Bottoms: We Had Crime Spike in Atlanta When I Was Mayor in 2020 Due to Things Like 'Social Justice Protests'

On Monday’s edition of CBS’s “The Takeout,” Democratic Georgia gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms responded to a question on crime during her tenure as the mayor of Atlanta by saying that there were drops in crime and then Atlanta “experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor.”

Host and CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett asked, “So, you were mayor of Atlanta. Being governor of Georgia is a promotion. For every leader in this country, COVID and everything around it was a crucible of leadership. Everyone was tested, and everyone made mistakes, I think. You would agree with that? When you look back at that, as you ask for a promotion to be governor of Georgia, what would you want the voters of Georgia to know you would do better, do differently?”

Bottoms responded, “What I would say to the voters of Georgia is to remember I was the woman in the arena. I was making very tough decisions there was no blueprint for. But any leader worth her salt is going to always look back and wonder, could I have done something differently? Should I have done something –?”

Garrett then cut in to ask, “Have you identified an answer to that question?”

Bottoms responded, “There are a lot of things. Hindsight gives us this great lens that we don’t always have in the moment. So, there are things, big and small, that I wonder, should I have made a different decision, could I have made a different decision in that moment? But what I will say is that every decision that I made was based on what I truly believed to be the best decision in that moment, and just reminding people, even during that time, this huge economic downturn and all the uncertainty that came with the pandemic in 2020 and Trump 1.0, I still left the city with four years of balanced budgets. We didn’t lay off employees. We didn’t raise property taxes. We created a child savings account for our public school kindergarteners. We even closed the largest real estate transaction that’s currently the largest public-private partnership happening in the southeastern United States. And out of that, we created an affordable housing trust fund and created 7,000 units of affordable housing. So, there [was] a long list of accomplishments, even in the midst of all of the uncertainty that was happening in the world. But you don’t grow as a leader without doing your own self-assessment and considering how you can be better and stronger.”

Garrett then asked, “Your Republican opponent, Rick Jackson, hammers you on crime, and the crime rate rose in Atlanta. It rose nationwide in many urban areas. Public safety’s a part of a governor’s job. What would you say to the state — voters in the state of Georgia and the sheriffs across the counties of Georgia about your attitude and what you learned about public safety in that crucible of COVID?”

Bottoms answered, “Yeah. And it’s interesting, prior to COVID, I was being called a public safety mayor, because I had given our police and firefighters the largest pay increases they had ever received in the history of the city. I was very supportive of law enforcement. And then 2020 came, and Atlanta, like so many other cities across the country and across Georgia, experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor. There was thing after thing after thing. But I can say, even in 2021, when we were still in the midst of the pandemic, my first meeting in the White House in the Oval Office with President Biden, we were there to talk about the rolling out of vaccines. There were governors, Republican leaders, governors and mayors, to talk about this rollout. And I took the opportunity to advocate for more funding, for federal funding for us to put towards public safety, because I knew that people were emerging from the pandemic in a way that we didn’t go into the pandemic. I remembered looking at a draft of my State of the City address that I was scheduled to give at the beginning of March of 2020, and we ended up canceling that address. But, in that draft, I had talked about these drops in our crime numbers and how well we were trending, and then there was 2020, summer of 2020.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett