Police Draw Plan to Relieve Overburdened Midtown Officers

Some of Midtown's finest face more than twice the urgent workload as their colleagues in other parts of town.

But all that should be fixed under a , which has the Atlanta Police Department sending five new officers to the area.

"The idea is to right-size each of the beats," said Atlanta Police Chief George Turner, who addressed about two dozen Midtown and Fourth Ward residents at a Wednesday evening public meeting at the Civic Center.

Some of the most wrong-sized beats are in Midtown's Zone 5, especially on the west side of I-75/85, from Atlantic Station all the way south to the state Capitol. By APD calculations (based on the number of 911 calls, plus the amount of time one or more officers had to spend on each call) those west side officers respond to 1.3 to 1.5 times more urgent demands than the average Atlanta officer.

One result of that, explained Turner, is some officers can't do anything but go from call to call.  That means no time for proactive policing, initiating calls and patrolling.

Meanwhile, there are six Atlanta beats where officers spend less than half their time responding to calls.

By the time officers hit the street on their new beats, probably by late 2011, all Zones should carry no more than 5.5 percent more or less than the average workload.

Atlanta's 66 beats will be expanded to 78. Each beat is the patrol area assigned to one officer per shift. Thus ideally, each beat should be manned by three officers over the course of the day.

Both west and east Midtown are in police Zone 5. Under the redraw of boundaries, the Fourth Ward will be cut out of Zone 5. The remainder, from Sherwood Forest to North Avenue to Castleberry Hill to Home Park, will be split into 12 beats: a net gain of one beat, five officers and one patrol car.

Not everyone was happy with the new map. Melissa Firestone, first vice president of Central Atlanta Neighbors (a Downtown and Fourth Ward community group) complained that now her neigbhorhood association would have to coordinate with two police zones: Zone 5 for the people living Downtown and Zone 6 for those in the Fourth Ward. 

"We never wanted to split a community," Turner said. There are more than 200 neighborhoods and communities in the city by his count. But Central Atlanta Neighbors isn't one of them. Turner promised to look at the data again and reconsider.

The APD must still take the maps to Atlanta City Council for approval. The maps are the result of more than a year of work. The process started in early 2010 when the Atlanta City Council directed the police to review their beats.

The police are supposed to do such a review every three years.

No doubt there will be more changes next time.

Atlanta found funds for 100 new officers last year, Turner said. But this September, they'll have to take over Fort MacPherson and start planning how to organize park police for the Beltline, which will shift traffic into some quiet corridors that are not reachable by car. 

"We've got a number of great things that are occuring in the city. We just have to look at how we're projected to patrol, to deal with those issues as they come online," Turner opined.