Cop City: The Police State is the Response to Our Needs
business and government collaborate to expand policing
[Editor’s Note: The state’s attorney has taken the dramatic step of charging community organizers with severe charges. We encourage you to click here to contribute to the legal defense fund.]
The City of Atlanta and its corporate backers plan to transform a 300-acre, publicly-owned forest in southeast Atlanta into an urban warfare police training institute and movie sound space. Organizers opposed to the project have dubbed the Public Safety Training Center “Cop City.” There are three overlapping histories of modern policing and its connection to the business class, and somehow, Cop City manages to encapsulate them all: Policing and incarceration were immediately necessary to defend stolen lands and the ever-shifting borders of colonial territories, to surveil enslaved black people, and later, to violently put down labor organizing.
In the 1800s, white settlers stole the Weelaunee Forest, as it was known by the Muscogee Creek peoples. Their remains still lie beneath the contested land. Slaveholders then used the stolen land as a plantation. After the Civil War, the government used it as a prison farm and continued to legally extract slave labor from black people thanks to the exception clause of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery except as punishment for a crime.
The current plan to enclose this now public land and put it in the hands of private industry and the police perfectly tracks with their symbiotic relationship. Importantly, the industry here is not just Hollywood, represented by Shadowbox Studios. Two-thirds of Cop City’s funding ($60 million) comes from dozens of corporations through the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Police foundations are little-known private entities that allow corporations to funnel money into the continued expansion and militarization of policing. As private funds, they come with few mechanisms for democratic control and accountability. A 2021 report from Color of Change and LittleSis found $60 million worth of corporate contributions to 23 police foundations in cities across the nation in 2019 alone. Cop City investors include UPS, Coca-Cola, Equifax, Delta Airlines, and Waffle House, among others.
The plan for Cop City was initially approved by the Atlanta City Council in 2021. It was met with immediate nonviolent resistance by residents, including protests, political education, lobbying elected officials, and forest defenders occupying the land. In a January 2023 police raid on the peaceful forest encampment, a multi-agency force murdered 26-year-old forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. The invading police force shot the unarmed, surrendered Tortuguita 57 times.
On September 5, 2023, the Atlanta Community Press Collective broke the story of another escalation in the state’s war on organizers: The Georgia attorney general filed RICO—racketeering-influenced, and corrupt organizations—indictments against 61 members of the movement for alleged horrors such as “collectivism,” “social solidarity,” and “mutual aid.” (Grand jury proceedings take place under sworn secrecy; yet, mysteriously, way back on February 3, the Atlanta Police Foundation’s director of public affairs was able to assure the board of directors and contractors that indictments would come.) Historian Dan Berger notes that while the RICO Act is used to prosecute the mob, it has been used to squash left social movements from the outset.
Human Needs Met with Organized Violence
We are in an era of acute need driven by overlapping crises of capitalism: climate, public health, debt, poverty, racism. Despite being reduced to mere problems, people the world over are engaged in historic mass mobilizations and mass migration. They are politically organizing to demand livable conditions. When that’s not feasible, they are moving in search of resources and security. There are two kinds of solutions to the crises we face: Ones that harness the productive capacity of our economies to pursue egalitarian solutions to our problems, thereby prioritizing human and ecological flourishing. Or ones that put profits over people, stamping out popular opposition.
Both the government and the business classes are choosing the latter—as they always do unless pressured from below by popular movements or by economic forces. Hawkish foreign policy stances, the violence at the border, and the increased capacity for state violence internally all embody this decision.
As organizers warned, the $90 million Cop City plan is being replicated elsewhere. Five months after Atlanta announced its plans to build Cop City in March 2021, Newark announced a $300 million project to turn an abandoned school into a police training facility. In the last six months, Baltimore ($330 million) and Nashville ($415 million) have either announced plans or broken ground on their own mega urban warfare training facilities. Chicago’s is already open ($170 million). The Texas Department of Public Safety is currently seeking $1.2 billion to create a statewide facility. It’s not just large and mid-sized cities either. The city of San Pablo, California, with only 30,000 residents, announced plans for a $43.6 million police headquarters and regional training center. The entire city budget was only $66 million last year.
The expansion of the policing capacity of the state is necessarily accompanied by a corresponding contraction of everyone’s civil liberties, marginalized populations first of all. Western governments, including the U.S. at the state and federal levels, are passing anti-protest laws in response to the mass mobilizations of the past twenty years, ranging from the anti-war protests of the early 2000s to Occupy Wall St. to climate justice to the largest series of protests in U.S. history in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.
Last spring, the United Kingdom passed a nationwide police bill that criminalized civil disobedience tactics such as breaking noise limits and occupying public spaces. Investigative reporters Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki found that the bill was drafted by a member organization of the Atlas Network, an international non-governmental organization consisting of climate change-denying think tanks. The organization was founded by entrepreneurs involved with some of the most polluting industries. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law notes that 42 U.S. states have passed anti-protest bills since January 2017. The expansion of the police and military state is the response to our needs. Cop cities are part of a series of compounding efforts to squash popular movements.
A Terrific Boomerang
I’ve been rereading Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism lately. It’s a challenging 1955 text—literally, it is full of provocations for his post-WWII white audience. Chief among them is to consider how Europe cultivated the appetite and skill for mass horrors abroad in the colonies. That those actions were only labeled “fascism” when they were applied to other Europeans. One day, he tells them, after centuries of colonial domination in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the mid-century European was “...awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” It’s a familiar intuition. Having been honed on America’s undesirables, the tools of mass incarceration won’t just be set aside.
This isn’t the first time a cop city has come to Georgia. For decades, the U.S. military trained right-wing Latin American police and armed forces in counterinsurgency, torture, and kidnapping at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. SOA graduates are responsible for the mass murders of thousands of peasants, dissidents, and leftists as U.S.-backed regimes waged their Dirty Wars up and down the hemisphere to ensure that capitalism would triumph over socialism. Today those weapons point back at the entire U.S. working class.
The scope of these cop cities belies the claim that the nation does not have the wealth to meet human needs at home and abroad. We’re living on the edge, and we’re fed up. Everyone from actors to janitors is organizing for less exploitative labor conditions. White kids in the suburbs are demanding that their lives be more valuable than the profits of gun manufacturers. Multiracial coalitions are protesting against police murdering black people in the streets. Schoolchildren cry out for their climate future.
Each new crisis stokes the embers of resistance in the hearts of poor and working people. In response, the ruling class mobilizes its resources to ensure that the police fulfill their historic role: to extinguish those smoldering embers before they combust into flames.
In solidarity,
Dwayne