Community organizer Kamau Franklin outside Atlanta's City Hall, June 7, 2023. (AP Photo/R.J. Rico)
This has to be one of the most controversial projects in Atlanta, but the city council recently voted to fund the massive police training camp that has been known as Cop City.
Protesters flooded the city while they decided to put through funding of $31 million, voting after a 16-hour meeting on June 6. The vote was 11-4. The opposition was so loud and aggressive that the city, closed many City Hall offices and temporarily banned liquids, aerosols, gels, creams and pastes inside the building, CNN reported. If so many citizens in the city are against the facility, which has a $90 million budget, then why did Atlanta’s City Council partially fund it?
Officially called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center it will be 85-acre campus just outside of the city proper and will be used by law enforcement from other cities as well for training. Those against the project say this marks the militarization of the Atlanta police force in a city that is predominately Black and at a time when police killings of Black people are still a major problem nationwide. Atlanta is 49.79 percent Black or African American, and 40.42 percent white.
“A multimillion-dollar police training center, in the middle of a forest, with little transparency or recourse for voters, felt like a slap in the face to people who had been marching Atlanta flat for democracy,” The Intercept reported.
Under the deal the city council voted for, the city will pay just over $30 million now and another $1.2 million a year for the next 30 years to cover debt for the entity building it, the Atlanta Police Foundation, The Intercept reported. The final total will cost the public about twice as much as was reported in late 2021 when the proposal was first authorized.
Interestingly, the decision-makers for the city of Atlanta are almost all Democrats– the mayor and at least 12 of the city’s 15 council members are Democrats, and of those eight of those voted to pass the funding.
The “Stop Cop City” movement has pulled in protesters from across the country. The January police killing of 26-year-old environmental activist Manuel Paez Terán, who had been camping in the woods near the site of the proposed project in DeKalb County, has attracted opposition to the Cop City project, AP News reported.
Community organizer Kamau Franklin speaks during a news conference outside Atlanta’s City Hall, June 7, 2023, to announce an effort to force a referendum that would allow Atlanta voters to decide whether the construction of a proposed police and firefighter training center should proceed. Under the proposed referendum, voters would choose whether they want to repeal the ordinance that authorized the lease of the city-owned land upon which the project, which opponents call Cop City, is being built. (AP Photo/R.J. Rico)
