Brutal murders, rotting corpses, broken elevators: Sen. Warnock’s slumlord apartments

Brutal murders, rotting corpses, broken elevators: Sen. Warnock’s slumlord apartments
Raphael Warnock (Image: YouTube screen grab)

The Free Beacon has a disturbing report on the grim conditions in apartments owned by Senator Raphael Warnock’s church. In essence, Warnock was a slumlord who allowed life-threatening conditions that led to the killing of a tenant by a maintenance man:

A maintenance man charged with brutally murdering a tenant. A sex offender who slept in the hallways. A dead body left in an apartment for days, found covered in flies.

These are just a few disturbing tales of the living conditions in apartments owned by Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D., Ga.) church, gathered from interviews with residents and hundreds of pages of Atlanta Police Department, Fire Department, and court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Atlanta police and firefighters have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences at MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020, the records show. Responding officers have been met with corpses and people trapped in elevators, as well as fights, burglaries, and car thefts. Both buildings are owned by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as senior pastor.

The Free Beacon also learned that Columbia Tower management hired a convicted murderer now charged with killing a female tenant who lived with him at Columbia Senior Residences, which is just across the street from the apartment building.

“They hired a guy who killed his girlfriend. He was the maintenance guy who was living in the senior building and he had a record already,” a resident told the Free Beacon in October. “Why would you hire a person like that who has keys to the building? I understand second chances, but this person already had a background in murdering someone, and you give him keys to our apartment?”

The records could pose problems for Warnock, who is seeking to defeat Republican challenger Herschel Walker amid rising crime. Crime is one of Atlanta voters’ main concerns heading into next week’s midterm elections, polls show. Homicides have increased in Atlanta by at least 60 percent since 2019, according to 11Alive News, citing Atlanta Police Department crime data.

Warnock has advocated for softer crime policies, including ending cash bail. He has criticized the American prison system as a “scandal on the soul of America,” and called to end “mass incarceration.”

Warnock has called for releasing many dangerous people without bail. He has said, “open up the jails.”

As the Free Beacon observes, “Emergency services have been called to MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020.”

In an undercover video, Raphael Warnock’s campaign staff said he “absolutely” would defund the police — “these suckers in blue” — although Warnock has avoided saying that publicly.

“So, he avoids using defunding the police, because he knows that the Republicans are gonna try to grab onto it and attack, right?” Derrick Bhole, finance assistant with the Warnock campaign, told an undercover investigative reporter. “But in reality, his whole platform with police reform is along the lines of the same people who are saying defund the police.”

Sasha Williams, director of small business development for the Warnock campaign, told a Project Veritas Action journalist that Warnock is “absolutely” on the side of activists who would defund the police. “But he is on our side for defunding these suckers in blue, these police?” the undercover journalist asked Williams in a conference call.

“Absolutely! Absolutely!” she replied. “You know, police officers are not all good, you know what I’m saying? Most of them are bad, we know that.”

Getting rid of the police would increase the crime rate. After Seattle slashed police funding, virtually all sexual assaults ended up going unpunished, and only 1% of all cases were solved. The New York Post reported on this in the news story, “Seattle does not have enough cops to investigate adult sex assaults after ‘defund the police”:

Nearly two years after Seattle led the way in defunding the police, the Washington city’s force is so understaffed, it did not assign a detective to investigate a single case of a sex assault on an adult last month, according to a report. The depleted department now only has four detectives in the squad handling sex assaults, nearly all dedicated to child abuse cases, local NPR station KUOW revealed.

Not a single sexual assault case involving an adult was given to a detective throughout the whole of last month, aside from any that already had arrests, the outlet said, citing documentation from a whistleblower. “The Seattle Police Department sexual assault unit is not at all investigating adult sexual assault reports or cases unless there was an arrest,” one police department source told the station. The lack of manpower even means people reporting sex assaults are sometimes routed to an automated telephone hotline designed to handle non-urgent crimes such as stolen checks, the report said.

Seattle’s council in 2020 voted to slash the police budget and cut officers’ jobs as the city saw some of the most troubling Black Lives Matter protests in the US, including a deadly cop-free “autonomous zone.” The 1,281 deployable officers the force had at the end of 2019 were slashed to just 958 at the end of last year, after the cuts, KUOW said.

Higher police spending tends to reduce crime. Europe spends more on police than the U.S., and has a lower crime rate. America already has far fewer police per homicide than other Western countries, as criminology professor Justin Nix has noted.

Warnock’s desire to slash incarceration would raise the crime rate by leaving dangerous criminals fee to roam the streets. Most inmates in state prisons are there for “violent offenses,” not drugs. As a lawyer argues:

Releasing dangerous criminals increases the crime rate, both by freeing the particular offender being released to commit crimes again, and by reducing disincentives to commit crime in the first place. That reduces the deterrent effect of the criminal justice system.

Studies show that keeping offenders in prison longer deters crimes from being committed, saving innocent lives. For example, California’s murder rate fell after the passage of Proposition 8. It increased penalties for repeat offenders who commit willful homicide and other major crimes. The violent crimes covered by Proposition 8 [such as murder, robbery, and rape] fell a lot after it became law, especially compared to crimes not covered by Proposition 8.

Warnock once praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for supposedly opening black preachers’ eyes to the fact that Christianity is a “white religion.”

LU Staff

LU Staff

Promoting and defending liberty, as defined by the nation’s founders, requires both facts and philosophical thought, transcending all elements of our culture, from partisan politics to social issues, the workings of government, and entertainment and off-duty interests. Liberty Unyielding is committed to bringing together voices that will fuel the flame of liberty, with a dialogue that is lively and informative.

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