The mayor of Atlanta was a rising star in Democratic politics. Then the crime wave hit.
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage On a sunny Wednesday in November, Keisha Lance Bottoms went to the Atlanta City Detention Center, a water-stained hulk of concrete with slits for windows glaring out over Peachtree Street. She was there on a kind of valedictory tour, showcasing her accomplishments as she gets ready to leave the mayor’s office.
And she knew which vision of Atlanta she wanted people to see. “Atlanta will be known for lemon-pepper wings and great strip clubs if we’re not careful,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2020, trotting out some of the hoariest stereotypes about the city’s Black poor. There is nothing wrong with those things, she clarified when we sat down for an interview in the mayor’s ceremonial room at City Hall. “I love it all,” she said.
And while these problems were coming into focus, Bottoms was thinking about death a lot. “My dad died suddenly at 55,” said the mayor, who turns 52 in January. “When my dad turned 50, he had five years left that he didn’t know were only five years left. If those were my last five years on earth, how would I want to spend them?”
The mayor’s social media is full of warm tributes to her dad, who died of heart disease in 1994. She writes him birthday posts every April 4. In June 2019, she shared what she captioned the “best throwback pic EVER” from around 1976. It shows young Keisha — hands on her hips with a tight half-grin, half-grimace on her face — and her father working in their backyard garden alongside soul icon Curtis Mayfield, who grew up with Lance in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project.
In 1994, the same year her father died, Keisha Lance married Derek Bottoms, a fellow law student. As a couple, they set out to build the kind of life that could easily have been packaged in a brochure and mailed to all the young Black professionals at whom so much of Atlanta’s cheerleading is directed. They put in time at their respective law firms. She made a career change, becoming a speechwriter for Thurbert Baker, then Georgia’s attorney general.
Almost from the moment she was sworn in, Bottoms faced an unprecedented sequence of crises. In March 2018, hackers based in Iran took the city’s computer system offline and demanded the bitcoin equivalent of a $51,000 ransom. Bottoms refused to pay. The system stayed offline for close to a week, reverting many city services to pen-and-paper operations.
It turned out that none of these challenges 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.
The plan satisfied neither the reenergized protesters nor the “tough on crime” contingent in the city government, emboldened 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 occupation amid the charred rubble. Bottoms did not immediately order the police to break it up, allowing the camp to stand for several weeks.
The mayor responded to the increased violence by trying to satisfy a lot of conflicting 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.
She was adamant that “systemic issues” needed to be addressed too, citing the diversion center and her One Atlanta initiative to reduce economic inequality. “I don’t think one has to be mutually exclusive over the other,” she said. But even the plan to repurpose part of the jail has been plagued by half-measures and political infighting. She had previously committed to closing the Atlanta City Detention Center altogether.
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 Black poor. He invested unprecedented time, money, and administrative clout into low-income housing and infrastructure in poor neighborhoods. It did not last.
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