What can a mayor do?

Seattle Mayor Mike McGuinn issued a statement of apology the next day [after the pepper spray incident November 2011], but Dorli then and now hasn’t been impressed.

“We spoke very briefly, and I told him that he is not in charge of what is going on, that our politicians really have lost control, and this sort of brutality is now endemic all over the United States and is being controlled by Homeland Security, by the FBI, and by the military against the war on terrorism,” she said. “It has nothing to do any longer with what individual mayors may want or not want to do.”