to send too few officers to too many calls. That will not be changed by adding a zone.  

In fact, Zone 7 may make things worse, because a new zone will mean yet another major—that’s a big salary—and more lieutenants (bigger salaries than those of beat officers and sergeants), and they will all come out of the existing police force, costing more money for fewer officers and taking more officers off the streets, cramming them in endless meetings and hiding them behind desks. The APD doesn’t need any more brass. What it needs is more beat cops.  

So is Zone 7 really only a glorified “friends and family plan”? Yet another way to offer sweetheart deals in exchange for loyalty to the chief? If you’re trying to buy people off, it helps to have more well-paying jobs to dangle in front of them.

Was it Acting Chief Turner’s idea? When I asked Assistant Chief Peter Andresen this, he said there were several options the chief and his staff are considering and that this is only one of them.

But we never hear about the other options. The meeting on Jan. 26 was the second Public Safety Committee meeting in a month at which Deputy Chief Shawn Jones brought up the Zone 7 plan, with its $20 million price tag.

If the APD knows where to look for $20 million, that money ought to go to the step-pay increases owed to rank and file officers. Officers are leaving the APD every day, and just paying them the money they are owed would help us keep them. That would cost about $5 million this year. The remaining $15 million could be used to hire additional officers. If the APD is looking for a way to spend $20 million, that would be the way to spend it.

Councilman C.T. Martin, a member of the committee, very pointedly asked Jones if he had any idea how much money it costs to run a zone. Jones said he didn’t have that information in front of him, but he could find it.

Martin chastised him: “You ought to know how much it costs to run a zone."

In that same meeting, Councilman Ivory Lee Young Jr. raised another concern: “We’ve got a whole bunch of wannabe police officers, vigilantes, who want to do something at no cost to us.”

City Hall needs to know officers aren't leaving the APD just because of the pay. They are also leaving because of the sort of irresponsible department politics the "Zone 7" plan represents.

We don’t need another zone. We need more cops. Let’s keep the ones we have and hire adequate backup for them. SP