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Voiceover: You're listening to The Takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry from WNYC and PRX in collaboration with WGBH radio in Boston.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When voters went to the polls in many cities on Tuesday, they were thinking about voting on issues of public safety and policing. The reason, an uptick in homicides and violent crime in 2020. After Minneapolis police officer, Derrick Chauvin, murdered George Floyd in the spring of 2020, people across the country took to the streets demanding racial justice and amplifying a national movement for police reform.

[protests]

Melissa Harris-Perry: The protests had some initial success, some cities cut policing budgets and redistributed funding to other municipal services. In this year's campaign cycle, many Democratic mayoral candidates promised to boost police budgets and hire more officers. Last year, New York City officials shifted roughly 1 billion from the police department but then added 200 million this year. Eric Adams, the former police officer who will be the city's next mayor, campaigned on fighting crime.

Eric Adams: We need to fight crime. We need to make sure that we have the right supervision but we also need to rebuild the trust between the good New Yorkers and our law enforcement community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the heavily Democratic city of Seattle, the two mayoral candidates debated public safety last week. City council president and mayoral candidate, Lorena Gonzalez, had previously supported cutting police funding by as much as 50% and diverting that money to social programs, but she's shied away from that language more recently.

Lorena Gonzalez: I am the public safety candidate for all people in this city. I have worked on gun safety laws, I have increased services to those who are suffering from gender-based violence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On Tuesday, former city council president, Bruce Harrell, took a commanding lead over Lorena Gonzalez, and Seattle's likely new mayor-elect said this in last week's debate.

Bruce Harrell: Under her chair for the four years, crime went up 22%. We have to understand that, we had the worst homicide rate we had in 26 years and they are still talking and perpetuating the narrative, "Let's defund the police by 50%."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, let's take a look at these mayoral races with Tim Craig, national correspondent for The Washington Post. Welcome back to The takeaway, Tim.

Tim Craig: Hello, how are you doing?

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, so let's start out west. Let's talk about Seattle. What was going on in that mayoral race?

Tim Craig: That race really, in the final days, had become sort of a referendum on the future of the city, more broadly, but especially as it relates to policing. As you noted in your segment, the council president, Lorena Gonzalez, did previously support slashing the police budget to shift to social services. Her opponent hammered her on that throughout the closing days of the campaign. Although it's going to take maybe a while to get the final final results out of Seattle, because of a lot of mail-in votes, he does, right now, appear to be winning by nearly two to one.

There was a pretty big pushback in Seattle, a West Coast city that they had a lot of protests last year, and they had some scattered incidents of violence. If you remember, for a while even a portion of the central part of the city was actually taken over by protesters last summer, but it seems like there has been a public backlash to that at Western Seattle.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering if in these conversations, in these debates, in this public discussion, which can be good. If we're going to have this conversation about public safety, about crime, let's go ahead and have it in the context of an election. I'm wondering if it was simply presumed that more police reduce violent crime rates or if there was any digging in in-depth conversation about that?

Tim Craig: I think in many cities there was a conversation about that but the reality is when people see homicides and killings soaring, which they have been doing over the past year in many cities, when people feel unsafe, it is hard to have a holistic traumatic conversation about policing because, let's face it, the natural inclination of people is the police, so in terms of an election--

Melissa Harris-Perry: Which people? I just want to challenge that. Maybe but it might also be true that folks don't seem to think of the police as a solution. I just try to put that--

Tim Craig: Yes, there's some of that, but you also got to remember in many elections like we had this year, which is not a presidential election, many of the people who show up to vote are homeowners. They are more traditional, somewhat older, more moderate homeowning but residents, and that it's a hard case to make for many of them that police and a strong police force is not a fundamental part of public safety.

With that said, it's not like many cities remain very progressive and very liberal. People still want police to be accountable. People still will support some reforms to police but I think when the discussion turns to "do you want to shift money away from the police department?" that is where I think a lot of voters yesterday in many of these cities said no.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's pick up on that idea and talk about Eric Adams, who was likely to win any way given the partisan makeup of the city, but is that also what you feel like happened there relative to the Democratic primary that he won?

Tim Craig: I think that was a big part of the primary results from the New York City was that Mr. Adams was viewed as sort of-- after all, he is a former police officer himself, a former police captain, was more supportive of a law and order's type narrative in New York City. Even in Mr. Adams's race yesterday, the Republican candidate, although he clearly was not going to likely to be winning the race, he did appear to do somewhat better in some of the outer boroughs, parts of Queens, of course, on Staten Island.

Again, it's who's turning out to vote in these elections, and the people who are turning out to vote in these elections are pretty adamant that they have hesitancy about the broader message of reducing police resources, especially as violent crime has spiked so far both last year and this year in many cities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, Tim. Let's go on down to Atlanta, where there were 14 candidates who were vying to replace Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, what was happening there?

Tim Craig: This is actually one of the more interesting races of the night, because there were 14 candidates. One of the front runners throughout the race had seemed to be former Mayor Kasim Reed, who was trying to make a comeback in the office. It was widely believed that he would be one of two candidates to advance to the runoff. If no candidate got 50%, there'll be a runoff later this month.

It appears now that Mr. Reed did not make the runoff and he lost to a younger city council member who will take the second spot. The top vote getter in that race was city council President, Felicia Moore. Again, Atlanta was the city that almost the entire discussion focused on crime. There had been a large spike in homicides and carjackings and other crimes in Atlanta since the pandemic began and all the candidates were pretty adamant that they were going to improve public safety.

Mr. Reed's challenge appear to be he's been linked to some past ethical controversies in the Atlanta city government when he was mayor from 2010 to 2018 and that seemed to really hurt him with voters yesterday.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's go on up to Buffalo. This was a fascinating campaign. Tell us a little bit about-- Obviously, we don't have all the results here yet, because we're write-in campaign, but talk to us about that write-in campaign.

Tim Craig: Yes, you're right. It was one of the most fascinating races. Community activist India Walton, as people may remember, ran as a socialist in the Democratic primary. In September, she knocked off the incumbent mayor, Byron Brown. It was viewed as a big win for progressives that they were going to really take over a major Rust Belt city, but Mr. Brown ran a write-in campaign pretty effectively around some of these same issues.

He accused Ms. Walton of wanting to cut police funding and he raised questions about whether voters in Buffalo wanted to embrace a more activist government or her, self-described, socialism model. It appears that he will have won in a write-in campaign which is not easy to do because there's all these rules about how people have to write the names, what you can and can't write in.

They still have to count all these write-in votes, but it appears that he will likely be returning to office. That's a pretty big setback to the far left wing of the Democratic Party, several progressive leaders went up to campaign for Ms. Walton, but they'd appear that they were not successful.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to talk about Minneapolis because clearly the move-- It's so interesting to even hear you as you're reflecting on how the primaries were won and in part by being in step with the second wave of the movement for Black lives around either defunding or reduction of police budgets but then by the time we're around the general election, those very same positions are a negative, a liability for those same candidates. Let's talk about Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin and the city chose not to replace its police department with a department of public safety.

Tim Craig: This appears to be a case where the activist may have went too far in crafting the referendum. The referendum called for basically disbanding the current police force, replacing it with a new force that would be more focused on health and delivery of social services and delivery of anti-crime measures instead of arresting people. That went down by a bigger margin than some had expected.

Again, it's a sign that the activists on the left when it comes to policing, going forward, probably have to be quite careful on how far they push for reform. The argument to that is in Cleveland, there was a much more nuanced referendum that called for creating a civilian review commission. The commission would have the power to discipline officers or even fire them, in some cases, and that did pass. In a city like Cleveland, it passed. That was a much more nuanced, much more narrowly focused referendum than they were trying to do in Minneapolis and that was defeated.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It also seems to be part of what else is going on here. I think we tend to talk about these elections always as though there are changing moods but if we really look it's often a changing electorate itself, your point that it is wealthier folks, older folks, homeowners, a more white electorate than there are in presidential election years. I'm wondering here if this is truly about changing attitudes or if this was about just the inadequacy of whatever the geo TV machines were for many of these candidates?

Tim Craig: I think it's probably a sum combination of both. I think one challenge like the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, has is they never really organize themselves politically. They did a lot of demonstrations last year as we know. They had some momentum but they never really established clear leadership. They never really established a clear vision for how they were going to move together as a unified group to push for change.

There's been a lot of division within the Black Lives Matter movement. One of their staples is not having a leader, which can be good in some situations, they want to have diffuse leadership and really empower the grassroots activists but that also maybe can be bad when they're trying to do wholesale political reform where it may help to have more of a clearer strategy in a more clear direction.

Your other point is well-taken, this was a relatively low turnout year. Last year we saw the 2020 presidential election, there was a massive turnout in many cities from younger voters, minority voters, from people who usually don't even vote in elections. If we get back to that scenario in the next presidential election year, some of these police reforms that they're pushing may have a much better chance of being approved.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's an interesting question about leaderful movements as the movement for Black Lives likes to think of itself, not leaderless but leaderful but that can also be challenging. Hierarchy has its place in the context of a first pass the post-electoral systems when you're trying to get someone elected or a particular referendum passed and there can be real challenges there. I appreciate that analytic perspective on it. Tim Craig, reporter at the Washington Post. Thank you for joining us and for walking all over the whole country with us on these local elections.

Tim Craig: Thank you very much.

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