Trump's Atlanta booking on RICO charges shows why we need perp-walkable cities

• Trump's booking and arraignment in Atlanta will take weeks, which is way too long.

• New York — the best city in the world — wrapped the whole thing up in about two hours.

• Manhattan's walkable urban environment should be a model for Atlanta and the rest of the country.

When the Manhattan district attorney's office indicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts earlier this year, the subsequent process was brisk and efficient.

A few days later, Trump went to the district attorney's office in downtown Manhattan, where he turned himself in, was booked, and had his fingerprints taken. He traveled to the 15th floor of the same building and was perp-walked for just five feet in front of press cameras, going straight from the DA's private corridor to the courtroom. In the courtroom, he had a combined initial appearance and arraignment before a judge, where he pleaded not guilty.

The whole process took about two hours. Trump had time to make it back home to Mar-a-Lago for dinner and a speech in front of his supporters that same evening.

In Atlanta, where the Fulton County district attorney charged Trump with an array of crimes for trying to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results, that same process is expected to take several weeks.

No offense, but that's way too long.

It's 'lightning speed' for Atlanta

Trump has said he'll go to Atlanta on Thursday where he'll be booked at the Fulton County jail, known locally as Rice Street, on 13 charges ranging from RICO — a racketeering charge — to illegally pressuring public officials.

Patrick Labat, the sheriff who oversees the jail, said he plans to follow "normal practices" and take the mugshots and fingerprints of Trump and his 18 co-defendants, who have until August 25 to voluntarily show up for booking. Trump can skip the initial appearance — which often happens before a magistrate judge in the jail building — because his lawyers already secured a $200,000 bond package for him.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said she wants to hold an arraignment — where defendants are formally presented with the charges and enter a plea before a Superior Court judge — with all of the defendants on the week of September 5. It might be held over Zoom instead of in person.

Many states, including New York, have what's called a "unitary process" that, under certain conditions, allow a booking, initial appearance, and arraignment to all happen at about the same time.

Fulton County doesn't have that. Bookings "never" happen in the district attorney's office, which is down the street from the Superior Court where arraignments take place, former DeKalb County District Attorney J.Tom Morgan told Insider.

"For the arraignment to take place within two weeks from the arrest, it's lightning speed," Morgan said.

The "extraordinarily fast" arraignment is possible because Willis has already brought a grand jury indictment against Trump and the other defendants, according to Morgan, who is now a criminal law professor at Western Carolina University. Other cases take much longer.

"Most people don't have attorneys on the day they're arrested," Morgan said. "The arraignment cannot happen without formal charges. Formal charges usually take weeks, sometimes months for the DA to present."

This process is not particularly efficient. There are a number of reasons why the Manhattan and Fulton County criminal justice systems are handling these events differently.

The Manhattan district attorney's office, New York Police Department, state court security system, US Secret Service, and other city authorities painstakingly choreographed Trump's court appearance — something that doesn't seem to be the case in Atlanta. At least publicly, the sheriff's office is handling booking no differently than it would with anyone else charged with a crime. The district attorney's office hasn't made any special arrangements.

And while the 19 co-defendants in the alleged election interference scheme are showing up to jail at different times, Willis has said she wants to arraign everyone in one shot. Spacing out the bookings and arraignments lets her and the court get their ducks in a row before an arraignment hearing.

"It does ensure that those who are to be arraigned have completed the prior processes and done it on schedule," Ronald L. Carlson, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, told Insider. "So there's a little bit of housekeeping."

But I want to talk about one other reason Manhattan did it better, which is that Atlanta is not a perp-walkable city.

New York City, and particularly Manhattan, is famously walkable.

Manhattan is better than Atlanta

I live in the city and I do not own a car, nor do I need one for my daily life — one of the many factors that make New York the best city in America, in addition to things like good pizza, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and occasionally seeing Steve Buscemi on the subway.

New York's court system is a testament to this great efficiency. In April, Trump traveled to the district attorney's office from Trump Tower with his motorcade, but he could have taken a 28-minute subway ride.

He took the elevator to the courtroom for his arraignment. If he wanted to check out the building where the grand jury indicted him, he could have walked across the street. To see the protests and counterprotests over his indictment, he could have looked out the window to Collect Pond Park.

Trump could have turned left on the sidewalk and walked a few buildings over to a federal courthouse to attend his civil sexual abuse trial later that month, which he lost to E. Jean Carroll (Trump never attended the trial, a possible factor in his loss).

During that trial, he could have gone two flights up in the same building to watch a musical performance from Ed Sheeran, who was in the middle of a copyright lawsuit he ultimately won. Around the corner from that building is the jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

All of that rich history is a 14-minute walk from Insider's office, which is very good for me, a reporter who covers court proceedings.

Atlanta is a mess by comparison.

Instead of being booked in the same building at the courthouse, Trump will be booked at the Rice Street jail which, according to Google Maps, is a 92-minute walk from Fulton County Superior Court.

The streets are hardly conducive to walking either — there are highway-like stretches that could result in a criminal defendant getting hit by a car, on top of all their other problems.

Yes, the district attorney's office, county court, and federal court are all nearby each other in downtown Atlanta. But overall, the streets are not walkable. You cannot have a good perp-walk if you don't have walkability.

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of problems with New York City's system.

Rikers Island, where incarcerated defendants pending trial in Manhattan state court are held, is surrounded by water and therefore not walkable. Criminal defense lawyers often complain about difficulties getting access to their defendants and preparing for trial, not to mention the other issues with Rikers that are beyond the scope of this hot take. The problems are not dissimilar from Fulton County's jail, which has been plagued by horrific inmate deaths.

On a federal level in New York, there is the aforementioned Jeffrey Epstein suicide and a host of other problems that led to the Manhattan federal jail's closure, which means defendants have been held across the river in Brooklyn instead.

In court, you sometimes even come across Ed Sheeran singing — rarely a pleasant experience.

The solution for both Atlanta and Manhattan is more urban density. Build more buildings, closer together, to speed things up.

Atlanta also ought to think about scheduling arraignments and bookings to happen on the same day, in a location clustered together. If defendants like Trump have already made bond arrangements that don't require them to be jailed, there's no point in taking them to a jail an hour-and-a-half's trek from the walkable parts of the city.

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