Third Ocean, 48th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Helios): Atlanta's Cop City is one of the largest militarized police training centers in the United States. The site includes military-grade training facilities, a mock city in which to practice urban warfare, and dozens of shooting ranges. Construction of the site cleared much of the Weelaunee Forest, Atlanta’s largest green space. 

Back in 2023, I signed a petition to stop Cop City. Some people scoff at opposition to the facility, saying it's important to train the police, and while I agree to that in principle, the training the police need is not in urban warfare but in de-escalation techniques and community awareness, classroom lessons you don't need a mock city to teach. They need hands-on leadership and an on-the-street mentoring  program. 

Further, building the site in a majority Black neighborhood that understandably didn't want it in their backyards reeks of racism, and it's well documented that it's the Black community that disproportionally suffers police brutality and over-zealous enforcement. I'm sure the sounds of gunfire from the shooting ranges and sirens and noise from helicopters, flashbangs, etc. have hurt the already depressed property values in the neighborhood. Would you want to live next to it?    

There's a lot of underutilized space in the City of Atlanta for a training facility, including abandoned shopping malls and environmental brownfields, and it seems preposterous that the only site considered was the city's largest remaining green space. Also, what about the old training ground? Why not rebuild there? And if it's so unusable, why should we turn the forest land over to such irresponsible stewards of property? 

If all that doesn't trigger alarms in your head, look at the absolutely vicious response to protests by the city. They literally murdered one protester while still in his tent (descanse en paz, Tortuguita), and prosecuted others as domestic terrorists and charged them with racketeering under the RICO Act. They even went after organizations offering legal aid and bail assistance. A judge eventually overturned the case, but both the City of Atlanta and the State of Georgia have vowed to keep persecuting the opposition and refile the charges, even though construction of Cop City is now complete. 

The petition opposing Cop City requested a referendum on the development be put on the ballot for voters to decide. The petition eventually gathered more than 116,000 signatures, nearly double the number required by the city to put a referendum on the ballot. It’s also more than the number of people who had voted in Atlanta’s previous mayoral election.   

The City engaged in a series of legal shenanigans to ignore the petition and the will of the people. They  announced that would use a burdensome signature verification process regarded by many as a tactic of voter suppression to disenfranchise Black, Brown, and low-income people. Many of the city’s leaders had argued against such verification requirements in a lawsuit over the 2018 election. 

Finally, the city simply refused to even count the signatures on the petition or otherwise acknowledge its existence. When the petition was presented at the city clerk’s office on September 11, 2023, city officials falsely claimed they couldn’t begin verifying signatures because a deadline had been missed, even though a federal court had extended the deadline to late in the month. 

According to recent reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a former municipal clerk was hired in 2023 to help with the signature verification process. The signatures were never counted, but the city still paid the former clerk $910,000 anyway. Nearly one million dollars to not verify or count signatures. Nice work if you can get it. 

The whole case stinks to high heavens. Murder, trumped-up charges against the protesters, persecution of those assisting the protesters, and illegally disregarding a valid petition, not even allowing a vote on the matter. And now we learn there's also what appears to be graft. This whole thing stinks and that's why I voted against incumbent Mayor Andre Dickens last November.

Stop Cop City!