Guns or gangs: What’s Savannah’s real problem?

A grandmother is dead. Three young men have been arrested. And the thousands of families who frequent Savannah’s Oglethorpe Mall are traumatized.

Yet even as police continued investigating what caused the gunfight in the mall ahead of the Independence Day weekend, politics have infected the tragedy. 

Less than 24 hours after the violence, Chatham County Commissioner Dean Kicklighter, a Republican who represents the Pooler area, was the first local official to weigh in on the question some area residents had already started debating on social media: Does Savannah have a gang problem?  

Kicklighter declared that the shootout allegedly between two groups of Black young men was gang violence. He called out Savannah’s Democratic leadership, who support tougher gun laws rather than the views by Georgia’s Republican-led legislature on tougher criminal sentencing, as the way to make communities safer.

Kicklighter was emphatic about the cause and solution to local crime. 

“Savannah does not have a gun problem, a group problem, or an issue defined by race. We have a gang violence problem,” he said. “Until our leaders are willing to acknowledge and address the root cause—gang activity—our community will remain at risk, regardless of how incidents are labeled or described.”

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican running for governor in next year’s election, piled on the criticism. His office has previously investigated and indicted gang-related crimes in the Savannah area with Savannah law enforcement. Funding for a new Savannah-area state prosecutor dedicated to gang-related crime started on July 1.

Still, Carr used the occasion of the shooting for his own swipe at Savannah, the second time in a month that he’s targeted the city’s Democratic leadership as out of step with his views on criminal justice.

“Savannah has a gang problem but local leaders refuse to admit it. They refuse to even use the word ‘gang,’” Carr wrote on his X account last Wednesday.

During Carr’s tenure as attorney general, Georgia has strengthened the punishments called for under the state’s stringent gang-related criminal statutes, as Gov. Brian Kemp’s administration made gang prosecutions a signature priority. 

The state’s emergency management agency has disbursed millions of dollars in gang prosecution funds to police and prosecutors across the state, including in Macon and Columbus. Carr’s office has not said when Savannah’s special prosecutor will start.

For his part, Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s statements about the motives behind the mall shooting have evolved over the previous days. 

After Kicklighter’s post gained traction on Facebook, Johnson said it was too early to know what role gangs played in the violence. By the end of the week the mayor had announced that the 20-year-old suspect arrested Friday and other suspects “have gang affiliations,” adding that “further investigation will be necessary to determine if this incident was gang involved.”

Savannah police added their own statement over the weekend that matched the mayor’s. 

The Current has previously reported that crimes prosecuted in the state that often get described as “gang-related” do not necessarily mean that gangs caused the crime. Those statistics generally mean something else — that an offender or victim was a gang member or an active associate of a gang, so the underlying crime whether driving under the influence or illegal possession of a weapon can be recorded as “gang-related,” according to Jose Ramirez, the head of the state’s gang violence investigators association.

Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones — the area official with the duty to prosecute crime — issued two statements of her own over the weekend expressing frustration about the confusion arising from what she termed an unprofessional communications strategy.

“Gunmen and shooters should never be more coordinated than community leaders,” Jones said in a statement. “When leaders become more concerned with power and politics over people, citizens suffer. In times like these, nothing is more critical than protecting the criminal justice process and preserving public safety.”

She added that if evidence is presented to her office to support gang-affiliated charges, then she would not hesitate to bring those charges. Until then, she said “bad messaging” should be avoided.