| Atlanta’s proposed “Cop City” hasn’t even broken ground, but the clash over plans to build the $90 million police training center has already resulted in the death of a protester, domestic terrorism charges filed against 23 people and a state of emergency. The Atlanta City Council approved the project back in September 2021, despite 17 hours of mostly negative public comment. That same year, a decentralized group of activists began living in the Weelaunee Forest in southeast Atlanta to protest construction of the 382-acre facility. Among them was a young, queer, Indigenous-Venezuelan protester named Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. On Jan. 18, 2023, law enforcement officers shot and killed Tortuguita. Officials say Tortuguita, who was in a tent at the time of their death, “did not comply” with orders and shot a state trooper, but officials have yet to provide proof of the claims, URL Media partner Pulso reports. Watch: Gavin Godfrey, Atlanta editor for Capital B, discusses the murder of Tortuguita and the larger, systemic issue of police violence against people of color. Following Tortuguita’s death, calls to stop the project grew. Most recently, URL Media partner Scalawag published an open letter from a group of Spelman College alumni calling on the school to divest from all entities supporting Atlanta Police Foundation and the “Cop City” project.“Spelmanites are rigorously trained to understand the many complex systems that comprise our world and their impact on the lived realities of Black people [that are] further marginalized by their gender (or lack thereof),” the letter says. “Destroying a critical ecosystem to invest millions of dollars into a police terror institution is an act of environmental anti-Blackness of the highest degree, and represents only the latest casualty in a string of destruction of our social infrastructure.”It’s important to note that this decision by the Atlanta City Council was not made in a vacuum. As Micah Herskind writes for URL Media partner Prism, the training facility represents the city’s latest example of corporate interests taking precedence over the health of its working class residents.“While the fight to Stop Cop City is a more recent struggle against the Atlanta ruling class’ orientation toward its most vulnerable residents, it should be understood within a much longer trend of state, corporate, and nonprofit forces banding together to shape the city in their interests and at the expense of Black and working-class residents.” Herskind adds, “This pattern showed up perhaps most vividly in the transformation of the city that occurred in the leadup to the 1996 Olympics.”Between 1990 and 1996, the city displaced roughly 30,000 people from their homes and illegally arrested more than 9,000 unhoused people from 1995-96 in an effort to “frame [Atlanta] as a world-class city that is welcoming to tourists and big business.”The deep connection between policing and “urban renewal” in Atlanta has a long history, one that writer Justin A. Davis explores for Scalawag in the two-part series “From Slime City to Cop City.”At the moment, the city appears to be moving forward with its plan to build the facility, destroying precious green space in the process, but there’s still time for the Atlanta City Council to listen to the community and “Stop Cop City.” |
