On Monday, Sept. 11, organizers and activists opposed to the controversial Atlanta Public Safety Training Facility, will submit more than 110,000 petition signatures to City Hall to force a ballot referendum on the project better known as Vop City. Although only 58,000 signatures or 15 percent of registered voters are required to force a vote, organizers say they are hedging their bets, commenting that they are concerned about efforts to disqualify signatures and halt construction until the issue can be decided at the ballot box.
City of Atlanta voting officials are expected to conduct a line-by-line review, a process voting advocates say is a “widely discredited tool of voter suppression.”
“That the city of Atlanta would use such a subjective and unreliable process is shameful and undermines the integrity of the city’s validation procedure,” more than two dozen voting rights organizations, including Fair Fight, wrote to city officials.
Last week, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr issued RICO indictments for 61 protestors he referred to as “military anarchists.” By Frida, Sept. 8, all 61 had posted bond and had been released from jail.
In June After a nearly 14½ hour-long session against a backdrop of hundreds of protestors, Atlanta City Council members voted 11 to 4 to fund the highly controversial Cop City in Atlanta.
Opponents of the training facility say they are concerned that the state-of-the-art police training facility will militarize police and result in more police brutality and police slayings of Black and Brown residents.
“We have more than 100,000 signatures. You have more people in the electorate involved in this than voted for the mayor… but the city council doesn’t want to let people decide,” says DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a national organization supporting the ‘Stop Cop City’ movement.
Other detractors of the project say…
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