After recent gun violence at a Statesboro apartment complex that left a 17-year-old dead, two other teenagers wounded and a 14-year-old charged with murder, the Bulloch County NAACP's MLK weekend Community Conversations event quickly focused on concerns about criminal justice and protecting and nurturing youth.

About 50 people attended Community Conversations, which began at 1 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 18, and lasted about two hours. The Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Parade had originally been slated to begin 1 p.m., but the Bulloch NAACP and its organizing committee canceled the parade a few days in advance because of forecast rain, and indeed the weather outside was drizzly when "Conversations" began inside Statesboro City Hall.

Yevette McCall, president of the Bulloch County Branch of the NAACP, said, "The decision about the parade was tough," and remarked that the crowd for the conversations event was not as large as she had hoped.

"But guess what? .. I'm here, and I'm here for the people, here for the conversation," McCall said. "I'm here because I do believe every solution starts with a conversation."

She mentioned the shooting, which occurred Jan. 14 at Pinewood Manor Apartments on Packinghouse Road in Statesboro, as well as the accidental drowning last week of two young men in Screven County as tragedies affecting the extended community.

Adrianne McCollar, advisor to the Bulloch NAACP Youth Council and wife of the mayor, noted that other events "lifting up Dr. King's legacy" had been held the previous week, including the Jan. 11 Youth Prayer Breakfast.

The young man who died in the Jan.  14 shooting was a Statesboro High School student and a friend of her son, she said.

"So when we got the news of what had happened, it always hits us in a very personal way, but it hit us in an especially personal way, knowing the young man who lost his life," McCollar said.

Calling for "courageous conversations," she asked participants to share their feelings about the tragedy and what they would like to see done as answers to violence.

Arriving in the room, Mayor Jonathan McCollar reviewed how events had progressed from when the police chief and city manager informed him the night of the shooting through news of the arrest a day later.

"What we found out at the scene was that it was all young people," the mayor said. "What we've come to find out today is that, that age range is from 14 to 17 years of age of the individuals involved."

First in 11 months

Both he and McCall noted that the homicide came only a couple of weeks short of a full year since the previous homicide within the Statesboro city limits.

"And so there are some things that we need to be very clear about," Mayor McCollar said. "Anytime something like this happens, this is a tragic event overall, but crime is not bad in Statesboro, violence is not bad in Statesboro."

He means that the violent crime rate in Statesboro is low in comparison to many larger cities.

"Every time something like this happens … somebody without fail is going to say, 'We're turning into Savannah.' " McCollar said. After asking how many people in the room had seen this on social media and watching many hands go up, he said this "turning into Savannah" claim is "a lie. We're nowhere near that."

Savannah has about 147,000 people, which makes it about four times the size of Statesboro, he noted, and pointed out that Statesboro over the past 15-plus years has averaged three to four homicides per year.

Savannah comparison

"On a per capita situation, in order for Statesboro's crime rate to be equivalent, on the violence side of the house, to Savannah's, that means we would have to have 12 homicides a year. Statesboro is nowhere near that," McCollar said.

He didn't cite an actual count for Savannah. In 2022, the last full year for which the Savannah Police Department's crime statistics were easily found online, Savannah had 32 homicides. So, the comparable rate for Statesboro, for that year, would have been about eight homicides.

Both cities' crime rates have varied considerably from year to year, and Savannah's are often combined with those for Chatham County.

McCollar also commented that the number of "young people that live in at-risk situations" in Bulloch County is "entirely too big for one organization, one individual, to do all the work" in prevention efforts.

"And so as we're having this conversation, what we're hoping is that what's in the back of everybody's mind is that they can do a little bit more. …," he said. "Whatever our talents are, we need to be working in that for our young people."

In this regard, the mayor criticized certain priorities of the national leadership.

"Everything that we do in our society touches our children, and I want you guys to know that we live in a country right now that, while we're seeing children shot in grocery stores, we're seeing our children shot in their schools, our country came together to ban TikTok — to ban TikTok. Meanwhile, we've got assault rifles in our children's hands."

County SPLOST priority

He also questioned a priority set by Bulloch County leaders for division of the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax revenue.

"Locally, your city was trying to negotiate with the county to build a youth facility for our children, and what we asked for was $15 million. We had an individual that's willing to buy five acres of land to donate to it. The county said 'no,' but instead, they're going to spend $120 million to lock our black and brown kids up with a new jail expansion and a new courthouse."

In the negotiations, city officials didn't say, "Don't build a jail, don't build a courthouse," but only asked to redirect $15 million out of the $120 million to build a recreation "facility for the children," he said.

Madeline Ryan Smith, who received about 30% of the votes last fall as a Democratic Party challenger to Republican State Rep. Butch Parrish, said that citizens who want realistic solutions to gun violence should speak up to Parrish, Rep. Lehman Franklin, Gov. Brian Kemp and other lawmakers.

"Arming every teacher in Georgia is not realistic, and it's not safe, and that's just a fact," she said. "So if we want to have realistic solutions, then constituents like us need to be part of the conversation."

More policing?

McCall said she had seen a lot of calls for more policing and that people should be careful what they ask for.

"Statistically, more policing really just creates more criminals, because that just means they're going to police your community harder," she said.

Dr. Akiv Dawson, assistant professor in the Criminal Justice and Criminology Department at Georgia Southern, said she was shocked when she heard about the deadly shooting involving teenagers.

"But I think I hear that story so often that maybe it didn't shock my conscience in the way that it should, because it's not just here in Bulloch County. It's all over Georgia. It's all over the United States," Dawson said. "We do have a gun problem."

She agreed to some extent with McCall's previous statement.

"You can go to more policing, and it's going to create some collateral outcomes," Dawson said. "But what it's not going to do is address whatever the root problem is that's leading to the youth homicide problem: access to guns; I saw earlier you were talking about poverty, unemployment."

Also asked to speak, Renata Newbill-Jallow, chief public defender in the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit, noted that the circuit was the last in Georgia to obtain a juvenile court judge, around 2015. Until then, the four counties had juvenile cases tried by their regular adult-court judges and prosecutors.

Now the circuit has a juvenile court judge, and most criminal cases involving defendants ages 13–16 in Georgia are tried in juvenile court. However, the 14-year-old charged in the Jan. 14 shooting will automatically be tried as an adult because murder and aggravated assault are two of the seven violent crimes handled this way under Georgia law, said Newbill-Jallow.

In some cases, defense attorneys can get the case "kicked down" to juvenile court, but this is rare. She also spoke of efforts in the Georgia Legislature, which have not succeeded so far, to have the cases assigned first to juvenile courts unless prosecutors successfully petition to move them to adult court, as is done in some states, and to raise the top age for juvenile detention to 17. 

"It's not the lawyer, it's the people that we elected" who make these decisions, she said.

Job creation

Saturday's participants also linked the youth and justice topics to poverty and economic development.

City Manager Charles Penny announced that Anna Chafin from RISE, the Regional Industry Support Enterprise, was scheduled to speak Tuesday, Jan. 21, during the mayor and council's 3:30 p.m. work session and briefly at the start of the 5:30 p.m. council regular meeting. He said she would talk about job opportunities being created by Hyundai Motorgroup Metaplant and its supplier industries in the region.

"We're talking about over 16,000 jobs that are going to be available to people who don't have that college degree….," Penny said. "We still want people to go to college, but kids can come out of high school today and come out with a job making almost $60,000 a year."