Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced on Friday that the Anti-Violence Advisory Council she created has submitted recommendations for how to combat the current wave of violent crime sweeping the city.
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The Council is comprised of community members and partners who “developed the recommendations by reviewing existing anti-violence efforts already underway by the administration and the Atlanta Police Department,” per Atlanta In Town.
Here’s more from the Atlanta Constitution Journal:
The mayor’s working group also advised Bottoms to pursue a $70 million investment into the recommendations, Bottoms said. She said the city will have to transfer dollars from other departments to provide the $50 million in public funding. The remaining $20 million will be generated by philanthropic and nonprofit partners, Bottoms said.
Many of the recommendations mirrored plans she announced during her State of the City Address in March. Those plans include the hiring of 250 more police officers; expansions to the city’s camera network and license plate reader systems; and the addition of 10,000 more streetlights in the city by Dec. 31, 2022.
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“Because our state was open, and there were many people coming into our city, we were starting to see an uptick in crime before many other major cities, and unfortunately what we saw was just not something happening in Atlanta,” Bottoms said Friday.
She described the rise in crime in Atlanta as a “public epidemic.”
The mayor recently called out Gov. Brian Kemp after he alleged that the anti-police movement in the city was to blame for the crime wave.
“I’m not the one who held a shotgun on a 14-year-old to show I was tough on crime,” Bottoms said in response. “I’ve been doing the work. It’s unfortunate that fingers are being pointed, but it’s an election season.”
Mayor Bottoms announced in May that she would not seek re-election.
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