Atlanta city councilman and mayoral candidate Antonio Brown is a fan of the defund the police movement, so much so that he voted in support of an ordinance that would withhold tens of millions from the city's police department budget until a new plan was put forth by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms' administration to reimagine policing in the area.
In a sane world, he may have rethought this position after his car was stolen in broad daylight by four young kids between the ages of six and 12, one of whom "acted as though he had a gun." But no, instead he made excuses to explain what happened.
City Council Member Antonio Brown had just gotten out of his white Mercedes coupe to speak to fellow community leader Ben Norman in northwest Atlanta’s Dixie Hills community Wednesday when he spotted four or five kids — the youngest only 6 or 7, WAGA-TV reported.
The children were walking around a store — and within seconds were inside Brown’s car, he said.
“One kid was in the driver’s seat,” Brown told the outlet. “Ben attempted to open the door to get him out of the car. He fought with Ben. I then engaged and tried to get him out of the car. The three other kids were trying to figure out how to get in the car or stay out of the car. He started to hit on the gas. Ben let go.”
“As he started to speed up, and I knew that if I had not let go, I knew I probably could have killed myself because he was going so fast, I would have started to tumble,” he added. “And I would have hurt him.”
Brown said he filed a report with the Atlanta Police Department. (NY Post)
While there has been no word on whether anyone was arrested, Brown said he doesn’t want police to press charges.
"This is a generational poverty issue," Brown told WSB-TV. "These kids, it's 12:30 in the afternoon. Why aren't they in school? Why aren't we enforcing systems to ensure that if they are not in school, they're in recreational centers?"
Brown kicked off his run for mayor with a platform of “reimagining” public safety and policing in Atlanta. Earlier this year, he sponsored a City Council ordinance to look into the feasibility of restructuring Atlanta’s public safety agencies and creating a new city department focused on “wellness.”
The councilman was also among the seven councilmembers who voted in support of an ordinance to withhold $73 million of the Atlanta Police Department’s budget until Bottoms’ administration drafted a plan to reinvent the culture of policing in the city. The ordinance, which was narrowly voted down, came in the aftermath of mass demonstrations nationwide sparked by the deaths of numerous Black people at the hands of police officers. (AJC)
"The reality is this," Brown told WAGA-TV. "We need programmatic initiatives in place to help support these kids to be able to give them another pathway instead of them committing crimes."
