The Atlanta City Council early Tuesday approved funding for the construction of a proposed police and firefighter training center, rejecting the pleas of hundreds of activists who packed City Hall and spoke for hours in fierce opposition to the project they decry as “Cop City.”
The 11-4 vote just after 5 a.m. is a significant victory for Mayor Andre Dickens, who has made the $90 million project a large part of his first term in office, despite significant pushback to the effort. The City Council also passed a resolution requesting two seats on the Atlanta Police Foundation’s board.
In a statement, Dickens said the passage of the budget resolution “marks a major milestone for better preparing our fire, police and emergency responders to protect and serve our communities.”
PUBLIC COST OF ATLANTA’S ‘COP CITY’ MORE THAN DOUBLED IN NEW ESTIMATE
“Atlanta will be a national model for police reform with the most progressive training and curriculum in the country,” he said.
The decentralized “Stop Cop City” movement has galvanized protesters from across the country, especially in the wake of the January fatal police shooting of Manuel Paez Terán, a 26-year-old environmental activist known as “Tortuguita” who had been camping in the woods near the site of the proposed project in DeKalb County.
For about 14 hours, residents again and again took to the podium to slam the project, saying it would be a gross misuse of public funds to build the huge facility in a large urban forest in a poor, majority-Black area.
“We’re here pleading our case to a government that has been unresponsive, if not hostile, to an unprecedented movement in our City Council’s history,” said Matthew Johnson, the executive director of Beloved Community Ministries, a local social justice nonprofit. “We’re here to stop environmental racism and the militarization of the police. … We need to go back to meeting the basic needs rather than using police as the sole solution to all of our social…
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