The movement against the police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” is planning two events for the coming weeks in and near Atlanta, Georgia – including a first-ever, non-violent protest march on to the project’s construction site.
The action, planned for 13 November and aimed at occupying the Cop City site for a day, could draw a thousand or more people from across the county. This would make it the largest protest to date at the location. The other event is a Black-led “week of action” the week before, aimed at Black audiences.
Both are new tactics in a movement now in its third year that has captured national and global headlines, particularly after police shot and killed Manuel Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, on 18 January, while the activist was camping in a forested public park about a mile from the planned training center.
Called “Block Cop City”, the occupation is planned to draw people primarily from audiences in 80-plus cities who have come to speaking tour events in the last two months. The talks have drawn crowds between several dozen and several hundred to bookstores, community centers and college campuses. They include a history of the training center project and the movement that opposes it, based on concerns about issues ranging from deforestation in an era of climate change to police militarization and anti-democratic decision-making.
The goal for 13 November is for people to peacefully march on to the 171-acre footprint of the training center, a forest south-east of Atlanta. The site has been guarded by police for months.
The week of action planned for 3-10 November is the seventh such event since Atlanta announced plans for the training center in 2021 – the first organized by Black-led groups and aimed at Black audiences in and outside Atlanta. The city’s population is 48% Black and the neighborhoods surrounding Cop City are mostly Black. The week’s activities include film screenings, panels and concerts.
“Block Cop City” came out of discussions at the last week of action in June, organizers said. By that time, Atlanta-area residents had set records for public participation in city council meetings three times, including one in early June where council members voted on $67m in tax dollars to fund the training center. About a thousand people went to express their opposition to the funding to council members for 14 hours. At the end of public comment, the council approved the funding anyway.
The June week of action was also the first that wasn’t centered on the forested public park where Tortuguita was killed, part of the South River Forest and separated from the training center site by a small river called Intrenchment Creek. Dekalb county closed the park in March, alleging that “forest defenders” – those who camped there in protest for more than a year – made the forest unsafe.
“We thought, what can we do to get a thousand people together? City hall isn’t listening to us … and the state of Georgia is trying to make it illegal to protest,” said Peter, who gave three talks in Florida on the speaking tour and does not want to disclose his real name due to the recent indictments of 61 people in connection with opposition to Cop City.
Organizing an explicitly non-violent protest seemed like the best way to reach the most people, several organizers told the Guardian.
“It was like, maybe try and organize an action in which the largest group of people could participate and feel good about it,” said Sam Beard, who gave 16 talks in six midwestern and north-west states and British Columbia in recent months.
Will Harlan, founder of Forest Keeper, a national forest conservation organization, helped Atlanta organizers launch a petition effort to put the question of whether Cop City should be built on a referendum for voters to decide. Months later, in September, organizers turned in 116,000 signatures, about twice the requirement, only to have the city postpone verifying voter identities due to an ongoing court case.
“When you’ve exhausted all legal options in the so-called ‘city in a forest’, in the ‘city too busy to hate’, you do what Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders had to do, when they tried everything else – a non-violent direct action,” Harlan said.
Meanwhile, Black-led groups in Atlanta sought “an opportunity to specifically target Black, Brown and Indigenous people in Atlanta and from out of town – who haven’t explicitly been targeted,” said Jasmine Burnett, organizer with Community Movement Builders, an Atlanta grassroots group.
“We want to combat the narrative from [Atlanta] Mayor Andre Dickens and others who say: ‘People in these communities want Cop City,’” said Burnett. “It’s not necessarily true.”
The week’s events also offer people of color who are interested in the issues surrounding Cop City to plug in, while assuming lower risk. “Block Cop City is inherently high-risk,” Burnett said, because “there will be contact with law enforcement.”
An open records request filed with Atlanta police about the event has not been answered.
Environmental movements have staged multiple events following speaking tours before, such as the “Redwood Summer” in 1990, said Keith Makoto Woodhouse, author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism. But the Block Cop City action’s “proximity to a city, and being against a police facility” makes it different, he said.
“This makes for a very unpredictable context,” Woodhouse added. “It’s hard to know what the state’s response will be.”
Organizers hope people arrive to Atlanta for “Block Cop City” as part of “affinity groups” from their home states; the groups will name spokespersons and the spokespersons will be part of a planning council setting forth routes through the forest and to the construction site – or alternative plans – up until the day of the occupation.
One stop on the speaking tour featured Joel Paez, Manuel Paez Terán’s father. Reached at his home in Chicago, he said: “On the one hand, I’m still processing the sadness and loss of Manuel. But there’s also something being born in me, making me committed … to following his legacy.”
Paez, who said he normally avoids speaking in front of groups, found himself recently talking to a room of some 60 people about the movement and “Block Cop City”. He sprinkled his speech with biblical aphorisms, and addressed the risk of arrests or violence from police.
“I’m worried about them taking care of each other,” he said. “I used the reference of how, when Jesus sent sheep out amidst wolves, they went in a group, for protection. I told them: ‘Don’t go [on to the construction site] alone.’”
At the end of his talk, Paez was surprised when the crowd stood and erupted in a now-familiar chant at protests in many places: “Viva, viva Tortuguita!”.
He also plans to be among those who occupy Cop City on 13 November: “The power of the people is what really matters.”
