InTucker Magazine

On the Beat with Lt. Schoeppner -August 2021

Lt. D.G. Schoeppner is Tucker’s liaison to the DeKalb County Police Department and can be followed at facebook.com/dgschoeppner or emailed at dgschoeppner@dekalbcountyga.gov.

I’m sure that most of you are aware of the civil unrest which affected many large cities last year. I’m also sure that you’re aware that Atlanta is one of those cities. This partly has resulted in an increase of violent crime. It has become virtually impossible to look at any news media and not see something about it. One aspect of this that is truly concerning is the number of road rage incidents. This month we are going to talk about these increases and what drives them.

So far this year Tucker has seen about 33 more aggravated assaults than the same time last year. Some of that can be attributed to the move from FBR to NIBRS, which I talked about at length in my December 2020 article. Of course, that doesn’t account for the entire increase. The cold, hard truth is that violent crime is up, even if it isn’t up quite as much as the number may suggest. The next logical question is why is this happening?

Violent crime tends to be driven by three main factors. The first is domestic violence. Many of our aggravated assaults start as disputes between spouses (both current and estranged) and couples that live together. Domestic violence has always been a problem, but recently these disputes have escalated to higher degrees of violence. The next common type of violent crime we see are disputes which escalate. In most cases, the parties in these disputes know one another. Just like domestic violence, these incidents have always occurred to some extent. Also, just like domestic violence, these incidents have recently escalated to greater degrees of violence than in previous years. The third most common type of violent crime incident is road rage. These incidents traditionally have been words exchanged and maybe a hand gesture or two. Lately, they have more regularly escalated to firearms being pointed and sometimes shots being fired.

I find the road rage incidents to be particularly concerning because they tend to be encounters between strangers. This typically means that identifying a suspect is far harder than incidents involving couples or acquaintances. The result is that these cases go unsolved far more often. This is why I would implore everyone to exercise patience with your fellow drivers. Road rage violence is never justified, but being right in a road encounter will be little consolation if you end up shot. That’s especially true if there isn’t enough evidence left behind to identify and catch the offender.