I haven’t been posting all that frequently lately and there are good reasons why, I promise. Lots of things have been happening for me and I’ve been travelling and cauht up in all of that and blogging tends to move to the backburner pretty quickly.

Well, I’ve graduated from grad school and I’ve accepted a job in Raleigh as a senior research scientist in a really good research lab. I’m moving just after the New Year. This means two things in particular. First, I’m leaving the city of Atlanta, which I love, for the Research Triangle, which everyone tells me is great but it can’t be as wonderful as Atlanta. Second, I’m no longer going to be writing here at the Metroblog, because I’m leaving Atlanta.

I’ve been here pretty much since the beginning (well, one week after it started I joined). My first post mentioned that it was run-off election day and pointed out the beauties of Krispy Kreme. Don’t worry. I’m not going to recap my tenure here at the Metroblog. Over 400 posts is too much. I’ve enjoyed writing about this city that I love and enjoy. I hope that you have enjoyed reading what I have had to say.

Stacy (from CBS46 News, they said, but I didn’t see her on this page) was the co-star. I could just memorize a line at a time and deliver it to her and, thanks to editing, the pauses could be edited out. Well, the script was HORRIBLE consisting of a mashup of famous movie lines and other horrible lines (”Darling, I love you like waves of amber grain flowing in the dusk light,” “War changes a man,” “I’m’ mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” “I could’ve been a contender,” etc.) placed to look like a scene between a boyfriend and a girlfriend (who is dumping him). I delivered the lines and they had me do some of them again and again and also in different accents (I went with Southern and Australian). But there was nothing that could’ve been construed as me being an idiot. The whole experience lasted 15 minutes.

Afterwards, they told me the real story. It was sort of a statement about badly delivered movie lines and how just people off the street could deliver them better than they were in the movies they were in. Of course, some people are awful (I might be one of them, they told me I was good, but who knows) and some people apparently get really upset with themselves for messing up a line. It’s for a new show, by This is Not Art Productions and they told me that it was for Turner, so I suspect it has something to do with this.

All in all, a fun little experience. And not too humiliating.

Let me repeat it again, best place to be a regular in all of Atlanta.

It’s a mystery to me why Atlanta has had to wait one week for the Mayor to even seem sad that an old woman was gunned down in her house by police. Was she unable to find an appropriately shaded carnation?

It’s a rare thing to hear people clamoring for a Mayor Bloomberg-like response to a situation, but Andy’s dead on with this one. And it seems like such a dropped ball by Mayor Franklin. In the past, she’s been very on top of things. This one-week delay in responding to the raid (and the lukewarm response that she gave) is very out of character of her otherwise very well managed administration.

Some comments that have been left here have suggested that it would be inappropriate for Mayor Franklin to comment before the facts are in. I’m all for reserving judgment until a clear picture has arisen but it seems to me that no matter how this is sliced there was some bad policing going on. A long speech is not needed, just an acknowledgement that something went terribly terribly wrong and that it, in all likelihood, was not the fault of the civilian.

The confidential informant on whose word Atlanta police raided the house of an 88-year-old woman is now saying he never purchased drugs from her house and was told by police to lie and say he did.

Chief Richard Pennington, in a press conference Monday evening, said his department learned two days ago that the informant — who has been used reliably in the past by the narcotics unit — denied providing information to officers about a drug deal at 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta.

“The informant said he had no knowledge of going into that house and purchasing drugs,” Pennington said. “We don’t know if he’s telling the truth.”

The search warrant used by Atlanta police to raid the house says that a confidential informant had bought crack cocaine at the residence, using $50 in city funds, several hours before the raid.

In the document, officers said that the informant told them the house had surveillance cameras that the suspected drug dealer, called “Sam,” monitored.

Pennington on Monday evening said the informant told the Internal Affairs Unit hat he did not tell officers that the house had surveillance equipment, and that he was asked to lie.

The story of the raid doesn’t sound very reassuring either:

The police chief said officers found marijuana inside the house but “not a large quantity.” The officers were not wearing uniforms but had on bulletproof vests with “Police” emblazoned across the front and back. And they identified themselves as they burst through the doors, police said.

Johnston grabbed a rusty six-shot revolver and emptied it. Five shots struck the officers, hitting one of them three times. The other two were each hit once. The officers returned fire, shooting Johnston twice in the chest and elsewhere, police have said.

The three officers were released from the hospital the next day. They are on leave with pay.

Let’s see, non-uniformed officers announced themselves as they “burst through the door” of a 88 (or 92) year old woman. Something clearly went terribly wrong. Of course, we don’t know whether this informant is actually telling the truth (and I’m not sure why the age of the woman has changed), but, no matter what, this does not paint a very competent picture of the Atlanta Police Department. The FBI has been called in to investigate.

The AJC has a pdf of the warrant available also. I’m not used to looking at warrants, so maybe someone with a little more experience with them could comment on it.

[Quick Update]: It’s a little unfair of me not to mention that I think that Chief Pennington is doing a decent job of responding to this situation (apparently, he was out of down in the initial days after). He seems genuinely concerned about this incident and is taking appropriate measures to get to the bottom of it.

The woman’s niece, Sarah Dozier, says that she bought her aunt a gun to protect herself and that her aunt had a permit for the gun. Relatives believe Johnston was frightened by the officers and opened fire.”They kicked her door down talking about drugs, there’s no drugs in that house. And they realize now, they’ve got the wrong house,” Dozier said. “I’m mad as hell.”

And well she should be. The police screwed up a little more also.

The woman’s niece, Dozier, who lives in Fayette County, said she had yet to be told by police that her aunt was dead even though police had called a news conference and talked to reporters outside Grady Memorial Hospital.

“I had to hear she had been shot on TV,” said Dozier, who said she wants a lot of questions answered and plans to hire a lawyer to get that information from police.

“As far as I’m concerned, they shot her down like a dog,” she said.

She was firing at them, but it seems like she was pretty scared by someone breaking in to her house. I would be also. Something is really wrong when these types of shootings (that is, police shooting civilians) are occurring fairly commonly. And I suspect that the ons falls to the police to make sure that they have the correct house and not to frighten 97 year old women who are alone in their house (the onus also falls to the police to tell the kin of the victim before they tell the media). The question I would have to ask is - did the officers feel that their lives werer threatened before they broke down the door or did they feel that the drug bust that they thought they were making was going to go south? Was there another way to secure the bust - like, say, surrounding the house? As I said, there are a lot of questions to be asked and one can only hope that the APD will cooperate to the fullest extent so that they can learn all of the lessons that need to be learned from this incident.

The new Monopoly Here and Now is out and our fair city makes it onto the board twice. Centennial Olympic Park is replacing St. Charles Place, a piece that I have always found to be well-landed on and very helpful in winning the game. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport also makes the board as the final “railroad.” Railroads, in my opinion, are very useful early in the game but their value diminishes as the game progresses.

A round-up of other Metroblogging cities making the cut can be found here. Frankly, I think Atlanta comes out on top. Two properties. Only NYC, LA, and Chicago can claim that with us. And we already know we’re better than them.

I went bright and early this morning at around 8 am and the poll worker told me that they have already have around 30 people go through, so that bodes well for a good turnout (I hope). I was dismayed at one thing though. I went into the polling place with my passport and the mailing I had gotten telling me which pieces of ID were acceptable (not the first mailing, but the proper second mailing). I filled out my form with my name and address on it, handed it to the poll worker who checked for my name on the computer, and then the poll worker gave me my electronic voting card. At no point was my form of ID asked for or even pondered about. My passport stayed in my back pocket the whole time. I’m not trying to restart the voter ID law debate (any number of identification could have been asked for, including a utility bill which doesn’t have anymore proof of my person than a piece of paper with my name crayoned on it). However, it seems to me that in a time when people are concerned about voter fraud (and/or votes not counting) that some effort should be made at least to pretend to verify that the person voting is the actual voter listed on the rolls. But maybe I’m just crazy.