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Originally published at The Georgia Record.
A video from August 2023 is circulating on social media again as Chatham County Sheriff Richard Coleman rolls out a new gang enforcement unit. In it, Savannah Mayor Van Johnson answers a local TV reporter's question about gangs after two violent weekends in the city.
WSAV aired the exchange shown in the video above in August 2023. Johnson said, “We do not have a gang problem. We have an issue with young people in that community. They don’t necessarily fit the definition of what we have as established gangs, but we have some in this community.”
On October 1, Sheriff Coleman took a very different approach. He announced a new gang enforcement unit inside the Chatham County Sheriff's Office. WTOC reported that Coleman had intelligence pointing to 18 active gangs. Of those, four were tied to the Crips, five to the Bloods, and one to the Vice Lords. The rest were homegrown street crews, many of them based on Savannah's east and west sides. Some of the gangs he described were named after housing complexes.
Coleman's announcement regarding the "Gang Enforcement Unit" followed up on the September 26 shootout near a downtown Bay Street parking lot. WTOC reported on the incident in which ShotSpotter detected at least 27 rounds of ammunition being fired. Police were called to the scene and collected 64 spent casings. Officers subsequently took a person of interest into custody over the shooting, which Coleman described as gang-related. Mayor Johnson, however, said no confirmation existed that gang activity had taken place in the shooting and that the city would not be presenting speculation as fact.
Johnson’s comments to the Savannah Business Journal were more careful than his 2023 line. He told the paper that there have been gangs in the city for generations. But that doesn’t mean every fight between a few people constitutes gang violence, he said. The kind of activity that does constitute gang violence, Johnson said, is activity that can be proven through an investigation to meet specific elements of the crime as defined by the state of Georgia. Police Chief Lenny Gunther, speaking to the same paper, said, “Of course we have a gang problem.” He said it extends into the middle schools of Savannah and beyond.
District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones told WJCL that Chatham County has a problem with what she called neighborhood hybrid gangs, and that it has been growing for a decade. Jones added that prosecutors need hard evidence in order to prosecute gangs for their crimes.
In the meantime, Mayor Johnson is getting pushback from some city officials, including District 3 Alderwoman Linda Wilder-Bryan. “We’re not going to keep saying that there are no gangs in Savannah because there are,” she said.
Alderman Detric Leggett agrees with his colleague. “To say that we don’t have a gang issue, just look around,” he told the station. The mayor’s office said that he was unavailable for comment on Friday.
The unit of Attorney General Chris Carr, meanwhile, is busy prosecuting cases in Chatham County. On September 2, for example, the Gang Prosecution Unit secured an indictment of six defendants in a 20 pound carfentanil drug trafficking case. The indictment alleges that several of the defendants in the case are affiliated with the Waters Ave. Crew, a street gang based in East Savannah that has ties to the Piru Bloods. The charges against the six are allegations of crime until proven in a court of law by the state. Coleman says Carr has promised his full support. The unit says it has secured more than 140 convictions statewide since 2022.
The mayor says no one is pretending Savannah has never had gangs. The real question of importance to the voters of Savannah is what the city calls them, how long it takes to admit it, and whether the Sheriff, Chief of Police, District Attorney and aldermen who live with the violence are all wrong.
