We Can Have Cop City, Or We Can Have Democracy
We Can Have Cop City, Or We Can Have Democracy
Atlanta’s Democratic leadership is trying to build a massive police urban-warfare training facility before the public can stop it. The outcome will set a precedent for the political future, with implications well beyond the city itself.
I'm kinda local and know some stuff about the situation (being vague to try not to completely doxx myself); AMA!
One shitty aspect of Cop City that the article barely mentions (which is fair, given that it's aimed at a wider audience) is the abuse associated with the choice of location itself. It is being built on the site of the old Atlanta Prison Farm, which, much like the Chattahoochee Brick Company on the other side of town, is historically significant as a site of post-civil-war reenslavement of black people (watch this video on "neoslavery" to understand how that worked). Like the Chattahoochee Brick Company site, it deserves to be memorialized and turned into an asset for the Black community it previously helped oppress, but putting Cop City there perpetuates that institutional racism instead.
Wow. That is an angle I was not aware of, and it definitely makes the situation even more shitty.
That's not even all the issues related to the location itself. The parcel that the City of Atlanta owns and is using for Cop City is adjacent to [what used to be] Intrenchment Creek Park, a Dekalb County park. By law, once land is a park, it's supposed to remain so in perpetuity. Nevertheless, Dekalb County decided to make a "land swap" deal with a nearby movie studio to give them that land in exchange for some (less valuable) mostly-unbuildable flood plain on the other side of Bouldercrest Road. Consequences of that debacle include:
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It set a very dangerous precedent; no greenspace in Dekalb County (or possibly the entire State of Georgia) can be considered as safely protected as it used to be.
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The park was largely destroyed, bulldozed by people hired by the studio (compare 2017 to the latest imagery)
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One of the protestors occupying that park was murdered by police. That's the first time in the United States that an environmental activist has been killed by police, by the way.
It's small potatoes compared to the above, but it also gratuitously cut off access to the South River Trail from Bouldercrest Road even though the connection barely touches the disputed site (compare 2014 to the latest imagery), which as a cyclist I'm particularly salty about.
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