At the City Council meeting on Monday, September 12, the City of Sugar Hill finally publicly unveiled its plans for a full-fledged Department of Public Safety - a “marshall service,” with a City Marshall, four assistant marshalls and an administrative assistant to be hired, and patrol cars.
Sugar Hill has real concerns about crime, which is a serious, potentially life and death issue. Law enforcement is also a serious, potentially life and death issue. These are arguably the most important issues any local government will ever handle. As such, they deserve public discussion. MUCH public discussion. They’ve gotten none.
Why is that? It seems the City could see only one solution they wanted to pursue: establishing their own law enforcement agency. They weren’t sure the public would be as enthusiastic, and they didn’t want public feedback to get in their way. All that is obvious.
However, the real reasons they wanted to shut out the community and only pursue this solution are anyone’s guess. We’ll never truly know, because they can’t be trusted to open up now. But, the secretive behavior rules out any good reasons.
My suspicions revolve around a few things. I’m going to put them out there, because we still need to discuss public safety and law enforcement, and now the City’s poor handling of these issues has become part of the issue.
First of all, it could just be a matter of ego coupled with incompetence. It was their idea, so they thought that automatically made it the best idea. Elected officials see themselves as better and smarter than anyone else, so it never occurred to them that the public might have some valuable ideas about addressing safety issues. We have intelligent people in our community. We have actual law enforcement and security professionals from multiple jurisdictions in our community who have relevant insight. It was foolish to shut them out.
Second, Sugar Hill has some legitimate security issues that easily become public knowledge when dealt with by professional law enforcement agencies like the Gwinnett County Police Department, because those agencies are transparent and accountable to the public. The City of Sugar Hill has issues with transparency and accountability overall. There have been some serious incidents in Sugar Hill over the past year, some on City property. The City has been very quiet about them. While I can understand why anyone would not want to say much (lawsuits), it seems odd not to say anything at all.
Third, a problem with City-owned property is that it opens the City up to lawsuits. That should have been considered BEFORE we built the e-Center and started building miles of Greenway. Perhaps it was, but the City never mentioned that cost to the public. They also glossed over the cost of ongoing security for these places and dismissed citizens who brought it up. Either the City deliberately didn’t tell people because those were other cases where they were afraid an informed public might reject their plans, or they hadn’t thought of that issue before and now need to cover themselves.
Fourth, I suspect the City may see this whole thing as a long-term investment in a revenue source. While it is expensive to set up and maintain a law enforcement agency, using law enforcement for revenue in municipalities is a thing, across the nation and in Georgia specifically. It’s incredibly misguided and potentially dangerous for both the public and officers.
Regardless of the reason, we needed to allow everyone to have a voice in the decision-making process. Everybody needed to be heard. We still wouldn’t have reached a perfect consensus or gotten a solution everyone liked. We could have easily gotten a solution that MORE people would have liked, and I think a better solution would have arisen out of many voices.