The AJC is reporting on a murder that happened this Sunday at 1am on Oakcliff Road. Please be on the lookout for an individual who matches the police sketch below – and report any suspicious activity or information about the shooting to the police at 770-220-1591.
Councilman Roche posted some interesting news recently on the neighborhood e-mail lists — the police departments of Doraville, Chamblee and Dekalb County have come together to form a task force that will focus on crime in the Chamblee-Tucker/Shallowford Road corridors.
So far, the task force has conducted two major operations. The first was an inspection of the Motel 6 on 2820 Chamblee Tucker Road. Apparently 80% of the rooms had some type of code violation, and the motel will be re-checked on June 4th to see if they have corrected their deficiencies. The other operation occured May 9th, when all three departments stopped over 100 people in the area (either in traffic, or because they were “suspicious”) and ended up making 7 arrests!
I think this task force is a good thing. For too long, the area between the three jurisdictions has been a sort-of no-man’s land, with seemingly little attention coming from any of the three jurisdictions. I am especially happy to hear that they are focusing on code enforcement, and hope they do more of that in the future.
If you want to read the report, you can find the PDF copy of it here.
Chris Avers and Donna Pittman have been distributing the following press release about a reception being held in Doraville Police Chief, King’s honor on Thursday, February 26 at 6pm. Chief King is being deployed to Afghanistan for another tour of duty, and this is the city’s way of honoring him and officer Dan Nichols (who is also being deployed). Information is below:
Doraville Police Chief John King to be deployed again
City will host reception February 26 prior to spring deploymentDORAVILLE, Ga. – The City of Doraville will host a reception on February 26, 2009 at Doraville City Hall in honor of Chief John King and Officer Daniel Nichols before their spring deployment to Afghanistan.
The reception will be held from 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm and guest dignitaries will speak from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm.
Among the speakers will be Maj. Gen. William Nesbitt, Adjutant General of Georgia and Sen. John Douglas, Chairman of the Senate Veterans, Military and Homeland Security Committee. Other guests include state legislators and DeKalb County officials.
King is a Colonel in the Georgia National Guard’s 48th Brigade, which will be tasked with training the Kabul police force. Nichols is a 1st Lieutenant in the 48th Brigade Tank Battalion
King has been Doraville’s police chief since 2002. He is a 25-year veteran of the Georgia National Guard.
Throughout his quarter century of service, King served in the first Gulf War and was deployed to Bosnia in 2000.
In May of 2006, King wrapped up a year-long deployment to Iraq’s “Triangle of Death,” where he helped train Iraqi police.
Not all of the results are in, but enough are in to be able to talk about them here.
Here are results as they were reported by the AJC and Dekalb County:
Doraville Annexation:
Doraville Homestead Exemption for Seniors over 70
District 81 House Race:
I had received an earlier number for the annexation, which must have been an early return, since it showed a much different result. Thanks to the commenter below who pointed out that the AJC had finally added this information. I still am concerned that the County did such a bad job at getting the right ballots to the right people, but 85% seems pretty decisive. I’ll update these numbers as new figures are available. The annexation results have been all over the place today – I’m not sure why so many different numbers have come out. The updated numbers are much different from what I saw on the AJC before. They are still in favor of the annexation, but by a much smaller majority. It seems like that might open the process up to problems if someone decides to challenge it – but we’ll need to leave it to the lawyers to sort that out. I just (Thursday morning) received word that new numbers are finally available from Dekalb County, and they are not good for annexation supporters. You can see above that the annexation appears to be falling behind again. I’m not sure if there will be more numbers coming out, but we will continue to post them here as they do.
Any other races that we should have been paying attention to which were missed?
While reading through this month’s Doraville newsletter, I saw the following small blurb:
The City of Doraville will begin curbside recycling on July 1, 2008. All ciizens interested in this program should sign-up for the Recycling Program at Doraville City Hall by Monday, June 16th.
Intriguing, but not a lot of information!
In an effort to get more details, I e-mailed my two representatives on City Council – Bob Roche and Brian Bates, asking about this new program. Bob sent a response directing me to Donna Pittman as the city’s resident “recycling expert.” He must have been right, because she has answered a lot of my questions about this program – although there are still some unknowns that won’t be clear until we know how many people sign up for the curbside recycling.
First of all, if you sign up for recycling, there is no way to know how much you will end up paying on your sanitation bill for the service. There was a large segment of residents who did not want to pay anything extra for recycling on their sanitation bill, so the city has made this program completely voluntary. Because of this, the costs for this program will be shared by a smaller group of citizens, and the city will not know how much the final charge will be until they know how many people sign up.
There will be a single 18 gallon curbside bin. All recyclable items (paper, plastic, aluminum cans, cardboard, glass, etc) will be placed in that bin and sorted at the recycling center. It will be picked up each week on the regular garbage day. For now, you need to sign up for this at city hall.
I’m going to sign up. I hope some of you do, too. I kind of wish they’d made this program opt-out, rather than opt-in. It would also be nice if we had access to sign up for this directly from the city website (as well as pay our sanitation bills!). All things said, however, this is a big step for Doraville, so let’s celebrate those small victories. Thank you, Donna Pittman, for championing this!
Update: According to reports on the message board, you do not need to go to city hall to get signed up for recycling. You can call them at 770-451-8745 and give your name, address and phone number to sign up. A better option for those of us who work than driving back into the city in the middle of the day.
I have not written much here lately – mostly because we have a city council that is both responsive and that seems able to work together. I’ve heard from several council members that a major redesign of the city website is around the corner – a change that should give us the ability to pay for our garbage bills online and that will do a generally better job of branding the city. Along with that, I think they are working on a weekly e-mail that will go out to people who sign up for it – updating us on things that are going on in Doraville. Currently, I don’t have any major complaints about the city council.
That leaves us with the state house race that is gearing up for the November election. Unsurprisingly, I don’t think Jill Chambers has any opponents going into the Republican primary. There are two Democratic candidates vying for the chance to take her seat, however. First of these is Chris Huttman – someone who is well known in the local Democratic scene and the political blogosphere. The other challenger is someone I’d never heard of before, but who is apparently known by at a least a few local Democrats — Cecilia Hailey.
Jill Chambers is an incredibly popular and effective legislator. Combine that with her negative campaigning, and I think even the best candidates will have a hard time being competitive against her in the Fall. Because he’s a blogger, Chris Huttman has an electronic record of statements on various issues that he has made going back several years – it’s a pretty good bet that some of the choicest ones will be used by Chambers if he’s her opponent. Cecilia Hailey, on the other hand, has recently filed for bankruptcy and was sued by her brother for improper transfers of money out of her dead father’s bank account (a suit which she won) – the general election campaign literature of her opponent almost writes itself in her case.
It’ll be interesting to see how things develop over the next few months till the primary. The only two things that I think may hurt Chambers in the general election are if there is especially high turnout because of Barack Obama being the Democratic presidential candidate or if people who supported Dunwoody incorporation are angry enough to vote her out (no word on whether Huttman or Hailey support the Dunwoody referendum).
You can read more about this race at Radical Georgia Moderate and Georgia Politics Unfiltered.
Update: May 18, 2008 - Someone sent me information that Cecilia Hailey also had a warrant issued for her arrest in passing bad checks (a felony) in December, 2007. I don’t see any other information in the case information, but log in to the Online Judicial System of Dekalb County and check out criminal case 07B44679 for more information. There’s also some civil case stuff against Hailey on the same site
This week, I ran across a couple of interesting resources, which I’m adding to the sidebar.
The first is a blog that appears to be written primarily by anonymous Dekalb County police officers. The general tone of the officers seems to be generally fed up with the county government and Vernon Jones in particular. An interesting insight into what the officers in Dekalb county (as opposed to Doraville) are thinking.
In the aftermath of the tornados that hit downtown Atlanta on Friday, I wanted to direct everyone to another resource that could be helpful in an emergency. Scan Dekalb is a site that allows you to listen to DeKalb County, Georgia Police and Fire Department radio communications. In the event of an emergency or natural disaster, listening to the audio on this site can let you get a better picture of what’s going on than the local media may be able to immediately show.
Both sites are now added to the sidebar.
According to Susan Fraysse, the city council has voted to give Chief King a contract tonight. Votes in favor were from Maria Alexander, Brian Bates, Donna Pittman and Bob Roche. I’m glad they finally sorted this out so that the city can now move on to other issues.
During last year’s election, one of the key points in Ray Jenkins’ mayoral campaign was that he supported John King as the city’s police chief. Although Jenkins presided over the illegal council meeting that fired the police chief in the first place, he quickly re-instated King once the media got involved and then made his support of the chief a key piece of his reelection campaign. In fact, the first campaign signs I saw during election season were in the yards of the mayor’s supporters claiming support for both “Chief King and Mayor Ray Jenkins.”
With all this focus on this issue from Jenkins, and all the credit he got for standing up to Spangler, Hart and Lowe in the last election, I find it disappointing that the mayor voted to postpone the signing of a contract between the city and the police chief at the last council meeting. If anyone who was at the meeting could post a comment about what the arguments were in favor of postponing the signing of the contract, I’d like to read them. I can’t help but wonder if all that campaign rhetoric about supporting the chief was just a lot of hot air.
For the record, Spangler, Roche & Fleming all voted in favor of postponing the signing of King’s contract; the mayor broke the tie in their favor. Thanks to Karen Pachuta for writing about this on the ONA and NNA e-mail lists.
The AJC has this new article about a New York City lawsuit against several gun dealers in Georgia for carelessly selling guns that were then used for crime in New York. One of the gun shops is the Gun Store in Doraville. According to the story, the lawsuit is based on a New York sting operation of “straw purchasing” guns, where it was very obvious that the person who was buying the gun was NOT the intended owner of the gun.
In the New York sting, a man would ask about guns and pay for them but have a woman with him in the store complete the paperwork, supposedly because the man was legally prohibited from buying a weapon.
It is not clear from the article whether the Gun Store was named to that lawsuit after falling for that sting. There are several disturbing facts in the article, but this is the most important one for the Gun Store:
In a federal lawsuit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg points out at least 126 weapons first sold by the Gun Store in Doraville were recovered in New York crime investigations between 1996 and 2000[...]
There’s also one more bit of trivia about the store that I haven’t heard the details about before:
Discussions of the ease of buying guns in Georgia recently resurfaced when rapper T.I., a convicted felon whose real name is Clarence Harris Jr., was arrested in October on charges he used his bodyguard to make straw purchases of nine weapons, including machine guns, from the Gun Store.
I’m sure our police department has worked together with the FBI and NYC police to help get the Gun Store to obey the laws, but Georgia needs some real enforcement of some real gun laws. Perhaps we should be grateful that we’re getting money for iron sent to rob and murder people out of state, but it might be good to consider why Georgia is such a popular source for such distant crimes.