Providing Safe Housing for Police Recruits
Atlanta Police Department protects Unity Place, a residence for recruits, with Axis cameras, door controller and reader. The apartment complex was primarily built to house personnel, but also to help deter crime and foster closer community relations.
Unity Place: affordable apartments for recruits
When a police department accepts a new recruit, one of the first decisions that recruit faces is where to live during their academy and field training. If that city is Atlanta, finding affordable housing can be a real struggle. The urgency of the situation came to a head when a recruit was found sleeping in their car because they couldn’t afford rent.
“A modest one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta costs more than half the salary a recruit receives during training,” explains Officer Hantz Jean-Pierre of the Atlanta Police Department and resident supervisor for Unity Place.
Concerned that the shortage of affordable housing would hamper the police department’s ability to attract quality candidates, the Atlanta Police Foundation proposed providing recruits with temporary, low-cost housing for the duration of their training. And thus the idea for Unity Place was born.
The Foundation acquired an abandoned house in a Westside neighborhood, bulldozed the building and erected a new three-story property to house a resident officer and up to 29 recruits. “Each recruit has their own furnished apartment that includes a bedroom and bathroom,” explains Curtislene Bass, director of officer support programs for the Atlanta Police Foundation. “They share a common living room, kitchen and a washer/dryer with two, three or four other recruits depending on the configuration of that apartment. There’s also a community room, weight room, storage room, parking lot and patio area that everyone enjoys.”
Recruits live at Unity Place for about a year as they attend classes at the police academy and undergo up to 12 weeks of field training. Officer Jean-Pierre estimates the rent recruits pay to reside at Unity Place is about half of what they’d pay for an unsubsidized apartment in the city.
Officer Ross Bettis, a former resident at Unity Place, says Unity Place played into his decision to apply to the Atlanta Police Department. “The low monthly rent was a big benefit for me,” states Officer Bettis. “I was able to save enough to afford a new car when my old hand-me-down car that I drove up to Atlanta with died.”
Keeping Unity Place a safe place to live
Because protests and riots had been staged at other police properties throughout the city and become targets of vandalism, the Atlanta Police Department wanted comprehensive security measures incorporated into the property to safeguard their recruits.
“We intentionally put Unity Place in a challenged neighborhood in an effort to improve safety there. There is the additional benefit of improving department culture and fostering community relations via this neighborhood immersion,” explains Marshall Freeman, deputy chief administration officer for the Atlanta Police Department. “Given what was happening at our other police facilities we made building security a priority.”
The building perimeter is surrounded by a mix of Axis fixed dome and panoramic cameras connected to the city’s Fusus real-time crime center platform. This allows the cameras to be incorporated into Atlanta’s citywide public-private surveillance network so they can be monitored from the police department’s Video Integration Center, by officers on patrol and by Officer Jean-Pierre in his role as resident supervisor of Unity Place.
“The cameras give us full visibility in both directions along the street as well as the parking lot and patio area,” shares Greg McNiff, Vice President of Programs for the Atlanta Police Foundation. Video analytics like AXIS Loitering Guard and AXIS Motion Guard installed on the cameras alert the police to suspicious activity like individuals lingering outside Unity Place late at night.
For an added layer of security, an AXIS door controller and reader restricts access to the property so only authorized residents can enter the building using key fobs.
Because many of our police sites have been actively targeted by anarchists and protestors, Unity Place security was a big concern for us. The Axis cameras give us full visibility in and around the property and so far, we haven’t had a single incident.
The value of cops on the block
“Unity Place isn’t a barracks or a dorm, it’s a recruit’s home,” says Curtislene Bass. “Living next door to one another gives recruits time to bond with each other, share meals, develop camaraderie and esprit de corps for the Atlanta Police Department.”
As one of the first class of recruits to live in Unity Place, Officer Bettis reflected on how embedding in the community has gradually changed the neighborhood. “When I first got here, I’d often see a group of guys hanging out on a particular corner, or homeless people wandering the street, or possibly dealing drugs,” shares Officer Bettis. “Now that they know we live here, those problems have really dwindled.”
The police department also encourages recruits to actively engage with their neighbors like helping to plant a garden or join in a community clean-up program. “We want Unity Place to be more of a “cop-on-the-block” presence in the community,” states Curtislene Bass. “It affords us an opportunity to build trust in the police and forge a better partnership with the residents of our city.”
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