Pushback against the future "public safety training facility" in Dekalb County, commonly refered to as "Cop City," is growing after protestors held a town hall in Southeast Atlanta on Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Baptist Church. 

Hundreds of people packed the pews to voice their opposition. “More police will not keep us safe,” Community Movement Builders Spokesperson Kamau Franklin said.

Many at the town hall said they feel like the site is going to be a place of terrorism and a place where police will learn harmful tactics. They also said it’s a horrible use of tax dollars. “Some police are good and some are not, there’s good and bad in all, but we don’t need that crap in our neighborhood,” one attendee said.

The town hall comes after DeKalb officials said they had to close down part of the forest because they allegedly found booby traps, Molotov cocktails, and fentanyl syringes on the property. The officials said they are not done with the clearing and claim there’s no timeline on reopening the forest.

However, protesters said county officials closed the forest for a different reason, “That’s a tactic and a strategy that’s meant to make people think this movement is a criminal movement, which it is not. . . as opposed to an opposition movement and a protest movement to stop Cop City,” Franklin said.

Despite voices of fear over the future of the training site expressed during the town hall, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said that the site’s purpose is to enhance public safety. “We need training facilities for our police and our firefighters. The training facilities that we have in place now have been long condemned. That’s why we are building the state-of-the-art Atlanta Public Safety Training Center,” Dickens said.

While police advocates are asking for social training (de-escalation techniques and community involvement), not militarized training, an entire mock city is being proposed to teach SWAT-style combat techniques.  De-escalation techniques can be taught in classrooms and a mock city isn't needed for that kind of training.  There are plenty of other viable locations for both classroom and field training that already have existing infrastructure in place and aren't currently greenspace. 

In addition to an apparent cover-up of the murder of an environmental protester by the Georgia State Police, nearly every other aspect of this project has involved a cover-up of some sort or another. The facility is being built outside city limits next to neighborhoods where the residents can’t vote against the officials greenlighting this project. Police from all over the state will be using a facility funded in part by Atlanta taxpayers. This is just a waste of taxpayer funds to placate the Atlanta Police Foundation, to benefit contractors, and to burnish the "anti-crime" credentials of elected officials.

Residents near the proposed facility are understandably upset about the noise (sirens, gunfire, helicopters) disrupting their lives while the police train on military tactics that will most likely be used against them, or people who look like them. 

Ultimately, the project's not going to do anything to improve policing because it's not addressing any of the actual deficits. The biggest issue the APD faces right now is understaffing, and another training facility isn't going to fix that. If the development money was used instead for sign-on bonuses and benefit boosts, they could partially solve that issue. 

Protesters at the town hall said they are not going to stop protesting and they are organizing another week of action against the site.