What happens when you demoralize your city's police force

So an eight-year-old girl was murdered in cold blood in Atlanta over the weekend. She was in a car with her mother and a friend. It pulled into a parking lot across the street from the Wendy's that got torched a few weeks ago. The parking lot was full of "protestors" who didn't take kindly to anyone using it for its intended purpose, so they shot the car up.

It's good that Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is outraged, but she faces a situation in which resources to address this kind of carnage are, shall we say, thin:

“We’re fighting the enemy within when we are shooting each other up in our streets,” the mayor said. “You shot and killed a baby. And it wasn’t one shooter, there was at least two shooters,” she said.

Bottoms said she wants people to have the same passion towards ending community violence that they have for police reform.

“We’ve had over 75 shootings in the city over the past several weeks,” Bottoms said. “You can’t blame that on APD [Atlanta Police Department].”

Bottoms said during the press conference that there had been a number of protests in the area where Brooks was killed and challenges with demonstrators closing roads. Saturday night she said she was told that barriers had been put back up.

“An 8-year-old girl was killed last night because her mother was riding down the street,” Bottoms said. “You don’t want someone on the street who would shoot into a car randomly. If you know them, you should turn them in.”

Turn them in to whom, exactly? The Atlanta police have been on retreat ever since the district attorney charged the two officers involved in the Rayshard Brooks shooting — a decision made before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had even finished its investigation. The police staged a walkout immediately afterward, and reports of “blue flu” have continued to circulate ever since.

That has predictably left the streets in control of those who are most willing to use violence. The shooting of eight-year-old Secoriea Turner is a direct result of the lack of will from city leadership to enforce the law and keep order. Police should have been dispatched immediately to take down any illegal barricades; their absence signaled a vacuum of order, and violence fills those vacuums quickly. However, police will not act when the political leadership of a city does not support their efforts to keep order.

Lance Bottoms is correct that the people of Atlanta can’t blame this on the police department. They should blame this on Fulton County DA Paul Howard and Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. If those two don’t act quickly to restore order, Atlanta residents can also start blaming it on Gov. Brian Kemp — unless he orders the National Guard deployed to stop the violence and restore order.

A preview of what urban post-America generally is going to look like generally if the forces of darkness continue to prevail.