On January 18, 2023, just before 9 a.m., cops entered a patch of forest southwest of Atlanta. The multiagency task force included officers from the Atlanta Police Department (APD) and a SWAT team from the Georgia Department of Public Safety (DPS), headed up by agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI).
Protesters had taken up residence in the forest nearly two years earlier, after the city announced it would build a new police and fire training facility on the site. The plan's opponents derisively called the project Cop City and rallied under the hashtag #StopCopCity, and many of them were camping there to prevent construction. The authorities had done another sweep of the area a month earlier. Now these officers were tasked with clearing out the protesters.
