Speakers from across the spectrum of policing, victim advocacy, defense and prosecution emphasized education on consequences and accountability, among other measures, during the Violence Prevention Forum hosted Saturday morning by One Boro.
The One Boro Commission is a study and advocacy group commissioned by Statesboro’s mayor and council and made up of volunteers from a number of organizations and areas of concern. About 30 people showed up for the forum held in the social hall of Trinity Episcopal Church. One Boro held a forum on the topic of violence prevention as far back as March 2021, originally intending them to be annual events. Another organization, the Bulloch County NAACP, hosted a similar community discussion in January of this year. But One Boro itself did not hold an anti-violence forum in 2024 or in 2025 until now, Adam Dean, chair of One Boro’s Violence Prevention Subcommittee, acknowledged.
“We missed it last year, but we just have new members on One Boro, so the violence prevention subcommittee was revamped and then we started to bring this back to our community,” Dean said Saturday.
Now, the subcommittee’s members hope to organize another forum this fall and to have participants follow up in other ways.
“I hope that the community realizes that it takes more than just law enforcement, it takes all of us, to prevent any type of violence, and so we want to develop an action plan that the violence subcommittee will undertake,” Dean said. “Then will kind of monitor that action plan to see how we’re doing.”
The forum comprised a series of spoken presentations, some with accompanying slide shows and some without, by leaders or representatives of the Statesboro Police Department, the Georgia Southern University Public Safety Division with emphasis on its Police Department, the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit Public Defenders Office, the circuit District Attorney’s Office and its Victim Services team, and The Teal House, also known as the Statesboro Regional Sexual Assault and Children’s Advocacy Center.
Statesboro Chief of Police Charles “Mike” Broadhead began his presentation with some graphs of long-term trends in crime statistics. These were based in the SPD’s 2024 annual report, with comparisons to all years back to 2014. Some of this same information was reported by the Statesboro Herald in February when he presented the report to City Council, but Broadhead added a few observations about 2025 so far.
“Statistics can be very misleading when you look at them day-to-day,” he said Saturday, “and so I really like to look at, at least 10 years of data to look at trend lines and see how are we doing overall as it relates to some of these crimes.”
Homicide, robbery, aggravated assault/battery and rape are the four categories of violent crimes tracked in the reports.
Four and a half years have passed since the year with Statesboro’s highest number of homicides in decades. In 2020, also the first year of the COVID pandemic and the partial shutdown of workplaces and official public gatherings, nine homicides were reported within Statesboro and a couple more in other parts of Bulloch County. But as Broadhead predicted in 2021, that unusually high body count did not become “the new normal.”
From 2012 through 2019, Statesboro had from one to four homicides reported annually, with an average of 2.4 a year. After the nine killings in the city limits 2020, there were three in 2021, three in 2022, four in 2023, and three again last year.
Rapes and robberies
After the number of robberies reported annually in Statesboro peaked with a total of 50 back in 2017, the incidence has declined most years, to 25 robberies in 2021, just 12 in 2022, resurging to 24 robberies in 2023, and 18 in 2024.
Seven rapes were reported as such to Statesboro police in 2024. Past numbers were 12 rapes in 2019, then 16 in 2020 and 25 in 2021, 14 in 2022 and six in 2023. Although the trend the last few years may sound encouraging, Broadhead said he believes the number is “wildly inaccurate,” because “the vast majority of legitimate sexual assaults are not reported to law enforcement.”
Anyone who has been a victim of sexual abuse or assault or has knowledge of any such incident is advised to call 911 or contact The Teal House, Statesboro Regional Sexual Assault and Child Advocacy Center, located at 209 S. College St., Statesboro, GA 30458. The phone number is (912) 489-6060. The 24-Hour Crisis Line is (866) 489-2225.
After the number of robberies reported annually in Statesboro peaked with a total of 50 back in 2017, the incidence has declined most years, to 25 robberies in 2021, just 12 in 2022, resurging to 24 robberies in 2023, and 18 in 2024.
“You know, when I first got here in 2017 we were having a lot of home invasion robberies,” Broadhead told City Council earlier this year. “You can see that we as a community have fought back against that problem. That’s been fairly steadily declining over the last several years.”
Safer apartments
The cooperation of the owners and managers of certain apartment complexes in doing five things has helped to drive down crime in those properties, he said.
“We know what drives down crime in multi-family housing,” he said. “So, (1) we need to have perimeter control, access to the property controlled. (2) We have to have video cameras up and we have to let everyone know about it. (3) We have to have adequate lighting. (4) We have to have active management that won’t tolerate drug and gang offenses on their property; (5) they have to screen people properly,” Broadhead said. (Numerals were added by reporter.)
He gave the example of the former Campus Crossing complex, which police officers once nicknamed “Campus Crossfire” because of the number of shooting incidents, but the owners and management made security improvements and renamed the complex.
“Today it’s called The Axis and we’re never there, never, because they did those five things,” Broadhead said.
Guns from unlocked cars
He also included statistics on property crimes. Gun thefts are a property crime that can supply tools for violence, and Broadhead as been noting for several years that Statesboro has a problem with guns being stolen from unlocked cars. He displayed a bar graph, with vertical bars in blue on the left for the number of guns reported stolen from locked vehicles paired with bars in lighter blue or teal on the right for guns stolen from unlocked vehicles for every year from 2019 to 2024. In the peak year, 2020, there were 53 guns stolen from unlocked vehicles and just five stolen from locked vehicles.
The number of guns stolen from unlocked vehicles has been far higher than the number from locked vehicles every year. In 2023, there were 50 guns stolen from unlocked vehicles and just two from locked vehicles. In 2024, the count of firearms stolen from unlocked vehicles dropped to 39, but none were reported stolen from locked vehicles.
“I don’t know if you were aware of this, but when you buy a car, it comes with locks on it,” Broadhead quipped, eliciting some laughter. “So for us, it’s just an education piece, if we can just convince people of two things: lock your car, and lock the gun that’s inside your car.”
Police here seldom to never find criminals roaming parking lots with bolt cutters and prybars breaking into cars.
“They’re just not doing that,” Broadhead said. “They’re just checking every door handle until they get an open car, and then they rifle through and if they find a gun, off they go.”
Teaching consequences
Chief Public Defender Renata Newbill-Jallow also suggested an educational effort at crime prevention, but hers involves educating young people about legal consequences of their actions. With just seven attorneys to represent defendants in felony and juvenile cases who cannot afford private attorneys throughout the Ogeechee Circuit’s four counties, the Public Defenders Office has limited time to spend on prevention and no funding for a social worker, she noted.
About 80% of defendants from arrests by the city or university police or the Sheriff’s Office will come to the Public Defenders Office, and most defendants accused of crimes involving firearms are between 18 and 25 years old, she said.
“For those of you who are members of student organizations, whether they are youth or even Georgia Southern, I think it might be important to reach out to us to come and talk to your class, and let me explain to you why,” Newbill-Jallow said. “Some of it is, do they know the consequences? … The majority of students we get as clients from Georgia Southern, it’s for possession of marijuana. It may be a little bag, and then they’re charged with criminal intent to distribute. They are blown away, because they have no idea that’s a felony.”
Similarly, with the “entering auto” crime involving unlocked vehicles, the public defenders’ clients often insist they “didn’t break in … the car was open,” but “then we have to explain to them, again, that’s a felony,” she said.
“So, do I think knowing the consequences is going to prevent all of this? I don’t,” Newbill-Jallow said. “But I do think knowing the consequences could help.”
The forum concluded with a breakout to small group discussions, who listed possible goals for the action plan.