DA Shalena Jones meets with business owners, community members to discuss crime impacting Savannah

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones met for an hour-long open meeting about how prosecutions work and the efforts needed to build a safer Savannah.

The sit-down happened Tuesday morning at the AC Hotel on River Street downtown, near businesses and residents that are being impacted by shootings and break-ins.

Jones wears two hats every day. She’s the DA, which is a significant part of the criminal justice system, but she’s also a community member like everyone else, and wanted to have an open forum for people to share concerns and potential solutions.

“If you imagine the criminal justice system as a machine, there are multiple gears inside that machine that make that machine work,” she said.

The Savannah Downtown Business Association says it addresses key issues like crime, panhandling, taxation, and sustainability to support the long-term prosperity of the area.

Topics included how they handle repeat offenders and how having resources available for them outside a jail cell could help. She also shared insights about how a jail cell doesn’t help those experiencing homelessness, but the sentiment stays the same on that front- resources need to be made easily available.

They also went over the regulations and laws surrounding expungement records and ways the DA’s office is working to improve its own crime data tracking systems.

Another talking segment involved the number of court cases, the pace at which they move through the court system, and how the COVID pandemic impacted those.

Another was the possibility of gangs.

“You have a First Amendment right to wear a red flag or a blue one or to throw up whatever signs you want to. What is a crime is involving yourself in gang activity.”

Jones said there are underlying criminal enterprises like human trafficking, sex trafficking, and/or money laundering that show the DA’s office that a group of individuals constitutes a gang that can therefore then be judged as such. Violence brings those underlying enterprises to the forefront.

She said, however, she’s not seeing that with kids in Savannah, that it’s a culture of beefing with one another, with accessibility to guns nearby.

“Pockets and pockets of neighborhood kids who fight with each other and have access to guns that they should not have, and they’re driven by a culture that is related to beef and violence and identity, but there is no uniformed, underlying criminal enterprise.”

Still, as the DA, she said she’s not the authority to say whether there’s a gang problem or not.

“To me, our public wants to feel safe; they don’t care what you call it,” she said. “My job is to address the evidence that’s presented in each case and to do what I can to see if it fits within the law.”

She said her office and police have been working closer than ever after the Oglethorpe Mall shooting in July, crediting them for increasing their presence downtown.

READ MORE: Two of six suspects in Oglethorpe Mall shooting appear in court; Case advances to Superior Court

“Sometimes it takes a tragedy to get to change.”

WATCH: District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones weighs in on Oglethorpe Mall shooting

But the underlying issue with kids having guns needs to be solved.

“With the proliferation of guns that we have in our community, they’re giving these things out like Skittles. Where are they coming from? How are our kids getting access to them?”