Cop City, the proposed site of a new $90 million dollar Atlanta Police Department training facility, is an 85-acre police training facility that was recently approved by mayor Andre Dickens on January 31st. The groups opposing this construction have united under the banners of Defend the Atlanta Forest (DFA) and Stop Cop City (SCC) to contest the deforestation of the area and Cop City itself.
Loosely composed of a diverse set of activists and protestors both local and national, SCC has established an encampment in the forest to nonviolently block construction of the facility, which they argue is both environmentally and ethically reprehensible.
Atlanta, sometimes called the ‘City in a Forest,’ is among the most surveilled cities in America. In 2022, a third of the city’s budget, some $231 million, went to the police department, a figure which will rise to $233 million this year.
Cop City would see $30 million of those city funds being used in the construction of a brand-new shooting range and a mock village of lifelike buildings for officers to be trained in. Equally important to activists as the destruction of the forest is the training of officers in isolation from the real people and communities they will oversee.
This separation has been identified by activists as part of a national, decades-long, state effort towards police militarization that aims to increase the lethality of officers while simultaneously isolating them from the very communities they are charged with protecting. Activists argue that these efforts result in officers seeing themselves as little more than occupying armies, and that the grotesque consequences for the members of those occupied communities are becoming increasingly clear.
In police operations to oust protestors from encampments, one activist has already been killed. During a “clearing operation” of the encampment on Jan. 18th, 26-year-old activist Tortuguita was shot at least 13 times and killed. Officers claimed that Tortuguita, known by family and friends for a commitment to non-violence, had shot and wounded an officer in the abdomen first. However, recently released body camera footage from that operation casts severe doubt on this narrative, with one officer commenting to another over radio, “Man, you fucked your own officer up?” The official autopsy shows that Tortigua was seated, legs crossed, with their hands in the air when they were shot.
This facility is only the next in a long line of massive police militarization centers constructed recently: New York opened it’s $1 billion dollar police academy in Queens in 2017 in addition to a $275 million update to a police training site in the Bronx, and a $170 million cop city with its own mock village currently underway in Chicago.
Popular opposition to these projects, especially from those residents who would be most directly affected, is not new or unstated. Rather, it is simply ignored. Cop City was initially approved by the Atlanta city council with a 10–4 in 2021 that came after 17 hours of comments where 70% of the 1,100 residents that spoke strongly disapproved.
Its construction was fully green lit on February 1st by Democrat Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens after massive local opposition, national condemnation by a variety of media outlets, and a death. However, in the face of a system that sees residents as enemies, and police officers as combatants, and urban neighborhoods as war zones, this anti-democratic posture should not be unexpected.
Instead of being reformed, police units are becoming increasingly militaristic, brutal, and trigger-happy as they position themselves beyond accountability. The American police force will not compromise or negotiate. It aims to directly suppress your agency by any means possible, whether through rubber bullets or disinformation campaigns.
Where does that leave us, as activists? Strikes, occupations, and sabotage have been tools of dissent for centuries, but in the past few decades the State has taken pains to criminalize any disruptive direct action. Most recently, 19 nonviolent protestors, alleged to have occupied the South Forest encampment, or participated in the destruction of police property in recent marches, have been charged with domestic terrorism. Overwhelmingly young, college aged adults, 9 of these 19 individuals were booked for merely trespassing.
These crimes were labeled by police and prosecution as acts of terrorism according to an argument that protestors from out of state couldn't have any vested interest in stopping the construction of Cop City and could be therefore assumed to be members of a militant organization organized to commit state terror.
Police chief and drooling fascist vegetable, Darin Schierbaum, would even go so far as to tell journalists challenging the charge that, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an attorney to tell you that breaking windows and setting fires is not protest, it’s terrorism.”
The legal definition of domestic terrorism as defined in the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 is nebulous, giving the state an enormous amount of power to crack down on any organizational or individual struggle against the powers that be. “National security” doesn’t mean security for citizens (cop killings make that clear enough) but rather securing the state apparatus from citizens who reject it.
Tacking terrorism charges onto protestors is a fear tactic, a weaponization of the state's legal authority used to silence protestors. Americans have watched as their state has slaughtered nations of people overseas in the name of counterterrorism; now, the State is showing that it is poised to turn that same wrath against the citizens it pretends to protect.
Given all of this, what can be accepted as a solution? The State is a malicious, self-perpetuating entity that violently resists any attempt to make it more humane. It does not answer to the people it lords over, and levels violence against any real or imagined threat to its power. It’s a cancerous mass, and nothing short of its complete destruction is acceptable.
What are radical and achievable goals to pursue to this end? Pursuing specific individuals within the state apparatus is no more effective than cutting heads off of a hydra. Instead, focus should lie on two things: abolishment of police unions which shield agents of the State from accountability, and total State disarmament.
Nipping militarization projects like Cop City in the bud is extremely important to the pursuit of disarmament. To make concessions to the State is to compromise with a cancerous tumor; it will only make us weaker, and it harder to kill. No amount of militarization, no amount of brutality, and no amount of control will satisfy it. If they build it, we must burn it. Never give in, never back down, and fuck Cop City.