In the face of a record number of objecting commentators, and a years-long multi-racial coalition and campaign of passionate resistance, the Atlanta City Council overwhelmingly voted to approve funding for Cop City. The early morning vote came after 14 hours of emotional testimony from about 375 speakers, with only four supporting the proposal. The decision elicited chants, and a few threats, from the tired and hungry onlookers, many of whom had missed work in order to participate in the meeting. As a “security” measure, City Hall barred the public from bringing food or water into the building after a similar crowd of hundreds came to oversee a Cop City meeting weeks before. During that session, many commentators were forced out of the council chambers, leaving rows of empty seats.
Beyond approving the funding, the vote actually doubled the public cost of the project due to a little reported unlimited leaseback agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The city is leasing the 85-acre plot of the Weelaunee Forest to the APF for about $10 a year, and councilors voted to lease it back for access to the training facility for $1.2 million per year for the next 30 years (about $36 million total). This flies in the face of the nearly two year Stop Cop City movement; it also ignores the many commentators who pleaded with the councilors to redirect this funding toward Atlanta’s marginalized populations, the major housing problem, and to help the 20% of the city’s children and 14% of adults who face daily hunger.
In the city council’s previous election, there was a major turnover, largely due to the rejection of harmful policing policies after the murder of George Floyd and Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks, bringing in seven new officials. The new city council was touted to be younger and more “ideologically progressive” than previous iterations. But the vote tally in favor of doubling funding for Cop City was 11-4, with eight of the eleven being Democrats. Once again, the fascist ideology of capitalism has held firm thanks to its stabilizing left wing, the Democratic Party. In a struggle with the far right for dominance in government, they have eagerly served the interests of the ruling class, despite their hollow words.
One of these new councilors, Byron Amos, has been fueled by developers and airport concessionaires throughout his political career. Another younger member, Matt Westmoreland, who has served since 2018, used his post as the Chairperson of the Community Development/Human Services Committee to cut time for public comment in half. He has also come under scrutiny for violations of the Open Meetings Act, which requires details of all votes to be recorded. In one meeting, Westmoreland appears to have falsified the votes of his colleagues in order to discuss legislation in a private, executive session. In a video, nobody, not even Westmoreland himself, was recorded voting on the motion before it was approved.
The true purpose of these offices — to serve the interests of the ruling class — is illustrated by Councilor Westmoreland’s former Chief of Staff, Wayne Martin, who came under investigation for conflicts of interest in 2019. The staffer became an employee of Comcast a few months after leaving his government post, which is a clear violation of Georgia law. According to the ethics complaint which triggered the investigation, his employment was a reward for helping the company secure another seven year franchise agreement with the city. While working for Comcast, Martin twice addressed the council, and personally lobbied them during the debate about the Comcast Franchise Agreement. He used his relationships and knowledge about the council process to secure the contract with a unanimous vote. Although Martin was careless enough to get caught, his is not the only example of the city government’s service to capital.
The City Council has awarded many lucrative contracts to corporations in the name of improving public safety with little evidence to prove that these new investments actually deter or prevent crime. One of these initiatives, One Atlanta – Light Up the Night, expands the city’s network of streetlights in areas with higher crime rates and traffic accidents. Georgia Power has installed 10,000 new LED street lights with multi-node capabilities, meaning that many of these lights are equipped or can be equipped with two cameras, microphones, A.I. filtering technology, and 5G capabilities. The partnership combines technology from GE, Genetec, AT&T, and CivicSmart that allows for detection of illegal parking, surveillance of the street and sidewalks, and uses ShotSpotter, which is an audio detection technology that alerts police to loud sounds that may be gunshots, and has a track record of being used to violently target Black and Latino communities. In Chicago, it was a ShotSpotter alert that deployed police to Little Village, a majority Latino neighborhood, who then chased down and murdered 13-year old Adam Toledo. There, researchers at Northwestern University MacArthur Justice Center found that at least 90% of ShotSpotter alerts yield no evidence of an actual gunshot, meaning that system produces dangerous, racist over-policing.
Georgia Power has also gotten a contract with the city through APF’s Operation Shield, selling them surveillance and license plate reading technology. Operation Shield has made Atlanta the most surveilled city in the U.S. Empire. The license plate reading tech is made by FlockSafety, whose products are now being used across the empire after being tested in Atlanta. Georgia Power and Flock Safety are both donors to the APF.
Corporations not only get contracts through the APF, but this foundation, like all other police foundations, are a means for private direction and guidance of municipal police forces. The police are molded to more effectively serve powerful interests. The over-policing of the U.S. Empire’s nationally oppressed communities, like Atlanta’s historically Black neighborhoods, goes hand in hand with their accelerating gentrification. This results in increased police murders and terror, which has led to many uprisings across the empire this past decade. The state is building Cop City in response to these uprisings; it was first proposed in 2017 and approved shortly after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In this training ground for domestic occupation, as Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders in Atlanta puts it:
They [will be] practicing how to make sure poor and working class people stay in line. So when the police kill us in the streets again, like they did to Rayshard Brooks in 2020, they can control our protests and community response to how they continually murder our people.
The council’s vote comes not out of dismissal of the empire-wide movement against racist police terror, but because of it. Fear is growing in the hearts of the capitalists, as can be seen with the staggering $28.1 million in revenue the APF had in 2021, triple the amount from the year before. This is higher than the New York City Police Foundation, and with a population 6% of its size. As cities across the empire double down on escalating police violence, a pattern seems to emerge: an endless barrage of police terrorism and murders that will inevitably result in more uprisings. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that increases the already egregious funding and militarization of the police, and siphons more public funds to megacorporations.
