38 new york | january 3–16, 2022
By late May 2020, a desolate mood had
crept over the city. The freeways had emp-
tied, and at certain times of the day it felt
like you could easily cross a dozen lanes
on foot. The smog had evaporated, whit-
ening the clouds. Backyards transformed
into miniature wildlife preserves where
lone coyotes greeted our claps and hol-
lers with bored indifference, and armies
of birds gathered outside our homes with
Hitchcockian audacity. But even as the
days started melting into one another, with
no vaccine or end in sight, people by and
large did not take their frustrations out on
Bottoms.
It turned out that none of these chal-
lenges compared to what would happen
later that month, after the killing of Floyd.
It’s more than a little ironic, given how
competent or lucky the mayor was when
facing the other curveballs fate threw her
way, that it was the issue of criminal justice,
to which she boasts such a vivid personal
connection, that most confounded her.
“i don’t believe thatpeople on the
street even heard me that night,” Bottoms
told me, referring to her much-publicized
call for the demonstrators to go home. She
has an idea why. “That really wasn’t a Black
protest,” she claimed bizarrely. “There were
times we had more white people protesting
than Black people, which is why that night,
or that evening, when I turned on the tele-
vision, I knew there was something differ-
ent about that protest. It didn’t look like a
typical Atlanta protest. It physically looked
like a different crowd to me.”
I asked the mayor why she brought
up Black mayors and Black police chiefs
in her speech when a Black mayor and
largely Black police force were some of the
protesters’ main targets. “What we saw last
summer was something we’d never seen
on many levels,” she said. Her goal, she
explained, was to offer a historical tem-
plate for navigating unfamiliar, dangerous
terrain. “For whoever was out there protest-
ing, let me remind you of our history, who
we are, and how we respond in a moment
of crisis.”
It often seemed that this idea—that a
Black political structure is worth preserving
in its own right—hobbled Bottoms’s
response to a crisis whose dynamics kept
shifting. In June 2020, another Black man,
Rayshard Brooks, was killed by a white cop
in Atlanta, and the visibly depleted mayor
spoke to the press on June 15 to chart a
path forward. Officer Garrett Rolfe, who
killed Brooks, had recently completed
de-escalation training. Bottoms lamented
the futility of trying to “train our way” into
racial enlightenment, only to announce
that one of her new reform ideas for the
Atlanta Police Department was a de-
escalation requirement.
The plan satisfied neither the reener-
gized protesters nor the “tough on crime”
contingent in the city government, embold-
ened by the images of disorder on the
evening news. Rioters burned down the
Wendy’s drive-through where Brooks died,
and a group of dissidents set up an occupa-
tion amid the charred rubble. Bottoms did
not immediately order the police to break
it up, allowing the camp to stand for sev-
eral weeks. On July 4, an 8-year-old girl
named Secoriea Turner and her family
drove up to a makeshift barrier near the
Wendy’s, and armed people opened fire.
Secoriea was killed.
The slain child became a fixture of the
backlash against both the mayor and the
protests. Young organizers “found them-
selves being demonized and vilified forreally an anomalous act,” said Tiffany Rob-
erts, an attorney with the Southern Center
for Human Rights. “And it felt like no one
at City Hall had the courage to even draw
some distinctions or disrupt some of the
rhetoric that seemed to suggest” these
movements against state violence “were in
some way responsible for that tragic event.”
Moore, the president of the City Council,
started pressuring Bottoms to bring “peace
back to the city,” and in January 2021,
Moore announced she would be running
to unseat the mayor with a campaign
focused on “crime that is out of control in
every neighborhood.” The AtlantaJournal-
Constitution’s editorial board began beat-
ing the same drum. “Atlanta is your respon-
sibility,” the group wrote in a column that
opened and closed by invoking Secoriea’s
death. “And you must do more to reduce
the bloodshed here.”
Few Atlantans, the mayor included, are
unmoved by concerns about safety. “Firstthing when I wake up in the morning, I see
five messages on what happened over-
night. I immediately do the rundown list
on Where—especially my 19-year-old—
where is he?” Bottoms told me. Nighttime
gunshots are also a regular chorus where
I live. This past summer, an hvac techni-
cian texted me after leaving my home. A
motorist had stopped in front of a house
up the street, he wrote, and unloaded with
an AK-47.
The mayor responded to the increased
violence by trying to satisfy a lot of conflict-
ing demands while avoiding the one that
gave the protests their unusual intensity:
the idea that policing itself is a crisis and
needs to be reimagined or abolished. She
earned plaudits for being decisive in 2020
when she fired Officer Rolfe and accepted
the resignation of Chief Erika Shields. Then
170 cops called out sick in protest. Less
than a year after protesters had chanted
“Defund the police” up and down Atlanta’sthoroughfares, the mayor rewarded the
officers’ abdication of duty with a $2,500
pay bonus across the department.
And what might have been interpreted at
the time as a gambit to put out a lot of dif-
ferent fires has shown itself in the months
since to be a full-blown reinvestment in
policing. In July, Bottoms announced plans
to spend $70 million on hiring 250 new
officers and further expand the city’s sur-
veillance apparatus by adding hundreds of
cameras. Cops now brag to local reporters
about how many people they’re pulling over
for traffic citations. One unit, composed
of just six officers and two supervisors,
stopped 2,300 motorists between January
and mid-February 2021.
I asked Bottoms if her investments in law
enforcement, like her pay raise and hiring
push, were politically motivated. “No,” she
said, repeating a line she had spent months
rehearsing. “The reality is this: Our police
officers respond to crime. As long as thereBottoms knows thatwhen cops are used toaddress sickness, it candestroy families,because that’s whathappened to hers.