The White Left is Building Cop City

Class War and Cop City

Almost nowhere in the United States is the class struggle sharper, or more one-sided, than in Atlanta, Georgia. And almost nowhere can the dynamics of race in that class struggle be more clearly seen. This has been true for years. In 2018, the Guardian devoted a week of coverage to the city, laying out in great detail a situation which was, even then, remarkably bad. The passage of five years, with the pandemic and the political unrest those years brought, have only made things worse.

Atlanta’s population in 2019 was 51% Black. By the following year, that number had fallen to 47%.  This was the first time in its modern history the city did not have a Black majority. In January of 2019, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the city was $1,868. By January of 2023, that had gone up to $2,212. The national average rent over the same period increased from $1,465 in 2019 to $1,900 in early 2023, placing Atlanta well ahead of the national curve for the period. These numbers clearly show a city that is rapidly becoming both whiter and more expensive.

This process is known as gentrification, of course, and it has arguably been the primary contradiction faced by the U.S. working class over the last several decades. In Atlanta, several factors have come together to create a situation that surpasses the scale and scope of the problem elsewhere. The most obvious of these, as a driver of the increasing whiteness and costliness of the city, has been the relocation of much of the U.S. film and television industry to Atlanta. Hollywood has come to town, and both the city and the state have rolled out a red carpet worthy of the gaudiest, most decadent film premier.

In the period 2019-2020, Georgia was home to an estimated total of 641 film and television productions, which brought over $5 billion into the state.  The vast majority of these productions were and are based in Atlanta. And what led them all here was simple: money. Georgia, from 2008 onward, has offered the industry heavy incentives in the form of tax rebates and other enticements. And the local government has allowed the influx of film industry people to essentially colonize the city. No effort has been made to protect longtime residents from the economic impact of a tidal wave of rich Californians and New Yorkers crashing into the place. Quite the opposite, in fact. The city has declared class war on its poorest people and their neighborhoods. And the army that fights that war is the Atlanta Police Department.

An excellent case in point comes from a neighborhood known as the Old Fourth Ward, which sits east of downtown. This was Dr. King’s neighborhood, and he and his wife are buried there. It is also rapidly being transformed into precisely the kind of petty bourgeois Potemkin village that has sprung up all over the city, to house and amuse the white gentry. Gated communities of condos or townhouses that come with game rooms and gyms, dog parks and pools, surrounded by upscale restaurants and shops to soak up the residents’ spending money. Many of these also feature a “market,” essentially a high-end mall food court minus the mall, of which there are many throughout the city. The one in the Old Fourth Ward is called the Krog Street Market. To go there on a weekend evening is to stumble into a stereotypical yuppie’s wildest dreams. Throngs of white people peppered with a few darker faces, all of them frolicking in their artificial paradise, dropping fistfuls of cash. What one does not see is any poor people, and very few Black people, who are not at work. This is one of Atlanta’s most historic working class Black neighborhoods.

The question is how the Old Fourth Ward got this way. We are fortunate to have a firsthand account from a former Atlanta police officer who, disgusted by what he was ordered to do and why, not only quit over it but went to the media. This was Tom Gissler, which may not be his real name. According to Gissler, in 2020, after three years on the force, he was given very specific instructions by his superiors: target the people living in an Old Fourth Ward complex called Bedford Pines Apartments, which is privately owned public housing. Gissler’s orders were explicit: get the people living there on anything you can, parking violations, old warrants, petty drug charges, whatever. Let nothing slide. According to Gissler these orders were unusual:

It made me very curious. So on my own time…I drove over there and…was like: “Hey, this is what I’m being asked to do. Why do you think that is? What’s going on?”

A homeowner in the area was very frank with me. He said the guys who own Bedford Pines got their tax bill last year, and their taxes were assessed based on all the gentrification that’s happening in the area. And so they wanted to move everybody out of these apartments and knock ’em down and rebuild these nice expensive apartments and the government said no. And so then they said, “Well, that’s ok, we’ll just increase the rent.” They tried to increase the rent and the Section 8 guys came back out and said, “No, you can’t do that either.”

The only way you can evict or do anything like that is if the person who [lives in] the apartment is convicted of a felony. So the Bedford Pines guys just went to the police department and said: “We want you to police in here, and we’re going to give you a section of Bedford Pines to actually have office space. And I want you to lock up as many people as possible so we can make these apartments vacant and we can knock ’em down.”

I go to my supervisors: Is this what the case is? And they looked at me like, what are you, stupid? Of course, why else would we be doing this?

The pattern of aggressive policing to drive out working class Black residents that Gissler witnessed in the Old Fourth Ward has been carried out in neighborhoods around the city. Summerhill, Peoplestown, Pittsburgh, the Bluff; the list is long and growing. Once the original residents are mostly gone, the city and their preferred developers move in and buy up whole blocks. These are then leased out to white hipster capitalists, who renovate the buildings and open their foodie restaurants, their breweries and cafés, their boutiques and yoga studios. Fast forward two years and the high-end yuppies start to move in. They displace the hipsters, and the whole grim circus rolls on to the next neighborhood. And if, somewhere along the way local residents become frustrated enough to protest or otherwise object, the police come back, make more arrests and bust whatever heads catch their eye. Many of the city’s numerous gang prosecutions are rooted in this process.

This has gone on in Atlanta for years, at least as far back as the preparations for the 1996 Olympics. It might appear, from the outside, to be strange. Atlanta is a Black-controlled city, after all. The offices of mayor, police chief and city council have been mostly occupied by Black people since the 1970s. The city has long been held up as the most successful, practical, capitalist answer to the demands of ’60s radicals for Black power. And yet the policies that slowly eroded that Black majority have been relentlessly pursued. One might be tempted to conclude, on this basis, that the primary contradiction in Atlanta is class rather than race. As we shall see later on, this is not really the case, though class does play such an outsized role in the political economy of race in the city that the two are difficult to separate.

The best guides through this terrain are E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 book The Black Bourgeoisie, Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture’s 1967 work Black Power, and the work of the late Glen Ford on the concept of the “Black misleadership class.” The short version is that the Black political leadership in Atlanta employs a rhetoric crafted to appeal to their working class constituents, while their policies advance other interests. Viewed through this lens, the situation becomes more clear.

Things in Atlanta would likely have continued this way until the remaking of the city was complete, if not for 2020. That year, the covid pandemic collided with outrage at the police murder of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and many others. There was a serious uprising in Atlanta. It was in the aftermath of that uprising that a proposal was put forward which had, as its stated goal and purpose, rewarding the police after a long hot summer. The centerpiece of that proposal was a massive, new, state-of-the-art police training facility.

This announcement was years in the making. Research on “what a training center would look like and what it would cost” began as early as 2015. By January 2021, after months of reactionary media coverage about crime waves and low police morale, conditions were ripe. The mayor at that time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, rolled out “One Atlanta: One APD,” a multi-pronged plan to “bolster police presence, training, and morale.” The plan called for the expansion of the city’s already vast surveillance network, the targeting of “nuisance properties” such as bars and nightclubs with increased force, and the forming of partnerships with the FBI and local sheriffs to “put more officers on the street.” 

Lance Bottoms’ plan further promised to “explore a public safety training academy that expands recruitment classes and ensures that police officers and firefighters have high-quality facilities and training.” On April 1, 2021 plans for the training academy were finally revealed. The $90 million project, to be constructed on a parcel of forested land in neighboring Dekalb County, was to include housing for police academy trainees, many shooting ranges, an explosives testing and training site, and large a mock city for urban warfare and counterinsurgency training. It was this last feature that led opponents of the project to give it the name which stuck: Cop City.

Opportunism from the White “Left”

Right Opportunism 

The proposal to construct Cop City was met with harsh criticism and resistance from around Atlanta. An eclectic coalition of neighborhood associations, police/prison abolition groups, environmentalists, liberals, democratic-socialists, and anarchists began to come together. Soon they had a slogan: Stop Cop City.

Activists focused their efforts on mobilizing community pressure on the City Council to vote the proposal down. They canvassed neighborhoods, circulated petitions, held rallies, marches, and town hall meetings. As opposition to the plan grew, the city made a few calculated concessions. The 150-acre project was scaled back to 85 acres, and provisions were added to plant 100 hardwoods for every tree removed during construction. Meanwhile, the official city council vote on the project was twice delayed by allegations that the “listening sessions” being held to gather community feedback were a sham. Eventually, the Council set up a phone line that people could call to make a short recording of whatever they had to say. This resulted in 17 hours worth of audio, about 70% of which was firmly against the project. Nevertheless, on the evening of September 8, 2021, the City Council voted to greenlight Cop City by a margin of 10-4, swatting away four months of mobilization like a gnat.

This was of course predictable, and indeed it was predicted. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s local Steering Committee, told a reporter at an August protest outside City Hall, that DSA thought the measure would pass. “We just believe that Councilwoman Shephard isn’t actually listening to her own constituents, and she is doing what she wants to do to support the Atlanta Police Foundation’s funders.” For some organizers, the obstinance of local officials was more than just likely, it was necessary. A former member of a local organization called Defund Atlanta Police Department, Refund Communities (DARC), Jesse Pratt López, stated in a recent interview that the defeat came as no surprise. It was, in fact, the very reaction the coalition had built their strategy around. According to Pratt López, the goal was to radicalize the masses by leading them through a futile civic exercise, thereby catalyzing a more militant movement against the project. Following the vote, however, rather than picking up steam the first iteration of the movement to Stop Cop City began to fissure.

Within days of the city council vote, DARC itself would dissolve. Its last act was the publication of an open letter, endorsed by a majority of active members, explaining the reasons for this dissolution. The letter describes a pattern of chauvinism and anti-Blackness in a movement riddled with internal contradictions. It begins: “In early September, our abolitionist group…informally dissolved after multiple white and non-Black organizers in DARC and Atlanta DSA completely eroded the trust and confidence of Black comrades in DARC. These same organizers harmed DARC’s relationship with other coalition groups that collaborated on the #StopCopCity campaign.” The letter goes on to allege that DSA’s leadership used the movement and the moment to advance their own goals: “While the campaign began as a horizontal movement-building project, it became clear that Atlanta DSA sought oversight and control (financially and structurally).” The DSA, according to DARC, saw the campaign against Cop City primarily as a way to recruit people into their own formation, and attempted to take over the coalition’s messaging and strategy. A text message from a member of the local DSA Steering Committee, sent the week of the council vote and published with the open letter, reveals them advising others to use this period of “peak attention” to “try to absorb as many people into DSA as possible, win or lose.”  

DARC’s letter helps explain the tactic of lobbying the City Council to vote the project down while knowing damn well they would not. The notion that working class Atlantans, people who live their entire lives in the trenches of the city’s class war, require a civics lesson to be radicalized is self-evidently chauvinistic. Such a plan coming from a broad, predominantly Black, coalition of locals makes no sense; but coming from a clique of mostly white, petty bourgeois electoralists, it does. DSA appears to have been more interested in growing their organization than winning a fight they always expected to lose. In pursuit of that goal, it strong-armed its way to the front of a movement of working class Black people, maligning and alienating fellow organizers as it went.

It is no surprise to see DSA, in this particular case and as a broader organization, move this way. It is an instrument, not of the working class, but rather of, by, and for petty bourgeois opportunists. Born out of the work of Michael Harrington, himself a petty bourgeois opportunist, amid the pervasive anticommunism of the Cold War, the DSA was formed in the early 1980s by a merger of two smaller social-democrat formations. Then as now, DSA’s entire reason for existence is to be a place for liberals who want to go further than the Democratic Party, but not “too far,” i.e.: not toward outright, mature communism. Its theoretical framework is derived largely from the work of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, two bourgeois collaborators who were soundly refuted by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg over a century ago.

Even the group’s name gives this away, speaking as it does, as Kautsky did, of “democracy” without going the necessary further step to ask: democracy for which class? The group has never, at any point, revealed an accurate understanding that everything in class society has a definite class character, and that which is not explicitly proletarian is bourgeois, because it derives from the culture and ideology of the bourgeoisie. As such, the DSA’s attempt to collage together a form of socialism that the bourgeois state will tolerate is doomed from the start, because this can only be accomplished by leaving the essence of Marxism, its scientific revolutionary character, behind. The end result can only be a reformist, radical liberalism at best, though more frequently such formations function, objectively, as agents of the bourgeoisie. The only real question being whether they are themselves aware of this or not.

Opportunism of this type arises in tandem with imperialism, as a fraction of imperialist superprofits are tossed to a section of the working class like so many crumbs. It emerged in the context of the First World War, which the opportunists supported in collaboration with their national bourgeois, in defiance of a revolutionary understanding of that war as an essentially imperialist project. In the heat of this controversy, Lenin defined opportunism simply as “an alliance between sections of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.” DSA’s actions in Atlanta clearly demonstrate the accuracy of this definition. They attempted nothing but the advance of their own short-term interests over those of the majority Black proletariat of Atlanta. And they accomplished nothing but furthering the bourgeoisie’s goal of building Cop City, in that they seriously damaged the working class resistance to the project in the city.

Left Opportunism 

It is within this context of a working class movement undermined by opportunism that anarchists entered the scene in a significant way. Early in 2022, a nebulous group of individuals calling themselves “forest defenders” moved into the South River Forest, site of the proposed facility. They began setting up camps and erecting “tree-sits.” Their intention was to physically occupy the forest, thereby preventing work on Cop City from beginning. It is unclear how the decision to pursue this particular tactic, which has been employed many times with very little success, was made. In many reports, the forest defenders describe themselves as a “decentralized, autonomous movement [where] nobody is in charge, and nobody is responsible for anybody else’s actions,” so it’s unlikely we will ever get an answer to that question.  

The camp was in a state of perpetual flux, with people constantly coming and going, but reports indicate that somewhere between 40-100 activists were ensconced in the trees throughout 2022. They practiced yoga, planted gardens, held religious ceremonies, and of course engaged in minor vandalism of construction equipment. Their strategy was to make themselves “an immovable obstacle to any construction” while allies outside of the forest went to court and pressured construction companies in an effort to end the project before it began. And when, as they sometimes did, work crews tried to start clearing the forest despite all this, those in the camp “put their bodies on the line, climbing into trees to prevent them from being felled.”

The risks involved with such tactics hardly need to be explained. The police were called in very quickly and there were frequent altercations, which became increasingly violent as the year went on. During a May confrontation, police claimed a forest defender threw a Molotov cocktail at an officer. In a December raid on the encampment, police used tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets on activists in the trees. Yet for all of this, the approach to operational security in the camp was incoherent at best. When speaking to the media, as they often did, forest defenders concealed their identities, distorted their voices and used aliases like Twig and Rutabaga. This gives the impression that, on some level, they understood how vulnerable they were. But rather than regimenting security given the clear threat of police violence, they left fundamental things such as scouting and keeping watch to be taken up by anyone on a spontaneous, voluntary basis, for reasons which were purely ideological.

Arguably more important security concerns, such as the fact that police would surely attempt to infiltrate the camp, do not appear to have been considered at all. On their numerous social media accounts and websites, forest defenders repeatedly sent out open calls to the public: all were welcome, no questions asked. A June 2, 2022 communique posted to the website Scenes from the Atlanta Forest reads:

We are welcoming ALL the tactics. Kate Bush flash mob when kkkops arrive? Fuck yeah. Frontline Action to stop machines of destruction? Fuck yeah. Please just get your sweet fucking feral ass down here.

Your house sitting gig & coffee shop job can wait– come occupy the forest, & if you got privilege, use it to throw down, as trees, community members & non-human animals are better than a clear cut lot with a militarized police training center.

The stakes are high & the forest is calling!

Come for the blackberries & community, & stay for the chaos!

Setting aside the condescension toward workers who, with bills and babies, must have jobs that absolutely cannot and will not wait, there are serious problems here. The “act first, ask questions later” ideology permeates the forest defenders’ entire internet footprint. One of their Instagram pages features a buffet of organizing tactics: phone zaps, rallies, marches, mutual aid, and teach-ins. These are peppered with more urgent calls to direct action. One such post, from January 25, 2022, reads in bold red and black font: “We need folks on the ground to stop bulldozing happening by the ponds by the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. Most of the entrances have cops. Risk of police encounter is medium-high, be smart. Be alert.” Another post, from May 4, 2022 reads “Police are entering the Weelaunee Forest in large numbers to remove forest defenders. Please come help now!”

One needn’t be a seasoned organizer to understand how reckless this is. To put out a mass call to action, on the internet, insisting that anyone who reads it charge immediately into the woods, flinging their bodies in front of a brigade of heavily armed cops and bulldozers is astonishing. The best it can do is halt construction at that particular moment, a victory so temporary as to be essentially Pyrrhic. At worst, it leaves everyone who turns up totally vulnerable to police violence, with no means of self defense and without the requisite knowledge of the terrain to even flee. It boggles the mind that activists, so diligent in concealing their identities from the readers of Rolling Stone or Vice, could have such a cavalier attitude about the various dangers posed by police. Eventually, this would have literally fatal consequences.

On the morning of Wednesday, January 18, 2023, gunfire rang out in the forest. Police encircled the camp and ambushed, opening fire on Manuel Terán, known in the camp as Tortuguita a.k.a. Tort. They were shot at least 13 times, killing them as they emerged from a tent. A sheriff’s deputy was shot as well, and while police claim that Terán shot first, everyone on the scene except the cops have disputed this from the start. For weeks, police denied that there was any body camera footage from the incident; but such cameras were clearly visible on APD officers in news reports and the recordings were eventually released. They reveal a cluster of suppressed, high caliber military weapons opening up almost in unison, with no preceding, small caliber fire such as might have come from the legal, registered pistol which Terán owned. Later in the video an APD officer is seen asking someone off-camera, “You fucked up your own officer?” and receiving a grunted, affirmative reply.

What happened that day is as clear as it will likely ever be, though important questions remain. Did the police know beforehand that Terán had a gun and target them on that basis? If so, how did the cops come by that information? How were police able to encircle the camp that morning without being detected? Why were there no lookouts when everyone knew this was coming eventually and even one minute’s warning would likely have kept everyone in the camp alive? Because the only real feature of the “autonomous, nonhierarchical” form of mobilization that prevailed in the forest is that “no one is in charge and no one is responsible for anyone else,” there is no one to even ask such questions, leaving only silence regarding the entirely needless death of a brave, committed person.

Rather than pausing to reevaluate their strategy after this catastrophic turn of events, anarchists immediately resorted to reckless mobilization once again. The Saturday after Terán’s murder, a vigil in their honor was used as cover for a small-scale riot. A police car was burned, a Wells Fargo vandalized, and 6 more protestors were arrested. #AvengeTort became a trending topic on social media and across the country there were other random acts, ranging from graffiti to attacking office buildings with “stench agents.” What the people involved clearly fail to understand is that mobilization alone, no matter how immediately satisfying to the emotions, will never be enough to halt Cop City or anything else. As Kwame Ture was constantly at pains to point out, mobilization is easy because people instinctively respond to injustice, but “if we’re not careful, we allow mobilization to become an event. The struggle is never an event, it’s a process: a continual, eternal process.” Mobilizations that aren’t tied to a disciplined, organized, working-class base will always fall apart once the heat of feeling fades.

Liberal reformists, petty bourgeois opportunists and custeristic anarchists have spent two years at the center of this struggle. For all of their efforts, they have not made any measurable progress at all, having failed at every turn to convert mobilization into organization. In fact, many of their tactics have proven downright alienating to Atlanta’s working class. This is certainly true of all the tilting at City Council windmills. And it is equally true of the forest camp, where one local resident noticed that “those treehouses are nicer than my fucking apartment.” The erstwhile movement against Cop City seems to be about everything except winning, and therefore it is losing. One activist is dead. Eighteen are facing Domestic Terrorism charges that carry thirty-five year sentences. At time of writing, construction crews are clearing the forest while heavily armed police stand guard at every entrance. And the best the project’s opponents can come up with is a plan to re-occupy the forest the first week of March, to which end they have called, once again, for anyone and everyone to come to Atlanta and go camping with them.

These events are as troubling as they are familiar. Recent history is littered with the wreckage of such mobilizations. From Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, all were undone by their insistence on mobilization at the expense of disciplined, militant organization. And for all this, still such methods are widely praised and held up as the future of leftwing politics, which is flatly absurd. The reality is that a truly horizontal organization does not and cannot exist. Friedrich Engels explored this in his 1872 essay, On Authority, concluding that, under bourgeois rule, it is impossible to create an organization in which one’s will is never subordinated to another’s. Even in the most utopian, anti-authoritarian formations, someone’s ideas end up prevailing. And when the idea that prevails is nothing but a refusal to have coherent ideas, it virtually always ends in defeat, with people dead or in prison.

The Atlanta Police Foundation and Ignored Answers 

The movement against Cop City, such as it is, has focused its outrage on various actors at various times. The mayor, the city council, the police, the contractors, and the corporations who have provided funding for the project have all been targeted for everything from protest to graffiti to sabotage. Often overlooked entirely, and rarely correctly analyzed, has been the private, 501(c)3 nonprofit called the Atlanta Police Foundation.

This is a serious error, because the APF is in fact the primary force behind Cop City. It was their idea, they brought it to the mayor, they pushed it through the city council, they have controlled the conversation around the issue, they control the land in question, they are slated to provide the overwhelming majority of the funding for the project and they will apparently operate it if it is eventually built. The question, then, becomes who and what is the APF? Answering that question is of paramount importance, because it reveals not only the interests that want Cop City built, but also maps the real terrain of power in the city of Atlanta.

In seeking an answer to this question, what we do not find is as eloquent as what we do. The APF, as a 501(c)3 organization, is required to file fairly transparent tax documents which subsequently become publicly available. But such records are only available up to and including fiscal 2020, the year before the activity around Cop City begins. So few details pertaining to the project are on the formal record. There are receipts for some of the money, though the source is APF itself and the information must, therefore, be viewed somewhat skeptically. This is relevant, because the records for 2020 show $24.1 million in assets against $16.7 million in liabilities, leaving a balance around $8 million. This is well short of the $60 million the APF has committed to the project. None of the tax records currently available, which go back to the organization’s founding in 2003, show them having anything close to a spare $60 million dollars lying around. So it is clear that a massive amount of money was raised very quickly for the Cop City project.

The information APF has chosen to make available, in a “campaign update” from the third quarter of 2022, lists 24 large donors. Nine of these are foundations, including the project’s two largest single donors. The Woodruff Foundation, endowed from the estate of an early president of Coca-Cola, has contributed $13 million. The James M. Cox Foundation, endowed by the owner of Atlanta’s only major newspaper, gave $10 million. Also on the list are the companies that control gas and electric service in Georgia, two large railroad companies, and then a laundry list of large corporations based or doing substantial business in Atlanta and Georgia more broadly.

For some reason, efforts to problematize the project’s funding have ignored the foundations almost entirely. Some attempts have been made to pressure one or another corporation into withdrawing their support, though at this point only Coca-Cola has been responsive to this pressure. And even then, the victory consisted only in extracting a promise that they would provide no further funding, rather than somehow clawing their prior $1 million “donation” back. Every other corporation involved has simply ignored the pressure.

But the corporations as such are beside the point. They are not the major donors to Cop City. And they are not people, despite the legal sophistry that classifies them as such in the U.S. They are not subject to shame or embarrassment. The investors to whom they ultimately answer might be, at least in theory, but probably not. The corporations and the foundations, along with all the other donors, are advancing the self-identified interests of human beings. If they judge that one way to do that is to give millions of tax-deductible dollars to the APF, then they will. The only language they understand is money, so arguably only a strategy that would escalate the cost of their involvement beyond what they were prepared to spend would have a chance of success. And it seems no such strategy was ever even considered.

The fact of the matter is that money to fund Cop City is simply not a problem the APF has. If one corporation were to drop out, as Coca-Cola appears to have done, it changes nothing. If they all pull out, the APF already has their money, and could simply switch to soliciting money from more foundations and private individuals. More to the point is who the APF is and what it does with the money that comes in. And here the available tax documents are actually useful.

First, the who. APF’s fiscal 2020 documents list some 50 members of the board of directors, 41 of whom hold the mere title of “director.” The other 9 are the foundation’s officers at the time, and even a brief glance at them is very revealing. The president and CEO is one W. David Wilkinson, who has served in that post through the administrations of three successive Atlanta mayors. Wilkinson’s prior work experience consists primarily of 22 years in the U.S. Secret Service. Marshall B. Freeman, the APF’s chief operating officer, is ex-APD, where he was the deputy chief administrative officer. The chief financial officer in 2020 was one Courtney Collins, who came to the APF from the local nonprofit sector, specializing in homelessness, toward which the city is infamously brutal. She has since left the APF, and gone on to work for something called the Atlanta Building Wealth Initiative, which is exactly what it sounds like. APF chairman Robin Loudermilk is a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest families in the entire South, and has a background in high octane real estate speculation. Vice chairman John F. O’neill was formally president of “US Multifamily Capital Markets” at Cushman & Wakefield, a Chicago-based commercial real estate firm with over $9 billion dollars in annual revenue. Calvin Darden, also a vice chairman, was an executive at UPS, and was heavily involved in the building of the city’s yuppie hiking park known as the Beltline. Treasurer Tye Darden has been general counsel for both Georgia-Pacific Railroad and Koch Industries. And finally, secretary Bob Peterson also has a background as a commercial real estate executive. Of these nine officers at the APF, only two are Black.

As for the what, the tax records don’t cover the Cop City project, but the APF’s other programs are nightmarish enough. Taken together, these activities are clearly seen as intended to bring about a kind of new golden age for U.S. police on behalf of those the police serve and protect. For the rest of us, the future the APF is working to bring about can only be described as a chilling, dystopian police state.

Perhaps the most obviously problematic program is what the APF calls OPERATION SHIELD. This is a surveillance network. It consists, not only of the 11,000 cameras that APF has provided to the city, but of virtually every other public and private camera in the entire city. Closed circuit security cameras, Amazon’s Ring cameras, traffic enforcement cameras and others are all linked into a single network that the APD can monitor in real time from their APF-provided Video Integration Center. As an adjunct to SHIELD, the APF has built what they call ComNet, a communications hub linking the APD to private security outfits. These networks are available to any group that cares to pay the subscription fee for access. This means communications between APD and any manner of private security, from the unarmed watchmen of a company like Securitas to the more overtly militarized personnel of a mercenary firm like Blackwater, are perfectly seamless because they are all on the same network.

More subtly troubling is an initiative called SECURE NEIGHBORHOODS. Under this umbrella, the APF purchases real estate in neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. They then bring in contractors to build new housing or renovate existing structures on those lots, and these homes are then sold to APD officers at sub-market prices. The end result, obviously, is that various working class neighborhoods come under full-time surveillance and threat of police intervention, courtesy of their new neighbors. This program has also provided discounted housing for APD recruits at a development called Unity Place, which has room for up to 30 such recruits at a time.

Another, more overtly carceral APF initiative is something they call the Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission. According to the APF’s tax records, in 2014 “the AROC was given authority” to track and issue reports on repeat offenders who, if their cases originated in different jurisdictions, might have received something less than the harshest legal punishment.

And finally we come to the Atlanta Crime Research Center, which APF describes as its “research and analysis arm.” Launched in 2019, the ACRC’s first task was a study of APF’s own Repeat Offender program, which included compiling reports on local judges’ sentencing patterns, no doubt intended to help pressure or remove those who decline to throw the entire book at every such defendant. The language in the tax documents is intentionally vague, stating that the ACRC “is managed by APF but works in concert with local universities and law enforcement partners to develop and analyze content” and conduct various “short- and long-range studies” with the goal of reducing “crime.” It seems reasonable to assume that this entity will be and is being used to identify law enforcement targets, probably using the pseudo-science known as “predictive policing.”

While this is not quite a complete list of the APF’s programs and activities, it is sufficient to outline the nature of the organization’s efforts. These, clearly, are all about expanding the power of the police. The Cop City project is about consolidating that expanded power, giving the police a physical, military-style base from which to operate while moving towards more sophisticated techniques of crowd control and counterinsurgency. Furthermore, it is quite clear that there is very little chance of effective political oversight being exercised by the city government. The city council has fallen over itself in its zeal for the project. And two mayors have now been caught in the project’s undertow. One has seen her political ambition go up in flames, in part, because of the controversy around Cop City, and the other has compromised himself so publicly that it is highly unlikely that he will even seek, let alone win, re-election.

In point of fact, one has to question who actually runs the city of Atlanta, where the real power resides. Mayors come and go and are tossed aside once they can no longer advance the APF’s agenda. City Council members, too. All of these elected officials, most of them Black, put in office by the city’s still large population of mostly Black Democratic Party voters, have a clear record of laboring, not on behalf of their constituents, but rather on behalf of the APF. And as we have seen, the APF’s officers and funding come from a sewer of private and corporate interests that all emerge from a single source: the bourgeoisie.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, then, is best understood not as a slush fund or a shady organization behind the scenes, but rather as a de facto shadow government that actually runs the city on behalf of a mostly white bourgeoisie. And it follows that the local political and civic leadership is not a Black bourgeoisie at all, but a petty bourgeois faction at best, a gang of compradors at worst, always at the service of those with real power. This understanding clarifies the situation around Cop City substantially, and such clarity is something that the movement to stop the facility’s construction has far too often lacked. But not always.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in this whole sordid tale is that, while mostly white “leftists” of whatever persuasion were offering no analysis of the problem, inventing strategies based on that missing analysis and deriving faulty tactics from that bad strategy, there was an organization in the city that not only could have but was doing all of this better: Community Movement Builders, one of the best grassroots organizations in the city.

CMB is based in a neighborhood known as Pittsburgh, where the APF is currently building three homes under the auspices of its “Secure Neighborhoods” program. The group is loosely modeled on the Black Panther Party’s community outreach programs. They teach adult literacy and political education classes, organize community gardens, host lectures on various topics and otherwise defend the community’s interests. As the struggle against Cop City has progressed, CMB’s involvement has increasingly become showing up to do media damage control for the latest mess their white “comrades” have made. They have done an admirable job of this, somehow managing to not directly criticize their “allies” in public. This says a lot, both about their organizational discipline and the quality of the help they’ve had in the fight.

CMB’s most public face is a movement lawyer and organizer named Kamau Franklin, who has lately been interviewed by a wide variety of liberal/progressive outlets like Democracy Now. He is also a key member of a grassroots platform called Black Power Media, frequently appearing on their morning news program, The Remix Morning Show. Featuring a group of contributors such as Jacqueline Luqman, Dr. Jared Ball, Kalonji Chonga, and Kim Brown, with music by The Ear Doctor, The Remix airs four days a week. It, and Black Power Media more broadly, are the best on-the-ground source for news about Cop City and the class war in Atlanta in general.

Much of this essay has its ultimate roots in regularly watching Black Power Media over the last year and a half. Had any of the variously problematic caucasians discussed above done the same, things might have gone differently. Almost every day since the Cop City project was first announced, someone on BPM has been talking sense about it. This analysis can have no better conclusion than simply quoting them and their analysis of the situation and what must happen from here if the fight against Cop City, or any similar struggle, is to have any chance of success.

Kamau Franklin, speaking to Robert Scheer:

It’s extremely important that people realize that these police foundations are taking off across the country, they’re not accountable to public officials because they are private nonprofits… [Cop City] is basically their facility that they’re renting from the city of Atlanta for $10 a year…for the next 20 or 30 years. So this is completely not going to be scrutinized by the public or answerable through CC hearings. They will train as they see fit, as an agency set up to promote policing…I’m not sure who elected or decided that the APF should play a prominent role in “crime fighting” and or “training” of the police. They’re not elected to do so.

Jacqueline Luqman, Remix Morning Show, the day after the murder in the forest:

I want people to understand that the right wing, the system, the corporatists, the capitalists in this country, they are very patient. They play the long game and they recognize the difference between mobilization and organization. They understood, I think, that the uprisings in 2020 was great mobilization, it was a wonderful, global mobilization. But most of those people did not connect to actual radical anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, socialist organizations to organize for actually changing this system. And they knew that a lot of people, yeah people were responding to the horrible thing, the public lynching of George Floyd, and they were angry in the moment, but most of those people did not want to commit to actually changing their own world view. Most of those people, like I said, great mobilization, but a lot of those people thought well we’re going to change…the police without addressing the need to change this whole system. And that is, I think, the very foundational difference…between mobilization and organization. What should have happened, during that uprising, is that radical organizations should have seen a crazy influx of people saying OK I get it, this capitalist system is the problem, or help me understand how this is a bigger problem than just the police, it’s about an entire system, teach me, let me learn all these things. But can we be real? People in this country don’t want to, largely, change a system that has benefitted them, most of them materially, if they’re not working class and poor, really. And working class and poor people are kept so tired and worn out just trying to survive that the idea of organizing and committing yourself to this other thing is overwhelming for a lot of people. So the system was like: We’ll wait. And we’ll give this nice, a lot of white folks, a little taste of what we’ve been giving the Negroes and the Indigenous for all this time and then they’ll go home. The politicians will make some promises. And then they will think they have done something, when in fact the system just kind of hibernated for a little while during those uprisings, to a certain degree, and they waited til those well-meaning, mostly white folks went back to their regular lives where they don’t have to deal with this every day. Where they’re not interested in overturning capitalism. Where they see no problem with U.S. imperialism and they don’t want to know the connections between domestic racist police terrorism and U.S. militarism abroad, particularly focused and targeted at Africans and the global south. I really want people to understand how absolutely critical and important it is to be in organizations. This is not like a part time gig. It’s really not. Because 24/7 365 days a year our enemy is organizing. They are.

Ajamu Baraka, of Black Alliance for Peace, on the Remix Morning Show: 

This fantasy that Europeans think that they’re gonna be the leaders of some kind of process, of some kind of radical, revolutionary process in the U.S., is absurd. And basically, if it ain’t us leading this thing, it ain’t going nowhere…The white left has got to understand: you aren’t going to be at the center of this. Not anymore.

Author’s note: In the time between the writing and publication of this piece, Stop Cop City activists revealed plans for a music festival in the South River Forest, which is still under construction and heavy police surveillance. Additionally, activists on social media are promoting a public calendar for a “week of action” to stop Cop City that anyone can access and edit. Meanwhile, the Black Power Media youtube page was temporarily suspended this week after reactionary elements of the white left brigaded and harassed one of the contributors quoted above, Jacqueline Luqman, following her criticism of an anti-war rally organized by members of a far-right Libertarian Party caucus.