Photo © Sara Hindmarch 2009

As found near Twain’s in Decatur. This would’ve been the highlight of my night, if not for the vodka from a Crystal Head.

With thanks to the Atlantans Together Against Crime (ATAC) blog, here’s a link to Raw Footage Atlanta Police Department May 8, 2009 Press Conference from Grayson Daughters on Vimeo.

Since I wrote a bit about the public reaction to the Standard shooting, I figured I should write something about the public reaction to this news, too. I’ve read comments of relief and comments of revenge. I’ve read lamentations about teenage shooters and I’ve read calls for blood.

Here’s the truth: I don’t know what to say.

When I tried to write about this from the perspective of a compassionate neighbor, I fell into the traps bystanders often fall into when talking about crime — all melodramatic and grandiose. When I tried to write about this from the perspective of a rational, detached neighbor, I found myself reaching conclusions that offer little comfort — cynical and sad.

What I’m left with is a mix of feelings that combines, one, a emotional, humanist desire to find a big-picture revelation in this specific story and, two,  a practical desire to recognize, both personally and as a community, that there is no one person that can be jailed that will change much. It’s The West Wing versus The Wire, for me.

So I’ve cut a lot of what I wrote here, because it’s all secondary to this: This arrest isn’t an ending. Police and lawyers and bartenders and housebreakers are all still going to work. The days keep coming.

“The conditions that brought in the storm were the hammer,” analogized Purdue University climatologist Dev Niyogi, “but local features were the chisel. They pinpointed the severe weather.”

That tornado cut through town a year ago today, and as I type this it’s a mild rainy day inside the Perimeter, but just a few blocks from here houses still show their scars. If you know someone who was hurt personally when the sky came down to Atlanta that day, give them a call. Buy them a drink. Remember that strange and powerful day.

But I’ll admit that I’m just bitter. My wife was one of the people laid off from the museum on Monday. The story, though, will be that the High brass bravely took pay cuts. [This is where I cut some honest criticism for the sake of politeness.]

Here’s what the actual NPR piece sounded like:

“Five percent for the majority of the staff, six percent for the [department directors], and seven percent for myself.” Shapiro says five full time and 3 temporary positions will also be eliminated. The changes are effective immediately.

To be fair, I understand why an Atlanta institution is the story and not the handful of souls that got cut loose, but I want to attract a bit of attention to the faces in the statistics here. In the news, people tend to be identified by their age and their occupation. People who get laid off get shuffled into a statistical purgatory where they wait to get their faces back. When we do point a lamp at them, it’s usually to back-light a scary economy.

In our case, the jobs that drew us here and bound us to this city have given us up. The Atlanta job market being what it is, our house being devalued as it has, we’ve got to look as far and wide as we can for work now. Who knows if we’ll still live here in 40 or 60 days?

For more on the High Museum budget cuts, check out the press release after the jump:

High Museum of Art Announces $1.4 M in Budget Cuts

ATLANTA, February 25, 2009 – The High Museum of Art announced a series of budget cuts today, including across the board pay cuts and a 7% reduction of its staff. These reductions, combined with previous cost-cutting measures, will result in $1.4 million dollars in savings and will reduce the operating budget for fiscal year 2009 to $23.7M. These measures will enable the museum to continue to provide high quality and meaningful art and educational experiences to the community.

The High has instituted a series of pay cuts across the board, starting with the Director’s office. Michael Shapiro will take a 7% pay cut and other Director-level employees will take a 6% pay cut. All other employees will take a 5% pay cut. These cuts will extend through May 31, 2009. Beginning June 1 and extending through fiscal year 2010, salaries will be reinstated but employees will be required to take 2.6 weeks of unpaid leave. The staff reductions have been achieved through hiring freezes, redistribution of staff responsibilities and the elimination of five full-time positions and three temporary positions.

“As with many non-profit institutions both in Atlanta and across the country, the High Museum of Art has been affected by the economic downturn, experiencing shortfalls in income we receive through donations and membership as well as losses to our endowment,” said Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green Jr. Director. “These are challenging times and few decisions are harder than one that involves staff reductions. However, the High needs to take these prudent steps in order to balance its budget and ensure that we can continue our role as the leading art museum serving the Southeast.”

“We are gratified by the tremendous response and record-breaking attendance for our ‘First Emperor’ exhibition; however, admission is a small piece of the museum’s overall budget. For the past fifteen years, the High has operated in the black and we will continue to operate without a deficit to ensure the institution’s long term health and stability,” Shapiro continued. “We are continuing to monitor our budgets and the economy and in looking towards fiscal year 2010, we are conscious that potential declines in corporate sponsorship, individual giving, membership, and losses to our endowment may require us to make additional reductions.”

These cuts follow a series of previous budget reductions which have been implemented throughout the past year. Working across departments, the High has taken a number of measures to trim expenses, including examining and adjusting exhibition schedules, instituting a hiring freeze and a ban on non-essential travel, reducing energy use, and strategically trimming programming without impacting the core visitor experience.

High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 11,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of nineteenth and twentieth century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s Media Arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005, the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta. For more information about the High, please visit www.High.org.

The Woodruff Arts Center
The Woodruff Arts Center is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. A not-for-profit center for performing and visual arts, its campus comprises the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art, Young Audiences and the 14th Street Playhouse.

People don’t feel safe. Groups like ATAC (Atlantans Together Against Crime) are getting the word out about it with their website and public rallies.

In contrast, this AJC article on symbolic flamingos describes the situation like this:

[Jason] Hatcher, an art director for a local weekly newspaper, and Johnny Castellic (a.k.a. “Johnny Hollywood”) have launched a campaign to raise public awareness of what they insist is a growing crime problem in their area.

[Emphases mine.]

That same article quotes APD Chief Richard Pennington from an earlier statement. He said:

“The community groups work closely together[.] [...] When they hear about one crime, they e-mail their neighbors and then you get a barrage of e-mails. I think they just respond to what they hear. And a lot of times, perception to them is reality.”

Those lines about insistence and perception-as-reality made some of my neighbors real angry. The implication is that citizens are being spooked by the echo chambers of online message boards amplifying every crime — that local crime has always been like this and people used to feel safer because they used to be happily uninformed. What I think a lot of locals heard in that quote was that they shouldn’t get all worked up just because a few houses have been invaded. That he knows better than the citizenry whether we should feel safe or not.

Is that how feeling safe works?

The argument on the ground is that it’s reasonable out here to feel unsafe and call for additional protection when armed gunmen are kicking in doors for televisions. The argument upstairs, in the city offices, is that stats are trending favorably and, so, we are safer even if we don’t feel safer.

I’ve stewed on this for a while, hoping I’d have some wise breakthrough. I haven’t. What I keep coming back to, though, is this: Does it matter if the stats are up or down? That’s a separate issue — a distraction.

The issue, to the people in their homes, isn’t whether burglaries and armed robberies are technically up or down, but that they’re common and frightening. People don’t feel safe. Winning the argument that property crimes are up or down, one way or the other, isn’t going to make anyone feel safer. The APD Chief isn’t really hearing the ground-level argument and the ground-level ralliers are getting distracted into a debate that they’ll lose even if they win. But the people on the blocks getting robbed need a win somewhere, and Chief Pennington and the AJC coverage are visible targets.

And now I’ve gotten distracted in all this. It’s easy to do.

I wanted to put it to y’all and hear more opinions: What does it take to feel safe? What is safety worth if you don’t believe you’re safe? How bad is bad?

EAV Coverage from the CSM

Some of our local crime woes are getting national attention lately. Just a couple of quick links for you:

• ABC News looks at how economic troubles are affecting police work, with our own APD furloughs used as an example, in addition to Phoenix, Boston, and others.

• The Christian Science Monitor looks specifically at crime crime-fighting efforts in East Atlanta Village — good reading whether you’re affected by the local crime problem or you’re just into clever tech usage, like security robots and Twitter-enabled neighborhood watch programs.

Do these stories get it right? You tell us.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a blurb about board games on the front page of the AJC this morning. Imagine my surprise exploding in slow motion when I discovered the article contained things that were actually news to me. I hadn’t heard of some of the places they mention. How the hell did that happen?

I’m glad to see Thinking Man’s Tavern get a newsprint shout-out for their ready-to-play game selection, and in that spirit I want to mention a few other places in town to find and play games. The Independent in Midtown is owned (whole or in part, I lose track) by gamers, and is thus stocked with well-worn board games and a Super NES from back in the day. Oxford Comics & Games has a nice slew of geek products of all sorts, including board games and card games you won’t find at, say, Target. Dr. No’s, way up in Marietta, had a knock-out selection the last time I was up there, plus play space. I’ve seen locals playing Scrabble everywhere from Starbucks to The Midway Pub.

I don’t know if what the AJC calls “the board game craze” is really anything new or not, but I can tell you that board games are great entertainment investments. Of course, I’m biased.

The party’s called Chin Up ATL. In their own words:

We’re looking for some positivity in Atlanta right now. So, teaming with SOPO, we’re getting together at the Bike! Bike! Conference to make some shirts that promote the good of our city. Jimmie Myers and Staci Janik have designed two different screens. There will be several colors to choose from. Lots of good people to be around. (I hear rumor there might be tall bike jousting?) There’s sure to be some going out afterwards . . . possibly in our new garb! So, let’s show Atlantans that there is still good here.

They’ll have about 50 American Apparel shirts on hand for you to buy and get screen-printed on the spot for $15. They may run out! So you can bring your own stuff, like shirts or skirts or socks, and get it screen-printed for $7 per screen.

All proceeds benefit the SOPO Bicycle Coop to aid in opening a new shop on the west side of town.

Check out the event’s Facebook page for details and comments.

People want things, so they’re coming into our homes and taking them. They’re smashing down our doors. They’re pulling guns. They’re killing and dying in the pursuit of money.

I sat down to write about that, but I keep thinking about something else. A friend of mine told me about a man who stood up on a MARTA train this morning, said he was homeless, and asked the passengers for money. This happens all the time, but tonight I kept picturing it.

“I’m homeless because of a fire at my house,” the man said. He sounded a little rehearsed. “I just need nine more dollars to get set up for the night. I’m trying to get back on my feet.”

People gave him five-dollar and ten-dollar bills. People nudged each other on the train, saying “Excuse me, I just want to get by you for a second so I can give that guy a dollar.” The man made more than his nine needed bucks for sure.

We can read a lot into this moment, if we want to.

We can see a train car full of passengers suckered out of money by a guy with a well aimed sob story. We can picture the train car passengers filing out and being replaced by another car full of Midtown professionals. We can picture the man telling his story again. We can picture him holding the cash out, pinched between two knuckles, and swapping it for a baggie of yellow rocks.

Or we can picture a man standing in a public bathroom, counting his last couple of bucks and coming up nine short of the fee for his motel room. We can picture him reciting his story to himself in the mirror, getting up the nerve to out himself as homeless in front of strangers. We can picture him standing in the strobing red glow of the fire trucks, soot on his face, wearing his pajamas, staring at the soggy ashes he used to live in.

I don’t know if that man’s story was true or not. It may be a mistake to look for too much meaning in these stories. What I know is that I’ve heard two stories about people trying to get money out of strangers this week, and they have different endings.