The fight over an Atlanta police training site is putting Georgia Democrats — including its two U.S. senators — in the hot seat over a complicated mix of policing and land-use issues.
Why it matters: At a time when Democrats are being tested by climate and equity trade-offs, they’re finding a fresh conflict: how law enforcement handles environmental activists.
🗣 What they’re saying: Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, had said little publicly about the situation until Axios approached them in the Senate basement.
- Both stopped short of taking a side over the training facility itself while splitting the difference on the activists.
- “Peaceful protest and the expression of opposition or support to a land-use plan or the siting of a specific facility somewhere is a sacred constitutional right,” Ossoff said. “What is not constitutionally protected speech is Molotov cocktails.”
- Warnock said that “protesting in the best of the American democratic tradition needs to be non-violent,” emphasizing his view that “local officials there in Atlanta have to work with the citizens of Atlanta” to find a peaceful way forward.
This is in line with what local officials have said, but it’s a more cautious approach than the one taken by Nikema Williams, the House Democrat who represents the contested site.
- Williams recently maintained she’ll “always stand on the side of protesters,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and that she doesn’t “buy the whole notion that you have to choose one or the other, between standing up for our law enforcement and standing with protestors.”
Catch up quick: The nation is watching as protests in a wooded area southwest of downtown Atlanta turn to chaos over local officials’ approval of a police training complex dubbed “Cop City.”
- Activists have cited a number of concerns, from environmental protection to confronting police power. They contend the project will jeopardize the South River Forest, which is…
Read the full article here
