Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb shared a panel stage with New York Mayor Eric Adams in late April at the African American Mayors Association conference in Atlanta.
The two mayors chatted about technology and policing with a representative from Axon, the company best known as the maker of Taser. Axon, which sponsored the panel discussion, also sells the body cameras used by Cleveland police.
One thrust of their conversation was that Black Democrats can both support the police and want better police-community relations. Adams is a former police officer, as was Bibb’s late father. Both mayors talked up the prospect of hiring more African Americans into the police ranks. Bibb argued that America’s Black big-city mayors deserve credit for falling homicide rates.
“What keeps me up at night is this continued perception that Black Democratic mayors don’t know how to run their cities and keep them safe,” Bibb said to applause. “This is a narrative that’s racist and fueled by the extreme right wing of the Republican Party.”
(Police have recorded 38 homicides in Cleveland this year as of May 11, a 31% decline from the same time period last year.)
Bibb also defended his expansion of ShotSpotter devices, which are meant to notify police about suspected gunshots.
“For folks who try to criticize a technology like ShotSpotter, I will tell you this,” Bibb said. “In many parts of the cities that Mayor Adams and I govern, folks aren’t calling 911.”
The Atlanta stop was just one of Bibb’s out-of-state travels in recent months. In mid-April, he spoke at a summit in Phoenix organized by the NewDEAL Forum, which promotes what it calls “pro-growth progressive” elected officials. Bibb spoke on a panel at the Black Economic Alliance Solutions Summit in New York City at the beginning of May.
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