Three years ago, Joe Santifer, a Black man in his early fifties, moved from the wealthy north Atlanta enclave of Buckhead to Glen Emerald Park, six miles southeast of the city’s downtown. Santifer, who owns a computer-consulting firm, raised triplets in Buckhead—all three are now in college—but his new neighborhood, he told me, is where he’d always wanted to live. He was attracted to its “collage of humanity,” he said, and also its proximity to the South River Forest, one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black part of unincorporated DeKalb County. “Most people in Buckhead couldn’t find it on a map,” Santifer said, chuckling.
After he moved, Santifer began making frequent visits to what he called a “verdant oasis,” where he often saw deer and rabbits. The forest also bears traces of the people who have lived in and around it over the years. Exploring by bicycle recently, I came upon giant stones with “HOMER,” “POE,” and “VIRGIL” carved into their nearly overgrown façades—relics from Atlanta’s old Carnegie Library, discarded here sometime after it was torn down, in the late nineteen-seventies, when the forest was a de-facto city dump. Underground are the much older remains of the Muscogee Creek people, who lived in what they called the Weelaunee Forest until they were forcibly removed by white settlers in the eighteen-twenties and thirties. Later, the forest was home to what has been called the “finest plantation in the county,” and the site of a famous Civil War battle.
Then, for much of the twentieth century, this land was the site of a prison farm, the gutted and graffitied ruins of which are still visible. In 1999, a city planner named Jillian Wootten published a history of the “honor farm,” describing its management of inmates as a sort of free-range incarceration, and calling for it to be added to the National Register of Historic Places. Wootten’s chronicle has been disputed by others, who point to accounts of “slave conditions” at the farm, including rape and beatings.
In 2017, the South River Forest was designated as one of four major city “lungs” in a report titled “The Atlanta City Design,” put together by Atlanta’s city-planning department. The report’s lead author was Ryan Gravel, a Georgia Tech alum whose graduate thesis led to the creation of the city’s ballyhooed BeltLine greenway. Gravel and his co-authors envision the South River Forest as a great urban park and conservation corridor. The city council formally adopted the plan, and Gravel began working with the Nature Conservancy to make it a reality; in March of last year, a two-hundred-acre parcel surrounding a drained lake three miles south of the prison farm, which could have become another landfill, was approved for permanent preservation.
Then, the following month, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, made an announcement: the area around the prison farm was going to be the site of a sprawling training facility for police and firefighters. This, Gravel said, was “a big surprise.” Many people in Atlanta were startled by the news—including Joe Santifer, who told me that he’d already been bothered by the police presence in the forest. For decades, the Atlanta P.D. has operated a firing range there, and, on his forest strolls, Santifer had begun hearing gunfire. Even from a distance, he said, it “sounds like a battleground.” He e-mailed a complaint to the city, and, a few days later, he got a response: “Call 911.”
In the year since Bottoms’s announcement, a different sort of battleground has taken shape. She and others—including Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp—have described the training facility as an answer to Atlanta’s recent rise in violent crime. (The number of homicides in the city spiked sharply in 2020; last year, Atlanta police investigated more than a hundred and fifty homicides, the highest one-year total since the mid-nineties.) Other cities have lately built or proposed similar facilities, but, at eighty-five acres, Atlanta’s would be much larger than nearly all of the others. New York City, for instance, has a thirty-acre facility for a force fifteen times the size of the Atlanta P.D. The A.P.D. facility’s planned features include a firing range, a “vehicle skills pad,” a “burn building” for firefighters, and a “mock village” for staging simulated emergencies. It’s slated to cost around ninety million dollars, with a third of that money coming from public funds, and the rest coming from the Atlanta Police Foundation.
The A.P.F., which was founded in 2003, is one of many police foundations created in the past two decades. These private nonprofits typically channel corporate money into policing initiatives, expanding police budgets and, in some cases, producing apparent conflicts of interest. Some of Atlanta’s most influential people—the C.E.O.s of Waffle House and of the Atlanta Hawks, V.P.s from the Home Depot and Delta Air Lines—sit on the A.P.F.’s board; Coca-Cola and Cox Enterprises, a media conglomerate based in Atlanta, are among the corporations that have acknowledged their contributions to the foundation. Cox’s C.E.O., Alex Taylor, is the chair of fund-raising for the training facility. Cox owns the city’s largest newspaper, the Journal-Constitution, which has published a number of editorials in favor of the facility and has only sometimes disclosed its owner’s contributions to the A.P.F.
Atlanta’s city council solicited public comment on the facility in September of last year, and received more than seventeen hours of remarks—including a few minutes from Joe Santifer. “I said the location isn’t congruent with the neighborhood,” he told me. “It’s outsized for the number of officers that Atlanta has, and the process has been rushed.” Santifer said that he’d also listened to most of the other remarks, which were recorded, and that “about seventy per cent” were opposed to the development. (A crowdsourced tally reached the same conclusion.) The other thirty per cent, he said, “were mimicking what they had been told—that this was gonna solve Atlanta’s crime problem and the problem with low morale in the police force.” Santifer began researching alternative sites, including a dilapidated mall in southwest Atlanta and a few industrial properties. He also took to social media to alert his neighbors to what was going on.
In September, the Atlanta city council voted 10–4 in favor of the project. Rather than put an end to the debate, the vote seemed to bring it into wider view, in Atlanta and beyond. Smaller publications in Atlanta kept up a drumbeat of coverage, and a fragmented, free-form protest movement began to come together.
On a morning in June, along a dirt path piled with food and camping supplies, I met a young woman who introduced herself as Rutabaga. She is one of a few dozen people who have relocated to the forest since late last year. They call themselves forest defenders; some have lived in tree houses and encampments for months at a time, working to stop what they call Cop City, a name inspired by the mock village planned for the police- and fire-training facility. In May, seven defenders were arrested after reportedly throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks at officers attempting to expel them. Some of the tree houses were subsequently destroyed, along with a suspension bridge that defenders had built over a creek. But most of the defenders remain.
Rutabaga wasn’t living in one of the tree houses. “I’m not a good climber,” she said. Prior to coming to Atlanta, she had been in West Virginia, protesting the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a six-billion-dollar project that spans three hundred miles in Appalachia. “The way that I see it, the state and institutions of capitalism are yet again trying to destroy and dominate nature in order to build monuments to themselves,” Rutabaga said, connecting her current protest to the previous one. She added, “Without the police’s enforcement of capitalist laws, all of this destruction I don’t think would be possible.” For Rutabaga and others, Cop City is the latest episode in the misuse and abuse of this land, going back to the removal of the Muscogee.
I had come to the forest with Jacqueline Echols, the board president of the South River Watershed Alliance, and Joseph Peery, a co-manager of the South River Forest Coalition. “A.P.F. saw an opportunity to take advantage of a multi-decades-long history of environmental injustice and community disinvestment perpetuated by Atlanta, and they seized it,” Echols said. We ventured deeper into the woods, where we met another young forest dweller, swaddled in dark clothing that obscured all but their blue eyes. I’d arranged to interview this person, who asked to be called Twig, through an intermediary, but we hadn’t met at the decided-upon time and place, and now they were skeptical: I could be a cop. Nonetheless, they brought me to a sunken area where we could talk more privately.
Twig told me about a “long personal history of facing brutality from the state”—they declined to share the details—and said that they had come to the forest so “that that doesn’t happen to other people.” Twig described seeing and hearing disturbing things in the forest, including screams from a nearby juvenile-detention center and “sunken rectangles that are roughly human size.” The city, Twig said, is trying to erase the stain of the prison farm and also push back against the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, by creating a training ground for “doing even more brutal crowd control, even more brutal SWAT raids, even more brutal murder. And a lot of us were, like, ‘Oh, fuck that,’ ” they said.
The activists in the forest do not have any official positions, Twig told me. But, in the short term, Twig hoped to prevent the construction of “a police murder playground” and to protect as much of the woods as possible. Twig noted that construction on the facility had been delayed, judging from a leaked timeline. “They’ve only gotten about a week done,” Twig said. “That seems like a beautiful thing to me.” Eventually, they suggested, the land might even be “returned to the Muscogee people.”
A delegation of Muscogee from Oklahoma had visited the woods earlier in the summer. Among those who came was Laura Harjo, who teaches in the Native American Studies department at the University of Oklahoma. It was her first visit to this part of the Weelaunee Forest. “When I was walking through it, the insect sounds, the birds and the heaviness of the air—I know my relatives had that same felt knowledge before removal,” she said. “To pass through that space meant a lot to me.” Harjo teaches a class on Indigenous community planning. “For a recent assignment, I had them work on what kind of future they imagined for the Weelaunee Forest, if there was a Muscogee tribal town instead of Cop City.” She added, “This has been treated as a carceral space since European contact, and Cop City would be a continuation of that rather than a return to community.”
At the end of July, someone set fire to a truck that had hauled construction equipment to a trailside parking lot. On its charred remains were scrawled the words “No Cop City” and “No Hollywood Distopia.” (The latter slogan refers to a film studio’s planned construction project on forty adjacent acres of the forest, a project delayed by a lawsuit brought by local environmental groups.) A few days after the apparent arson, I asked a representative of the forest defenders about it. “We don’t know if it was somebody we know or just, like, somebody taking an autonomous action,” this person told me. “But we do know that vehicles are not human lives, and human lives will be taken if this forest is destroyed and a cop city is built.”
Atlanta’s most recent budget was approved in June; more than a third of it, about a quarter of a billion dollars, is earmarked for the police department. The mayor who submitted the budget, Andre Dickens, a Democrat, was elected in November; he was previously one of the ten city-council members who voted in favor of the police-training facility. (Of the four city-council members who voted against the facility, only one ran for reëlection. She lost.)
Recently, I spoke with Dickens about the facility; it was his first interview specifically devoted to the project. He seemed frustrated by the way in which it’s being discussed, describing the project’s opponents as a “bandwagon on the Internet” who had largely been misinformed. When I referred to the facility’s construction site as a forest—which seems consistent with an A.P.F.-commissioned assessment of the site as “wooded and/or grassed land”—he said, “If you stood there, you would see lots of building foundations, lots of asphalt from where the parking lot was, et cetera. There’s still a forest, it’s just not a forest where this is right now.” He also noted that any downed hardwoods would be replaced, as the A.P.F. has also claimed.
Could he envision the facility being built anywhere else? “No,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing else that we own of scale.” Dickens believes that the plan’s eighty-five acres is a reasonable footprint. “We looked around,” he said. “And experts that are really involved in real estate did that, too.”
Soon after taking office, Dickens created a green-space advisory council, with whom he said he would discuss the environmental impact of the Public Safety Training Facility. A member of the green-space advisory council told me recently that, although the council has met twice, neither the Mayor nor the Mayor’s office has asked the council for any input on issues related to the facility’s location or environmental impact; the city had leased the property to the Atlanta Police Foundation before Dickens was elected.
Dickens pointed me to a different group, a community-advisory committee, and said that there’s still “a lot of room for input.” He invoked “the Atlanta way,” an aspirational term that—like “the city too busy to hate”—seeks to cast Atlanta as a place where Black and white leaders have historically put aside their differences to pursue mutual economic interests. “That’s what makes Atlanta special,” Dickens said. “All throughout our history, we take the input of citizens carefully.” The sixteen-person advisory committee does not include any members of environmental groups, but it does feature representatives from the Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Fire Department, and the Dickens administration. A few weeks earlier, Lily Ponitz, an environmental engineer who wrote an op-ed critical of the facility for a local online publication, was removed from the committee. (Echols, of the South River Watershed Alliance, said that the composition of the committee should prompt an ethics investigation.)
The facility’s plan has been modified during the past year, as opposition has grown louder. The size of the A.P.F.’s lease has been reduced from a hundred and fifty acres to eighty-five, and the A.P.F. has promised to test explosives elsewhere. But critics view these concessions as minor. Sixteen environmental-justice groups, including the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club, have signed an open letter arguing that the proposed development would be “devastating for the ecological community.” Shooting ranges are a known cause of heavy-metal pollution, and paving naturally permeable surfaces is likely to make the city more vulnerable to flooding, which the letter describes as “Atlanta’s top natural disaster.” Any loss of forest canopy could make an infamously hot city even hotter.
Several environmental activists I spoke to did not want to go on the record criticizing Dickens’s administration, which they otherwise support. When I asked why Dickens would back a project like this, one activist suggested that it was a “gesture to the folks in Buckhead who want to secede,” a reference to a high-profile effort to make Buckhead a city of its own, separate from Atlanta. Buckhead secessionists have cited the uptick in violent crime as part of their rationale; others have argued that racism is the underlying motivation. Buckhead is a significant part of Atlanta’s tax base. I asked Dickens whether he had Buckhead in mind when he voted to support the training facility. He said that Buckhead secession and the police facility “are two separate issues.”
Joe Santifer, the former Buckhead resident, who is generally supportive of Dickens, believes that the two issues are pulling the Mayor in opposite directions. “He’s got Buckhead trying to secede, and then he’s got the southeast part of the city and beyond that’s opposed to this training-facility project,” he said. Santifer hasn’t given up, though. “Many other locations could still be identified for the training center,” he said. “And this land could be put to its best and highest use—to allow people to reconnect with nature, with their fellow-humans, and with themselves.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the acreage of the training facility.
