january 3–16, 2022 | new york 39are criminals, you’re going to havetohave
police officers.”
She added, “Atlanta is not withoutfault,
because we’ve not always gottenit right.
But I do think, when you lookat cities
like Los Angeles, our history withpolicing
has not always been as complicatedasit’s
been in other major cities. I thinkthat’s
worthnoting.”
She was adamant that “systemicissues”
needed to be addressed too, citingthe
diversioncenter andherOne Atlanta
initiativetoreduceeconomicinequal-
ity. “I don’t think one has to bemutually
ex clusive over the other,” she said.But
even the plan to repurpose partofthe
jail has been plagued by half-measures
and political infighting. She hadprevi-
ously committed to closing theAtlanta
City Detention Center altogether.It holds
about 30 prisoners a night thesedaysand
has become “something we didn’tneedto
continue to carry on our books,”shetold
me. But the City Council wasn’tonboard,
and the mayor spent months negotiating
a compromise with surroundingFulton
County, which wanted to buy thejailfrom
Atlanta to absorb overflow fromitsown
crowded facility.
The result, which ended up havingbipar-
tisan support, was a new animal altogether.
The Center for Diversion and Serviceswill
have showers and treatment resources
for people with behavioral-healthprob-
lems (“nonviolent” people, the celebrants
were careful to emphasize). The“county
jail is the biggest mental-healthfacility in
the Southeast,” lamented JudgeRobert
McBurney of the Superior CourtofFul-
ton County, taking the podium beforethe
mayor and saying he hoped the newcenter
would change that.
The jail is still open, though. “Ihopethe
next administration will committoa full
repurposing of the facility,” Bottomssaid.
“It would, in my opinion, be a verynatural,
easy lift for the next mayor to takeit one
step further and close it completelyasa
detention center.” But Mayor-electDickens
is already planning to keep the jailopento
lock up Fulton County’s extra prisoners.
And the current agreement to housethe
diversion center stands for onlytwoyears
with an annual option to renew.L
ike many of thepolice-
reform activists she has
fo ught to distanceherself
from, Bottoms suspects
the recent uptickincrime
is mostly due to covid. “It’s whatI’ve
described as the covid crime wave,”she
told me. Sickness is the root ofit,sheincluding Chicago and Washington, D.C.,
and, soon, New York—have responded to
the revolutionary promise of last summer
by realigning with the police. The assump-
tion that Black political leaders are natu-
rally more committed to justice for Black
people looks as shaky as ever. An enduring
lesson of the past 18 months, as fears about
crime have taken familiar shapes, is that
Black-led American cities are still Ameri-
can cities first and foremost.
InJuly,Bottomswasnamedanhonorary
HBCUfellowat ClarkAtlantaUniversity.
She said she is fielding “a nice assortment”
of job opportunities in the public and pri-
vate sectors. She is also leaving aparting
gift for the city’s police. The Atlanta Public
Safety Training Center, approved by the
City Council in September and supported
by Governor Kemp, is set to replacean older
facility that the mayor calls “deplorable”—
“I wouldn’t send my worst enemy over
there,” she told me. If it looks anything like
the early renderings, the new center will
be bucolic. Like Atlanta itself, the complex
referred to derisively by local activists as
“Cop City” will be woven into a forest—this
time on the grounds of an old prison farm
in DeKalb County, one of the largest pieces
of vacant city-owned property in town.
The mock-ups call to mind the secluded
bliss of northeastern liberal-arts cam-
puses. Each glossy structure is ringed by
trees, each walkway lined with lush grass.
Shafts of sunlight illuminate the wooded
jogging trail that members of the nearby
communities are invited to use—a “green-
space,” the planners have called it. There
are stables for the mounted-patrol horses
fronted by abundant fields of grass for them
to eat. There’s a building where firefighters
can practice their rescue drills while real
flames lick their heels and a fake little city
in which cops can rehearse drug raids, riot
control, and hostage situations. It’s a place
whose key purpose, its proponentssay, is to
make cops feel better. “It’s going to lift the
morale and optimism of the police officers
tenfold,” said Atlanta Police Foundation
head Dave Wilkinson.
For the mayor, it’s also about proving
to the police that Atlantans deserve their
respect. “If we want officers whorespect
our city, respect our communities, I don’t
know how we expect to get that in return
when we send them in places for training
and it seems as if we don’t respect our-
selves,” she told me. By investingaccord-
ingly, she and her partners have conjured
a sylvan paradise where every copcan feel
like a hero in their own fable. If someone
told you it looked magical, you might not
even blink. ■says, the cause of heightened insecurity,
shortened fuses, and economic convulsion
in many of the city’s neighborhoods. She
knows that when cops are used to address
sickness, it can destroy families, because
that’s what happened to hers.
But mayors of Atlanta are bound to a
system that precludes such nuance. The
city’s first Black chief executive, Maynard
Jackson, elected in 1973, paired an initiative
to grow Atlanta’s Black middle and upper
classes with an unusual attentiveness to the
Blackpoor. He investedunprecedented
time, money, and administrative clout into
low-income housing and infrastructure in
poor neighborhoods. It did not last. White
business leaders accused Jackson of anti-
white bias, a charge he felt compelled to
disprove as they threatened to take their
dealings elsewhere. By his second term, the
mayor had switched gears, breaking a sani-
tation workers’ strike in 1977 and moving
money from neighborhood-improvement
projects to downtown development.
This has been the prevailing dynamic
ever since. “An established, as well as ris-
ing, Black middle class could only benefit
from a city in which the racial priorities but
not the class priorities had changed,” writes
historian Ronald H. Bayor. As Andrew
Young, the city’s second Black mayor, once
remarked, “Politics doesn’t control the
world; money does. And we ought not to
be upset about that.” To this day, Atlanta’s
Black working class and poor are routinely
left behind—their neighborhoods bisected,
left to deteriorate in the shadow of new
sports stadiums; their economic needs
deprioritized in new business ventures
welcomed by the city government.
Black mayors are tasked with man-
aging this order on the tacit condition
they don’t change it. You get the sense
that many, from Jackson to Bottoms, are
driven by the apprehension that boom
times are fragile—that this experiment
in Black rule, for all its successes, could
just as easily fall apart and vindicate the
racists. Atlanta’s economic momentum
is already under threat from its mostly
white Northside. The local cityhood
movement, in which mainly rich com-
munities in Georgia break off to form
small cities, has recently enticed Buck-
head, Atlanta’s wealthiest district. The
big reason its leaders have given for
wanting to secede is crime. And the easi-
est way for mayors to perform serious-
ness on the matter is to throw money at
cops, to greet Black suffering with night-
sticks and gun barrels.
Atlanta isn’t unique in this regard.
Several cities run by Black mayors—