Dunwoody Crime - now is the time to start telling the City Council what type of Police services you want.

On Monday there will be an introduction of the Chief of Police, William “Billy” Grogan as well as the authorization of the police departments management structure (Deputy Chief, 3 Lieutenants & an Executive Assistant, as well as their pay scales).

Every City Council meeting has 30 minutes of public comment at the beginning and additional comment time at the end; therefore if you want to express your hopes & concerns over the future Dunwoody Police Department. Now is the time to start talking to us.

For example: Councilman Taylor and I were contacted by a small neighborhood on the far southeast side of the city to discuss the amount of crime in the area. Councilwoman Bonser joined us at the meeting to discuss the situation and to learn of the special needs of the general area with its older, very dense residential housing and its high percentage of non-English speaking residents. The meeting went well, we passed along a good bit of information. I informed them that the city would be doing what it could to reduce the crime rate in the area and that we would be speaking to the Police Chief about obtaining a number of officers who can speak Spanish.

My goal is to get an active police department in place, have them dedicated to Dunwoody (vs being pulled to Buford Highway as DeKalb is now), have them not only handle the routine calls but also have goals and strategies to lower the City's over all crime rate. That being said, I would like to see the department adopt an electronic reporting system and have the citywide crime data available to anyone who would want to know where the crime is occurring.

DeKalb's Interactive Community Policing program doesn't have the capability to put all crime reports on the internet but the local precinct will send your neighborhood watch coordinator the crime stats if so requested. This week the North Precinct sent all 60 of the Dunwoody neighborhood watch coordinators, all of the crime calls from each of the three Dunwoody territories. The data provided is very telling as to what crime happened where in Dunwoody and it reaffirmed that the residents complaint was valid with a large amount of the pedestrian robberies happening within a few blocks of them.

In these tough economic times, crime and murder is at an all time high in DeKalb County and the Dunwoody community has also been affected of these rising crime rates with a number of murders taking place within our borders.

Chief Grogan will not have an endless budget to set up his department yet he will have my full support to do what needs to be done to best serve the citizens.