These are the faces of the human beings who have been led by those who failed to see the vast chasm as they drove straight at it. WARNING: This slide show of the faces of the people of the newsroom of The Rocky Mountain News as they got word that they were being shut-down for good will make you cry.
And yeah, I lay the blame on leadership and management that failed their people. They failed to show vision and adaptability. They simply were not good enough.
Here’s how my jack-up at Ansley Mall looks on file with APD:
Seems I was a Robbery and an Aggrevated Assault. What are you? You can map your own personal Atlanta crime here. Although I tried to do so myself and it crashed my browser. Thanks to @sarawara for sending this picture above.
UPDATE: this Digital Bootcamp was postponed to… sometime in April ’09. I’ll update when new info becomes available.
Here’s my Atlanta Police Department (APD) case number (080011828) for that particular moment in time when some thug tried to jack me up at gunpoint. It was New Year’s Day, 2008, at the Ansley Mall Bank of America drive-up ATM on Monroe Drive, right in the heart of the quite lovely 30324 Ansley Park neighborhood, surely one of the toniest zip codes in the entire city of Atlanta.
I’m curious to see just how APD classified that particular case. Surely they would have marked a case involving a weapon to the face of a woman alone as “violent” wouldn’t they?
Given Mayor Franklin’s and Chief Pennington’s magical thinking and now-shrill insistence that violent crime is down so much in intown Atlanta, the cop who responded to my panicky 911 call (a relatively concerned cop I should add) likely just checked ye olde “Generic Crimes” box and never thought about it again. Maybe “Assault” at best. Honestly, I don’t know how APD would have classified that particular crime, but, again, I’d sure like to find out.
And yeah, I got away from my attacker… only because he was really really stupid (is there any other kind?) , and I am a quick, reflexive action-taker when under attack. Plus, I was in a car and thus plenty faster than my would-be assailant was once he decided to exit his own vehicle and approach mine.
I instantly and instinctively put my own car in reverse and got the hell outta Dodge, totaling my built-like-a-tank Volvo wagon in the process, but I escaped unharmed. I got lucky… if you can even begin to label the deep and extreme trauma caused by a masked assailant screeching up in a car in front of you to cut you off at a drive-up ATM then jumping out waving a gun in your face as anything remotely approaching “unharmed” and “lucky.”
From Tina Trent’s Crime Victims Media Report. Background: Eugenia Calle was murdered in her midtown Atlanta condo on Tuesday, February 17, 2009. Shamal Thompson is charged with her murder. This is Trent’s research on the criminal record of Thompson.
The Anatomy of Yet Another Unnecessary Murder: How the Justice System Failed Eugenia Calle and Is Failing Us All
Introduction
What follows is a preliminary effort to piece together Shamal (aka Jamal) Thompson’s long and troubling journey through Georgia’s broken criminal justice system prior to February 17, 2009, the day he murdered* an innocent cancer researcher named Eugenia Calle. Ten months earlier, a DeKalb County Superior Court Judge named Cynthia J. Becker let Thompson walk free from what should have been a ten-year sentence for burglary. She did so on the grounds that he was a first-time offender.
He was not.
I gathered the records of Thompson’s many other criminal charges and pleas merely through Internet searches and a few phone calls to court clerks in Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett Counties in Georgia. These counties and jurisdictions vary quite significantly in their commitment to making public safety information available to the public. Fulton County’s public records system is almost uniquely shameful in comparison to similar courts throughout the country, while DeKalb County’s records are impressively detailed and easy to access on-line.
This information is preliminary, based only on a few phone calls and web searches. If you choose to reproduce or quote this article, please understand that I am unable to guarantee its absolute accuracy at this point. Court records themselves often contain errors, and I can only reproduce what is entered on-line by the courts. However, I include the public records case numbers for every case I cite, and if anyone involved in the justice system (or not) wishes to offer corrections or add to this account, please contact me through this website.
Why Didn’t Judge Cynthia Becker Do What I Did?
The WiFi Cat is out of the bag!
Click on photo for full size and clearer res. It goes to 11!
As I handed my kid her Sunday morning plate of blueberry pancakes and simultaneously wrenched the remote out of her hand so I could tune-in the Georgia Gang (I’m getting really good at this maneuver), away goes Sponge Bob and up pops Phil Kent, who was deep in the momentary thrall of calling Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin “a liar.”
Kent says Mayor Franklin is telling outright lies when she says, as she did again recently, that crime in Atlanta is, statistically, down. Kent says Franklin is lying because crimes in the City of Atlanta are actually up, but there’s no way to prove this because APD is not providing accurate stats for interested parties – the “interested parties” being local journalism outlets such as The Sunday Paper and the AJC; that any efforts by journos-with-money to find reliable and accurate crime stats are being thwarted by APD and/or, I presume, City Hall.
Kent cited The Sunday Paper’s recent story by editor Stephanie Ramage about crime stats in Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods as his journo-source in this matter. In the story, Ramage is hinting of a gross cover-up or manipuation by APD of the actual crime stats in Atlanta – a deeply serious charge with criminal implications for those involved, and an historical issue former APD deputy chief Louis Arcangeli has never been shy about going on the record about, at the expense of his APD job too. From The Sunday Paper:
“You are talking about a department that has a proven, documented track record of manipulating the numbers, so you have to consider that the police department might be doing it again,” says Louis Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of the APD who now teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University. “The amount of public concern is completely at odds with the numbers, and that’s troubling.”
(And the matter of The Sunday Paper being a credible news org was laughingly and haughtily dismissed by Jeff Dickerson on today’s Georgia Gang episode, but that’s a whole other can ‘o worms for a whole other blog post right now. Still, what else we got to help us out in the urgent and critical need for data-driven, reliable journalism? The Panda Press (AJC)?. Thus my plea here. Keep reading.)
Whatever Kent says, Mayor Franklin’s numerous attempts to cite magical statistics about crime in Atlanta are not getting any leverage in the court of public perception. Citizens simply feel crime is out of control. Everyone feels victimized by crime. (This I know from my own citizen reporting on the matter.) People feel Chief Pennington is out-to-lunch and indifferent to their perception. Pennington sure doesn’t help when he says citizens concerns are based on citizens’ “misperceptions.”
To heck with Chief Pennington though, as Atlantans Together Against Crime (ATAC) continues to enlist thousands to their grass-roots cause, with the next ATAC rally scheduled for Monday, February 23rd at 5pm at the corner of MLK and Joseph Lowery.
The big problem for Mayor Franklin is that the stories from the droves of crime victims in Atlanta are now being heard. It doesn’t really matter if crime is up or down, come to think about it. The thing that matters is, because of social media and the networks created in that medium, stories can now be told in new media ways they never were before. The pain of the people comes through loud and clear online… now that harrowing tales of death and survival on the mean street of the ATL are so easily told and shared. Yes, despite City Hall’s best efforts to tone down the citizenry’s rhetoric, voices will be heard.
But that’s one piece of the new media pie in the matter of Atlanta’s magical crime stats. The other is the hard, cold reality of what the crime stats really are now. Who do you believe? Are they up or are they down? Let’s put the matter to Professor Leonard Witt and Kennessaw State University (KSU). Why this place? Why this person?
Because Witt and KSU just received some nice bucks (1.5 million to be precise) to create The Center for Sustainable Journalism. Given the mission and the message of The Center for Sustainable Journalism (CSJ), seems Atlanta’s mysterious crime stats would be the perfect place to apply the resources KSU now has.
From the press release about The Center for Sustainable Journalism (CSJ):
KENNESAW, Ga. (February 7, 2009) In the midst of an annual conference designed to pinpoint the Southeast’s niche in the digital media revolution, Kennesaw State University announced receipt of a $1.5 million gift from the Harnisch Foundation to establish a center to research and develop innovative ways to produce and distribute news.
Kennesaw State President Daniel S. Papp announced the award and the creation of The Center for Sustainable Journalism Feb. 7 at the SoCon09 “Unconference” attended by more than 300 business, non-profit and media professionals, bloggers and digital media enthusiasts.
The center will be overseen by Leonard Witt, Kennesaw State’s Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication, eminent scholar and associate professor, who organized the SoCon09 conference. Witt is a pioneer in developing community-supported journalism models and exploring the potential of online social networks to disseminate news.
Full press release here.
Crime and the APD’s ability to control it aside, what is sustainable in Atlanta now are the networks and the crowd sourcing and the social media structure that would allow for deep and comprehensive dissemination of the journalistic, data-driven findings of a journalism project that would help the citizens of all metro Atlanta get to the heart of our mysterious and sometimes magical crime stats situation.
So what’dya say, CSJ? Wanna get crackin’ on tackling a community-based journalism project right in your own backyard? Enquiring minds need to know, and it might help a lot of people sleep better at night. And I’m always good for a quickie video package or two.
From the institution that’s downsized itself into oblivion… how about a nice streaming bowl of “media solutions!” All the while the AJC, (aka “Panda Press”) has managed to set absolutely NO standard for online anything, other than to issue bleating memoranda via Julia Wallace (who doesn’t even blog last time I checked) that end-up all over Romensko claiming the AJC’s going to dominate online-everything in their path. Oh sure.
Have you ever tried to use the commenting interface on their blogs? Now that’s some scary shit. Crashes everything from Windows ’98 to entire HVAC units. “Media solutions” from the AJC. LMAO! Hey, it’s your money. From Atlanta Daybook today:
“We have fundamentally changed our organizational structure and go-to market approach based on research and feedback we heard from our advertisers and prospects about their continued challenges,” said W. Michael Clay, AJC Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer.
“We’re responding with AJC Media Solutions. We’re more than a newspaper, we’re now a one-point-of contact solution across digital, print and direct marketing platforms that can help businesses navigate their messaging to the audiences and consumers they seek and that will truly help them grow their businesses.”
Full boast here. This is about like saying local TV news stations have functioning video archives on their websites. Oh sure. Let’s all “skip-to-market” while we’re at it.
Let’s put this one in the why-newspapers-are-dying cat: so the Rock Hill (South Carolina) Herald gets a line on a truly amazing story… that the white racist who beat John Lewis at a bus station back in 1961 was seeking John Lewis’ forgiveness for his (white racist dude’s) ugly past actions. Amazing, eh?! You better believe it is.
So the white man/former racist travels to Washington to visit with Lewis, to ask Lewis’ forgiveness in person. (The pathetic creature didn’t even realize that the black man he’d beaten-up back in 1961 was a longtime, famous Congressman now. That’s how ignorant and small-minded the racist dude really was.)
So, back to my mostly media point here, and I do have a BIG one today. The white man is from Rock Hill, SC. His story makes its way to the Rock Hill Herald, the local newspaper. The newspaper sends a reporter, Andrew Dys, to Washington, DC with the white man to document him seeking Rep. Lewis’ forgiveness.
Great story, right? And you, if you were the Rock Hill Herald, pretty much have an exclusive, except for a pesky Good Morning America crew that weaseled their way into Congressman Lewis’ office too for this great story.
Thing is, the Rock Hill Herald shows-up to their story with a pen, paper… and a still camera. Considering that you can pick-up a video camera for about $100. at Wal-Mart on your way to any interview, wherever, that strikes me as just plain backwards – with no multimedia thinking whatsoever about the Rock Hill Herald’s website presence in this near-exclusive. And we wonder why newspapers are dying…
GMA was there in Lewis’ DC office with a camera crew. (See the Herald’s slide show.) But as of 2pm on Feb. 5, 2009, GMA has yet to broadcast their version of the story, presumably captured on some kinda video format.
Meanwhile, the Rock Hill Herald could have had their video version, whipped-up cheap, all over the Internet by now if they’d taped something. Anything! The lil ‘ole Herald could have had a serious exclusive by now.
I know for a fact CNN, for instance, would have loved to have acquired any videotape of the Washington encounter, had there been any to acquire. That way, CNN too could have beaten GMA to their own “exclusive” in the process.
Come to think about it, there’s really not much you can label “exclusive” nowadays… unless you neglect to bring along a video cam. So watch GMA Friday morning if you gotta have your “exclusive” modern moving images.
A few scenes shot in my hometown of Kershaw, South Carolina on 1-19-08. Song used to set the appropriate mood is “Useless Desires” from the 2004 Patty Griffin LP, Impossible Dream.
