From the new police headquarters built on his watch, Richard Pennington lets the numbers tell his story. People may not like his style. But crime is down, he says, down so far that Atlanta’s next police chief will find it difficult to match what he has done.
When Pennington took charge in July 2002, the city was ranked the nation’s third-most violent. This year, it ranked 18th.
“Violent crime in Atlanta is down 39 percent; our overall crime in Atlanta is down 19 percent during my tenure,” Pennington said in an interview last week. And this year the city may have fewer murders than at any time since the 1960s, he said.
Pennington often comes across less as the chief of police and more as the CEO of the APD. He brought in a data-driven system that gives a real-time count of the arrests and crimes taking place, enabling police to react quickly to emerging trends. Crime rates fell. Those numbers, Pennington said, are what count.
But other numbers help explain the chief’s unpopularity. For instance: 260. That’s at least how many days he has been away during his tenure here, according to his appointment and planning calendars. That’s the equivalent of an entire work year.
Or 799. Those are the comp-time hours — equivalent to 20 work weeks — he logged in his first 15 months on the job.
Critics say his focus on numbers created a quota system that led cops to cut corners. The police shooting of Kathryn Johnston, 92, in 2006 came about because narcotics officers were pumping up their warrants and arrests, critics say.
“The Atlanta Police Department does not have a quota system,” Pennington said after narcotics officers were arrested for the raid. “Yes, we get on officers for performance. Any corporate system does that.”
It was a revealing moment: the chief was more CEO Jack Welch than Gen. George Patton.
Pennington’s fiercest critics should be his main supporters: cops, community leaders and the City Council. They say he started very strong but after a few years seemed to lose touch. He was often out of town, they say, particularly when crises hit.
In July, Pennington, 63, had to answer for being away, once again, when two high-profile crimes occurred hours apart: a former boxing champ was slain and a city councilman was carjacked. At a City Hall news conference, Pennington defended his absence with sound bites that one responsible for a city’s safety should never have to utter.
“I wasn’t missing in action,” he said. “I have not checked out.”
A single episode a year ago seemed to capture Pennington’s seven years on the job.
Randall Cobb, of the Midtown Neighbors’ Association, was so livid about the repeated carjackings, home invasions and burglaries, he sent angry e-mails to politicians and police with the heading: “Chief Pennington Where Are You?”
The reserved Pennington agreed to meet at Cobb’s home with representatives from five neighborhoods. The chief was unimpressive, Cobb recalled, delivering only “political rhetoric and dogma.”
Even so, he said, there were soon more cops on the streets and things seemed to turn around.
But he still calls the chief’s tenure a missed opportunity. “Pennington dropped the ball. He didn’t take enough hands-on interest in the community,” Cobb said.
City Councilman Ivory Young said Pennington’s first years were far better than his last.
“If we had a Richard Pennington who was 100 percent engaged, we’d have a lot,” said Young, whose district has several crime-ridden neighborhoods. “But he delegated too much of his authority. You can regurgitate crime stats, but numbers don’t give you the reality of quality of life in a neighborhood.”
Pennington, a large, low-key man with a deliberate presence, will hear none of that.
“I’ve worked extremely hard since I’ve been here,” he said. “I put everything, heart and soul, into the organization. That’s what I was hired to do.”
Mayor Shirley Franklin gives Pennington high marks, saying he upgraded training, increased the number of officers, brought back foot patrols, realigned beats and oversaw a drop in crime.
“As I look back to mid-2002 when the city’s police department was in disarray, officers were grossly underpaid, undertrained, loosely managed, under-equipped and city residents had become accustomed to Atlanta leading the nation in violent crimes,” Franklin said.
Pennington brought the department “into the 21st century,” she said.
Putting ‘cops on dots’
When he was hired, the career lawman was considered a visionary and a reformer.
In 1994, Pennington took over as chief in New Orleans, then seen as America’s murder capital. By 1999, the city had 162 murders, down from 421. When he left in 2002, violent crime had plunged 50 percent. (Violent crime also dropped 30 percent nationally and 36 percent in Atlanta during the period. Also, New Orleans media reported in 1996 that police supervisors, under pressure to cut crime rates, routinely downgraded crimes to lesser offenses.)
At the outset, Pennington visited crime scenes and met with local business owners. He also shook up APD’s leadership.
He set up the Command Operations Briefings to Revitalize Atlanta, the computerized system that tracks crime and makes zone commanders accountable to higher-ups on a real-time basis. In weekly COBRA meetings, commanders stand before superiors and answer pointed questions about spikes in crime.
“The COBRA system has impacted the police department more than any other program I’ve put in place,” he said. Police brass can quickly address “hot spots” where the map shows crimes occurring. Pennington calls it putting “cops on dots.”
As he extols his tactics and results, council members say the city needs to go in a new direction with the next chief.
Councilman C.T. Martin said the next chief should be “Someone who will mix and mingle with the police and civilian staff, who will attend roll calls periodically, who will attend council meetings, who will come up with something better than COBRA as the primary decision-making mechanism, who will get on the streets from time to time to find out what’s going on.”
Pennington said he tried to connect with the rank and file early on. He held luncheons with groups of 30 officers to field their questions and gauge morale. Later, he went to roll call after hearing complaints about him not attending. But officers did not ask him questions, worried it would get back to their bosses.
“So I said, ‘Why am I going to roll call if they won’t talk, won’t say anything?’” he said.
Pennington’s personal calendars, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through the Georgia Open Records Act, show that the chief attended conferences in Honolulu; LasVegas; Sun Valley, Idaho; Philadelphia; Dallas; Washington; Los Angeles; Phoenix; Miami; Pasadena, Calif.; Boston; New Orleans; and other cities.
The International Chiefs of Police and Major City Chiefs Association conferences are required and provide needed training, he said. He had to attend conferences of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives because he was president of the group in 2005 and 2006, he said.
Pennington said he left capable aides in charge and raced back in times of crisis.
“I don’t take a lot of vacation,” he said. “No, I don’t feel like I was out a whole lot because, you know, I took the required training opportunities I had.”
But Pennington picked bad times to be gone.
He was vacationing in Cancun when Brian Nichols began a shooting rampage at the Fulton County courthouse in March 2005. He watched it unfold on CNN.
He was in New York for Thanksgiving in 2006 when Kathryn Johnston was killed. In July, he was at a conference in Virginia when former boxing champ Vernon Forrest was killed and City Councilman Ceasar Mitchell was carjacked.
The shooting death of a popular Grant Park bartender in January seemed to change the mood of the city. The crime galvanized that gentrifying area, and residents put the issue front and center in the mayoral election.
“Crimes may be down but crimes against people who read papers and have e-mail are up,” said Lou Arcangeli, a retired deputy chief. “People who are productive, job-holding, computer-using citizens have become victims. Poor people and old people who are shut in don’t blog, they don’t tweet.”
The AJC has found that while violent crime is down, residential break-ins grew by 65 percent from 2004 to 2008 and thefts from automobiles were up 30 percent.
This year, police had to take furloughs. The city’s inability to pay officers enough has led to an attrition rate of 125 cops a year. Pennington never came close to the city’s long-sought level of 2,000 officers. He said his peak was 1,801 officers and there are now about 1,650, up from 1,482 when he arrived in 2002.
A shortage of officers largely explains why 911 dispatchers routinely hold emergency calls longer than the time in which officers are supposed to reach the scene, an AJC investigation showed recently. Delays of an hour or two are not uncommon.
Pennington acknowledged that scarce resources were a frustration, but he said pounding the bully pulpit is not his style.
“A lot of things I did were always behind the scenes,” he said. “I’d write letters to the mayor. Everything that I did in terms of trying to get additional resources and additional things for the cops was always done probably in a quiet way, in a low-key way.”
In community meetings, like one last week at a church near where Johnston was killed, Pennington came across as matter-of-fact, confident, unflappable. He apologized for the killing after being asked to do so by a community activist. Then he quickly added, “I think we’re a much better police department.”
On Tuesday, Pennington announced that he will step down at year’s end. Even if he had wanted to stay, both candidates for mayor, Mary Norwood and Kasim Reed, have said they will be looking for a new chief.
Pennington said he will stay in Atlanta and pursue consulting work. His pension from his years on the Washington and New Orleans police forces tops $120,000 a year. His pension for his time in Atlanta, based on his $200,211 salary, could approach $18,000 a year, according to a reading of the city’s retirement code.
As for his critics, Pennington said, “it’s perception versus reality.”
“All it takes is — it’s just like that bartender getting shot. The people were outraged and they had a right to be,” he said. “And so you can’t go in that neighborhood and tell people, ‘Oh, crime is down here,’ because they don’t want to hear it and I don’t blame them.”
The Pennington file
Age: 63
Birthplace: Little Rock, Ark.
Education: American University, 1976, B.S. in criminal justice; University of the District of Columbia, 1988.
Professional: From 1968 to 1994, worked for Washington Metropolitan Police Department as patrol officer, budget director, captain, community relations coordinator, deputy chief and assistant chief; 1994 to 2002 was New Orleans police superintendent, managing department with about 1,640 officers and $110 million annual budget; June 2002 to present, APD’s chief of police.
Other: Ran for mayor of New Orleans, losing in a runoff to Ray Nagin in March 2002; president, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, 2005-06.
Family: wife, Rene, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce vice president, Atlanta education; sons, Rashad and Richard Jr.
How we got the story
Reporters Bill Rankin and Bill Torpy sat down with Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington for an interview this past Monday. They also sifted through hundreds of pages of APD documents obtained through requests under the Georgia Open Records Act and interviewed city leaders, members of neighborhood associations, city residents and current and former members of the Atlanta police force.
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