Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won praise from politicians and commentators with her poised and powerful rebuke of protesters who smashed windows and spray-painted buildings during protests after the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer.

“I am a mother to four black children in America. . . . So you’re not going to out-concern me or out-care about where we are in America,” Bottoms said during a news conference. “This is not a protest. . . . This is chaos. A protest has purpose.”

“Go home!” she commanded.

Bottoms’s honesty in talking about the challenge of being a black woman running a black city at a time when images of black people being killed are shown over and over in viral videos has made her a leading voice in the national debate over policing. She became a go-to guest on network news shows. Former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said her performance has been “incredible.” Muted conversations and speculation about Bottoms being Biden’s potential presidential running mate suddenly grew louder.

Then her own police department became the center of national debate after video showed a white police officer shooting and killing Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man.

Brooks’s slaying came two weeks after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Protesters again flooded the streets of Atlanta after Brooks’s death, shutting down an interstate highway and torching a Wendy’s restaurant.

Since then, Bottoms has gone on television to express sympathy for Brooks’s family and frustration that she had, just three days before his death, empaneled a commission to recommend changes in use-of-force procedures for police.

The two officers involved in the incident are facing criminal charges, the chief of police has stepped down, and a rebellion has sprung up in the ranks of the Atlanta Police Department, with officers staging sickouts in protest. Brooks’s funeral was held this week at the city’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. Bottoms was among the mourners present.

It’s unclear how the turmoil will affect Bottoms’s nascent national profile. She is up for reelection next year. Some local political leaders and activists have been more frustrated than impressed with Bottoms’s messaging and action before and since Brooks’s shooting.

Some thought her much-applauded reprimand of protesters was tone deaf, showing more concern for property damage – Bottoms noted that more than half of the businesses in metro Atlanta were minority-owned – than the reason that people had taken to the streets: to protest a broad frustration with systemic racism, including the disproportionate number of deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement officers.

And they say the current crisis of police violence is merely a symptom of long-standing underlying inequities in the city that Bottoms, who served eight years on the city council before becoming mayor, and other city leaders have failed to address for years.

“The killing of Rayshard Brooks shows what happens when you introduce reforms but move too slowly and without a sense of urgency,” said Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, who has been working with Bottoms on police reform. “Rayshard Brooks would be alive today if the officers had utilized many of the alternatives we’ve been introducing over the last year.”

Bottoms, 50, was elected in a 2017 runoff election, beating her opponent by fewer than 900 votes. She is the second woman and sixth consecutive African American to lead Atlanta, which is often cited as an example of racial progress and equal opportunity. Bottoms’s office declined an interview request last week.

Atlanta has long boasted a visible population of affluent black people, thanks to aggressive efforts to ensure that black entrepreneurs participate in public economic development initiatives. In recent decades, Atlanta has glittered as black entertainers have made the city home. They include television and film mogul Tyler Perry, who last year opened a $250 million, 330-acre studio complex in the city.

But income inequality also has grown, increasingly pricing out working-class and poor residents, especially African Americans. Some believe the city’s black leaders over the years have paid less attention to poorer residents than the businesses community.

Chris Baumann, director of SEIU-Workers United for the Southern Region, said Bottoms deserves credit for moving quickly to discipline officers and embrace reform, but “for too long she has not addressed the underlying causes that have led us to this moment.”

“She often cites the motto that Atlanta is the city too busy to hate, but our union’s low-wage members in Atlanta feel that it is often the city too busy to care,” Baumann said.

Bottoms, in an interview earlier this month, acknowledged the challenges of the job during the past several months. Before ordering demonstrators off the streets with a curfew during the early days of the protests, she was encouraging residents and visitors to stay home to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has disproportionately killed African Americans in Georgia and nationwide.

The mayor disagreed with the decision by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to reopen the state for business in mid-April and delayed reopening Atlanta. Amid the pandemic, many Georgians were shocked when a video emerged of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who had been pursued by men in a truck and killed while jogging through a residential neighborhood in Brunswick, Ga. A grand jury indicted three white men for Arbery’s killing Wednesday. Protests of Arbery’s death had been peaceful. Then Floyd’s death on May 25 set off demonstrations across the country, including in Atlanta.

While enforcing curfew in response to those protests, police officers pulled two college students out of a car, using a Taser on a young man and throwing a young woman to the ground. Six officers were criminally charged in the incident and four fired.

The tenor of the protests were mostly peaceful when Brooks was killed June 12. He initially attracted police attention after falling asleep in a Wendy’s drive-through lane. Brooks calmly spoke with officers for nearly a half-hour, but a scuffle broke out when they attempted to handcuff him. Video shows Brooks grabbing an officer’s Taser and pointing it toward officers while running away; an officer is then seen drawing a weapon and shooting at Brooks, who falls on the asphalt. Brooks died of two gunshot wounds to the back, according to authorities.

After Brooks’s shooting, Bottoms announced a series of executive orders to set new guidelines on use of force, including training officers in de-escalation techniques, and requiring officers who witness excessive or unlawful use of force to attempt to stop it and report it.

Bottoms was asked on CNN last weekend about police officers calling out sick to protest disciplinary action against their fellow officers, including the two charged in the fatal encounter with Brooks.

“We value our officers in Atlanta,” said Bottoms, a city native who said she has known some members of the police force since childhood. “I also recognize that our communities are hurting and our officers are hurting. And so, in the same way our demonstrators need an opportunity to vent and to express their frustration and their concern, understand that our officers need the opportunity to do that as well.”

She said it is her job to make sure police officers get “the training that they need, that they are appropriately trained in de-escalation techniques, and so that they are equipped to work alongside our communities in the way that we need and expect them to.”

Atlanta’s interim police chief, Rodney Bryant, and Bottoms have said that there are enough officers showing up for work to keep the city safe. Vince Champion, Southeast regional director for the International Brotherhood of Police, did not respond to a request for comment.

Antonio Brown, a member of the Atlanta City Council, had a tense exchange with Bottoms during a telephone meeting shortly after Brooks’s shooting, in which he suggested she might spend less time on national television and more time on the streets listening to the concern of residents.

This week, he and other council members made an unsuccessful push to withhold $73 million in funding from the police department until Bottoms’s administration came up with a plan to remake the department.

He said he had apologized to the mayor over last week’s dust-up.

“It’s not about the number of interviews she’s doing,” he said. “It’s about making sure we’re keeping the city at the forefront of our conversation and we’re doing our part with the community and being a part of this movement that’s impacting so many people’s lives.”

“I know Mayor Bottoms cares,” Brown added. “She’s from Atlanta, born and bred here. I know she cares and I know that it’s been difficult with everything transpiring.”

Even as she navigates the lingering tensions from the events of the past three weeks, as well as the potential for additional eruptions in this charged atmosphere of ongoing protests. Bottoms still has an eye on a bigger prize.

A few days into the protest, Biden told Bottoms that she had been “incredible” during a virtual roundtable with other mayors, praising her passion and composure. Bottoms endorsed Biden nearly a year ago and served as a surrogate during the primary. Biden is being heavily lobbied to put a black woman on the ticket.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Bottoms if she met Biden’s criteria that his running mate be “ready on Day 1 to be president of the United States.”

“Yes,” Bottoms answered, adding that it was up to Biden to make that determination.

“But there’s been no handbook for so many mayors and so many governors across this country dealing with covid-19 and now with the demonstrations that we are seeing around the country,” she said. “Not many people have been tested in this way, in the same way that leaders across this country have been over the past several months.”

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