Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has gone from rising star to scapegoat amid a crime wave that’s left a little girl dead and prompted sharp criticism of her public safety policies from other city officials.
Bottoms, who was reportedly on Joe Biden’s short list of running mates, was on the defensive after a bloody Christmas weekend capped a deadly year. Much of the violence began during a summer of unrest and local and national calls to defund the police department. But the death of 7-year-old Kennedy Maxie outside Phipps Plaza in Atlanta on Dec. 21 has prompted mounting, and pointed, criticism.
“It will take a lot to turn this around,” City Councilman Howard Shook said in a recent statement. “But here, in descending order, are the three things we need to begin: 1). Leadership; 2). Some leadership; 3). Any leadership. I don’t want to hear the word ‘uptick.’ Stop minimizing our concerns by telling us that ‘crime is up everywhere.”
The girl’s death from a stray bullet shocked the city and precipitated a bloody Christmas weekend that saw three more people killed in a 24-hour period. That brought the number of homicides recorded in Atlanta this year to 154, the most since 1998.
“If there are solutions that we have not explored and enacted, I welcome the suggestions, as I am always open to making the city that I am raising my children in a safer place for us all,” Bottoms said in response to criticism.
Crime is on the rise in several cities that embraced the “defund the police” movement sparked by Black Lives Matter protests following several racially charged shootings by police. While Bottoms, a 50-year-old Democrat and former prosecutor, did not explicitly endorse defunding her city’s police department, she claimed over the summer that Atlanta was “ahead of the curve” and eagerly touted the closure of the city’s detention center, which she said symbolized “a new era for the city of Atlanta.”
But Bottoms elected to continue funding the city’s police department and insisted that any budget cuts affecting public safety were already underway. Bottoms also took issue with the phrase “defund the police,” preferring instead “reallocation of resources.”
“I think that a very simplified message is ‘defund the police.’ But I think the overarching thing is that people want to see a reallocation of resources into community development and alternatives to just criminalizing … behavior, so I think it’s incumbent upon us to help people articulate that frustration,” Bottoms told 11 Alive in June.
Still, Councilman J.P. Matzigkeit said he would “like to see more focus” from Bottoms “on taking a leadership role” regarding issues of violence within the city.
“She hasn’t focused as much attention on crime as she has on other issues,” Matzigkeit said.
