… New Police Chief Scott Thurmond, formerly the captain of the highest-crime sector of the city and a homicide investigator, was sworn in on August 2. In a wide-ranging interview with Carol Robinson at Al.com and The Birmingham Times, which are doing a joint series on crime, he spelled out the problem. “The majority are acquaintance based. We don’t have a lot of strangers getting killed,” Thurmond said. Eighty-eight percent of murder victims are black.
