After decades of criminal street gang uprisings across Georgia, Peach State prosecutors will still be surrounded on all fronts by the public safety and criminal justice reform debates. Yet a small legislative victory befell gang-crime victims this year– and Attorney General Chris Carr is now uniquely positioned to set the tone for gang prosecution statewide.
The General Assembly recently passed House Bill 1134, authored by State Rep. Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, which granted the AG and district attorneys concurrent authority to stop and dismantle criminal street gangs. The state budget also includes funding to create a Gang Prosecution Unit within the attorney general’s office. Aggressive, targeted statewide gang prosecutions would minimally require training, certifying and resourcing the new Gang Prosecution Unit with enough legal firepower to light gangs up across the state.
A great example to learn from would be former DeKalb DA Gwen Keyes Fleming. She was a Democrat who installed best practices directly with a relatively small amount of aggressively targeted gang prosecutions in 2010. Strangely, her successor diverged from this, since the office refuses to fully leverage the same best anti-gang practices in their training or gang-charging.
DeKalb District Attorney Sherry Boston instructed prosecutors during a statewide training event in 2019 not to “felonize” gang members because it might disrupt their families’ public financial assistance. This pro-defendant prosecutor training now makes sense why low gang charge rates persisted there for the last four years.
Incredibly, Boston even hosted a 2017 fundraiser for the now federally indicted Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby. She’s best known for aggressively prosecuting police officers. In attendance were now-Sen. Raphael Warnock, former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, then-Fulton County DA Paul Howard and several other Democrat district attorneys.
But back to the gang side of things. Every one of Georgia’s 159 counties have experienced escalating gang-related violence. According to a 2018 study by the Georgia Gang Investigators Association, our state contained at least 71,000 out of the purported 1.4 million gang members in the nation. Furthermore, federal and state law enforcement agencies estimated this counterculture was responsible for at least half of all violent crime.
Appallingly, not all gang prosecutions in Georgia were created equal due to rogue district attorneys treating their “jurisdiction-specific” gang cases differently. The gangs have certainly adapted and evolved accordingly by operating in multiple jurisdictions to avoid statewide prosecutions across judicial districts.
Unfortunately, the crisis worsened due to the rock-bottom gang charging which was visibly surfacing in some judicial circuits. This means that some prosecutors weren’t leveraging the powerful Street Gang and Terrorism Prevention Act refusing to attach its stiffer penalties while ignoring best anti-gang practices in the name of criminal justice reform.
Criminal justice experts, however, continue to dismantle this “justice reform strategy” because it directly correlates to upticks in violent crime. Consecutively exceeding annual murder rates tend to infer this too.
In response, almost every criminal justice agency in Georgia declared a state of war on criminal street gangs: the Governor, the State Attorney General, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, federal law enforcement, all three United States Attorneys, local police, and numerous other district attorneys. These partnerships evolved into the Georgia Anti-Gang Network across the state.
For years, though, Gov. Brian Kemp’s decisive actions to dismantle the 71,000 gang member invasion still faced insurmountable opposition from several in attendance at the aforementioned Mosby fundraiser. Principally, in 2020 a bipartisan group of district attorneys gutted stronger gang legislation Kemp proposed. They insisted gang prosecutions needed to be handled by each prosecutor differently and that aggressive gang prosecutions were already possible without stronger provisions.
Sadly, though, the comprehensive opposition to stronger gang prosecutions perpetuated a revolving door of violence on every law-abiding Georgian. Moreover, in 2020, Georgia saw stark decreases in gang prosecutions leading into a pandemic in addition to stark increases in prematurely prosecuting police misconduct. Go figure, since most of the DAs in attendance at the notorious 2017 Mosby fundraiser were still in office then.
Meanwhile, a recent example to learn from would be Fulton County DA Fani Willis, whose predecessor attended the Mosby event. Willis has dramatically transformed her office’s gang crime prosecutions since taking office in 2021. In addition to developing a powerhouse gang prosecution team, her office increased charging rates nearly 400 percent according to data obtained by the Georgia Gang Investigators Association. Willis and her team proposed enhancements to the gang laws and propelled bipartisan criminal justice reform in the name of public safety– although ultimately it was blocked by opponents in the 2022 General Assembly and even by some from the Superior Court bench.
In reality, the positive impact of aggressive, targeted gang prosecutions will always be universal regardless of jurisdiction or prosecutor. Dramatically lowered crime rates due to precisely just this in both New York and Oakland are proof. More crime will be prevented with less arrests overall as long as law enforcement, particularly the AG’s new Gang Prosecution Unit, turn the heat up on gang charging.
Bill Black is a Georgia attorney focusing on government investigations, cybersecurity, and privacy.
