Unfinished business

A dozen or so years ago, I celebrated New Year's Eve in the French Quarter with a man who typically lacks any reasonable sense of fear. We were walking toward the waterfront when he froze and said, "Uh-oh. Let's get out of here."Ahead of us, two policemen were lurking in the shadows. We hurried to a crowded intersection.

Back then, encountering a cop in New Orleans could be really bad news. Police ran drug rings, ran with gangs, robbed and even murdered each other. The force wasn't merely demoralized -- it was pathological. Bad New Orleans cop stories were so bad they made the national news.

Then Richard Pennington was appointed chief of police in New Orleans. He fired scores of crooked officers, hired hundreds of new cops, and paid them a living wage. He extinguished a wildfire of corruption and cut the city's murder rate in half.

People are asking if he can do the same here. The short answer is: He doesn't need to. Atlanta's cops lack resources, not morals. Despite the media spin concocted by activists, the recent police shooting in Buckhead is a consequence of ever-present street crime and nothing more. The occasional bad cop roughs up a suspect or gives cover to drug dealers. But on the streets, that's the exception, not the status quo.

So can Pennington afford to tread lightly in Atlanta? Will a couple of job fairs and pay hikes for cops cut our murder rate in half?

I hope he doesn't think so. There's corruption in the city police force that needs to be weeded out. It was only in 1997 that a GBI investigation uncovered hundreds of crime reports mishandled by police and intentionally left unsolved -- crimes officially "unfounded" either because somebody didn't believe the victim or because somebody in City Hall told somebody in City Hall East to make crime statistics look like they were dropping.

Beverly Harvard was a deputy chief when this scandal first surfaced, but nothing ever happened to her -- except that she got promoted to chief. The "unfounding" of crimes continued under her administration, then nothing happened to her again.

Interest in these wrongdoings has waned as time goes by. "Yesterday's news," the media scoffs whenever some decent cop comes forward with a new fistful of sex assault reports that somehow disappeared on the way to central processing.

So what will Richard Pennington do with a scandal that's been going on for more than a decade -- one that involves a police chief no longer in office? Hopefully he'll buck the tradition of waiting for things to get better when the next election rolls around -- a tradition that gave us Sidney Dorsey, among other public-official blights. For, as Pennington himself proved in New Orleans and Rudolph Giuliani proved in New York City, zero tolerance policing for lesser offenses really does prevent more serious crimes. Why shouldn't this work for public officials at least as well as it works for vagrants?

If there's a lesson we should take away from the prosecution of Dorsey, it's this: You don't wake up one morning and just decide to assassinate an elected official. It takes years of sending police cruisers to pick up your son's Happy Meals before you work up to being that craven. The very public sigh of relief that accompanied Dorsey's conviction contains a lesson, too: After decades of breaking the law in the most egregious ways while serving as the head lawman in DeKalb County, Dorsey had little reason to believe he'd pay for his crimes. If he hadn't killed Brown, he'd probably be correct in thinking this.

When I worked in politics, I heard the most extraordinary stories about Dorsey and other people in power. Anyone can do a simple online search and find the names of law enforcement officials still employed by the Atlanta Police Department who were responsible for manipulating crime statistics and pressuring officers to ignore violent crimes. The question is: Will Richard Pennington do anything about it? Tina Trent doesn't think there's anything funny about corruption.