A society that builds a Cop City cannot be redeemed
In late April, press and local dignitaries took their seats atop the new green grass in front of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center’s education center. Mayor Andre Dickens took the podium with a smile. “Getting here has not been an easy journey,” he said. “But our perseverance to see it through for the people of Atlanta now and into the future cannot be denied.” The City of Atlanta flag billowed over his shoulder, a phoenix with outstretched wings beneath the Latin word resurgens: rising again. With a slice from a pair of shears a white ceremonial ribbon snapped, and Atlanta’s Cop City opened for the first time.
Before it was a law enforcement training center, the land was 85 acres of forest, part of the largest remaining green expanse within metro Atlanta. Before the Trail of Tears, the Muscogee people called the forest Weelaunee. For generations, it held the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, where the incarcerated produced the food that sustained the greater Atlanta penitentiary system. After the Prison Farm closed, the wild retook the land. But in 2021, less than a year after the so-called racial reckoning exposed the white supremacy at the heart of American law enforcement and society, the City of Atlanta told its constituents that they would need to pay tens of millions of dollars to convert the Weelaunee Forest into a campus for the preparation of death.
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Cop City contains an entire mock city for police, both local and invited from around the world, to practice military-style operations. There is a mock convenience store, a mock school, a mock single-family home —an entire slice of American existence, comprising all the arenas in which law enforcement might find themselves called upon to exert force and take life. Cities at their best are ecosystems of life, of cohabitation and connection. Cop City is a playground reserved for the rehearsal of death.
In the course of its conversion to a lethal playing field, the land of Weelaunee had already absorbed blood. After Cop City was announced, activists from around the city and the world gathered in the Weelaunee Forest to block construction with their own bodies. The movement to stop Cop City is a disparate assemblage, with electoral door canvassers sharing solidarity with arsonists and saboteurs. It united the most vibrant threads of resistance in the so-called United States: radical environmentalist direct action, the militancy of the alter-globalization movement, a resurgent Black nationalism. One of those who moved to the forest to defend the land was known to their comrades as Tortuguita and the state as Manuel Paez Terán. When police stormed the forest in January 2023, they executed Tortuguita as they sat in their tent. And now, the site of their murder will serve as a training ground for their killers to practice the art of further death.
The state slandered opponents of the development as outsider agitators and terrorists. When it became clear that Cop City opponents might well include a majority of their own constitutents, the political class unilaterally scrapped a popular referendum. While Cop City’s urban warfare training grounds feature a microcosm of American life, its backers constitute a representative sample of American power. Cop City has been supported by the federal government under Biden and Trump alike. At the ribbon cutting, Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens shared his podium with Republican Brian Kemp. The project’s corporate funders include Bank of America and Chik-Fil-A, Delta Airlines and The Home Depot, Coca-Cola and UPS.
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As the support by multinational firms suggests, Cop City is not just a problem for Atlanta. There are now 80 law enforcement training and recruitment centers planned across the United States, in every state but Wyoming. The 2020 George Floyd Rebellion raised the threat of massive urban ungovernability, a primary strategic fear of the capitalist class since the urban revolts of the late 1960s. As soon as the street movement was defeated, state elites began planning “urban warfare” training centers across the country.
The people who the police will train to kill in the mock schools, stores, and homes of their Cop Cities will not work in the C-Suites of their corporate funders. They will train to kill us. Especially if we are Black or brown or migrant, especially if we are criminalized or unhoused, especially if we fight back. They are supported by Democrats and Republicans, home improvement chains and major banks, mayors and governors of all political persuasions. In such a fractious political environment, one of the few points of domestic political consensus is building laboratories, at great public expense, for law enforcement to practice the art of killing us more effectively.
The other great point of elite political consensus likewise concerns the costly administration of civilian death. On the day of Cop City’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, when its mock school opened for paramilitary drills, Israeli had blockaded all aid into Gaza for almost two months. The previous weekend, it killed five siblings in a single strike on a residential building. The youngest was four. Perhaps the opening of Cop City would have received more attention had it not come to pass in the 18th month of the Gaza genocide.
Beneath the shopping malls and residential complexes, we inhabit a society oriented from its commanding heights towards the administration of urban warfare at home and abroad. As Trump plans his ostentatious military parade in DC, we might delude ourselves into believing that now, finally, our society has become militarized. But we already live in the most bellicose nation in human history. The most warlike, the most belligerent, the only one that has vaporized cities from the map with atomic fire, the only one that boasts of foreign military bases in almost half the nations on earth. To envision a pervasively militarized country, you don’t need to imagine ICBMs rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. Our chicken sandwich chains and airlines are building urban warfare training centers in the Atlanta forest.
A tree that bears such fruit contains a deep rot. It is not enough to nourish us, our elders, our neighbors, our children. It is not enough to prune its leaves and hope for better harvest. It is not enough to settle.
Cop City has been built.
Cop City must never survive.
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This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.
