You may not have heard of Atlanta’s contested “Cop City,” a $90 million state-of-the-art project encompassing 85 acres of Weelaunee Forest land in the center of an all-Black neighborhood in Georgia’s capital city.
“Cop City” was designed as a police military facility, or a mock city, to give law enforcement the opportunity to test their policing with bombs, tear gas, and high-speed chases.
Activists from the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement have been camping out in the trees for nearly two years in the hopes of stopping the development. The site sits on the land of a former slave plantation and prison farm.
Environmentalists have held vigils up and down the East Coast since last week when Atlanta Police entered the forest and fatally shot a protestor. Protests erupted in the city after 26-year-old activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was shot and killed by law enforcement.
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Terán, who used the name “Tortuguita,” meaning “little turtle,” was killed during an operation involving the Atlanta Police, DeKalb County Police, Georgia State Patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (which operates under Republican Gov. Brian Kemp), and the FBI.
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The official story is that Terán shot first at a state trooper “without warning,” and an officer returned fire. But there is zero evidence to prove that story. The shooting was not caught on body-mounted camera—but there is bodycam footage of the aftermath.
Terán’s mother told The Guardian, “I will go to the U.S. to defend Manuel’s memory. … I’m convinced that he was assassinated in cold blood.”
The land for the proposed project has been contested for some years. In 2017, there was a plan to turn the neglected land into public housing, but in 2021, despite the local outcry, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve the training center, and the “Stop Cop City” rallying cry was born. The project includes the removal of large swaths of the South River Forest, which helps prevent flooding and gives the city protection from the brutal summer heat.
Bentley Hudgins, a local organizer who lives near the project, told The New York Times, “People don’t want gunfire and bomb detonations to be the soundtrack of their neighborhood.”
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Kemp and other local leaders have begun referring to the activists as terrorists, and dozens of forest protestors have been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism.”
A police cruiser was set on fire, and the storefronts of Wells Fargo and Trust banks in midtown Atlanta were vandalized. Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum called the acts “terrorism.” Nearly everyone arrested for causing damage is from out of town, and all are white.
Locals who live near Cop City say the issue is not unfamiliar to residents.
“The problem with the police training center and the Atlanta forest is a classic Atlanta issue. Those in power did what they wanted without a lot of concern for what local residents wanted. This is the Atlanta way,” Doug Williams, a local activist and a resident of Atlanta’s East Lake Neighborhood, told The Intercept.
“Atlanta residents and unincorporated DeKalb residents who thought this was all going to be park land were told, ‘This is what we’re doing, accept it,’” Williams said. “Everyone who opposed the training center for any reason was lumped together as ‘anti-cop.’ Now there is no trust, and in this vacuum, we are seeing this become a nationalized issue for those who oppose the militarization of police and those who want to paint democratic communities as being anti-police.”