Atlanta Mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms showed sympathy for people pushing to defund the police in Atlanta, but says she doesn't support the movement.
“I understand the sentiment, I didn’t support it no," she recently told the BNC. "The reason being city budgets are complicated, the majority of our funding for our police department goes to salary, retirement, and worker’s comp, so to just say slash it in this area doesn’t really capture the sentiment.”
The Atlanta police budget was increased by 6% this year, in spite of calls from protesters to defund the police.
“I think everybody agrees that everybody wants to have positive interactions with the officers on the streets. I can give an example: when I had a family member that was murdered, we called the police. The police solved his murder,” Bottoms said in the interiew.
These comments come as the defund the police movement saw mixed success in 2021, with some major cities increasing police funding and others decreasing. In Atlanta, momentum for police reform and a decrease in funding faltered among local officials after a rise in homicides and other violent crime in 2020.