By SCOTT KREHER

Friday, February 20, 2009

Mayor Shirley Franklin wants to hush neighborhood community outrage over her recent dismantling of public safety in Atlanta and justify her budget cuts and furloughs of our firefighters and police officers by whitewashing reality (“Atlanta is ‘safer now than it has been in decades,’ ” @issue, Feb. 12).

The mayor continues to brag about having 300 more officers since 2001. She doesn’t talk about the 1,000 officers who have left our department because of poor management under Chief Richard Pennington and annual reductions in police officer pay and benefits since 2001. Most of our officers have seen a reduction in pay totaling over 30 percent during her administration.

The department lost over 170 officers last year and is already on target to exceed that number in 2009. Her comment that “the city is reasonably staffed” is not acceptable to our officers nor should it be to the citizens of Atlanta. The mayor’s statement that crime is down 7 percent this year conflicts with current statistics from Command Operations Briefing to Revitalize Atlanta, a computerized crime tracking system. It shows crime down 4 percent this year, but up 12 percent for the last two years.

What the mayor doesn’t want to talk about is the dismantling of the Atlanta Housing Authority and how that had a dramatic impact on crime reduction from 2001 through 2004. Several large public housing properties were closed and resulted in huge reductions in crime in those areas.

Our city has increased its population by more than 100,000 since 2001 but our police department remains the same size. The assumption that we shouldn’t be compared to Washington, D.C., is not accurate. In her own admission, APD must secure a city that swells to more than 1 million daily.

The mayor also mentioned that we support the airport. What she never mentions when telling the public we have 1,600 police officers is the fact that more than 130 of them are assigned to the airport and not fighting crime in the city. So in reality we only have about 1,470 total sworn officers. About 200 of them work in administrative or supervisor positions, not fighting crime on our streets. This leaves about 1,270 officers our citizens can rely on. As the furlough and budget cuts continue to erode our department, the attrition of our officers will increase.

The mayor can’t say the city will be safe regardless of how many officers it has. Those “huge strides” she talks about are on the backs of our men and women wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a 20-pound equipment belt, not her or Chief Pennington. Should we not ensure both our officers and citizens have an adequate number of police officers to keep them safe?

• Sgt. Scott Kreher is a 17-year veteran of the Atlanta Police Department and president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Local 623.