After Independence Weekend 2020, Atlanta is clearly a more dangerous place because of the reckless progressivism of Keisha Lance Bottoms, another in the line of liberal U.S. black females who use elected office to compromise public safety for the sake of their ideology.
You might recall how Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had police stand down to give “protesters” free rein and others space to destroy in Baltmore in 2015, and the incompetent State’s Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, who, after vowing “justice for Freddie Gray, convicted no one and so discouraged Baltimore Police with her persecution that the city’s murder rate skyrocketed.
POC female office holders now have a record of disregard for public safety. Mayors like:
- Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot,
- D.C.’s Muriel Bowser, and
- San Francisco’s London Breed,
and prosecutors like
- Chicago’s Kimberly Foxx,
- Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby, and
- Boston’s Rachael Rollins
maintain adversarial relationships with their respective police departments, ignore crimes that hurt businesses and communities, and advocate more strongly for criminal leniency than for crime reduction. Keisha Lance Bottoms is now at the head of that class.
Bottoms entered office in 2018 with a police shortage. Though the Atlanta Police Department was authorized to have 2,039 sworn officers, it had as few as 1,650 officers available, nearly 20% less. Unsurprisingly, law enforcer shortfall didn’t help the city’s crime problems.
Two Keisha Lance Bottoms years later, Atlanta’s Police Department still has too few cops, and the ciity has too much crime. A department authorized for more than 2,000 sworn officers has but 1,770. And Atlanta struggles mightily under Bottoms when it comes to lawlessness:
- Total Crime Rate is 111.15% above the national average,
- Violent Crime Rate is 108.40% above the national average, and
- A Murder Rate higher than all but 22 U.S. cities, nearly treble that for the State, and more than 3.5 times that of the nation.
Along the way, Bottoms made Atlanta a de facto Sanctuary City…and publicly lied about doing so to affluent white residents at a 2019 townhall meeting, while crime was spiking in their neighborhoods. That year got so rough for Bottoms that social media savaged her selection as Spelman College’s Commencement Speaker with a #NotKeisha hashtag.
And 2020 has not been kind to Atlanta, thanks in large part to the mayor.
When the Hypocritical Hashtag – #BlackLivesMatter – brought their “peaceful protests” to Atlanta, Bottoms said many “motherly” things, but did nothing to quell the violence. And when her understaffed police force acted aggressively to control what she had called chaos, instead of supporting them, she fired two officers and suspended three others – employing the standard Democrat (POC) female officeholder tactic of valuing the rights of (often transient) societal disruptors over those of citizens who make societies work.
Then came Rayshard Brooks, the probationer who, on May 24th told the world he knew his next transgression would send him directly to jail – without passing GO! or collecting $200. Despite that knowledge, Brooks showed up sloppy drunk, passed out behind the wheel at an Atlanta Wendy’s Drive-Thru on June 12th.
Officers called to the scene engaged Brooks for more than half an hour as the “happily married” man spoke of his daughter’s upcoming birthday, how his sister lived nearby, and of his girlfriend (not his wife) who was at the restaurant with him. The engagement took an unfortunate turn after Brooks failed a voluntary breathalyzer test.
Brooks resisted arrest, fighting the officers and stealing a taser before attempting to flee. When he pointed the stolen taser at the pursuing officers, he was shot and killed.
That was too much for Mayor Bottoms.
If, in the Mind of Keisha, tasing protesters who violated curfew and resisted arrest was excessive force, then fatally shooting a probationer who resisted arrest, stole a police weapon, and then turned that weapon on police officers must be murder. The officer who shot Brooks was fired and charged, apparently with everything not nailed to the floor in the District Attorney’s office.
And that was too much for Atlanta’s police officers.
In direct response to the charges, to the firings, to two years of the Mayor and City Hall showing how unserious they were about securing Atlanta against crime and disruption, or about supporting police officers, at least 8 officers resigned. At least, because the Atlanta Police Foundation had the number at 19 before the Atlanta Police Deparment “corrected” them, and others the Police Department could not influence put the number of police resignations at 70, and accusing city officials, including the mayor, of trying to minimize the issue. This is significant, because what the City wants to call a temporary job action might be more a permanent job search, as officers seek, not time away from their jobs, but new jobs away from a toxic work environment.
For her part, Bottoms acknowledged that poice morale was low, though accepted no responsibility for why it was “down ten-fold”. She went on to speak of how she expected officers to “keep their commitment to our communities” without mentioning how she had spent more than two years showing no commitment to the Police Department, or to controlling crime.
And, channeling her inner Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Jenny Durkan personas, Bottoms gave a portion of her city, the area where Rayshard Brooks was shot, over to the destructive safe-keeping of #BlackLivesMatter. What could go wrong?
Well there’s this: in the 2015 Baltimore tradition, criminal violence in Atlanta increased in proportion to the increase in persecution of police officers, culminating in the 2020 Atlanta Independence Day Massacre, a July 4th that saw more than one person per hour shot; in the Seattle 2020 tradition, where #BlackLivesMatter is responsible for 4 shootings in 9 days, which wounded 4 and killed…wait for it…two black males, they blew way an 8-year-old black girl in the area Bottoms surrendered to the Hypocritical Hastage.
That’s what could – and did – go wrong and, yes, this is on Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Concluding Atlanta’s mayor to be a public safety incompetent, Georgia’s governor called up the National Guard, which have arrived in Georgia’s capitol. Bottoms complaint about the call up? That the governor had not sent face masks:
“The irony of that is I asked Gov. Kemp to allow us to mandate masks in Atlanta and he said no. But he has called in the National Guard without asking if we needed the National Guard.”
Bottoms believes getting facemasks to address a virus she did not need to control were more important thangetting the manpower to address violence she had failed to control. Just another glimpse into the Mind of Keisha.
Bottoms went on to tell ABC’s “Good Morning America” how she believed COVID-19 was a major contributor to the violence, not only in Atlanta, but throughout the country. You can’t make this up. Which brings us to the only positive thing for Atlanta to come of this sorry spectacle: Bottoms has tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.
Why is that positive, one may ask? First she’s unlikely to die; the death rate keeps falling like a polished safe, now at half a percent and heading lower.
It is positive because, if dealing with the virus takes any part of her attention OFF running the city of Atlanta, then someone might “sneak in” and give it the attention to public safety and leadership against crime that black females in elected office virtually never do.
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