The Atlanta Objective: We Went on a 911 Strike Last Year

Amid an unprecedented rise in violence last year, Atlanta stopped calling the cops.

Former Atlanta police chief Erika Shields was talking about crime statistics with me a few years ago, as we were reviewing yet another year of small improvements in the homicide rate.

We had a sense that the fall in violent crime in Atlanta, like the rest of the country, had become a natural progression. Crime fell as the product of small iterative impro…