Hey Atlanta, Show Us Your Crime Case Number,

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.”

Social Media and The Mayor

Careful what you Twitter. Now that all of Atlanta seem to be using social media tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, you will easily get what you are after. This was the case during Mayor Shirley Franklin’s annual luncheon talk with the Atlanta Press Club on Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

Between bites of the sliced chicken salad, I sent out a Tweet via my iPhone’s Twitter application that asked, “Any questions for Mayor Franklin?” Immediately, I had droves of questions to choose from, thanks to my carefully cultivated, personal Twitter/Facebook network, plenty of them peppered with salty expressions not suitable for for re-printing on this blog. (FYI, you can sync Twitter to Facebook.)

Alas, Mayor Franklin was taking questions from those in attendance during the Q&A portion only if they were written down on a slip of paper and passed to the front, then read out loud to the Mayor by APC Board Chairman, John Boswell. So old-school!

No matter, as I would never have had a chance to eat my Commerce Club banana pudding if I’d hand-written every Twitter/Facebook response/question on a piece of paper, nor would the Mayor have had time to answer them all. And when presented with Commerce Club banana pudding priorities fall right into place.

I did manage to scratch out one question on a paper slip that was soon read to the Mayor. That question was, “Were you (Mayor Franklin) aware of the role Facebook played in organizing citizens during the recent (perceived or otherwise) intown Atlanta crime wave?”

Breezing over the crime-related portion of the question, Mayor Franklin answered that she (or her office I must assume) was not on Facebook, but that she knew Cobb County, for instance, was using social media tools to communicate with its citizenry.

Maybe Mayor Franklin should be on Facebook. And soon. Within days of its creation, the Facebook Group called Atlantans Together Against Crime and Cutbacks, had signed-up almost four-thousand members. Four thousand. In less than a week. That’s a whole lot of ATL citizenry one could immediately, and easily, start communicating with.

Come to think about it, when the traditional press bunched their hulking dino Beta cams around Mayor Franklin after the luncheon to roll on a few choice mayoral media morsels for their five-o’clocks (see photo above), had my own $120. digital camera’s battery not died  on me (the one that also shoots HD video) at that particular moment, I could have held a one-woman press conference, taking questions via Facebook and Twitter in real time and directing them to the Mayor.

But that’s this new media for you. With so many people on board social media in Atlanta now, provided your power supply holds, anyone can hold a virtual press conference – wherever, whenever.