A recent spate of shootings has Savannah crime back in the news, but it’s hard not to be cynical about public officials pledging renewed efforts.
We’ve heard this song before, after all, and the loss of lives and livelihoods has continued.
Crime in Savannah has declined significantly over the long term, but the rates of both violent and nonviolent crime are far too high.
I’ve lived for nearly two decades right on the edge of one of the biggest red circles on the interactive crime map available via the Savannah-Chatham metro police website.
The most recent shootings have been elsewhere, but the densest area of crime has for years been in the neighborhoods more or less west of Bull Street between Anderson Street and Victory Drive.
We took a detailed look at the demographics of the rapidly gentrifying area a few weeks ago in this column.
The area is plagued with reported crimes, but the most obvious activity doesn’t even show up in the data. Residents have largely given up reporting the street level prostitution and drug dealing that obviously opens the door for other crime.
Just last week, riding my bicycle well before sunset, I passed a prostitute at Barnard and 42nd streets. While showing an interested party around the neighborhood after a column about the city’s planned new Central Precinct, we wandered past a drug dealer working openly just off Jefferson Street.
City officials seem to think a new precinct at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and 33rd Street will reduce crime in the neighborhood, but how will a station in that location have any greater effect than the current one at Bull and 32nd streets?
Everyone already knows that drug dealers and prostitutes are operating routinely and openly in the area.
Street level dealing and solicitation might be tough to prosecute, but how can more serious crimes be policed when other criminals — those who want to buy illegal drugs and hire prostitutes — have an open invitation to come into the neighborhood?
Street crimes like these are not “victimless” crimes as I hear argued routinely. Neighborhoods are destroyed by criminals involved in illicit selling and buying of whatever.
We can and should focus on community outreach, education, poverty reduction and other initiatives. And on rooting out police corruption.
But we aren’t going to see significant reductions in crime if we continue to tolerate so much of it right out in the open.
The neighborhood I’m talking about will eventually see reduced crime through an ugly sort of attrition. As it becomes more gentrified, the criminal activity will be pushed out.
But that activity will likely resurface elsewhere if we don’t deter it.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.