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It was a political power move, intended to show the city’s first woman mayor wasn’t intimidated by the job. I remember being on the phone that morning with one of Krewson’s advisers, who was explaining to me that the mayor was about to fire police Chief Sam Dotson. While we were on the phone the news leaked out. Dotson, who had planned at one point to run for mayor, resigned.

Was the move bold, as her advisers were pushing as the chosen narrative, or was it rash? If nothing else, it was a lesson. Controlling the narrative as the mayor of the city of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ isn’t all that easy.

The next day, two utility workers in the city were murdered. Krewson could no longer blame the police chief for the city’s crime problems. They were now hers, hung around her neck like an albatross, weighing her down for what would be a rocky four years.

This week, with the city setting a record homicide pace, Krewson announced she would not seek a second term. She leaves a legacy of indecision, except for those times when the decisions were made but they were bad ones. She was for airport privatization, then against it. Then she watched as the corrupted and convoluted process collapsed on its own. She embraced one ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County executive, and offered to give him the keys to the city. Then she eschewed the next one. The one she embraced is in federal prison.

The truth about crime is mayors receive too much blame when the statistics are bad and try to take too much credit when they trend the other direction. Crime, particularly in a segregated city like ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ where gun violence is rampant in Black neighborhoods awash in generational poverty, has multiple causes. Most of them are out of a mayor’s control.

But there is another issue that bookends Krewson’s brief tenure that I hope resonates with the next mayor. (At the moment, the only two announced candidates are Treasurer Tishaura Jones and Alderman Cara Spencer.) It’s the issue of homelessness and, more broadly, how the city invests in the least among us.

On the day of her inauguration, Krewson said the right things. “I have great aspirations for our city,� she said. “The success has not reached everyone.� Before that speech, I stopped in Poelker Park across from City Hall and talked with a man sitting on a park bench named Gary Watkins. The 51-year-old had been living on the streets for a couple of years, he told me. I asked him what the next mayor should care about, and he pointed at the remodeled Central Library: “The city spent $35 million on that thing and none of it went to the homeless,� he said.

It was actually $70 million, and it was mostly library district money, but never mind that. The streets offer clarity. Watkins identified a long-standing problem in the city. It gives handouts to developers, not schools. It funds stadiums, not shelters. Just a few months ago, amid the coronavirus pandemic, Krewson ordered a tent encampment at Poelker Park cleared, despite a promise from her police chief that it wouldn’t happen. When the unhoused people moved to another encampment under a downtown overpass, after a complaint from state transportation officials, she had them cleared out again. The service providers who form the city’s Continuum of Care, an umbrella organization that advises the city on homelessness and does much of the actual work serving people who live on the streets, were aghast at the moves.

Then, on the very week she told the city there would not be another election in her future, Krewson announced a plan to put 50 tiny houses at an old RV park, at Jefferson Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive, as a place for unhoused people to find shelter. Money from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act will help fund the new neighborhood.

It’s progress, a tiny step in the right direction. Perhaps unburdened by the pressures of a coming election, Krewson will spend her final months focusing on those she mentioned in her inauguration, the people in the city who have been left behind. The next mayor, whomever it is, would be wise to do the same.