Politics

Atlanta Mayor Feels Her Own Life Is Not Safe From Police, Shares Concerns For Her Four Children

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Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms does not think that she or her children are safe from the possibility of dying at the hands of the police, Axios reported Tuesday.

“I just saw my 12-year-old who’s running around the house with a cap gun, a black cap gun, and I thought about Tamir Rice,” the 12-year-old African American boy who was playing in a park with a toy gun when a Cleveland police officer saw him and shot him in 2014, Bottoms said in an emotional interview with Alexi McCammond for “Axios on HBO” Monday night.

Bottoms is a possible vice president pick for Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, two sources with knowledge of the discussions confirmed to Politico. Bottoms deferred questions about being Biden’s potential vice presidential pick to the campaign.

Bottoms, who is black, told Axios that when she saw her son with the cap gun, which she did not know her son had purchased through her Amazon account, she wondered if Rice’s mother had ever been in a similar situation.

“You know, in the same way I saw my son with it, did Tamir’s mother know that perhaps he had ordered a cap gun on Amazon and was outside playing with it?” Bottoms said.

Bottoms said she has cautioned her oldest son to avoid problems with police. Instead of her typical advice of telling her son to “be confident and speak up for yourself, and don’t ever shrink, and own who you are,” Bottoms said she tells him that if he is met by police he should “fade back. You need to not be a threat…You need to be compliant,” Bottoms said in the interview.

During the interview, McCammond asked if Bottoms felt that what happened to other black persons killed by police could happen to her.

“Absolutely,” Bottoms said.

“I want to make something clear: We have so many men and women on our police force who go out each and every day and they do the right thing,” Bottoms added.