The City of Atlanta was recently audit by the Department of Justice. The audit was conducted to trace how nearly $400,000 of the $1.1 million the city received in grants has been spent. Atlanta was awarded the DOJ grants to help the city clean up its most crime-ridden areas. The money was to help the city’s ‘Weed and Seed’ program which intended to ‘weed’ out the crime and plant ‘seeds’ of new positive growth.
In a recent press release, city officials announced a drop in crime in some of the most affected neighborhoods. Crime rates were said to be down 35% in Mechanicsville and down between 42 and 51% in Pittsburgh, Vine City, and English Avenue. A Georgia online newspaper questioned the figures; they contacted city spokesman Carlos Campos who researched the numbers. He acquiesced that the numbers were incorrect.
In actuality, crime rose in Mechanicsville by a whopping 35% during the time period between 2007 and 2011. In the other areas, crime rates were merely exaggerated to be about 5% down. Campos blames the discrepancy on a failure to validate the numbers through the Atlanta Police Department’s Tactical Analysis Unit.
The city corrected the statistics in a statement and also noted that even though the numbers were incorrect, crime rates were down an average of 21% in the four neighborhoods targeted by the ‘Weed and Seed’ program.