Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms this week identified the person who will lead the city’s new Office of Violence Reduction, and that person has a background not in law enforcement but in public health.
Bottoms, in a press release, announced the Office of Violence Reduction will fall under the purview of Jacquel Clemons Moore.
“Clemons Moore is a passionate public health professional, with more than 20 years of experience in developing and deploying culturally appropriate programs and public health interventions,” Bottoms said in the press release, adding Moore has worked in the field of HIV and AIDS prevention.
Moore, on her LinkedIn page, said she recently led a public health initiative that addressed violence and trauma in Brooklyn, New York. In that role Moore said she helped “achieve and surpass progmattic [sic] goals and objectives.” But Moore did not elaborate on what those goals and objectives were or how she addressed them.
Atlanta’s rising crime rates prompted Bottoms to start advertising for a director of Violence Reduction in August. Crime has increased so much that residents of nearby Buckhead formally want to secede from Atlanta. Buckhead is a residential district of the larger city. The man leading that secession movement, Bill White, told The Georgia Star News that month that the new director of Violence Reduction won’t influence Buckhead residents to have second thoughts about leaving.
According to one ad, Atlanta officials blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the alarming rise in local crime, especially homicides. The director of violence reduction will actively pursue state and federal grants to support prevention and intervention policies, according to the ad.
White said in August that Buckhead residents, once they divorce themselves from the City of Atlanta, will address crime their own way, “from the top down.”
“We are going to have a mayor that will allow our police to do their job,” White said.
“We will have a massive police force in Buckhead City that we most certainly can afford. We are going to let them arrest shoplifters, chase carjackers, and remove these homeless encampments throughout Buckhead. That’s the way you reduce crime. Not by any of this hocus pocus stuff.”
Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) has proposed spending $3 million in additional state law enforcement resources to fight Atlanta’s worsening crime problem.
Ralston said state legislators will consider his proposals during the 2022 legislative sessions appropriations process.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star and The Georgia Star News. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Jacquel Clemons Moore” by Jacquel (Moore) Clemons Moore.
The sad thing is that, while we have some police officers, who know how to defuse a potentially violent situation–or at least make a conscientious effort to do so–, we have, sadly, several officers who either inadvertantly or intentionally, escalate a situation into more violence. I don’t think that this violence reducer will be any worse than most cops. If the police had made a greater effort to diffuse potentially violent situations in the first place, we would not have needed to hire a civilian violence reducer.