by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Consortium News) After years of intense opposition that left one protester riddled by police bullets, Atlanta’s so-called Cop City is set to begin operations in the next few weeks. The city’s police chief hosted a tour of the campus last week and training programs are expected to start during the first quarter of 2025.
The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, as it is officially known, is an 85-acre campus with a price tag of at least $110 million and another $1.7 million recently approved by Atlanta’s City Council for its security.
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Most infamously, it includes a mock city, for which the site gained its Cop City nickname, for “real-world” training that includes a convenience store, two-story house, apartment and commercial-style building.
There is also a military vet training center, leadership institute, lab to develop and test technological innovations, training field, 12-acre emergency vehicle operations course.
It also comes with burn towers, a shooting range, horse stalls, police-dog kennels and training grounds, and 40 acres of horse pasture, according to a video published by the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Foundation’s website.
Backlash to Black Lives Matter
George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, Aug. 17, 2020. (Fibonacci Blue, Flickr,CC BY 2.0)
Atlanta’s Cop City site was designated in 2021, the year after a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin asphyxiated a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Chauvin’s murder of Floyd, after a series of high-profile police killings of Black Americans, kicked the growing Black Lives Matter Movement into high gear, causing what has been described as one of the largest social movements in U.S. history, with some protests extending internationally.
The wave of demonstrations during the summer of 2020 shone a spotlight on the greater harm that police cause Black people, who are more than three times as likely to be killed by police, according to a study by Harvard University.
Protesters’ calls to defund and abolish the police yielded policing reforms efforts in several states.
At the federal level, however, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has stalled.
And while the wave of protests in 2020 helped expose the threat that police pose to the overall population in the U.S., they did not succeed in protecting Americans from deadly police violence. In 2024, police killed civilians at the highest rate in a decade, according to the collaborative research group Mapping Police Violence.
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