Buckhead City - Part One

I started writing this post as a lead-in introduction to what I really wanted to discuss - the proposed secession of the Buckhead district from the City of Atlanta.  But I wanted to be as detailed as necessary to make my point, and the more I got into it, the more I realized that I needed to say.  So this is the first part, Part One, of at least a two-part post about Buckhead becoming it's own city, and why I think that's such an awful idea.

In the terrible, covid-plagued spring of 2020, police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin inflicted a barbarous and murderous crime against an unarmed civilian, George Floyd.  That Floyd was a person of color resulted in a nationwide galvanization of the existing Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements, and massive protests broke out across the country. Many people look at the reaction to Floyd's murder  as a pivot point in the national deliberation on civil justice and racial inequity.

While all this was going on, police here in Atlanta shot and killed a black man, Rayshard Brooks, who had passed out, apparently drunk, in his car in the drive-through lane of a Wendy's.  As a result, there were still more protests here, on top of those already occurring nationwide.

On the national level, Agent Orange, the now-disgraced, twice-impeached, former president of the United States, reacted to the protests with calls for more show of force by the police.  There was talk from the White House about the police and the National Guard needing to "dominate the streets," as if the American streets and American citizens protesting on them were some sort of foreign threat to be conquered and vanquished.  To make his point, Agent Orange had the police gas and beat protesters in D.C. so he could get a photo op of himself brandishing a Bible (upside down as it turned out) like a weapon in front of a church.

Not that there weren't excesses in the protests.  Although they were far and wide mostly peaceful, at some locations, cars were burned, stores were looted, and violent clashes with the police occurred. The press, naturally, gave more coverage to the violent clashes with law enforcement than the hundreds of thousands marching peacefully on the streets, giving those not involved in the movement the incorrect impression that it was all madness and mayhem out there.

To those of a progressive mindset, the vandalism and the violence were the inevitable result of years of bottled-up rage and frustration, and the police were only inflaming the problem and exacerbating the situation with over-zealous repression.  To those of a conservative mindset, the vandalism and the violence were proof that "bad actors" like BLM  and Antifa were merely anarchic gangs out to loot and cause mayhem.  Both sides saw what they wanted to believe, and further settled into polarized viewpoints.

Here in Atlanta, an angry group of protesters burned down the Wendy's where Rayshard Brooks was shot, even though Wendy's had no role or culpability in the events that unfolded there.  What's more, a group of protesters blocked off University Avenue, where the Wendy's was located, resulting in scary-looking images of masked gunmen at inner city roadblocks with bonfires burning in the background.  It looked more like Beirut or Baghdad that Atlanta.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, wanting to defuse the situation, decided not to go the route of Agent Orange and order the National Guard to sweep in and forcibly clear the streets, but instead told the police to stand down and let the protests play out.  In essence, she didn't want Atlanta to become the setting for nightly televised battles between the police and the protesters, like those televised each evening from the streets of Milwaukee.  For a period of time, the police didn't challenge the roadblocks and wouldn't venture down University Avenue, which essentially became a lawless enclave ruled by an angry mob.

Reports differ on just how bad the situation was there.  Some motorists said armed young men, possibly gang members, told them to turn back and go away at threat of being shot, while others say that the road was partially open and if you were patient, you could easily drive past the protests in the single open lane.  People have told me that cars were being stolen and houses robbed, and the thieves would retreat to behind the roadblocks where the police wouldn't dare pursue them.  Personally, I didn't go down there to check things out and see for myself due to a sense of self-preservation, stemming from both a reluctance to getting shot (by police or by protesters) and the on-going covid pandemic.

Mayor Bottoms' refusal to forcibly clear the streets infuriated the conservatives, who claim she was derelict in her duty to protect the people of Atlanta and was turning the streets over to armed, angry gangs. Their anger intensified when the officers involved in the killing of Brooks were dismissed  from the APD without a trial or hearing. Conservatives felt that she was demoralizing the police by not backing them up.

By that weekend, the protests spread, both the peaceful, lawful marches as well as the violent vandalism and looting.  The violence moved beyond University Avenue and the surrounding minority communities and up Peachtree Street.  Shops were looted in Midtown Atlanta.  Windows were broken and stores looted in the Lenox Square mall in Buckhead.

Many things happen during episodes of civil disobedience, and not all of them have to do with protesting social injustice.  Here in my neighborhood, while the police were spread thin responding to looters and arson all across the city, several drug stores and supermarkets were robbed by someone using smash-and-grab techniques. The front windows were broken and the pharmacies - and only the pharmacies - looted.  People who lived nearby reported that they didn't hear anything, such as chants of protesters, and it appears to me that those particular robberies were performed by someone opportunistically taking advantage of the chaotic situation.  The almost surgical precision used to target specifically drug stores is evident by the fact that windows were smashed and the pharmacies looted at my local Publix supermarket and adjacent Rite-Aid store, while the liquor store right across the street was untouched.

But to much of the white uptown community, the distinction between criminals taking advantage of a distracted police force and "gangs of Antifa and BLM" went unnoticed. They were badly shaken by the violence and the mayhem occurring in their own neighborhoods, and blamed Mayor Bottoms for being soft on crime and for demoralizing the police. It was suggested in some quarters that for political reasons she was pandering to the black community by turning a blind eye to the protests and the crimes, while ignoring the safety of the white community.

The protests did wind down with time and the police were eventually able to take back control of University Avenue, but the political climate became quite unfavorable towards Mayor Bottoms. And then, following the protests, a wave of street racing and stunt driving broke out all across the City, including on Buckhead and Midtown streets.  Muscle car enthusiasts, realizing that traffic was minimal due to stay-at-home covid mandates, began using the open streets for drag racing, and throughout the evening, and even during the day, we could hear the loud roar of auto engines tearing up and down the streets.  I live near Northside Drive, which runs in an almost perfectly straight line for several miles and was a favored site for street racing. The noise was unsettling.

Even more disturbing to behold were large crowds of young people gathered at impromptu, flash-mob, stunt-driving events.  The stunt driving was mostly cars spinning around in tight circles, burning rubber and leaving circular skid marks on the street, while young men stood as close as they dared to the spinning cars.  One popular spot for these events was the bridge where Peachtree Street crosses I-85 (see the fifth photo in my post of Sept. 3), and crowds of dozens of people watching the automotive acrobatics basically shut down traffic going both ways.  I live on a quiet, residential side street not far from there, but one Friday night, I saw a car "cutting donuts" at the intersection closest to my house.  There wasn't a large crowd present, but the many cars parked all up and down the road suggested someone somewhere was throwing a party.  The skid marks have lasted almost a year now.

Again, to many people - and by "many people" I mean (mostly) white people living on the north side of Atlanta - the drag racing and stunt driving seemed to be a continuation of the protests and riots and looting that followed the George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks killings. All over social media, I heard white Midtown and Buckhead residents complain that Mayor Bottoms has abandoned the City to mob rule, that she told the demoralized police force to let the racing continue, and that she simply doesn't care about the safety or community values of upscale Midtown and Buckhead.

Finally, as if the protests and the opportunistic looting and the drag racing and the stunt driving weren't all enough, like almost every major city in the U.S., Atlanta has suffered a significant increase in violent crime. Although overall crime is either steady or still on the downward trend of the past several years,  that doesn't apply to the worst of crimes.  Murders are up in Atlanta and the U.S., and the number of reported rapes are also up.  According to the Atlanta Police Department, as of the beginning of the year, over 600 people have been shot in the city and there were 109 homicides, most of which involved a gun.  I've heard several explanations as to why, ranging from covid-induced cabin fever to economic inequality to political polarization, but none have convinced me of any single reason.  Conservatives have proposed as additional possible explanations a sense of lawlessness created by slack enforcement of the law following the George Floyd/Rayshard Brooks protests, and Mayor Bottoms' alleged demoralization of the police. 

Whatever the cause, it seems that every day the news is reporting on someone getting shot somewhere in Atlanta, often disturbingly close to my own neighborhood at times.  No place seems safe, not local shopping centers or gas stations or ATMs, judging by the crime reporting.  But while some of the crimes seem cruelly predatory by nature, including a horrific abduction and murder of a popular bartender in the Grant Park neighborhood last month, upon reading the news past the "Man Shot At Local Gas Station" headline, most of the shootings appear to be arguments or confrontations between people who knew each other and that quickly escalated out of control.

The APD state that approximately 60 to 80 percent of the homicides involve people acquainted with each other on some level. "We see acquaintances, family members and friends making the choice to use a gun to settle disputes. These statistics tell us that far too many people have limited conflict resolution skills, do not value life, and are not fit to be gun owners," they state. 

The APD claim to be perplexed at the number of people willing to throw away their lives, abandon their families, or destroy another person’s life over an argument, disagreement, or petty violation. If shooting someone when you are angry is your natural reaction to conflict, then you are part of the problem and are a direct contributor to the rise in violent crime.  "When people decide to make better choices in disputes, and take responsibility for management of their anger, gun related violent crimes will go down," they conclude, although unfortunately they offer no guidance on how to get people to reach such a decision or to take responsibility.

I see the problem stemming in part from just the sheer number of guns out there.  After years of NRA-backed deregulation of gun laws and the proliferation of gun sales, if one finds oneself in a confrontation or some sort of argument, one can generally assume that the other person is probably packing.  If he's not armed, then one of his friends or acquaintances almost surely is and it's just a matter of time before someone's pointing a gun at someone.  It's this kind of Wild West mentality that results in a "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude, and so often leads what used to result in a bloody nose to the Gunshot Unit in Grady Memorial Hospital.