Pressure is growing on Atlanta politicians to vote against giving $31m to a police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”, even as the state continues to characterize opposition to the project as the work of “terrorists”, and the city’s mayor doubles down on the notion it is needed for “public safety”.
Atlanta’s city council will soon vote on giving taxpayer money to the controversial scheme, which is months behind schedule due to protests. The Atlanta Police Foundation, the organization behind it, is also apparently coming up short in sought-after $60m in corporate funding.
Meanwhile, the state’s second-highest law enforcement official successfully argued this week against granting bail to one of three people recently arrested for leaving fliers on mailboxes in a north-western Georgia town. The flier called a police officer who lived nearby a “murderer” for being involved in the shooting and killing of an environmental activist.
The incident pushed the Cop City project on to global headlines; the state says the activist, Manuel Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita”, fired first and the case is with a special prosecutor.
Police have arrested dozens of protestors since the 18 January shooting, and the state has insisted on labeling those who oppose Cop City as part of a “domestic terrorist organization”.
If the council approves the funding as early as 5 June, it will be against the wishes of nearly 300 Atlanta-area residents who signed up for seven-plus hours of public comment on Monday – plus another 100 or so who attended the meeting but weren’t able to sign up in time.
Some read opposition letters signed by college faculty, union presidents, neighborhood residents and other local groups. The meeting set a record for civic participation in the city’s modern era, several people who have been involved with city politics for decades told the Guardian.
It’s unclear whether public opposition will matter. City councilman Michael Julian Bond, a member of one of two committees charged with reviewing the funding proposal, said: “I appreciate their passion. But that doesn’t absolve us from serving public employees.” None of the other council members replied to the Guardian’s repeated requests for comment.
Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, landed an editorial in the city’s main daily, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), the day after the meeting. In it, he invoked a recent mass shooting – in which four were wounded and one person was killed – as a reason for building the training center, since such incidents “show that when a crisis hits, we rely on all our first responders to be on top of their game”.
But Shannon Cofrin Gaggero, a personal friend of Amy St Pierre – the person killed in the shooting – published an op-ed in the Atlanta Community Press Collective in which she lambasted Dickens for “us[ing] her death in an attempt to drum up support for the deeply unpopular police training center”.
She noted St Pierre, a healthcare researcher, opposed Cop City and supported “a safer, more just society by advocating for common sense gun laws and investments in housing, education, healthcare and social services”.
Gaggero also mentioned that she submitted an editorial to the AJC countering the mayor’s, but received no reply. To date, the AJC has only run one editorial in nearly two years of public protest that even questions the project – written by Bernice A King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. In it, she encourages the city to “identify a more suitable location” for the training center.
Many of the hundreds of residents addressing the council’s 14 members invoked the city’s civil rights legacy, and its most famous son, King.
This included Atlanta-area Black residents mourning deaths of family members at the hands of police, such as Jimmy Hill, whose son Jimmy Atchison was killed by police in 2019. Hill asked city council members who will soon consider the funding: “What happened to integrity?”
The meeting also included scientists, human rights attorneys, reverends, college students, school teachers, university faculty, community organizers, gardeners, environmentalists and senior citizens. Some expressed concern about the environmental impact of locating the training center in a forest amid a changing climate.
Amelia Weltner, 34, told the meeting about her grandfather, Charles Weltner, a Democrat who was the sole member of Georgia’s congressional delegation to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and declined to run for re-election after his party asked him to support segregationist Lester Maddox.
“I get that they have political ambitions,” Weltner told the Guardian. “But in the long term, where does that get you? How do people view you after you’re gone?”
In an interview with the Guardian, Bond – son of civil rights leader Julian Bond – acknowledged he had never seen as many members of the public come to a city council meeting for an issue that wasn’t yet up for a vote, since being elected in 1994.
But he added some of the comments made “were not factual, or incorrect … such as saying that we were doing this in response to the unrest of 2020 – that’s not true”.
Many of those opposed to Cop City, however, do draw a line from the historic Black Lives Matter protests to Atlanta’s plans.
But even if the proposed $31m goes through, documents obtained through open records requests by the local media group Atlanta Community Press Collective suggest the Atlanta Police Foundation has concerns about cutting costs that may point to corporate funding issues.
Will Potter, who studied environmental movements in his book Green Is the New Red, compared Bond’s characterization of public opposition to Cop City to other activism he’s studied.
“In environmental movements, there’s a moving of the goal posts when it comes to the ‘proper ways’ for achieving social and political change. And especially if they’re successful in any way. There’s always something pointed to, always a way of invalidating.”
Potter added:“It’s hard not to get cynical. What conditions have to be met for people to be heard? What is enough? Will they ever be heard?”
