Cop City: Dystopia in Atlanta
The dead man was gunned down by a cop – not once, but 14 times. On January 18, 2023, environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, nicknamed “Tortuguita”, was murdered by a Georgia State Patrol trooper. Terán was protesting the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, colloquially called “Cop City.”
Cop City, a police training facility erected by the Atlanta Police Foundation, claims to “reimagine law enforcement training” through the creation of classrooms, shooting ranges, a burn building, and a simulated city environment for officers to gain practical experience. However, beneath its façade of community engagement and police reform, Cop City is disturbingly dystopian. The APF attempts to disguise the facility’s militarization, framing it as a mechanism for promoting cultural sensitivity and police reform through a partnership with the National Center for Civil & Human Rights. Such insidious tactics are meant to conceal the true nature of this agenda.
Cop City’s testing of tear gas and explosives is opposed by community activists, who worry that this type of training will inflict even more devastating police violence against the very-vulnerable, predominantly-Black community in Atlanta. On their website, the Atlanta branch of the Democratic Socialists of America states, “True safety in Atlanta will not be attained via increased policing, militarization, or carceral punishment.” Kwame Olufemi of the Community Movement Builders Group aptly described Cop City as a “a war base where police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill black people and control our bodies and movements.”
Activists also protest against Cop City’s corporate sponsors and its overall businesslike approach to policing. The Atlanta Police Foundation’s gentrification of neighborhoods and the list of its corporate backers, which includes the CEOs of Coca-Cola and Home Depot, highlight the connections between policing and capitalist objectives.
In the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the harrowing killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others, it is disheartening to witness the Atlantan elite, particularly Mayor Andre Dickens and the City Council, double down on community policing rather than embarking on genuine reform measures.
Increased police presence and additional surveillance of Black people will not fundamentally change the systemic structure of policing. The goal should be to divest from the police, create community control over public safety issues within Atlanta neighborhoods, and invest in alternatives, such as community psychiatrists and educators. The enormous funds dedicated to Cop City could be spent on improving mental health services, housing, education, and other social services in lower-income, predominantly-Black neighborhoods. Community-based intervention programs, such as Cure Violence, could mediate nonviolent conflicts instead of the police. Mental health services should also be normalized in underserved communities. Unarmed officials could engage in traffic services, where many instances of police brutality occur. Atlanta’s political leadership, of course, has no desire to create radical change.
Former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms thwarted activists’ attempts to defund the police, maintaining that the only way to abolish the police is to abolish crime. Elected officials misguidedly believe that crime itself is the biggest issue in Atlanta neighborhoods instead of its true origin: poverty. The relationship between poverty and crime was succinctly summarized by Inside Crime, the national newspaper for detainees and convicts in the United Kingdom. A population that is unable to afford basic necessities and lacks the resources to attain upward socioeconomic mobility creates “the breeding grounds for criminal activity.” Poverty limits educational opportunities and employment options while creating a lack of good role models. Moreover, the stress, trauma, and fear that poverty instills has ramifications on mental health and self-esteem, causing overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and desperation that can instigate criminal activity. Lower-income Black people have to contend with those realities along with being frequently abandoned by the system. According to Atlanta Magazine’s George Chidi, the bottom 20 percent of Atlanta households earned less than $17,000 yearly. Approximately 30% of Black households live in poverty. When the conditions of an environment limit legal ways of attaining wealth and status, what else is left to lose?
“Atlanta’s crime increase is among the highest in the country because Atlanta was more broken than other places before the pandemic started. It plays out on the street, at the nightclubs gravid with Atlanta hustle,” Chidi explains, noting that among the city’s 70 excess murders over the pre-pandemic baseline, at least 25 were within distance “sketchy clubs” or the nightlife scene frequented by Atlanta’s predominantly-Black, lower-income stratum.
However, it’s much more difficult to solve poverty than crime, because it would require a philosophical examination of America’s political system and structure. It’s telling that Atlanta politicians and corporations are funding harmful police initiatives rather than funneling more money into underfunded inner-city school systems or medical care. Cop City is not reimagining law enforcement – it’s intensifying the violence against the most vulnerable segment of Atlantans.
Avantika Jagdhari is a high school Senior from Stamford, Connecticut.