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Friday, May 9, 2025
The Emory Wheel

Ha-tien Nguyen/Senior Staff Illustrator

5 years later, Cop City demands Atlantans’ attention

Despite opposition from students, activists and community organizations — including forest defender occupants and several attempted referendum petitions — the Atlanta Public  Safety Training Center, colloquially known as Cop City, is set to open and begin full operation in the coming weeks. On April 9, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) and Atlanta Fire Rescue Department held a flag raising ceremony to commemorate the launch of Cop City. According to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the training center has labs for testing technological innovation and a mock streetscape designed to simulate “real-world crisis situations faced by law enforcement officers.” 

Behind the superfluous ribbon cutting and flag raising is an unsettling truth: The continued militarization of Atlanta’s police force is undergoing a rebrand, not a reconstruction. As we near the two-year anniversary of the April 25, 2023 Emory Stop Cop City protests on the University Quadrangle, it is crucial that we reflect on our part in this movement and keep the spirit of dissent alive.

Outrage arose in 2021 as community members realized that the $100 million project — one-third of which is funded by Atlanta taxpayers — would bulldoze 85 acres of the Weelaunee Forest, which holds deep cultural and historical significance for the Muscogee (Creek) people. Activists also emphasize the forest’s ecological significance as one of Atlanta's largest green spaces, which Atlanta-based reporter Sean Keenan dubbed “The Lungs of Atlanta.” 

Equally as outrageous, Cop City partially sprawls across the site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, a now-abandoned prison complex where the City of Atlanta forced Black incarcerated people to produce food for the region's prison system in a modern form of indentured servitude. To build a police training center over a site where Black people were once brutalized only to further enable the systems that continue to harm them is not only dystopian, but disrespectful. In Atlanta, Cop City demonstrates that Georgia is doubling down on carceral control, expanding surveillance over residents and suppressing mass public dissent. 

On Jan. 18, 2023, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an environmental activist who went by the name Tortuguita, was killed when Georgia State Patrol (GSP) troopers raided a “Stop Cop City” encampment. Allegedly, Tortuguita fired at GSP troopers first before being fatally shot, but there was no body cam footage to corroborate this statement. While a DeKalb County Medical Examiner autopsy stated that there was no conclusive evidence for how Tortuguita was positioned, an independent autopsy report showed that police shot Tortuguita at least a dozen times while possibly sitting down in a position of surrender. A special prosecutor did not charge the six GSP troopers who shot and killed Tortuguita with any crime. Under the carceral state, police are encouraged to shoot first and ask questions second. 

Atlanta law enforcement’s patterns of escalation and intimidation in its policing has been demonstrated right here on Emory University’s campus. In 2023, APD responded to the “Stop Cop City” protest on the University Quadrangle alongside officers from the Emory Police Department (EPD). Although the protest was peaceful, around 1 a.m., EPD along with 11 armed APD vehicles arrived to remove protesters from the space. And last April, police responded to a peaceful pro-Palestine protest with pepper bullets and irritant gas. 

While police agencies across Georgia have made attempts at sensitivity training and police violence reduction, these measures have little concrete effect on the broken state of policing. The Atlanta Police Foundation, which is funding Cop City, claims the training center will address the  “variety of citizen concerns that modern policing in a diverse city requires.” In this same vein of cultural awareness, the Chamblee Police Department held a special training session, in which it taught officers how to interact with individuals on the Autism spectrum. However, this special training session only lasted two days. 

Although these initiatives are meant to make the reputation of the police more palatable, they are not enough when police militarization training centers are actively being built across the country — centers which promote the opposite of empathetic policing. Many cities, including San Pablo (Calif.), Dallas, Chicago and Nashville (Tenn.), have allocated incredible amounts of money to these projects, with at least seven cities planning to spend over $100 million for their own Cop Cities. This nationwide trend reveals that cities are not interested in addressing the root causes of crime in productive ways and are instead choosing to fund state violence under the guise of public safety.

The overwhelming force that the GSP and APD are known for is a symptom of the larger illness of American policing. The hyper-militarized police of America aim to stun public dissenters into a private quietude of terror and self-regulation, directly contradicting the values of free speech our nation is predicated upon. 

To the Emory community, we urge you to stay vigilant of the true nature of the police — especially within Georgia — and to not be coerced into being content with a system that takes the side of indifference towards the sanctity of life and expression. As students, faculty and staff, we can promote the use of community service officers (CSOs) as an alternative for the continued expansion of the police. While CSOs can be associated with more standardized forms of law enforcement, they differ from forces like the EPD as they are not sworn-in officers and do not carry weapons — lessening the chance of violence. For example, San Diego State University’s community-engaged campus policing aims to stop the reliance on more traditional forms of militant policing when it comes to monitoring its campus. 

Cop City may be centered in Atlanta, but its implications echo across the nation. We cannot become desensitized to a police presence that promises community friendliness while operating within a system that prioritizes suppression over support. We must fight for a future where our safety does not come at the expense of people’s dignity. 

The above editorial represents the majority opinion of The Emory Wheel’s Editorial Board. The Editorial Board is composed of Editorial Board Editor Carly Aikens, Arts & Life Editor Hunter Buchheit, Allie Guo, Carson Kindred, Mira Krichavsky, Eliana Liporace, Ilka Tona and Crystal Zhang.