Around the country, we hear the cry for more police training. Unless you don’t want police training. In Atlanta, despite sometimes violent protests, the city council approved millions in funding for a new training center for law enforcement dubbed “Cop City”. The decision was not unanimous and after the 11-4 vote, the council was greeted with “boos” from the crowd in the wee hours of the morning after hearing a parade of testimony.
This classic case of damned if you do (want to improve first responder training) and damned if you don’t, has played out in vociferous objections to the building of a facility that advocates say will develop the kind of first responder the public is demanding in terms of training and skills.
One of the major claims that protestors have made is that the site’s environmental impact is devastating to the ecosystem there. The reality is that the nearly 400-acre area had been cleared years ago for a prison and that the training facility would involve only 85 acres. There is no mature forest growth to be impacted. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens told reporters that the tract is filled with rubble and overgrown with invasive species, not hardwood trees and that 300 acres would be preserved as a public greenspace. “This is Atlanta, and we know forests. This facility would not be built over a forest,” Dickens said.
Another claim is that the training will increase the militarization of the police to engage in urban warfare. This claim disregards the fact that other public safety first responders will be training at the site in addition to police officers. The militarization argument is a frequent trope of anti-police extremists who have no clue about what law enforcement faces.
Thirdly, just to toss in some racism as part of the protest soup, the training site will be near an economically depressed area populated largely by minority residents. If this were a nuclear waste dump one might be inclined to join the protests, but this facility will offer job opportunities, traffic for businesses to cater to the new population of staff and trainees, and may be the best hope for economic development that can benefit the area.
It is important that observers of this controversy recognize the terroristic tactics being used so that the character of these attacks on the facility becomes crystal clear. In January of this year, Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp had to declare a state of emergency over the protests. Explosives were reported to have been found and six arrests were made with criminal charges of domestic terrorism.
Purported to be protests over the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis Police officers, the protesters set a police cruiser on fire and damaged buildings in downtown Atlanta one of which houses the Atlanta Police Foundation. A thousand National Guard members were on call but were not deployed. Kemp declared that in Georgia “we’ll always back the blue”.
Protestors also called the shooting of a protestor at the Cop City site a murder, even though the individual shot by police had shot and seriously wounded a state trooper. Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, was a non-binary individual who had undergone training to be a medic for the “forest defenders” and was among a small group of protesters being cleared from the site. Tortuguita fired into the abdomen of the trooper with a gun that was purchased by Terán in 2020.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Mike Register said that his agency and other law enforcement “embrace a citizen’s right to protest, but law enforcement can’t stand by while serious criminal acts are being committed that jeopardize the safety of the citizens we’re sworn to protect.” While protestors shouted slogans like “Trees give life. Police take it. Stop Cop City! If you build it, we will burn it!”
Register said the protestors were illegally occupying the area and committing criminal acts that endanger the community, including arson, beating people up, using explosives and setting booby traps that have the potential to seriously hurt someone.
Governor Kemp tweeted “Domestic terrorism will NOT be tolerated in our state, and we will not hesitate, we will not rest, we will not waver in ending their activities and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law”, in the kind of unequivocal
support that citizens need in support of their police.