The Atlanta Police Department plans to open a new mini precinct in Buckhead to address traffic calls.
Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant detailed the plan on Thursday. Watch the full presentation on Facebook.
Called the West Village mini precinct, the goal is to address the uptick in crime in Buckhead by adding officers in Zone 2.
“The crime was elevating in Zone 2, in the Buckhead space, much more rapidly than traditionally,” Bryant said. “So we had to do a deep dive into what we were seeing, what we could do to counter that.”
The new precinct should be fully operational by summer 2022 with a minimum of 24 officers, said Bryant. The location for the mini precinct has not been determined, he said. Until it opens, the officers will be based at the Lenox Square mini precinct.
The West Village mini precinct will focus on traffic-related calls. That will help free up other Zone 2 officers to address high priority calls and investigations.
“We were able to identify that in a certain part of Buckhead, population doubled in size every day, and that most of our units were being tied up on addressing accidents and traffic incidents,” Bryant said. “This is not just crime driven … No other area in our city garners that much population growth every single day.”
Bryant detailed other crime-fighting measures, including the new “Titans Unit” to combat street-level crime, with a focus on gangs and narcotics enforcement.
He said that crime is down from the beginning of summer.
“At the beginning of the summer, our murder rate was up 59%,” Bryant said. “We’ve dropped that down 47% since that time.” The number of rapes and aggravated assaults are also down, he said.
“We still have a long way to go,” he said, adding that crime is still up 9% across the city. “But we are on the right trajectory.”
