Robbery: A community problem

Editorial by Chief Michael Berkow in today's Savannah Morning News

Community: 1) A social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2) A locality inhabited by such a group.
Problem: a state of difficulty that needs to be resolved

We have a community problem here in Savannah. It’s called Armed Robbery. Far too many young men — we do arrest a few women, but mostly young men — are ready, willing and able to take a gun and commit an armed robbery, or as they say on the street, “do a lick”.

This year, from January 1 to December 1, we have already had 555 reported armed robberies. Now some of them are false – for example, the person who doesn’t have rent money on the first of the month reports that they were the victim of a robbery; or the person who is trying to buy drugs and in the course of that illegal activity becomes the victim of a robbery. But the fact of the matter is, all too many are truly occurring.

Let’s just talk about the past holiday weekend. If we pick 6:00 p.m. Wednesday as the start and we go to midnight on Sunday as the ending point, during that time period, Savannah Chatham Metro Police responded to 14 reported armed robberies in all corners of our county.

Breaking it down even further: on Saturday, officers responded to an armed robbery at Kroger’s. Within 30 minutes, two of the three suspects were in custody. But that’s only the start. Detectives then have to put the case together, interview the suspects, collect evidence, transport them to jail, and document everything for court.

That Saturday night, while still working to locate the sawed off shotgun that was used in the robbery, there was a purse snatching on Abercorn (suspects described as 15-16 years of age) and then, at around 10:00 p.m., right when the detectives were wrapping up the afternoon robbery and arrest, two young men tried to rob the Burger King on MLK. Both were caught by patrol, and cycle begins again.

Armed robbery is a serious crime. It is one of the few crimes that stipulate a mandatory sentence in Georgia: get convicted and you are going to prison for a long time. This is a crime that creates fear in a community and rightly so: robbery, by definition, is taking property from a person by force.

Robbery in itself (armed or not) is an expensive crime. In 1996, the National Institute of Justice estimated that each robbery costs a community $2,300 dollars in tangible costs (productivity lost, medical care, public safety services, victim services and property and damage loss) and $8,000 if we include intangibles (quality of life, crime prevention, etc.). If there is any injury, it jumps to $19,000 per robbery. Using the formula of this 12-year-old study, armed robberies alone are costing our community close to $4.5 million for the current year – and that’s not including the added amount for injury!

Your police department cannot solve this problem alone; we need to attack this as a community. From January 1 to November 6 of this year, the Metro Police Department had arrested 145 persons for 160 robberies. Our arrests continue to increase and we are pushing hard for good, strong cases that lead to convictions and jail time. But we need everyone’s help: from parents talking to their kids; to the schools; to the business community using good solid crime prevention techniques.

December is traditionally a high time for robbery. Ask a long-time cop and they will tell you folks have to get money to buy gifts. Well, the Metro Police Department is mounting an all-out attack on armed robbery. For December, we are canceling or postponing any training that we can—we want our cops on the street. We are moving our small staff of officers that work in administrative functions to the streets and the command staff will be out in force, at night, on our streets. An “all hands on deck” call.

We ask the community that we proudly serve to join us, add your eyes, ears, and knowledge to this effort. As a community, let’s make it clear that robbery is not acceptable in Chatham County. Working together, we can surely make this a reality.