Residents are strongly encouraged to express their concerns for our city’s lack of public safety and increasing rates of violent crime by emailing Mayor Skip Henderson directly at SkipHenderson@columbusga.org, while cc’ing their respective city council members on the email.
COLUMBUS, Ga. — The Fountain City suffered another weekend of violence as a string of shootings rocked the area between March 17-19, 2023.
No less than five people were reported shot in four separate shootings. These numbers may be even higher; it is important to remember that these numbers only include shootings that were reported and investigated by the police.
The violence comes as the Columbus Police Department remains without effective leadership after officers have resigned in droves citing police chief Freddie Blackmon’s extremely poor leadership as the reason for their resignations.
Here’s our interactive map with the details of each reported shooting along with more information published below:
The shootings occurred as follows:
The Columbus Police Department’s staffing has withered away to a vacancy rate of roughly 41%, leaving the department missing nearly half of the officers it requires to keep our city safe. The CPD’s staffing saw a 112% increase in resignations during Blackmon’s first year as chief, which is 6.22 times higher than the national average for that same year.
As a result, our city’s 26 police beats are only patrolled by as few as 12 officers on any given night; roughly fifty are required.
Blackmon recently briefed city council with his ‘strategic plan’ for how he intends to fix the problem, though his ‘plan’ rests solely on the literal bribing of his officers to not resign using imaginary funds that do not exist within the budget that he himself dictates for the department. The reliance on bribery coupled with the lack of fiscal competence serves as another prime example of how Blackmon continues to demonstrate that he is unfit to lead.
In response to Blackmon’s poorly-developed and incoherent plan which does not by any stretch of the imagination sequentially work toward an objective point of culmination to reduce our city’s violent crime, we at the Muckraker have independently developed a proper strategic approach for the Columbus Police Department.
Residents are strongly encouraged to express their concerns for our city’s lack of public safety and increasing rates of violent crime by emailing Mayor Skip Henderson directly at SkipHenderson@columbusga.org, while cc’ing their respective city council members on the email.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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