ATLANTA -- A new report echoes what officials have been saying for months: much of the crime in Atlanta comes from repeat offenders.
"This is the most pressing issue faced by law enforcement today in the city of Atlanta," said Dave Wilkinson, president and CEO of the Atlanta Police Foundation.
The foundation led a report from the Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission, which was tasked by the mayor to investigate the problem. The commission discovered that 461 individuals had committed more than 14,000 crimes; of those individuals, just 16 of them received actual prison time.
The report also found a probation system stretched paper-thin. National standards recommend one officer handles every 200 low-risk offenders. One Georgia officer must juggle nearly 500.
"We had individuals with as many as eight simultaneous probations," Wilkinson noted. "That doesn't even make sense, right?"
In the past month, we've seen high-profile crimes across Atlanta, specifically in Midtown. City leaders said then what Wilkinson said today: "The vast majority of these guys are repeat offenders, and you look at the rap sheet and wonder, ‘How the heck is this guy not in jail?' That's what we're trying to fix."
They've directed staff to track how county judges sentence repeat offenders. They will publish, twice a year, judges' statistics. They want that information to be in the hands of voters.
"It is putting pressure on judges basically to follow the law and do the right thing, we believe, and put these guys in prison," Wilkinson said.
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