Download Otter for your meeting notes

Public Safety Update Meeting | Otter.ai

Public Safety Update Meeting

Kristopher Wilhelm1h 1min

Speaker 1

00:01

Johnson, thanks. Welcome to City Hall. Everyone you own this building, this is your public space. So before we officially, formally get started, to have you all here, I was joking with Professor Johnson when we hang out outside, that it's actually somewhat unusual for us in 2025 to have journalists in this room, which is for me, as an old man, sad, and I would wish that every meeting, we would have five or 10 journalists who are asking questions of myself and county commissioners and key staff people, the sorts of things that hopefully you're going to ask today. I mean, it's my strong, strong belief that we don't have a strong media, that we don't have a strong society, because really, kind of from the ground up, people's ability to be part of a democracy like the United States is reliant upon them having access to good information. So you guys are doing great, important work, and I hope you never forget that just a couple of things. So I think this is maybe something like the eighth or 10th, one of these springs, just my seventh year as mayor. Next year 2026, will be my last year's Mayor term limited. So I got all my beehive out of here before long. But this has been the joy of my life, and a bunch of that has been participating things like this. People become better at their work. A couple of other like detailed kinds of things. The restrooms are out through my left in the hall and then upstairs as well. So the restroom that's true on social media, I'm on Instagram, Twitter and blue sky, plus Facebook forever.

Unknown Speaker

02:01

Find me there,

Unknown Speaker

02:03

and you're welcome to tag me out on

Speaker 1

02:07

that at all any other just like detailed functionality questions, where we get into the meat of this. All right, so the way this will work, I'll do about 15 minutes of talking at you as kind of a formal press conference. Will they have about, I guess, a half hour, maybe 20 minutes of time for you to ask any questions, like Professor Johnson said, don't worry about being too hard. That's my job. I mean, I wouldn't be here if I was not ready to take a question. That's part of what you get into your public service. And then we'll stop, we'll kind of debrief a little bit and find out, like, what worked for you, what was difficult, what you might want to do next time you're in a room like this. So does that get everybody? All right, let's do this thing. All right. So welcome everyone. It is September 23 2025 I am Mayor Kelly gerx. I have the great honor and privilege of serving the people of Athens Clarke County, and I'm here today to talk a little bit about our public safety gains over this last several years, and some opportunities that we have as well, because this is an area where we've never reached the pinnacle, we've never gotten to perfection, we've never gotten to exactly where we want to be. We're always in the process of getting there. Now I often like to set the stage when we talk in spaces like this around public safety, because what I don't want the public to think of is some reduced image of public safety, because we need to think about this being a multi layered, multifaceted phenomenon. Public Safety certainly are those folks who wear uniforms, who are doing very critical work and difficult work out on our streets. That's public safety for sure. Public Safety are also folks who are working in the Boys and Girls Club Center, who are making sure that young people have productive and to do with their lives. Public safety is also making sure that people have their basic human needs met, because when those Cornerstone elements of people's lives are well taken care of, people have good places to live, if they have health care, good employment opportunities. That's going to mean we have a safer community. And we certainly need to be thinking about public safety from the perspective of our infrastructure, like safe streets and our medical and fire protection. So we'll be talking a little bit about this point in time in Athens Park County, around all of those matters today. Now we'll begin with the formal police department, because people often center their thoughts around public safety. Here again, we're going to be more expansive than this, so we'll start here. One of the things that I want people to know about the Athens, Clark County Police Department is that we intend to go above and beyond, and we put those words into action. We make sure that all of our officers have six months of certification training right here in house. We want to make sure that people are well versed in engaging with every member of the public, rich or poor, black or white, young or old, and we want to make sure that, particularly in this day and time, when we're dealing with an environment where everybody's talking about behavioral health, that we've got officers with strong crisis intervention, intervention protection. So that means that we have about five times the state requirement that every one of our officers engages in every year to get better and better in their skill. We've also raised pay significantly over the last decade for our public safety officers in the police department, so a police officer, each 21 comes straight out of the academy today, making 57 five with a $10,000 hiring bonus, and then they're going to continue to get a structured escalator from there. And as part of our pay plan, we've made sure that it's easy for somebody to come from Macon or Jackson County or Atlanta or Columbus to Athens Clarke County to be a police officer and not lose any of their credential or experience in much the same way that if you were a classroom teacher and you were coming from Carrollton to Athens, or if you were a school guidance counselor and you were coming from Rome to Athens, you don't lose any of your training or credentials or pay. We make sure that that's the case with our police staff too. And so what that has meant, and I'm very proud to say this, is that 2024 was the first year in over 20 years when we had all of our certified police officer positions filled here in Athens Clarke County. So all 243 sworn officer slots are full. So our only openings right now are when folks retire or get some kind of promotion, but we don't have any deficit in staff, and I'm really proud that we've been able to make that happen. We also are very strong in terms of our outreach to other agencies. Just a week and a half ago, I sat upstairs with our police chief, with the UGA police chief, with the UGA Associate VP for public safety, with our district attorney, with the UGA community outreach person, and our county manager to make sure that we're interacting very well and successfully, not only through big events like the upcoming Texas and Alabama games, but just every day of the week, and a big innovation that we've taken over the last couple of years is something that's continuing to evolve, and that's our real time crime center, making sure that we have both public and private cameras that are feeding into a common room. And so that way, if a criminal activity happens, we can respond to that very quickly. Give you a couple of case in points. Two years ago, we sadly had a shooting near five points. We were able to trace that vehicle and that gun to where it was disposed of in a trash can, and we were able to make arrests in less than a day to make sure that that criminal actor could perpetuate those same crimes and that we had all the evidence very similarly. Earlier here in 2025 there was a young woman who, just as lots of folks have happened in their lives or happened to family members, had sort of a medical episode. She was effectively sleepwalking through downtown, we were able to find her very quickly and get her to safety. She walked from one of the student apartment dwellings just east of downtown. And so without the real time crime center, we wouldn't have been able to solve that crime so quickly, and we wouldn't have been able to take care of that sleepwalking student. I want to talk a lot today about preventative work in addition to reactive work, because when we talk about public safety, prevention is worth a lot more than a cure. We want to make sure we're keeping crimes from happening in the first place, low level crimes and high level crimes. And I can lean back on the work of Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharpie who knows that when you increase your nonprofit community in any city of our scale, you're going to see a commensurate reduction in crime. And why is that? It's because children, families and working folks have their needs taken care of, and they're not traumatized and they're not desperate, and they don't get into criminally active situations. And so we responded to this understanding by partnering with family connection communities and schools of Athens to put in place a neighborhood leaders program where we have 17 paid staff who fan out across the community and make sure people know how to find a good job. People have help finding housing. People know how to find things like food resources. One of the most critical things that the neighborhood leaders have been in place is work with the Department of Family and Children Services to get over $9 million each year of SNAP benefits out to the community that families were eligible for but didn't realize they were eligible for. So back in 2020 we had this $20 million gap in food eligibility, again, benefits that anyone could have taken advantage of, but just people didn't. Not realize. And we've almost closed half that gap. We've also invested in quality housing. We're in the midst right now of our second big neighborhood scale, complete redevelopment, in partnership with the public housing authority here the Athens Housing Authority, the first one of these, Columbia Brookside that was completed over 10 years ago actually saw a tripling in population, three times as many people living in that neighborhood, but a reduction in the absolute amount of crime by more than half. And we believe our second project is going to be just as significant just a couple blocks from us, the North Downtown Project, on the bones of which had formerly been Bethel homes.

Speaker 1

11:28

We've also, over this last five years, made sure that, really from a very early age, from toddler age all the way up, that we're taking hold of our young people's hands and making sure that they've got positive, pro social activity they can be involved in, in every neighborhood in town, on every side of the community, so that those young people grow into very productive teenagers and are going to grow into productive adults. So that means we've reopened several neighborhood scale community centers that have been shuttered for decades. And it also means we partnered with Athens Technical College in the Clark County School District to put in place, for the first time, a pathway to the high wage biotech community that's producing so many new great jobs here in Athens and so now at the Athens community Career Academy, you get a certificate in biotech research. You can take that, and at age 18, you graduate from high school, you get a job immediately, or you go on to Athens Tech or UGA, and you can get further credentials if you want to do even more, but you've got the foundation there. And these things all need public safety because they need a healthier community. I want to give you a five year snapshot of some of what the FBI calls index fraud, and what you've seen across the board when it comes to aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, kidnapping, robbery and homicide is using a consistent reduction. Now I'm going to make sure that you iconically have this entire presentation, so don't worry if you don't have time to write down every one of these numbers, but I'm really proud that here in Athens, we've seen aggravated assault come down, even while we've actually seen more people move into the community, we're bumping up against them as 140,000 people here in Athens Clarke County now. And even though you've seen more people, you've seen less crimes, same as strong burglary, where we started, 2020 with 551 burglaries and 2024, with 303 and while in 2023 you saw a community like Megan did with over 40 murders, and that same year, Columbus, Muskogee, with over 70 murders, you only had six in Athens Clarke County. Now we believe six is six too many, because every murder means life got short trauma in your family surrounds them. We're not going to rest on our laurels. We're not going to stop doing until we push all these numbers down to zero. And I'm happy to report that we have continued to see reductions in 2025 we've seen aggravated assaults down 18% so far here in September, we've seen robberies down 21%

Unknown Speaker

14:27

we've seen motor vehicle thefts down 24%

Speaker 1

14:30

and for the first time in the entire history of a place called Athens, we've gotten to September with no murders in this community. And I could be more proud of all the work that's gone into that now we also have some areas where we've seen some rises. Chief Salters would say that some of this is simply due to having more officers out on the street. And so the kind of places we've seen rises in number of violations is where you would expect we've seen more driving under the influence violations because we've got more officers who are tracking people's behavior. We've seen more liquor law violations, and we've seen narcotics violations, again, largely because there's eyes on the street out there, an area of enormous interest is just in making sure that whether you're on foot, whether you're on bike, whether you're behind the wheel, the streets and rights of way in Athens are safe to pass, that they're not dangerous. And this is an ongoing need that we're going to have to continue to address in Athens Clarke County. The reality is so many of our highways were designed in those decades after World War Two, when the goal was really just to get people places fast. But with science and data, what we've learned is that faster traffic is not safer traffic. Faster traffic to the counter is traffic where you end up having more actors. And what we've learned is that it really is the engineering of roadways and of intersections that make the difference. You can put any number on a speed side, side of the road, and if you reduce that speed from 4535 to 25 and all you do is change that sign. You're not going to change people's behavior. You change people's behavior because you change the way that the roadside feels, you change the lane width, change the number of lanes, you change the way that the intersections are designed. And so sadly, we've seen many fatal accidents in recent years, five to date, this year in 2025 and we've had eight by this point, 2024, so what we've done is we founded a Vision Zero office, and we've charged that Vision Zero office in our transportation department with coming up with a work plan to make sure that we have a toolbox for improvement so our streets are safe and our intersections are safe, and We've given that office $15 million to work with over the next three years. So thus far, we've begun targeting traffic management improvement. Sadly, two of those fatalities this year were on Thomas street near the classic center, and so we have under construction in the next couple of months, a new pedestrian crossing there was a protected refuge mid block so that we can make sure that we don't have any fatalities in that area again. And we've done it. We've evaluated our intersections, county wide, to know where the intersections where we have the most accidents and the most dangerous accidents, particularly where we have T bone accidents, or we have head on collisions, and we found that the intersection of Hawthorne and Oglethorpe avenues was the place that was absolutely the most challenged. And so right now we're in the middle of redesigning that intersection. You're going to see that roll out over the next year. Do want to end by talking about fire protection and medical support when you see our folks out there in red trucks in uniform, know that as much as those folks are out there putting out fires, 60% of their work is responding to medical emergencies. So that means grandma has a heart attack, your aunt has a stroke. Child falls out of a tree, somebody gets into a vehicle accident. These are almost always the first responders on the scene. And so we've done over the last four years is we've made sure that we've got heightened training throughout every one of our nine fire stations, and we've added three medical training supervisors to make sure that's an ongoing part of our firefighters professional and a similar thing is making sure that county wide, we've optimally located our fire station because we need to have everybody as proximate to safety and to health care possible. So we're in the midst right now of relocating station number four, currently on the corner of Davis road and Cedar Shoals drive. We hope to site that near the corner of Morton road and old Lexington road, and there's going to be a commission vote on that on October 7. So I hope all the members of the public will encourage their commissioner to vote for this relocation, because what this means is it's going to positively impact 800 members of our community who are right now too distant from that medical protection to get the kind of safety support that we expected. Want to end just by noting that as much work as we've done here in Athens Clarke County, we don't operate in a bubble. There's not a wall around this community. What's happening throughout the state and throughout the nation makes a difference. So I would say that the preventative efforts that has been a key part of what we do here in Athens need to be universal to every community in this state and in this country. So that means health care, housing needs, services and pass the high wage employment are critical, particularly when we know that our state's capital, largest city in the state, just an hour west of here, Atlanta, has the highest income inequality of any large US city. That's a public safety matter, because it means that people are more challenged. More people are more challenged, they're more traumatized, and they're more desperate, and they act out of that. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can prevent this. If you look in Georgia relative to the rest of the nation, we have many more people who are under community supervision. One out of 23 adults in Georgia are on either probation, parole or incarceration, versus one out of 71 across the nation. This shows us that we're not doing all those things in people's early childhood and people's early adult lives that we could be doing to make people less likely to be criminally engaged. Finally, I want to end on something that's certainly been a big part of the national conversation in this year is reductions in federal funding for very critical activities. In April of this year, the US Department of Justice rescinded over half a billion dollars of grants. These were grants that were going to cities like Savannah to make sure that there was violence prevention activity going on on the street level, and I demand that these be restored, because that's for the good of every man, woman and child in our state and in our nation. Similarly, under the new 2025 budget bill that passed this summer, the bird justice grants that in the past had gone for a great array of activity now can no longer be used for violence prevention, and we need this violence prevention working to use at every school, in every community center, nonprofit, our faith community and our police departments to make sure that we're living in the optimal community and the optimal nation that we can these are easy tasks to take care of. These are easy lifts, and so I'm looking forward to seeing Congress demand of our federal administration what we all should as residents in this land. So I want to stop here, and I want to see if folks have questions for about 20 minutes. I know we've got a mic, and so I think the mic will come to you. So I think we're going to begin over here on my left. You.

Speaker 2

22:25

Hello. My name is Serena Felix. My question is, with the population growth in Athens Clarke County, or the past few years? I know you mentioned that last year was the first year that accpd was fully staffed. But also I wanted to know, How are y'all keeping staff with firefighters and EMTs and medical people, sorry for when, for the growing community, to make sure that they're also getting care and policing the in growing time, in an adequate amount of time. And a second follow up is that, what is the typical response time to a 911 call in the community?

Speaker 1

23:00

We can get the typical response time to you. I don't have that data in front of me, but we'll get that in follow up. So somebody will capture that. We'll make sure we get that. What I will say is that particularly on the overall staffing level, we are paying attention to that property growth. So for example, about 12 years ago, you saw us roll out a ninth fire station because then we realized we have just gotten to the point the community where we needed more coverage. Now, fortunately, we are the smallest geographic county in the state of Georgia, so that means that we don't have the challenge of a Gwinnett County or a Henry County, but we need to be conscious of this, and we do see people migrating into different parts of the community, so we have seen a lot of people move eastward, which is why you're seeing this new fire station revocation. Thank

Speaker 3

23:56

you. I'm Linda, and my question is, you mentioned that you were for donating with the UGA Police Department last week, and I was wondering, how you coordinate with them to get a full picture of crime in the Athens area, since most of the time online is not including crime on UGA witness.

Speaker 1

24:13

So question is, how do we coordinate with UGA and how do we make sure that we get kind of a full portrait of crime come throughout the community, including from the 90 or so officers who work for the UGA Police Department. On the coordination front, one of the things that we have happen every time there's a big activity in half, whether that's Twilight criterium in April or any one of the own football games, is we have a commonly set to ask operation center, and so we're just making sure that hand in glove, we're interacting with officers very successfully. Unfortunately, we've got that down to a well oiled machine because we've done it well for so many years on the data part. UGA also reports to Nebras, which is the FBI center crime data portal. So we have those, those incidents just as well. I think I heard you mentioned something about online and in fact, online crime are one of the kinds of crimes where we are seeing some escalation. So financial crimes involving predatory behavior, even seniors. If you would go back 30 years ago, kind of a common crime type with somebody knocking on grandma's door and saying, hey, it looks like you got some cracks in your roof. I'll go ahead and begin to work on that tomorrow for you, and just $2,000 down, and 2000 when I finished. Well, that's been replaced with cyber crime and phone based crime, and so we're continuing to track that as well. I I just

Unknown Speaker

25:47

want to say thank you so much for your time today. There's a

Speaker 3

25:50

statement from 2024 that said you proposed a $300,000 budget for Athens Park County to invest in heavy duty surveillance trailers to operate during major events such as GA football

Speaker 4

26:00

games, as well as $100 $100,000 budget for additional

Unknown Speaker

26:04

cameras in high traffic and high crime areas. Could you update

Speaker 1

26:06

us on that? Absolutely. So both the mobile cameras and then the fixed cameras have been rolled out. So we have two mobile trailers. You'll sometimes see them downtown. You might have seen them on the library on Baxter Street in some recent months, and we moved them around kind of as needed. We also have the fixed cameras that we've upgraded, and then we've partnered with a lot of both public and private sector companies. So just as recently as this week, I met with the library director, and they're going to install some cameras for their own use that are also going to feed ourselves. Same kind of situation with public housing.

Speaker 3

26:48

Hi. My name is Caroline. So since April of this year, four inmates have died in the Clark County Jail, at least two from apparent drug overdoses involving fentanyl. I just wanted to know, are there any immediate steps your office is taking off the flow of drugs into jail tend to detect incarcerated individuals.

Speaker 1

27:02

Thank you for asking this question. And of course, this is a multi layered one. Fortunately, we've seen a modest, significant, and I'll say modest, reduction in fentanyl deaths community wide over the last year. That tracks with what's going on in the nation. We don't know if that's going to last or not. Of course, fentanyl is one of these drugs where just a very small piece of the drug could be deadly, and we know that for decades, some contraband has gotten into the jail as well. And so the sheriff, who of course, manages the jail, because he's a separately elected official that is an administrative purview, has been tracking that very closely, and I understand from him that he's just wanted to make sure that they have all tools at their disposal. We have worked with the sheriff this year to make sure that their sheriff's deputies also received a pay increase, so his staffing levels will increase. I think that's something we're going to have to track. And so hopefully, a year from now, when we're having a similar conversation, we will have seen a reduction both in contraband and an increase in staff. Good morning.

Speaker 5

28:14

Good morning. My name is Courtney Pratt. This is in relation

Speaker 6

28:21

to drugs. So you told us that crimes like aggravated assault with burglary and kidnapping have all gone down the past five years, but according to the Clark County 2024 police report, drug violations have actually increased over the past five years, with 706 violations of the year 2024 alone. So are there any plans to get this number down to increase public

Speaker 1

28:44

safety just outside of yeah, thank you for that, Courtney. And certainly you heard me say earlier that we don't live in a bubble, right? So, you know, we have multiple state highways that come and go. People are doing commerce here of all sorts, all kinds of great commerce, you know, around the creative community, around health care, around biotech, but we realized part of the reality is that we've got drug trafficking that does come in and out of town. And so not only internally, but we partnered with the Northeast Georgia drug task force to begin to do some of this work. And we've also, not only in this administration, but the past administration, partnered with our federal agents through the Middle District to make sure that we brought federal charges when it was available. And there was a very large scale version of this that was just announced about six weeks ago, I would wish that we could push this down. I don't think that's going to happen overnight. I have to be very honest with you, I think it's going to take sort of multiple layers, again, at least a piece of Chief Salter's perspective is that with additional officers on the street, we're simply making more busts, but that the activity hasn't noticeably changed. You know, if you could be objective, if we were all the Eye of God, that there really has been about the same volume of activity, but we're going to be tracking that as well.

00:0000:00