As crime rates rise in Atlanta, surrounding neighborhoods consider creating a new city

Mark 13:12 “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”

Important Takeaways:

  • In Atlanta’s Buckhead Neighborhood, Rising Crime Fuels Move to Secede
  • In increase in violent crime has spurred a movement in Atlanta’s wealthiest and whitest neighborhood, Buckhead, to push harder to secede and create a new city with its own police force.
  • Bill White, chief executive of the committee pushing Buckhead cityhood, said Atlanta hasn’t done enough to stem violence, car-thefts, drag-racing and other crimes that surged beginning in 2020, during the early stages of the pandemic and after civil unrest followed Black Lives Matter protests.
  • “They really don’t care about Buckhead,” Mr. White, said about city officials. “They just want the money.”
  • Atlanta had 158 homicides in 2021 and 157 in 2020, compared with 99 in 2019, according to the Atlanta Police Department
  • The crime “makes me want to move to the suburbs,” said Evita Alexander-Esteves.

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New York City crime fell to historic low in 2016

New York City Buildings

By David Ingram

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Crime in New York City fell to a historic low last year, the police said on Wednesday in a report showing that the largest U.S. city avoided the spike in murders that has battered other major American cities, including Chicago.

Overall, there were 101,606 crimes that police said they knew about during 2016, down 4 percent from 2015, police said.

There were 335 murders reported last year, down 5 percent from the 352 murders a year earlier, police said. The record for the fewest since the city started keeping reliable numbers in 1963 was 328 murders in 2014.

By way of comparison, Chicago, which has about one-third as many residents as New York’s 8.6 million people, recorded 762 murders last year, more than twice as many killings as in New York.

That spike prompted President-elect Donald Trump to suggest on Monday that the city needed federal help.

The trendlines in New York pointed downward in nearly all categories of reported crime, as shootings fell 12 percent, rapes fell 1 percent, robberies fell 9 percent and burglaries fell 15 percent.

Reports of felony-level assaults were up 2 percent, while reports of grand larcenies were flat, according to police numbers.

Police, politicians and criminologists have hotly debated the reasons behind the sharp drop in U.S. crime since the early 1990s, when New York City had more than 2,000 murders a year.

They have put forward explanations such as changing tactics, better data collection or even a reduction in lead poisoning.

New York City Police Commissioner James O’Neill credited last year’s reductions to a “laser-like precision” on gangs and to the department’s neighborhood policing program, which is aimed at improving relations between officers and the communities they patrol.

In a statement, O’Neil said, “2016 was the safest year ever in the history of New York City.”

(Reporting by David Ingram; Editing by Scott Malone and Lisa Shumaker)