Sheriff’s Office Addresses Downtown Community Concerns

Representatives from the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, including Sheriff Gino Brantley, met with downtown residents and business owners on Thursday, May 29 to discuss problems, perceptions, and possible solutions in terms of crime in the downtown area.

Sheriff Brantley opened the meeting with a state-of-the-streets address, detailing some of the initiatives taken since he took office in January. These include increasing police visibility downtown, assigning unmarked patrols in parking garages and on side streets, and the installation of cameras for real-time surveillance. He noted that the Sheriff’s Office had 132 new hires since January and would continue to fill slots. He said that auditing activity downtown and engaging with those that work and live there is essential to ensuring the area remains safe.

“Once we realize we need to do something different, that’s exactly what we will do,” he said. “We know we still have a ways to go. We are trying to change a culture that has been going the way it has been going for 12 years, and that is a process.”

He said those in the room, the stakeholders, were an essential part of the process. He said the community taking an active interest in downtown was a primary component to keeping the area safe.

“Without the help of the community, enforcement simply does not work,” he said.

Chief Lewis Blanchard also addressed the crowd. He said that most of the criminal activity downtown was person-on-person altercations happening after 1:30 a.m. and noted that compared to some metropolitan areas, such as Atlanta and Savannah, criminal activity was relatively low in Richmond County. He noted that, so far this year aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, rape, and robbery incidents are down from last year, some by a large margin. Aggravated assaults with a firearm are down almost 39 percent and auto thefts are down almost 42 percent. Homicides, he notes, have remained flat.

Questions from the crowd focused less on violent crime, which many in attendance said is less of an issue than popular perception might indicate, and more on the issue of homelessness.

“It’s still a problem,” Sheriff Brantley said. “And it is going to continue to be a problem. That’s because it is a mental health problem.”

Jeremy Hawes, owner of Miami Vybz, a Broad Street nightclub, said that he had personally addressed the homeless issue near his business by engaging with people on the street to help him around his business and providing food for those without. He said the real problem downtown might be that people think there is a problem.

“Perception is far from the truth,” he said. “What fueled, in the past, criminal activity downtown was the youth – and it is correct that most of it happened after 1:30 in the morning. But we’ve never had a problem, and I think that’s because we take care to be responsible.”

“If everyone does that, a lot of the problems people think we have will go away.”