The Problem with King Reed

There's nothing like an inflammatory post title to get things started, I always say. I am, however, rather inflamed at the sudden authoritarian swing of the mayor's office regarding Occupy Atlanta.

As far as I can see, the movement has been rather aggressively paused by the Atlanta Police. By this, I mean that Occupy has yet to regroup elsewhere. It might even appear to some that this was the outcome, not just the simple clearing of Woodruff Park, for which Mayor Reed was hoping. After all, despite the ugly, latent racial tension across town that was ignited during his electoral standoff with a white woman, he owed at least some of his victorious fraction of a percentage point to our city's business community. He was tactful, amicable towards state Republicans and willing to be the yes-man for corporate Atlanta, who obviously would have little sympathy for those who protest their behavior.

Is this powerful influence upon Reed's office the reason that more than two officers were deployed for every protestor almost 48 hours ago? It's not hard to believe. Local executives would, as a group, be far more upset by a gathering of socialists, hippies and general skeptics of the financial industry than by open prostitution, mugging and murder in less visible parts of the city. A less theatrical distribution of officers would leave fewer openings for those criminal acts which are truly harmful to society (and, yes, corporate executives are part of society), but it wouldn't make for a grand statement, packaged and ready for media distribution.

I visited Woodruff Park on Monday night, when the threat of mass arrest was looming. The protestors were friendly, calm and mostly rational; they never behaved in a way that would justify the comically large group of officers that would descend on the park the following evening, or the rage directed at the park's media liaison, Tim Franzen. According to somebody I met who is a friend of Tim, Mayor Reed was shouting at the top of his lungs and pounding his table on Saturday, while threatening arrests that very night (mercifully proving that Atlanta is not an absolute monarchy). Tim was more than a little shaken afterward.

There are aspects of Kasim Reed's mayorship that I can admire. He has not openly antagonized us white Atlantans as his friend Bill Campbell did. He appointed an APD veteran of more than thirty years as Police Chief, rather than somebody from another horribly corrupt police department who only wanted a paycheck, as his friend and promoter Shirley Franklin appointed. If Mayor Reed does not come to decide that we, ordinary Atlantans, are less important than members of the Maynard Jackson dynasty and the directors of corporations in town, it is time for a new mayor who not only believes that we are equally important, but, indeed, sees himself or herself as one of us.