On Cop City’s opening day, protesters drop banners in vow to keep fighting it
While city officials celebrated the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center’s grand opening, local Stop Cop City protesters held a block party protest on Jackson Street Bridge, from which they dropped banners expressing resolve to keep opposing the facility.
On Tuesday evening at the Jackson Street Bridge in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, scores of Stop Cop City protesters held a block party in protest of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, commonly known as Cop City. Their message of opposition was clear on the same day that city officials held the ribbon-cutting to open the Center: The fight against Cop City will continue.
“We’re here to mark this terrible occasion, but also have our own celebration,” said Tim Franzen, a member of the People’s Campaign to Stop Cop City and American Friends Service Committee Atlanta Economic Justice Program director, during a press conference at the protest. “Because while they’re celebrating this—the further militarization of our community and the suck of economic resources and the issues that Atlantans really care about—we’re here to celebrate that we launched an international—a global movement around these cop cities. Here in Atlanta, we made the rest of the country aware of this move toward militarization.”
In a continuation of the Stop Cop City movement’s creative and colorful displays against Cop City, organizers hung from the bridge large banners that declared their persistence in resistance and drew many supportive honks from drivers passing underneath along John Lewis Freedom Parkway. Meanwhile, protesters on the bridge drew further attention to their cause. They chanted with signs, drew chalk art, danced and handed flyers to drivers pausing to observe the spectacle.
One protester wore a cardboard bulldozer outfit for political theater, representing the forces that built Cop City against the will of 116,000 petition signers in favor of a referendum vote on Cop City’s fate in summer 2023. Children playfully opposed the bulldozer, which the group ultimately tore apart to symbolize a future triumph of Stop Cop City and aligned movements everywhere.
“It’s never too late—I remain hopeful in what the power of the people is able to accomplish,” said Mary Hooks of the Movement for Black Lives and the Cop City Vote Coalition. “Who knows what will happen over the years? Because I believe there will be a changing of the guard in this city, and somebody with some good sense will eventually come into office and be right and make good on what this city was supposed to do.”
Cop City against the needs and desires of Atlantans
In a prepared statement, the People’s Campaign said the City of Atlanta should have used the $118 million spent to create Cop City for crises of affordable housing and homelessness, vital city worker layoffs and health care.
“Now we have this building that could be repurposed for all kinds of things,” Franzen said of the completed Cop City facilities. “That area needs a community center. It needs affordable housing.”
The statement also noted Jackson Street Bridge as a relative midpoint of two glaring examples of those issues: the closed Atlanta Medical Center a few blocks north—undergoing demolition despite the dearth of hospital services in the area—and the Old Wheat Street encampment a few blocks south—where a city vehicle reportedly ran over and killed unhoused man Cornelius Taylor in January. Demonstrators took leftovers from their block party to that encampment afterward, to the delight of many people there, they said.
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To underscore the systemic and perpetual nature of “a city government that chooses militarization over community care,” the People’s Campaign statement also emphasized this event occurred just a few days after the Fulton County police killing of 24-year-old Damario Smith. Franzen highlighted how people of Smith’s generation have played a major role in combating that militarization and deforestation.
“Stop the further militarization of our communities,” he said. “The other big obstacle: young people put their bodies on the line to protect one of the biggest urban forests, while our world is on fire.”
A 2018 City of Atlanta Department of Planning and Community Development study found that Atlanta—known as “The City in the Forest”—had “an ongoing trend towards canopy loss at the city scale.” This was before Cop City’s construction on 381 acres of Weelaunee Forest, among other major development projects since. Although many trees are gone from what was the largest green space in Atlanta and cannot be replaced for decades, Stop Cop City protesters reaffirmed all the more on Tuesday that the sacred Muscogee site must be reclaimed for the people to decide its usage.
“It’s never too late,” Franzen said. “They may have won this battle, but the war continues.”
