Atlanta saw a reduction in every major crime category in 2024, city officials said Monday.
For a second year in a row, homicides were down in the city decreasing from 135 in 2023 to 127 in 2024, about a 6% reduction. Atlanta Police Chief Darrin Schierbaum said the reduction continues a trend of a 26% reduction on lives lost in Atlanta since 2022.
Schierbaum said the number one reason for homicides in the city continues to be disputes, that escalate quickly and end in violence. Domestic violence was the second leading cause of homicides in the city, Schierbaum said.
He praised Mayor Andre Dickens’ No More Campaign, which calls upon residents to speak up if they witness violence and encourages open dialogue on the issue, as one the reasons there was a reduction in domestic violence related homicides in the second half of the year after the program launched in early July.
“We need you to know who is in a dangerous and toxic relationship and help them get out of there,” Schierbaum said.
Dickens and Schierbaum pointed to a variety of city programs and smart policing as the reason for the reduction in crime. Dickens talked at length about his Year of the Youth initiatives, including Midnight Basketball, that have continually helped keep young people away from crime and focus on employement opportunities.
Since taking office, Dickens said his priority has always been to “make Atlanta the safest large metropolitan city in America” and feels they are on the right path to do that with the recently completed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center and the work Schierbaum and the Atlanta Police Department has done to reduce violent crime.
“The bottom line is crime is down in Atlanta,” Dickens said.
Schierbaum said they’ve been able to remove more than 3,000 guns from the streets of Atlanta, primarily from felons and gang members. He also said his department shut down a drug dealing operation in the city every five days, for a total of 73 separate drug operations being taken down in 2024.
He said APD has been able to solve 78.5% of last year’s homicides, which is above the national average of around 50%. Schierbaum said the police department has over 1,000 officers for the first time since October 2021 and praised the work the city’s E-911 center has done to improve average answer call times from 24.3 seconds in 2023 to 12.5 seconds in 2024.
Major William Ricker, who commands Zone 3, which saw the largest reduction in crime out of all the APD zones, said the city’s camera system, which has more than 20,000 integrated cameras, and the community support and assistance has helped them in solving crimes.
“We get a lot better chance of solving crimes when the community is involved and they’re the ones that are supplying the extra photos or videos of when cars broken into and when things are broken to give us a much better chance of solving those crimes,” Ricker said.
The largest reduction in crime came from auto car thefts. In 2023 and early 2024, police struggled with reducing auto car thefts, primarily due to a proliferation of Hyundai and Kia thefts due to a missing anti-theft device, which has been exploited online.
Auto theft was the “highest crime category” the department had in 2023. In 2024, Schierbaum said they saw a reduction of 29% this year in auto thefts.
He credited the mayor’s office for launching pop-up events where Kia and Hyundai owners could stop by to get a software update that would help reduce auto thefts, as well as APD providing steering wheel locks. Schierbaum also said they made sure those who stole vehicles were prosecuted by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.
“We arrested people, we put them in the district attorney’s courtroom and asked judges to take note on who needed help to be steered out of a life of crime and who needed to be held accountable,” he said.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis complimented Dickens and Schierbaum for their work in reducing crime through different initiatives and the collaboration with her office. Willis said the reduction of homicides means fewer people have to bury their loved ones.
Willis said they’ve been able to work with APD to ensure once they received the cases, particularly domestic violence cases, it’s easier and it’s a more streamline process to get a conviction.
“We are at about a 90% conviction rate across different type of crimes. That’s homicide, that’s sexual assaults which is really unheard of in the country, but we can’t take credit,” Willis said. “We like to take the credit in the DA’s office all by ourselves but the reason we’re able to do that is because we’re requiring better cases from the start.”
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