What is behind a huge drop in the murder rate this year?
Last summer, Atlanta Police Department Capt. Ralph Woolfolk accepted a devastating truth: Far too many Atlantans were killing each other, and they weren’t letting up.
As murder rates spiked in 2020 and remained at levels not seen since the early 1990s, Captain Woolfolk, the head of the city’s homicide division, hatched a plan.
On an early July 2022 evening, a new task force fanned out across the city for the first time. The mission of Operation Heatwave was to use crime data and word on the street not just to identify trouble spots but also to pinpoint residents at particular risk of engaging in gun violence.
Spanning various agencies, the unit had a dual purpose: a hard line on “guns, gangs, and drugs,” but a gentler side, too. On every corner, the word
