An Election’s Rock Bottom(s): How Atlanta’s Top Mayoral Candidates Praise Police and Disappoint Progressives

Protestor in Atlanta driving past police with handmade “ACAB” sign. Photo by Maria Oswalt.

This May, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms (D), announced her decision not to run for reelection. Bottoms posted a letter announcing the news on her Twitter account; in the letter, Bottoms referenced some of the various wins and losses of her tenure, from ending a city-wide relationship with ICE to overcoming “the largest cyber-attack in municipal government history” . Despite overseeing the city as it experienced a 58% surge of homicides, received the title of the city with “the worst income inequality in the US,” and her personal failure to comply with the Georgia Government Transparency & Campaign Finance Commission during an investigation about her campaign’s finances, Bottom’s announcement came as a relative surprise to her constituents.  

Since Atlanta elected Maynard Jackson in 1974—its first Black mayor—no mayor has served less than the two-term maximum. Also notable is that every mayor since Jackson has also been both Black and a Democrat; in this 2021 election cycle, all but one of the five leading candidates to replace Bottoms are also Black Democrats. On the November 2 ballot was former mayor Kasim Reed, councilmembers Antonio Brown and Andre Dickens, city council president Felicia Moore, and attorney Sharon Gay (Gay remains the only non-Democrat, though her campaign does include an ex-Obama adviser, signaling some blue ties). As the city’s initial election did not conclude with any one candidate receiving 50% or higher of the votes, a runoff election will occur on Tuesday, November 30 between Dickens and Moore. However, for the city’s most progressive voters, none of the top candidates are promising enough to answer pressing demands about policing.

As was the case throughout the country, Black Lives Matter protests defined Atlanta's summer of 2020, calling attention to police brutality and racism. In response to these protests, some other major cities have begun to "reimagine policing" by removing police officers from schools (Denver and New York City), shifting police funds to more community-oriented services (Austin), and even introducing ballot questions allowing voters to choose to replace police officers with "public-health oriented" departments (Minneapolis). The "Atlanta Way," on the other hand, has left the city essentially unchanged. In July 2020, the Atlanta City Council voted 5-2 in favor of an ordinance that would have effectively made the 8CantWait demands such as illegalized strangleholds and chokeholds into city-wide law. This ordinance—often referred to as the "Rayshard Brooks Bill," after the unarmed Black man killed by Atlanta police in a Wendy's parking lot—was vetoed by Mayor Bottoms. 

Following this veto, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) paid a $500 bonus to every Atlanta police officer, police continued tear gassing protestors until September, and, to the dismay of many residents across the city, the City Council voted to lease at least 350 acres of land to the APF. This land transfer, which passed despite 17 hours of largely oppositional public commentary, has been aptly dubbed "Cop City." Considering Atlanta is already the most-surveilled city in the country and historical evidence suggests that increased police funding does not necessarily lower crime, this major win for the Atlanta Police guarantees nothing for an already hyper-policed, hyper-surveilled city. 

Despite evidence against the effectiveness of high police spending, a recent report from Pew Research indicates that a growing percentage of Americans want increased police spending. So, while Atlanta City Council may ignore some of its most vocal, left-wing critics, their interests are not necessarily wildly oppositional to national demands and trends. What remains disappointing, as well as wildly predictable, is the lack of options available to progressive Atlantans in city-wide elections.  

All five candidates have highlighted crime as a defining issue in the election by emphasizing their stances on the APD and general policing initiatives across their campaign websites. Reed’s website explicitly outlines his plan to hire 750 new officers "so that we have a fully functional force," while Moore dedicates an entire section of her site to simply "Crime." Despite acknowledging that she has "seen firsthand the pain that bad, racist, and unaccountable police had on communities of color," Moore still outlines her plans to incentivize retired officers to return to the force. Councilmember Dickens highlights his involvement with introducing and passing the 8CantWait police de-escalation legislation—granted, this portion of his website fails to mention the demands never went into effect due to Bottoms’ veto. Brown remains minimally more progressive than his leading opponents, as he was just one of four council members who voted against the $90 million Cop City land transfer. Even so, his punchy, almost as youthful-as-he-is website still supports legislation upholding Atlanta policing, with half-hearted initiatives to "require officers to intervene" should they witness their coworkers breaking the law. 

What remains evident is that regardless of their age, electoral history, or any other apparent way to distinguish themselves, these top mayoral candidates all echo a pro-police narrative that inevitably disappoints the subset of Atlantans so devoted to protesting the ways it has failed to protect the city. 

In response to the largely pro-cop conversation emerging from the mayoral candidates, Atlanta's most progressive publications and independent groups like their Democratic Socialists of America chapter have abstained from endorsing anyone for mayor. The Mainline, which describes itself as Atlanta's "only antiracist and antifascist labor press," is an example of one such publication. However, Mainline did compile a spreadsheet of the various organizations and notable individuals' endorsements across candidates (mayoral and otherwise) city-wide. Immediately striking is the Atlanta Police Union's endorsement of Kasim Reed—who the Atlanta DSA pointedly notes “may be the worst candidate of the race” in their most recent voter guide. 

As Mainline, DSA, and national groups like the Working Families Party, Fair Fight Action, and Sunrise Movement all decline to endorse any of these quintessentially moderate Democratic candidates, Atlanta’s progressive constituents are mostly left with the option of mutual aid and other direct actions to support the city as they see best fit. While this in itself is not necessarily disappointing, as progressive groups like the Atlanta Homeless Union or the decade-old Occupy Atlanta movement do certainly aid some of Atlanta’s most vulnerable, the lack of a truly anti-police (or even blatantly anti-Cop City) candidate is certainly discouraging for those on the left who still place some faith in the framework of electoral politics. Nevertheless, as evidenced by daily protests last summer and vocalizations that delayed the Cop City land transfer, Atlanta progressives have shown they will not be going away anytime soon, even if the city’s elected officials choose to serve police before the general people.

Ava Young-Stoner (CC ‘25) is staff writer for CPR studying Religion and Russian Literature.