Darien Long is gone but not forgotten at Metro Mall

The day before Darien Long, the Internet’s favorite “kick ass mall cop,” got arrested by Atlanta Police for kicking too much ass inside downtown Atlanta’s Metro Mall, an altercation of a different sort took place between Long and an upset customer.

Unlike the patrons or loiterers stunned by Long’s Taser gun in videos that have amassed millions of YouTube and WorldStarHipHop views over the past two months, this particular customer was dapper and articulate. “All the notoriety you brought to this place is destroying these businesses,” he yelled, catching Long off-guard in the middle of the mall. The Duluth resident, who’s been a Metro Mall customer for 10 years, had come to purchase a knockoff bag for his mother, and there were none to be found. The stalls that typically sold knockoffs were now closed in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon.

“I worked pretty hard for these people to have somebody come and tell me I’m responsible for their fucking problems,” Long said later.

Earlier that day, word began circulating among the media that the celebrated onsite manager of Metro Mall had lost his job. His last day would have been Easter Sunday, March 31, if he hadn’t been hemmed up by APD after allegedly tackling a mall patron without provocation on March 21.

In a matter of weeks, Long had fallen from folk hero to cautionary tale, with no immediate job prospects at press time. In a sense, he brought it all on himself. The police raids that followed his highly publicized videos meant to expose what he called “Atlanta’s Downtown Criminal Culture” resulted in the loss of two Metro Mall tenants who were busted for selling counterfeit goods. To make up for the shortage, Metro Mall’s upper management chose to fire Long, he says. It’s a weird lesson in karma for a guy so thoroughly committed to carrying out justice on his day job, even if his efforts have been proven overly aggressive and antagonistic.

The story of Metro Mall is bigger than Long, though, and bigger than the mall located at 73 Peachtree St. It’s about the stalled efforts over the years to revitalize downtown, and how Long’s videos could serve as a catalyst to renew that conversation among the city’s power brokers. But it’s also about the cultural marginalization that occurs when those who will be impacted most by the change to come are excluded from the conversation. All of which begs the question: Is downtown dangerous or endangered?

A week later, another passionate dialogue takes place inside the Metro Mall. This time, it’s between the owner of 911 Hair Braiding & Styles and a barber who rents a chair there.

“We have enough negativity,” the barber, Jay Stylezs, says to owner Francisca Shokane after she begins telling stories of prostitutes who openly solicited johns in the mall before Long started the job a year ago. “Let’s make the people believe it’s OK to come down here and patronize us,” he continues. It’s the fearful perception of crime stoked by the media, he argues, rather than the culture itself, that’s hurting downtown businesses.

It’s easy to make generalizations about the people who populate south downtown’s streets and sidewalks. Walk down Peachtree between Marietta and Mitchell streets, and a tableau emerges of Atlanta’s hand-to-mouth hustler class — from panhandlers to street preachers, petty drug dealers and legit sidewalk vendors.

Beneath that stereotypical perception lies a reality much more nuanced — a ground-level economy where legal and illegal enterprise fill the void of economic development that has eluded these blocks for years; where reputable building owners are as eager to make a buck as the vendors and store owners to whom they lease retail space; and where a grander vision of downtown’s future promises little to those seeking provisions in the meantime.

Two weeks ago, 52 people were arrested in the district south of Marietta — one of them was Long. “That’s up significantly” for the area, according to Atlanta Police Department Deputy Chief Renee Propes. Though the APD denies that the exposure Long’s videos brought has played any role in its recent crackdown south of Marietta Street, raids have increased substantially. “If people don’t think that had anything to do with me, that had a lot to do with me,” Long maintains.

A March 13 raid of Metro Mall was the second in four months, Long says. According to incident reports provided by the APD, the raid resulted in several arrests and the confiscation of counterfeit goods including brand-name knockoffs of Michael Kors, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Polo, True Religion, and Levi’s.

Other recent raids in the surrounding area at 90 Broad St. and 155 Forsyth St. have netted multiple minor drug busts. That’s negligible in the big scheme of things, says one shop owner who’s been a Metro Mall staple for 16 years.

“The drug issues and the criminal activities that have been focused on throughout these last couple of months are not as prevalent as they used to be four, five, six years ago,” says Ricardo Fludd, who owns the mom-and-pop CD retail booth the Funk Shop, which has employed such locals as rapper Gorilla Zoe. “Now you’ve got petty hustlers out here trying to make a living. That’s all it is. When you focus in on that, it looks bigger than what the problem is. My problem is not drug dealers. My problem’s not crime. That’s not the problem right here.”

Rather, says Fludd, it’s the lack of economic development that’s brought business to a crawl south of Marietta. “Let’s not look at the small aspects of Metro Mall,” he says. “That’s irrelevant right now. We’re looking at the struggle of businesses downtown.”

The Downtown Development Technical Advisory Group, the latest city task force charged with reimagining south downtown, will likely consist of major civic players, including Keith Parker, general manager and CEO of MARTA; Georgia State University President Mark Becker; Frank Poe, executive director of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority; Invest Atlanta CEO Brian McGowan; and Central Atlanta Progress head A.J. Robinson. Based on the preliminary list of names being floated, few, if any, of the area’s small-time business owners will be represented.

Perhaps task force nominees would be pleasantly surprised to find out current vendors such as Fludd would like to see the same kind of improvements any respectable businessperson would want, such as safety and quality of life improvements to encourage more foot traffic.

“This is supposed to be the heart of Atlanta and it doesn’t represent the heart of Atlanta. When you cross that line,” Fludd says, pointing two blocks away at the neon Coca-Cola sign at Marietta Street, “it’s a whole different environment. There are police on every corner. It’s a livelier ‘hood. There are more restaurants, more shops, more this, more that. Let’s do the same thing over on this side.”

Right now, Fludd’s immediate concern is his safety, he says, expressing his fear that Long could return to Metro Mall seeking armed vengeance. “It’s valid, because I’ve heard him make those statements,” he says. Despite his recent arrest, police likely view him as a less of a threat than a bad example. “I don’t know what to say about him,” said Deputy Chief Propes. “I mean, he went well beyond what he should’ve done. I think it’s unfortunate he took it to that extreme, because if he’d worked within the confines of the law, he could’ve been part of the overall solution to the area.”

Though Long’s first-person point-of-view videos have given ammunition to community groups pushing for downtown’s long-delayed revitalization, they’ve done so by promoting the worst stereotypes about Atlanta’s black impoverished class — a group methodically dispersed by the city since the demolition of its housing projects.

A vendor whose shop was closed a few days after Long’s arrest stands behind a glass display case filled with $25 fake Ray-Ban sunglasses. He agrees to talk only under the condition of anonymity, and I ask him what he thought of the job Long had been doing before he was arrested. “Way too much, man. He makes it look like we’re selling drugs in here and selling stolen items. He just made the entire place look really bad. I don’t know why he does it; the only thing I can think of is maybe somebody offered him some kind of reality show and he was trying to make this place look really bad and act like he came and cleaned it up.”

In a corner of the shop, a man barely hidden from the public’s line of sight tries on a pair of jeans.

“Honestly, he did a pretty decent job,” the vendor continues. “But then again, he’s security. He’s not a mall manager. There are some things you should do and some things you shouldn’t. And he was just way too much.”

In the midst of our interview, a woman dressed in a MARTA bus driver’s uniform approaches the vendor’s booth with a quizzical look on her face as she scans the inventory.

“Wait a minute, hold on. Y’all don’t got no purses?” she asks.

The owner shakes his head “no.”

“What? You ain’t gonna be selling them no more?”

Another “no” shake from the owner.

“What the fuck? Never ever?”

“No,” he finally says.

“Whaaat! That’s crazy. ‘Cause of what happened?”

The owner nods a “yes.”

“OK. All right. Thank you. All right. Damn.”

“I imagine you get a lot of that now?” I ask him as she walks away without buying anything.

“Yeah,” he says under his breath.

Like Canal Street in New York City or the Slauson Swap Meet in Los Angeles, the streets around the Five Points MARTA station in Atlanta proliferate with tacky storefronts that hawk knockoff purses, designer jeans, gold jewelry, sports apparel and every bit of randomness in between.

Many proponents of revitalization wax nostalgic about the area’s heyday when department stores such as Rich’s, Kessler’s, and Davison’s were staples decades ago. But they tend to gloss over the more recent history of the past 30 years, during which an underground economy of sorts flourished in a district practically deserted by major retailers in the wake of white flight and the black middle class brain drain from the city’s center.

While no one’s eager to take ownership for the decades-long desertion of the area, almost everyone agrees that south downtown’s current building owners must be involved in any proposed revitalization efforts.

According to the Fulton County Tax Office, Metro Mall is owned by Strauss Properties, L.P., the business partnership of Walter Strauss. You might recognize Walter as the namesake behind downtown Atlanta’s sneaker institution Walter’s Clothing, which has been in business on Decatur Street for more than 50 years. In fact, Strauss Properties LP owns several buildings in south downtown, including the building that houses Payless Shoe Source (55 Peachtree St.), one of the area’s only national chains; the kitschy Discount Store (74 Peachtree St.), which sells everything from Boost Mobile phones to toasters; and the office of Dr. Dennis Jaffe (98 Broad St.), a dentist who specializes in gold grills and has been dubbed “the father of Afrodontics.”

But before building owners can be pressed into taking responsibility, “you have to remove the elements that are here so that other elements feel free to come in,” says Long. While he believes his videos have embarrassed the city enough to quicken that day, he claims he has never been a proponent of gentrification in its most loaded sense.

“Some people want to regentrify the area. I never wanted to regentrify the area,” says Long. “I think low-income people should have a place where they can come downtown if that’s what they want to do, and shop and buy some things. But I don’t need guys over here selling crack and rock, 50 feet from the MARTA police station. People should be able to come down here without somebody doing that. That’s what I believe.”

Ultimately, gentrifying south downtown could bring about a culture shift sure to strip downtown of its peculiar authenticity. It’s already under way. Last week, police began enforcing a new city ordinance that bans street vendors from setting up shop daily in front of Five Points.

As for Long, who likened himself to a whistleblower the day before his arrest, he’s resigned himself to a similar fate. “I’m just telling things the way I see it about the stuff that goes on downtown. I may suffer like every other whistleblower. When you’re a whistleblower, you’re a hero to some and the scum of the earth to others.”