ATLANTA (AP) — The Atlanta City Council on Tuesday morning approved funding for the construction of a proposed police and fire training center, rejecting calls from hundreds of activists who filled the hotel with city and have spoken for hours in fierce opposition to the project which they denounce as “Cité cop.
The 11-4 vote just after 5 a.m. is a significant victory for Mayor Andre Dickens, who made the $90 million project a big part of his first term, despite the effort falling sharply. The city council also passed a resolution calling for two seats on the Atlanta Police Foundation Board of Directors. The decentralized ‘Stop Cop City’ movement has galvanized protesters across the country, particularly following the January fatal police shooting of Manuel Paez Terán, a 26-year-old environmental activist known as ‘Tortuguita’. who was camping in the woods near the proposed project site in DeKalb County.
For about 14 hours, residents repeatedly took to the podium to criticize the project, saying it would be a poor use of public funds to build the huge facility in a large urban forest in a poor, majority-black area.
“We are here to make our case to a government that has been unresponsive, even hostile, to a move unprecedented in the history of our city council,” said Matthew Johnson, executive director of Beloved Community Ministries, a local non-profit social justice organization. “We are here to stop environmental racism and the militarization of the police. … We need to get back to meeting basic needs rather than using the police as the only solution to all our social problems.”
The training center was approved by city council in September 2021 but required an additional vote for more funding. City officials say the new 85-acre (34-hectare) campus would replace inadequate training facilities and help address police hiring and retention challenges that have worsened after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice three years ago.
But opponents, who have been joined by activists across the country, say they fear it will lead to further militarization of the police and that its construction will worsen environmental damage. Protesters had been camping at the site for at least the past year, and police said they caused damage and attacked law enforcement officers and others.
Although more than 220 people have spoken out publicly against the training center, a small handful have expressed support, saying they trust Dickens’ judgment.
Council members agreed to approve $31 million in public funds for the construction of the site, as well as a provision requiring the city to pay $36 million – $1.2 million per year over 30 years – to use of the facility. The rest of the $90 million project would come from private donations to the Atlanta Police Foundation, though city officials have until recently repeatedly said the public obligation would only be to $31 million.
The heavily guarded vote also comes in the wake of the Wednesday arrest of three organizers who run the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provided bail and helped find lawyers for arrested protesters.
Prosecutors charged the three activists with money laundering and charity fraud, saying they used some of the money to fund violent acts by “forest defenders”. The warrants cite expense reimbursements including “petrol, forest cleanup, bins, rapid covid tests, media, signage.” But the charges alarmed human rights groups and prompted Georgia’s two Democratic senators to issue statements over the weekend expressing their concerns.
US Senator Raphael Warnock tweeted that bail funds played an important role during the civil rights movement and said images of heavily armed police raiding the house where activists lived “reinforce the very suspicions that contribute to liven up the current conflict, namely, Georgians’ concerns about over-policing, the repression of dissent in a democracy, and the militarization of our police.
Devin Franklin, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, also cited Wednesday’s arrests during a speech to city council.
“That’s what we fear – the image of militarized forces being used to make arrests for accounting errors,” Franklin said.
Numerous instances of violence and vandalism have been linked to the decentralized “Stop Cop City” movement, including a January protest in downtown Atlanta in which a police cruiser was set on fire as well as an attack in March during which more than 150 masked protesters chased the police away. on the construction site and set fire to construction equipment before fleeing and blending into the crowd at a nearby music festival. Those two cases have led to more than 40 people being charged with domestic terrorism, although prosecutors have so far struggled to prove that many of those arrested were in fact those who took part in the violence.
In a sign of safety concerns on Monday, dozens of police were stationed throughout City Hall and authorities temporarily added “liquids, sprays, gels, creams and pastes” to the list of things prohibited from entering. interior of the building.
Six hours into the meeting, Sara McClintock, a professor of religion at Emory University, took to the podium and pleaded with council members to reject, or at least rethink, the training center.
“We don’t want it,” McClintock said. “We don’t want it because it doesn’t contribute to life. It is not an institution of peace. This is not a way forward for our city that we love.