When people ask me the best way for a police department to reduce crime, they expect me to say more officers, faster response times or tougher enforcement.
Those steps matter, but the most honest answer is that the most effective crime reduction happens long before we ever receive a 911 call.
The data from the city of Atlanta’s own streets tells the story.
In 2019, we recorded 99 homicides. Then the pandemic arrived, and by 2022 we had reached a peak of 171 — the highest total since 1996. Recent numbers are now telling a different story. In 2025, we recorded 100 homicides — still too many but far below prepandemic levels and the lowest total in years.
That kind of progress does not happen by accident. It happens when a city makes safety a whole-of-government priority.
Treat public safety as a shared responsibility
Credit: SYLVIA McAFEE
Credit: SYLVIA McAFEE
I am proud of the hard work of our officers, who have stayed focused, disciplined and relentless in their commitment to this city. Our internal tracking process shows they removed nearly 3,000 illegal guns from Atlanta streets and charged 140 documented gang members with 560 crimes. Those actions made a difference, and they will continue to matter. But enforcement alone did not get us here.
The larger story is what happens when public safety is treated as a shared responsibility across the entire city, with policing working alongside investments in neighborhoods, young people, housing, jobs, schools and in coordinated efforts to prevent the conditions that make violence likely in the first place.
In the summer of 2023, Mayor Andre Dickens launched his Summer Youth Employment Program, a partnership among nonprofits and businesses to place 5,000 teenagers and young adults in jobs. The city of Atlanta’s At-Promise Centers gave young people who were on the edge a place to go and feel part of something bigger than themselves.
Community violence intervention programs put credible messengers — people who had lived the life — directly into the neighborhoods where the tension was highest and dispel the myths about choosing that path. As a result, the pace of homicides slowed noticeably through those summer months.
This is the insight I want to build policy around: Crime is not primarily a policing problem. It is a neighborhood health problem. And when neighborhoods are unhealthy — when there is concentrated poverty, abandoned properties, no jobs, no youth programming, no sense of ownership or belonging — crime fills that vacuum. We can make arrests every single day in a blighted neighborhood, but the underlying conditions will keep regenerating the same behavior. We are not going to arrest our way to a safe city.
Reinvesting in neighborhoods is pivotal for public safety
That is why I am so encouraged by the direction this city is moving. Dickens’ Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative commits at least $5 billion to focus on several communities that have experienced decades of disinvestment. His administration is condemning blighted properties, building high-quality mixed-income housing, investing in new parks and trails, and issuing administrative orders to align the entire city government around neighborhood health as its core priority. These are not peripheral feel-good initiatives. They are the upstream work that makes everything law enforcement does downstream more effective and longer lasting.
The research on this is unambiguous. When vacant lots that are cleaned up and redeveloped, we see measurable reductions in gun violence in the surrounding blocks. Neighborhoods where residents have access to good jobs, high-performing schools and quality housing have substantially lower crime rates — not because police are doing anything differently, but because the social fabric that deters crime is intact. When people have something to lose, they behave differently. When they feel seen and invested in by their city, the relationship between residents and law enforcement changes. Trust goes up. Tips come in. Crimes get solved.
That is the deeper purpose of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. NRI is not simply a set of projects or a funding strategy. It is Mayor Dickens’ comprehensive, whole-of-government approach to creating whole, healthy, thriving and connected neighborhoods by investing in both people and places. It brings city departments, public agencies, community partners, residents and private-sector stakeholders around a shared framework to work upstream of the challenges that show up later as crime, displacement, poverty, student transiency and neighborhood instability. Different results require a different system, and NRI is that system: a coordinated, community-guided model for building equity, connection, safety and opportunity citywide.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We fail children when they grow up in blight
I have spent my career in law enforcement, and I can tell you the most dangerous places I have ever policed were not frightening because bad people chose to live there. They created a culture of fear and distrust because generations of public and private disinvestment stripped those communities of the conditions that allow families and individuals to thrive. When a child grows up surrounded by blight, with no realistic path to a job or a future, with no adults modeling a different way, we have already failed them long before they encounter law enforcement.
Across the city of Atlanta, our goal is to continue to drive crime down. To do that, we must not only police well but also build neighborhoods where the conditions for crime are not present. We need more summer jobs programs, more At-Promise Centers, more remediated blight and more investment in communities that have waited too long for the city to show up.
The men and women of the Atlanta Police Department will continue to do our part. We will take guns off the streets, dismantle gangs and respond when our residents need us. But I am asking Atlanta — its political leaders, its business community and its residents — to understand that the safest city is not the most heavily policed city. It is the most invested-in city.
The crime numbers are moving in the right direction. Now let’s build something durable enough that they never move back.
Darin Schierbaum is the chief of police for the city of Atlanta.
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