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Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has gone from rising star to scapegoat amid a crime wave that s left a little girl dead and prompted sharp criticism of her public safety policies from other city officials.
Bottoms, who was reportedly on Joe Biden s short list of running mates, was on the defensive after a bloody Christmas weekend capped a deadly year. Much of the violence began during a summer of unrest and local and national calls to defund the police department. But the death of 7-year-old Kennedy Maxie outside Phipps Plaza in Atlanta on Dec. 21 has prompted mounting, and pointed, criticism.
Kennedy Maxie was the victim of a stray bullet near a shopping mall on Monday
She spent the next five days in a hospital before dying as a result of her injuries
There have now been 155 murders in Atlanta this year, the most amount of homicides in the city since at least 1998
In 2019, there were just 99 murders, marking a sharp uptick from a year ago