In January of this year, I was in Austin, Texas. As I waited for a light to change on a street corner near the campus of the University of Texas, I noticed a piece of graffiti and wondered how it got there. It was a spray-painted stencil on a nearby electrical box that read, "Stop Cop City."
"Cop City," I knew, was the derogatory name given by its opponents to a proposed multimillion dollar police training center. Not in Austin, or Dallas, or Houston. It's planned for Atlanta--my home town, a thousand miles away. Back in January, I bet that 90% of Atlantans couldn't have told you what Cop City was, or why it should--or shouldn't--be stopped. It was a fringe issue in its own community, and the opposition was led by a few folks, mostly young, on the political left. That stencil was proof that opposition to Cop City had, even then, become a cause celebre--it had galvanized activists around a constellation of issues: police abolition, environmental preservation, and indigenous rights. A group of mostly young adults traveled to Atlanta from other parts of the country (and world), and staged a year-long "occupation" of the Cop City site to prevent it from being developed. Toward the end of the occupation, a protestor was brutally killed by increasingly-aggressive police--who claimed it was in "self-defense." The evidence presently available suggests it was state-sponsored murder.
That murder was the most outrageous and tragic of the many ways that Atlanta authorities have bungled this project--in its design, its rollout, and in the process of defending it. They have leveled "domestic terrorism" charges against the forest occupiers--a grossly inflated criminal charge for what has been an overwhelmingly peaceful protest. Recently, authorities charged an Atlanta nonprofit associated with the Cop City protests with criminal actions related to mis-use of funds--again, a wildly inflated and highly targeted charge. These "big" legal charges have an ugly and transparent motive: to stifle legitimate political speech. The whole Cop City project, which is a partnership between the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, feels rushed. It feels like it was designed and executed covertly without sufficient public input. It feels as though the mayor and city council knew it would be controversial and knew there would be opposition so they pushed it through quietly, hoping to do so before anyone would notice. The coalition of defenders of Cop City are a curious mix of black Democratic politicians, corporate allies of the Atlanta Police Foundation, law enforcement (which remains overwhelmingly conservative), and conservative Republicans who have been chomping at the bit to demonize and criminalize progressive protest since the Black Lives Matter movement.
The wise decision, at this moment, would be to stop the project and re-open the process to public participation. To discuss the price of the facility, to discuss its location, to discuss its environmental impact, to discuss how and why the city feels like it's an essential part of the future of public safety. But this week, the Atlanta City Council voted to move ahead, and demolition on the site has already begun.
Throughout all of this, my own feelings about Cop City have stayed measured. I haven't felt called to the front lines to protest. So much of this project is, to me, deeply offensive. I've tried to understand why I've not joined other activists.
Here's my struggle: my concerns about Cop City are strongest with respect to the ways that authorities have responded to the protests, rather than with the project itself. The murder of a beloved child of God, Manuel Teran, has to be investigated and, if appropriate, the officers who killed him prosecuted. City leaders who moved this plan through should be held accountable in the next election. The suppression and criminalization of legitimate political dissent is a deeply troubling issue upon which the future of all civic participation rests; the state, county, and city's legal maneuvers to escalate prosecution of legitimate political speech is completely outside of what is acceptable.
But on the central question of Cop City itself, I'm not convinced it's a bad idea.
Police--and firefighters (who will also be trained at the proposed Cop City facility)--need training. They are essential public servants (my opinion--I know not everyone agrees) and ought to have access to a modern training facility. Every public official that I've spoken with myself or heard speak who supports the Cop City project has said it plainly: Atlanta needs a new facility where public safety workers can practice the specialized skills they use in their work. The site chosen for the facility, on the city's south side, was definitely chosen because it's poorer and blacker than the rest of Atlanta--you could never build this in Buckhead. But it was also chosen because the city already owned the land--the Cop City project will occupy 80 or so acres of what was once known as the "Atlanta Prison Farm," but the whole site is 380 acres, much of the rest of which is planned for environmental preservation.
The language of this project is important too. Opponents of Cop City have implied that the project is destroying virgin forest, but that's not accurate. The whole area in question in south Atlanta has been serially developed since the 1800s; the land has been used and abused and abandoned. There remain residential neighborhoods, but much of the area was given over in the late 20th century to large, ugly, commercially-viable industrial purposes. And, like most low-value, majority-black communities, there's a landfill there. The green spaces that exist (my favorite is Constitution Lakes and the Doll's Head Trail) are small carve-outs in this industrialized landscape. Spend some time studying the vision created by the Atlanta Regional Commission for the South River Forest and read the alternative perspective of the South River Forest Coalition. You will begin to understand the complexity of assembling the resources to create a coherent, protected chain of green spaces from the existing patchwork of mixed land uses that now characterize the area. This is deeply reductive, I know, but my sense is that the development of the police and fire training center on this site paradoxically increases the likelihood that remaining forest land will be preserved--perhaps even preserved in a way that, unlike the Atlanta Beltline, slows the gentrification that comes with green space development. In our culture today, development initiates and often funds enduring natural resource preservation.
I hate everything about the way the government has handled the protests around Cop City. I just don't hate Cop City itself. A trained, community-based police department is important to Atlanta, and my expectation is that Cop City will stimulate environmental protection and development of the South River Forest vision. I wish Atlanta had the prudence to slow the project down and make the case more deliberately. The more authorities move to stifle dissent, the more they make it feel like the will of the people doesn't matter, the more likely it becomes that people like me on the moderate left will find ourselves forced to admit that those on the activist left are correct: that police today are nothing more than armed agents of private capital, and that abolition is the only way to true justice.
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