Mayor Edna Jackson’s state of the city speech last week focused heavily on Savannah’s persistent violent crime.
Jackson cited a variety of reasons for the city’s violence, including Savannah’s gun culture and “generational crime occurring in the same neighborhoods — and same families — year after year.”
Jackson outlined “a five-step plan to reduce violent crime” that included hiring Chief Jack Lumpkin, fully staffing the police force, implementing a violence reduction model that will be developed with “policing expert” David Kennedy, deploying new technologies and reducing poverty through “better education, better jobs and better job training.”
Critics would have pounced if Jackson had made mention of other priorities, but I still wish she had devoted some of the speech to a broader vision for the city. It’s impossible to address the fifth of those goals — poverty reduction — without a more comprehensive plan.
I was also struck by several elements that were largely absent from Jackson’s speech.
Yes, Jackson said, “We need a stronger police presence on our streets.”
But Lumpkin himself has gone one step further. He has routinely linked Savannah’s violence directly to street crime and “open air drug markets.”
Press coverage of Lumpkin’s tenure as police chief in Athens reveals that his forces have a history of addressing suspicious loitering and street drug sales.
Missing from Jackson’s speech was any acknowledgement that Savannah has long ignored known trouble spots. Sure, crime has persisted for a long time in many neighborhoods, but we have allowed it.
Jackson also seemed to place full blame for the slowly collapsing police merger on Chatham County officials. In the many years I’ve been writing this column, Savannah city government has been plagued at times by insularity, and it seems that Jackson does not realize the extent to which the public has turned against the city in this dispute with the county.
I keep asking one question about the merger that created the joint Savannah-Chatham County force: Would we be better off with a somewhat weakened merger or no merger at all?
Jackson also failed to mention that part of her crime reduction vision for the Central Precinct involves moving dozens of poor people to the west side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, destroying a bunch of historic homes in Meldrim Row, closing a block of a city street and building a 1.6 acre police sub-station.
It’s a cynical move that sounds like something from 1955, not 2015.
Jackson’s lifetime of experiences in Savannah could help her lead the city out of its current crime woes, but those experiences might be hindering her, too. If we just repeat old mistakes and offer the same old platitudes, we’ll get nowhere.
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.