Stop Cop City goes West: activists kick off Tucson summit

By Sam Barnes

TUCSON, Ariz.—Approximately 150 organizers and activists opposed to the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, more commonly known as Cop City, kicked off a four-day summit in Tucson Friday afternoon. 

The summit marks the first major mobilization of the Stop Cop City movement to take place outside of Atlanta. 

Prior mass mobilizations of the movement have typically taken the form of a so-called “Week of Action.” Atlanta has hosted seven Weeks of Action, which often included a wide variety of cultural and social events in addition to protests. Intrenchment Creek Park served as the primary hub of Atlanta’s Weeks of Action. Located in the South River Forest and bordering the eastern boundary of the site chosen for Cop City, the park remains closed off and under constant guard by police following a multi-jurisdictional police raid on the South River Music Festival during a Week of Action in March 2023.

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Sam Beard, an organizer of November’s Block Cop City convergence, spoke about why he sees the summit as a logical step for the movement. 

“Since the loss of the forest as a protest and encampment site, and with the increased repression, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue these types of mobilizations in Atlanta,” he said, referring to raids conducted Feb. 8. at the homes of three vocal Cop City opponents in Atlanta. One person who police allege is connected to an arson of several police motorcycles in July 2023 was also arrested. 

“One of the primary goals of Block Cop City was to experiment with a new type of mobilization for this movement and to breathe life and energy back into the larger movement ecosystem,” Beard said. “I see the summit in Arizona as doing similar.”

The enthusiastic crowd at the kickoff event embodied that vision as it gathered Friday afternoon. The motions of exploring a new space, setting up camp, greeting new friends, and reuniting with old ones hearkened back to previous gatherings in Atlanta, even as the familiar forest canopy was swapped out for cacti and desert mountains. 

Many attendees expressed relief at being able to participate in a communal form of resistance outside of the increasingly precarious environment in Atlanta, even as they discussed the possibility of repression from local police agencies in Tucson. Little police presence was observed as night fell over the camp aside from a single flyover by a helicopter registered to the Tucson Police Department—another familiar sight to Week of Action veterans. 

As tents rose and cooking fires were lit, discussion among campers turned to the shared struggle of resistance against violent systems. The genocide in Gaza, the violence at the border with Mexico, the current repression in Atlanta, and the police killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the name Tortuguita, were all held up in those discussions as interconnected and inseparable examples of how the state seeks to crush those that stand against it.

“Even on land belonging to the Tohono O’odham Nation, Customs and Border Patrol is using surveillance technology from Elbit Systems to surveil and harass Indigenous people and it’s not all that different from how Cop City seeks to keep Muscogee people from repatriating their own lands. It’s all part of the same violent carceral system,” Jason added. 

Elbit Systems is one of Israel’s largest manufacturers of military technology. 

Organizers of the summit expressed a hope that the gathering in Tucson will set a national example for local resistance not just to the ever-increasing number of Cop City-like facilities nationwide, but also to the prisons, the borders, the institutions of the carceral and criminal legal systems that already run rampant in so many communities across the globe. 

“The economic and political forces that are trying to push Cop City through don’t restrict themselves to any specific terrain, and their capital and political power flow freely over borders—so must resistance,” Beard said. ACPC will be on the ground at the summit. Follow us on X and Instagram for updates.