Cop City Is Born

Protesters chanted that the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center would never be built. It opened today. The timing is pretty bad

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, opening the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, April 29, 2025

Cop City is open.

“In 2020, the public had had enough,” said Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, opening the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center today, flanked by Governor Brian Kemp and Atlanta Police Foundation President Dave Wilkinson. “Residents were crying out for more training for police officers, and I was right there with them, marching in the streets as a city council member asking for more training and modifications to standard operating procedures. I supported this vision of a training center back then, and I certainly support it now.”

Raise your hand if that’s why you were marching in the street in 2020.

My recollection is that the public was demanding accountability for police brutality cases. Perhaps with the tear-gassings and flash-bang grenades and all, I am misremembering what thousands of people were shouting around me.

But much of the early opposition coalesced around the center’s failure to address the need for a change in police training. Speaker after speaker in public commentary at the dais of City Hall and in social media messages noted that the ballooning price tag for the center’s construction had not come with a strategic rethink of training methods. Instead, the complex would house mock buildings suitable for military operations on urban terrain training.

“I along with most of the people of Atlanta believe in the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center,” said the mayor, who faces token opposition in his re-election this year. He decried “the lies, the misinformation, the disinformation” in the public conflict over the construction of the center.

He left unspoken the unresolved legal fight about how the city thwarted a signature initiative calling for a public referendum on Cop City, an initiative that gathered more signatures than any such effort in living memory and more signatures than he — or any Atlanta mayor — had ever won in an election.

The suggestion that the training center has a majority of the city’s support could have been answered definitively at the ballot box, if he and the city’s powers had wanted that answer.

That said, I find it surprising and noteworthy that the opposition could gather tens of thousands of signatures for a ballot initiative but could not find a credible mayoral candidate to rally around.

And no — no one who has a plausible chance to challenge him is running. If they were, they would have announced their candidacy last year with enough time to raise money and build name recognition. Cop City might be controversial and unpopular, but if that is true it has not been converted into electoral politics in a measurable way.

(I will leave attributions of diminished Democratic margins in metro Atlanta counties as an exercise for argument; I don’t think the data there is conclusive.)

Cop City took $118 million in public and private funds to build, Dickens said. That’s about twice the sticker price. Dickens said if they tried to build it today it would cost $300 million. I’ve asked for the estimate upon which that figure rests.

APD’s public affairs office is generally quite responsive and professional with my requests for information. The mayor’s office has increasingly been less so recently. Conversations about Cop City began two years ago with relatively genial conversations on background about what was happening. That open dialogue has become less familiar and less consistent over the last year, not just about the training center but generally.

We’re not at Keisha Lance Bottoms or Kasim Reed levels of disengagement or open hostility yet. But I can see there from here, measured in the number of emails I send that receive no response and the number of announcements that are sent to other journalists and not to me.

If we are to assess the real costs of construction, we might consider the life of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an anti-Cop City demonstrator better known as Tortuguita. Their death – a police shooting that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has concluded came after cops returned their gunfire – was a flashpoint around which training center backers said little today.

The training center has arguably cost the government some of its fidelity to the constitution, given the nature of the terrorism charges leveled by a politically-ambitious attorney general issued over the objections of the DeKalb County district attorney.

Kemp touted the results of a state-level crime suppression unit in reducing violence in the city. Again, left unsaid: the increasing number of civilians killed after aggressive state patrol pursuits that municipal governments like Atlanta have long banned because they know they get people killed.

Two weeks ago, state police chased a fleeing driver into the heart of Little Five Points, arguably the busiest pedestrian streetscape in the city. The driver crashed into another car, killing 19-year-old Cooper Schoenke. The teenager, a multigenerational Atlantan, worked at the Fox Theater.

A resolution passed by the Atlanta City Council’s public safety committee called on the state to rein in these pursuits. It notes that Georgia has the highest rate of police pursuit fatalities in the nation. At least 63 people have died and more than 1,900 people injured in these pursuits; higher figures than the 47 arrests of murder suspects and the 1,200 warrant arrests Kemp cited as results.

Kemp suggested that the decrease in crime around Atlanta could be attributed to the efforts of this crime suppression unit. “The numbers speak for themselves,” he said.

No, Governor Kemp. They do not.

Crime has been falling across the country since 2022, with the largest decreases in the largest cities. To show that Atlanta’s crime reduction is anything other than a regression to the mean post-pandemic, much much more than the numbers have to be talking.

And yet, Kemp tied the efforts of this crime suppression unit to the successful completion of the training center, suggesting the two efforts are cut from the same cloth and preparation for large events like the World Cup in 2026.

“That’s what this project was always about,” Kemp said. “The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center reflects a shared goal, making our community safer, while standing firmly behind those who answer the call to serve and protect.”

Again, if we are to account for the costs of this project, we should tally the lost sovereignty over the administration of the Atlanta Police Department that the city has ceded to the Atlanta Police Foundation. The foundation – which is somehow better funded than any other police foundation in America – is footing much of the bill, using private donations that are at best opaque and at worst a naked act of corporate bribery buying influence over a police entity that might be expected to investigate and enforce regulations on their businesses.

A parade of Atlanta’s corporate leaders spoke at the opening today: Norfolk Southern’s chief legal officer Jason Morris; QuikTrip’s Atlanta regional leader Robert Smith and Michael Russell Sr., CEO of HJ Russell and a scion of the Atlanta Way. Every one of these companies has had serious legal challenges in Atlanta either connected to city corruption, public safety or both.

A side note: two years ago, as protests raged over Cop City, the Georgia legislature passed the “LESS Crime Act” which allows a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to law enforcement foundations. The credit caps at $3 million for any given foundation and $75 million in aggregate statewide. And the Atlanta Police Foundation has maxed out every year.

The foundation claims it is not subject to a Georgia Open Records Act request, despite receiving these tax funds and administering government programs like a housing program for police officers, subsidies for police salaries … and running Cop City.

Here’s a link to a fundraiser for Cooper Schoenke’s family to bury him properly. Kemp didn’t mention this death in his stump speech, of course. Acknowledging that might make the state’s lawyers squirm a little.

As the city prepared for its coming out party today, civil libertarians have been contending with a pair of ominous executive orders issued by President Donald Trump yesterday.

The first, “Protecting American Communities From Criminal Aliens,” describes state and municipal resistance to federal authority on immigration enforcement as “a lawless insurrection” and instructs the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to identify so-called sanctuary cities and states, and then to end federal payments to them, as well as bringing them into compliance using “all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures.”

Note the arrest by the FBI of a Wisconsin judge last week for letting an undocumented defendant out the back door, rather than see him deported before getting a hearing and a trial.

The second executive order plays into the first, and connects to the arguments some Cop City protesters have made about how the training center might be abused.

The order, “Strengthening And Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement To Pursue Criminals And Protect Innocent Citizens,” intends to protect police officers from … you know, all of the stuff people have been talking about since the murder of George Floyd.

Trump intends to end the consent orders local police departments have agreed to following findings of horrifying police abuses and to “establish best practices at the State and local level for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.”

The order instructs the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.

“Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.”

There are only so many ways for local law enforcement to absorb that materiel. Cop City is one of them.

Section 5 of the order “Holding State and Local Officials Accountable,” looks like a framework to start arresting and prosecuting local lawmakers who don’t toe the party line, prioritizing “prosecution of any applicable violations of Federal criminal law with respect to State and local jurisdictions whose officials: (a) willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law, including by directly and unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety and law enforcement; or (b) unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil-rights violations under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives that restrict law enforcement activity or endanger citizens.”

Essentially, DEI will be used as a rationale to arrest the mayor and city council of any city that doesn’t play ball with whatever bullshit he has planned. But even without it, the order is broad: “the obstruction of criminal law” is only limited by whatever some ICE agent might argue in a warrant narrative. At least, as long as they still act like a warrant is necessary to arrest someone.

For those of us contemplating how much of what we are seeing in the Trump Administration is a prelude to a declaration of martial law and an end to democracy, we have wondered how much Posse Comitatus — the law preventing the U.S. military from acting domestically against American citizens — might apply. Section 6 of this executive order — “Use of Homeland Security Task Forces” — begins to answer that question.

“The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall utilize the Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) formed in accordance with Executive Order 14159 of January 20, 2025 (Protecting the American People Against Invasion) to coordinate and advance the objectives of this order.”

I looked at that order, which is Trump’s first-day omnibus go-get-illegals order, for the first time today. It establishes state-level task forces “to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.”

It’s the first time I’ve heard that such a federal task force might exist in Georgia. I’m now starting to ask around about it. Who is on it? Is it the same thing as the Georgia Board of Homeland Security? The executive order calls on Homeland Security “to provide an operational command center to coordinate the activities of the HSTFs and provide such support as they may require, and shall also take all appropriate action to provide supervisory direction to their activities as may be required.”

What the hell is this thing? Where is it? And what are they doing right now?