They call it “the Foundation.” It is the evil heart of a reactionary network that stretches across the U.S. Empire. Its home is in Atlanta, Georgia. 

The city of Atlanta has been called a “Black mecca.” It’s the country’s 4th-largest Black-majority city and a center of Black wealth, political and social power, education, and culture. It has been called “the capital of the New South” and the “capital city of Black America.” It has one of the highest LGBT populations per capita, behind only San Francisco and Seattle; it’s the second-fastest growing city in the U.S. Empire. The wealth and size of the Black propertied classes of the city — its petit-bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, landlord, and political classes — are exceeded only by New York City and Washington, D.C. Yet, between 2000 and 2020, the city has seen wave after wave of white gentrifiers pour into the city. According to analysis performed by RentCafé, the average rent in Atlanta increased 65% between 2010 and 2020, from $895 to $1,474 per month. Median home prices in and around the city have increased by 98%, from $126,830 to $251,135 in that same period.

At the same time, Atlanta has seen the creation of the Foundation. But what is this mysterious reactionary Foundation? What do these demographic changes have to do with it? In order to answer that question, we have to examine it closely. More properly the “Atlanta Police Foundation,” the APF is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit, incorporated in 2003. On June 12, 2020, Atlanta police murdered Rayshard Brooks for sleeping in his car at a Wendy’s drive through. On June 17, 2020, the Atlanta Police Department went on strike to protest the charges that were filed against the officers that performed the murder. On June 18, 2020 the Atlanta Police Foundation paid out each Atlanta police officer a special $500 bonus. The municipal government of Atlanta relies on the Foundation and its increasing ratchet of police militarization. It needs the Foundation to control the people.

But it’s not just Atlanta. The Foundation is far from the only police foundation in the U.S. Empire, and the money trail leading to the Atlanta Police Department doesn’t start with the Foundation itself. No, the money comes from a long list of corporations and firms. The APF, for instance, receives funding from JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, WH Capital (the Waffle House), Axon Enterprises (the company that manufactures police body cameras and Tasers), the Cathy Family (who own Chik-fil-A and lobby against reproductive and LGBT rights), Delta Air, UPS, Home Depot, Inspire Brands (which owns Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Baskin Robbins), and other businesses. Foundations across the U.S. Empire have their own lists of capitalist backers, and the lists tend to overlap from one local department to the next.

Why do capitalists fund police foundations and police unions? As an investment. The police are the main domestic arm of the state’s repressive forces, whereas the military is the international arm, and the state that governs the U.S. Empire is a dictatorship of the capitalists and the other propertied classes. Ultimately, the American police serve the class of monopoly capitalists, represented by the big corporations. These corporations rely on the police to enact daily repressive violence and terror  against the vast majority of the population of the U.S. Empire: the colonized and working masses. These “unruly” masses must be continuously brutalized, beaten down, and reminded of who this country — this empire — really belongs to: the capitalists. Every time a politician runs on a platform of defunding, demilitarizing, or funding alternatives to the police, the local police foundation snaps into action and, through these foundations, the business community funnels money and  pledges more support and equipment to fund the murderous police.

The first of these organizations, these police foundations, was the New York City Police Foundation, which dates back to the 1971 police strike and city bankruptcy crisis. The foundation was created by the “Association for a Better New York,” a voluntary business association which was funded by real estate developers and local business owners. The logic is the same in Atlanta as it was in 1970s New York City: private business derives a particular benefit from the police. This is self-evident, if we really stop to think. Private businesses are property-hoarders, and the only way to protect this unjust distribution of property is with armed battalions to repel the needy by force. Here in the U.S. Empire, police have two basic jobs: the defense of corporate private property and the suppression of national self-determination in the Empire’s internal colonies. Atlanta, of course, the “capital of the New South” stands at the heart of the Black Belt, a crescent-shaped region of the U.S. South where the wealthiest slave plantations were located and where the majority of Black persons in the U.S. Empire today still live. Police foundations are the very incarnation of neoliberalism. Where the police cannot be privatized directly, private corporations can still fund and influence them, direct and guide them, and they can be run as companies, making money from the taxes of the masses by selling their “expertise” to municipalities. Today, the NYC Police Foundation gives millions of dollars in private donations to the NYPD each year which are not disclosed.

In 2019, the NYC foundation made $11,885,187 USD. The APF made $10,848,654 USD. The St. Louis foundation made $10,378,796 USD. On and on it goes. Of all the police foundations, the APF is one of the largest and most well-funded. These foundations are an engine of white terror — they are the direct expression of capitalist control over the oppressed nations within the U.S. Empire. They are factories that produce brutality and fear, the very machinery of the state outsourced, by 1970s neoliberal policy, to private corporations. Despite their tax-exempt status, these “foundations” still turn a profit and pay their executives and employees incredible salaries to teach the police how to better beat down the poor. Some employees of the APF, for instance, make nearly half a million dollars every year.Now, as the demographics of Atlanta change and the capitalist rulers of the region are united in a concerted effort to push out Black families, the APF wants to build the mother of all training centers: a 381 acre, $90+ million USD facility complete with fake streets to patrol. This is Cop City, in the words of Kwame Olufemi of the Community Movement Builders, a

war base where police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill Black people and control our bodies and movements. The facility includes shooting ranges, plans for bomb testing and will practice tear gas deployment. They are 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 continue to murder our people.

They make their money by the suppression of Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and Chicanx liberty, and by hawking their ludicrous wares to city governments. Cop City promises to be their crowning achievement.

The New White Guard

Like all police departments, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has an evil history. In 2006, APD officers killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson while trying to serve a no-knock warrant. Three officers entered her home, cutting off the bars on the door and breaking the door itself down. Although the officers claim that Kathryn fired at them, evidence suggests she may have fired a single shot over the heads of the officers. They fired 39 shots and hit her with five or six. They then planted marijuana in her house to cover themselves, but it was later discovered that not only had they lied about this, but that they had entirely fabricated the reports they submitted to a judge to get the no-knock warrant: they made up a story about buying cocaine at Kathryn’s house.

On September 10, 2009, APD raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar, brutalized its employees and patrons, and arrested eight of the bar’s employees. Seven of the eight had their charges dropped or were found not guilty at trial. The eighth failed to appear to court and was arrested by bench warrant. Those arrested — and there were 62 patrons in addition to the employees — were subject not only to beatings, but also to vicious anti-gay slurs. In 2011, sixteen of the police officers involved in the raid were fired for lying, fabricating evidence, and later destroying evidence that was pertinent to lawsuits against the city.

The city of Atlanta pays the APF for access to their Security Communication Network that, like something from a sci-fi dystopia, they call ComNet. This network is a radio link between private security firms (which have to pay to subscribe), the city’s 9-1-1 service, police dispatches, and the APD. 

In the late 2010s, the APF launched “Operation Shield.” This ominously named plan saw the installation, by the conclusion of 2017, of 3,000 surveillance cameras throughout the city. As part of the plan of Operation Shield, the APF also launched software that allows some 7,000 cameras owned by individuals and businesses to connect to the Shield network and integrate the ComNet system. Yes, private homes can link their Amazon Ring cameras into the Shield network — but that should come as no surprise, considering Amazon itself is one of the institutional investors in the APF. In total, then, this Operation Shield has transformed Atlanta into the most heavily surveilled city in the U.S. Empire, and most likely the world. The “public-private” snitch network not only ensures that businesses can call on APD jackboots whenever they need to, identify anyone in the city at a moment’s notice using their cameras, or summon both rent-a-cops and Atlanta’s own White Guard to their premises; it also transforms every home that signs up into a little Hitler-Jugend, ready to turn over friends, neighbors, and community members to the police for interrogation, prosecution, and incarceration.

The main product of the APD is White Terror. In revolutionary terms, white is the color of reaction and reactionaries. It was the color of the Bourbon kings in France and was taken up by monarchists across Europe. In the U.S. Empire, white is the color of the reactionary movement by a kind of metaphorical coincidence: here, the White Terror doesn’t represent the terror of monarchs and their nobility revenging themselves on the working people. We’ve never had formal nobility. Here, the White Terror is the terror of the settler-garrisons, the constant fear the ruling classes want to exert on the oppressed nations that they might be surveilled, arrested, questioned, jailed, or murdered at any moment. The police are the agents of the White Terror. It is what they’re paid to make, more so even than the arrests and “crime-stopping” power of prosecution, they exist to terrify and subdue. They are an alien, occupying army, encamped in the heart of every community.

The Atlanta Police Department is forced to spend roughly $950,000 a year on average to settle lawsuits brought by the communities in which it operates. Between 2018 and 2020, APD shot 14 people to death, all Black. This is White Terror. The old forms of punishment — public flogging and even execution, bodies hanging on gibbets or from the city walls — have given way to new ones. Rather than watch the punishment be inscribed on the bodies of others, we are forced to internalize the potential, to grow up under terror. No more does the ruling class ask us to go out and watch an outlaw or a rebel be hanged. Now, we are reminded that every house has a camera. The force of the regime has moved from the public square to lodge firmly in our hearts and minds. Institutionalized post-traumatic stress disorder is the tactic of the day.

If the police department of Atlanta serves as the White Guard of the New South, the APF is its captain and leader. New “policing initiatives” come from the APF. The city has tasked the APF with developing its plans for the police department — which now includes expanding the police force by at least 750 people, increasing their presence everywhere in the city, increasing arrests, and increasing convictions. The APF is the institutional memory of the Atlanta police; even when circumstances change, police chiefs retire or are fired, scandal rocks individual politicians, the APF sits behind everything, guiding the city to spend more money on the militarized police, granting payouts to killer cops, and buying police departments military-grade equipment. In this way, the big businesses can funnel money into state repression while presenting superficially clean hands. There are no direct links between Amazon and the Atlanta Police Department. No one can say with legal certainty that Amazon put Operation Shield into place, or that Amazon is putting advanced “crowd control” machinery, guns, drones, bombs, or armored cars into the hands of police. Moral certainty is another question. Amazon has done, is doing, and continues to do these things. So do all those businesses funding the police foundations. This is the fascist integration of the profit motive directly with the state’s apparatus of repression.

In September of 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to bulldoze 85 acres of woods in the South River Forest and commission the construction of the $90 million USD training camp that’s now known as “Cop City.” Just east of the land that’s been designated for the killer cops, the city gave permission to another developer to destroy a further 40 acres of forest to build a soundstage for Atlanta’s growing film industry. The two projects are linked by the bonds of gentrification and capital: as Atlanta’s white petit-bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie grows, it needs more and more protection from the impoverished working people who actually make the commodities it consumes and consume the commodities it makes.

In 2017, the same year the APF created the Shield network, it announced a plan to build a megachurch of white violence. In the words of the APF, the harmless-sounding Atlanta Public Safety Training Center will “improve morale, retention, recruitment and training for APD…, facilitate collaboration and joint training between Atlanta’s police… and their local, state, and federal partner agencies.” Of course, they harp about “community engagement,” and mention over and over again that Cop City will also train firefighters. In an official document, the Foundation said “APD and AFR training facilities have been starved for resources for 30-plus years,” which is a patent lie. The most telling admission, however, was that Cop City “was never envisioned as a money-making venture.” The Foundation is doing this purely out of the kindness of their hearts! Oh, and also because the corporations that fund it want more effective police to combat the working classes. What exactly is in this proposed 85-acre monument to police overreach and violence? It will have a shooting range, of course, to train the police in the use of their sidearms, which they use to shoot young Black men, often in the back. The shooting range will also presumably train the APD in more advanced crime-stopping techniques, such as precision riflery. There’s a leadership center, where the police can give lectures like those described in the Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop — that is, lectures “taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else.” These confessions are worth quoting at length:

The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

…[N]early everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS morality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

….Once police training has — through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle — promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you.

….One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs.” Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

….Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were the result of their inherent criminality. ….To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.”

Above and beyond these, the real piece de resistance is the simulation city the Foundation calls its “Mock Village.” This is a four-block square containing a convenience store, a hotel, a nightclub, houses, residential apartment buildings (low and high-rise), and a warehouse. This is the plan for training a domestic occupation force. In the early 2010s, U.S. army intelligence built fake “Middle Eastern” villages to train its imperialist occupation forces. One of those training facilities also cost $90 million USD (in 2014 dollars). The words of the imperialists’ Asymmetric Warfare Group in 2014 are prophetic here: “In the emerging world of 21st century conflict, the battlefield is no longer the countryside but the city…. In full, the urban complex of the AWTC [Asymmetric Warfare Training Center] include [sic] stores, a gas station, school, soccer field, church, mosque tunnels, subway platform and a bridge…. The subway trains look exactly like that of the DC Metro’s, down to the logo.”

It’s clear that the Foundation planned Cop City with the June Uprisings of 2020 in mind. Although they first pitched their cathedral of violence in 2017, the design for Cop City wasn’t presented before the city until 2021. It is, in essence, a real life Call of Duty: a training simulator designed to look like the U.S. Empire’s newest war — the war at home, against its own working class.

The Direct Opposition: Six Activists Charged with Domestic Terror

Standing opposite the new campus of state terror are a mixed group of environmentalists, anarchists, and scientific socialists of all tendencies that go by the collective name Defend the Atlanta Forest (DAF). While the driving impetus appears to have been primarily environmental, the movement has become multivalent and much focus has been given to the construction of the new state terror complex as an evil in itself, above and beyond the clearing of forestland. They have established an encampment, Vengeance Village, in the forestland which is supplied by a network of supporters throughout the country. They host teach-ins and community events during the day and at night they have cultural performances that feature bands and local DJs.

The real work of the DAF, however, is violent confrontation with the developers and the state. Direct action — destroying excavators, chaining activists to trees, building barricades and armored treehouses — has been the word of the day. Most recently, five of the Forest Defenders were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism: Francis Carroll of Maine (22 years old), Nicholas Olson of Nebraska (25 years old), Serena Hertel of California (25 years old), Leonardo Voiselle of Macon (20 years old), Arieon Robinson of Wisconsin (22 years old), and Ariel Ebaugh of Stockbridge (22 years old) have been called the Atlanta Six by activist media and their unjust imprisonment may lead to becoming the all-empire faces of the movement. Their arrests appear to stem from bombarding police cars with rocks as the Atlanta cops and Georgia Bureau of Investigation (cops in fancier clothes) attempted to clear out Forest Defenders and the later discovery of prepared “incendiary devices” (read: gas bombs).

Under Georgia’s state law, anyone convicted of domestic terrorism is subject to 5-15 years in prison, no portion of which may be suspended, stayed, probated, deferred, or withheld. That makes the 5 year number a mandatory minimum jail term. It’s unlikely that the state will really proceed on these charges; it would do more harm than good to Cop City and its image among the community. One of the ways the state breaks up movements like this, however, is to threaten extreme legal response over a long period without actually needing to use it. That way, momentum is sapped, important members of the movement are taken out of the fight, and by the time the legal battle has concluded with a plea on a lesser charge or even outright dismissal or acquittal, the actual battle over the territory (in this case, the Atlanta forestlands) has been lost. The fight needs resources to carry on; the DAF is confronting the enemy state directly, head-on, and only with the support of an all-empire movement can it hope to overpower the State of Georgia, the City of Atlanta, and the titanic corporations behind the Foundation. The DAF solicits funds directly through the Forest Justice Defense Fund. More broadly, social justice and social revolutionary movements in Atlanta rely upon the legal assistance of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. If you cannot join the fight, consider making donations to stiffen the resistance to the Foundation and its citadel of White Terror — because if it isn’t stopped, it will become the center of a whole new network of police training and brutality throughout the U.S. Empire.