Atlanta votes to fund police training center critics call ‘Cop City’

Atlanta city council votes to fund ‘Cop City’ police training center - The Washington Post

Tensions boiled over inside Atlanta’s City Hall overnight as the city council voted to transfer $31 million for the building of a police training camp. The vote followed hours of public comment in which hundreds spoke, most of them opposing the plan.

Proponents of the project, including city officials and law enforcement organizations, contend that turning a parcel of woodland in the outskirts of southeast Atlanta into an 85-acre law enforcement facility is needed to help recruitment efforts and boost morale.

The $90 million center — which will be partially funded by the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private law enforcement nonprofit — will feature a mock city for urban police training, a shooting range, an emergency vehicle driver training course and an auditorium.

But the proposed center has been met with fierce opposition among environmental advocates who are seeking to preserve one of the city’s biggest green spaces, and activists who have been pushing for less confrontational forms of policing.

Dubbed “Cop City” by critics, the proposed law enforcement facility has for months been a point of contention in Georgia’s capital. In January police fatally shot Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, a 26-year-old activist, while trying to clear the training site of protesters. (Officials say Paez Teran fired at police first, who shot back. Paez Teran’s family and activists have strongly opposed that narrative.)

The divisive nature of the plan was on full display on Monday and into Tuesday, as an emotional public-comment period lasted more than 14 hours.

Police barricaded the city hall entrance. Hundreds of protesters packed into the chamber carrying banners emblazoned with messages like “Stop Cop City!” Some 360 people, spanning all ages and political parties, signed up to speak on the decision, many waiting in sultry temperatures into the early hours of Tuesday. As the comment period expired at 2:30 a.m., the council attempted to move on to its meeting agenda, but public outcry prompted it to take more speakers, and they continued until past 3:30 a.m.

Earlier in the evening, boos and chanting erupted when a council member explained why the center was a necessity for Atlanta.

“Whether it’s the deal that’s before us today or some other iteration, eventually the city of Atlanta will have to acquire equipment, build facilities for our departments. And that is a fact,” council member Michael Julian Bond said as protesters shouted.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (D) has supported the move, saying last week in a news release that building the training camp would allow the city to save $200,000 annually or $6 million over 30 years — instead of using those funds to lease other “suboptimal” facilities for public safety training.

“This is a reallocation of funds that saves the City and taxpayers money,” Dickens said. “Once completed, the new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center will be owned and operated by the City and will be designed specifically to provide the highest quality training to our first responders, including de-escalation and anti-bias skills and techniques.”

Yet activists remained unconvinced — particularly after the protests this year sparked a heated debate over Georgia’s application of its “domestic terrorism” charges. In 2017, the state’s domestic terror statute was broadened to include a slew of property crimes intended to change government policy through “intimidation or coercion.”

The relatively new law has since been used to charge 42 people who protested the training facility by holing up in the forest-filled site and erecting a community of treehouse encampments. That demonstration of dissent was met with force when state agencies moved in to get clear the area in January. What the police described as a shootout left Paez Teran dead, and widespread protests erupted in its wake.

Opponents of the training center have accused officials of raiding the forest to quash dissent and of applying domestic terrorism charges to suppress free speech and political organizing. On Monday, a representative read out a statement from three activists who had been arrested in connection to their efforts to oppose the training center.

“As we saw with the killing of Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Teran, there seems to be no limit to the violence police are willing to direct against those they see as political opposition,” their statement said.

Tim Craig and Niha Masih contributed to this report.