Born and raised Vermonter, now living in Alabama, about an hour away from Atlanta.

Thank you for supporting us and adding your voices to the opposition of ruining communities and militarizing police. I can’t tell you what it means to us.

Please care about us.

I’m out of the loop. What is the beef here?

There is a lot wrong with cop city but these clown protestors can suck an egg as well. I read the article then looked for facts. Most contradict the claims laid out. There is no mass displacement no ones homes are being taking etc. etc.. Plenty to be pissed about but stick to facts and no all 380 acres wont be developed either. And close womens prisions?? What?? Guess what Jayna some of you women are foul murderous creatures that belong behind bars. Sorry but your vagina does not equal a get out of jail free card. And you expect people to take any of this seriously? And I shouldn't say woke about this either right??

They want to demo an old growth forest to build a fake city to train cops in combat simulation. There's been a bunch of protests and the police have been recorded saying they want to murder protesters and there has been one execution style murder of a protester by police already

Do you have any not-sensationalized articles about what this facility is intended to do? I can’t read most local news sites from Europe

I just escaped Atlanta to move to Vermont for many, many reasons, but the lawlessness of the law was high up on the list. So many POC friends and coworkers with horror stories - can't carry a purse into stores, don't wear thick jackets, you have to buy something or you're accused of shoplifting and can be at risk for being frisked.

It was both cathartic and infuriating for my white-ass brother, who always love to be a centrist, got pulled over driving from CA to GA with his dog for our fathers surgery. Cop saw CA plates and dollars in his eyes, unlawfully put my brother in the backseat with no probable cause, and searched the car over while his anxiety-ridden dog lost it without his favorite person. All for that sweet civil forfeiture.

Atlanta cops fucking suck - reading the police blotter in VT almost makes me want to cry.

here's a big reading list - feel free to pick something off it that seems reasonable. & here's a copy of the article i shared that should work in europe

Have you seen the videos or maybe played a video game where they make a fake building with cut outs of criminals and run through them shooting the bad guy cutouts and not the good guy cutouts? It's that but on a much larger scale

This has the same flavour as some of the hysteria over the Dakota Access Pipeline

For what agencies?

I would wager a lot that the forest is not “old growth” as claimed above

EDIT: I looked on a map, and there's no way in hell that it is

Police. (As in "fuck the")

Why?

I mean police have already murdered an un-armed protester....

Look at the bigger picture

See, this is the problem, people know that they don’t like the police but they don’t know enough about how policing works to fix it. You can’t tell one police agency from another

Look at the actual picture that is happening.

I did. It’s DAPL all over again

The bigger picture being what?

Is it the assumption that people can't be upset about the demolition of a forest to build a fake city to train police in military tactics? Or more so that you feel as though their outrage is hyperbolic because they're reading into something here that you would assert isn't actually the reality of the situation? I'm not trying to put words in your mouth friend, I'm honestly curious.

If I'm on the mark, I suppose then friend, when you ask about the bigger picture, a lot of the people might see that 'bigger picture' as being the militarization of the police, which they take issue with.

Is this project the smartest use of this land? Probably not.

Is it designed to train police in “military tactics”? I’m not sure, I haven’t found any sources yet that confirm that.

Do most people who talk about the “militarization of police” have very little knowledge of the subject? Definitely.

It sounds a lot like DAPL in that it has become a lightning rod for people’s justified-but-ill-informed outrage and thus the breathlessly hyperbolic claims start to fly.

i'm guessing the implication here is that you have a lot of knowledge about “militarization of police”—would you mind sharing how?

As someone from Atlanta, this seems to be opposed by everyone except people actually from Atlanta. Please mind your own business.

Wtf are you talking about lmao

Very telling that you don't think the problem is the police getting away with rape, murder, torture, extortion, intimidation, and other breeches of the public trust. Millions of dollars of public money to raze an irreplaceable natural wonder and train an army of psychopath thugs. Who cares what number of alphabet soup agencies would use this facility? That's an unimportant nit picking detail your using to try to derail the actual conversation here.

I think I understand why people have the assumption then that this is an escalation of police force and presence. I get the brushback you're giving, but it really doesn't seem hyperbolic, honestly.

If I was personally trying to create some kind of 'ah, but there's more to it' argument, I would point to the fact that they've already stated the 'city' will be used to train emergency services like the fire department in navigating and quickly putting out fires in an urban environment, as well as EMT services with things such as water rescue.

Having said THAT, none of this discounts the very real argument of cutting down 85 acres of forest in Atlanta to accommodate the project, as well as that none of what I just said directly addresses the fear that this space would also be used to train police in various tactics that many would suggest treat civilians as potential threats at best and operators at worst. There's plenty of argument there as well given Atlanta PD's rather varied history with dealing with the local population.

Of the two, I guess I'd probably see the argument of how that 90 million dollars could be better spent directly on training instead of a cool new facility, that arguably sure, has a lot of bells and whistles to it. But I have a feeling this isn't where our disagreement lies. To each his own.

Really? You don’t think, that I think, that that is a problem? It’s not that I don’t think it is a problem. It’s that you all have no fucking clue what to do about it. Your comment is exactly the kind of DAPL-esque hyperbole I’m talking about.

Because I’ve been around the world of public safety and I have taken the time to understand the history and structure of American policing and the myriad agencies involved, and I have also studied how it works in the rest of the world. Your average ACAB Redditor has not.

>Atlanta’s city council solicited public comment on the facility in September of [2021], 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.)

just to be clear, are you saying the people being discussed here don't exist, or aren't from atlanta?

edit: oh, i see.

"been around" meaning?

???

You know that exact pipeline had a massive leak exactly like they said it would? Not exactly any hyperbole in either of these situations

Fake news. It’s a closed prison site

You’re like incredibly out of touch on both the DXL and Cop City. The pipeline has already spilled and is fueling climate change, and cop city is in part a reaction to 2020 US protests against the lack of culpability cops have in the US. Maybe be less of a fascist?

When in doubt, just call your interlocutor a fascist. Works every time, or at least that's what people like you think

The cops in the US follow fascist tendencies. So do oil companies (and most large companies causing harm). It’s well documented. Idk what dialogue you’re getting at, or really what your point is with it being like DXL, which was exploitation of locals (with DXL indigenous people) for something that is incredibly unpopular and detrimental. Sympathizers for the DXL and Cop City need to take an inward look. Especially with how politics will be shaped due to climate change.

You mistake me if you think I am a "sympathizer" of DAPL or this so-called "Cop City." But I don't have any respect for the wild-eyed hyperbole of people like you either. Come up with some real solutions and then you can graduate from sitting at the kids' table.

Then enlighten me how this is like the pipeline. Because as someone who protested against both of and joined the BLM movement during the pandemic, this has a very different vibe with different context

Can't argue with these morons. I mean abolish womens prisons what planet are you even on??

Our prison population is indeed too damn high and I would like to see it reduced. One imagines that there are few women in prison who urgently need to be there

I wish people understood whare they were protesting. This was a proposal by a black city council woman to create a training center and improve the quality of Atlanta policing. Strange optics to have a bunch of white people from outside the community tell black people of Atlanta what they should be doing

That is not true. That protestor was killed after firing on the police

My brother in christ the 5 police officers who beat to death Tyre Nichols were black. The problem is the police regardless of who is in it.

More importantly from the article is the displacement of families already settled. Unsure where people are talking about "old growth forest" as there is literally none in the US.

> more importantly, Chambers said the 380-acre facility would dislocate members of the city’s Black and Hispanic communities.

The time and money would be better spent on affordable housing and community projects than a 100,000,000$+ larping grounds for police.

that's not true

Fair point. I just worry that the rhetoric around this doesn't fit the reality, and there is often a pattern of outside activists imposing their views on the local community. But framing it in terms of priorities is valid

It absolutely is.

So you complain about police being undertrained and want standards to be raised, yet you actively oppose a training area that will increase the quality of training in urban areas.

You can’t abolish police, so what do you want to happen?

Some violent protestor pulled a gun on police fired several rounds and subsequently found out that there are consequences.

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👍

It’s all sensationalized hyper-partisan garbage. But unfortunately Redditors tend to love ingesting this sort of crap. So many people have absolutely no sense of historical or global perspective.

What a bunch of misinformed idiots….

Big guy is a pig or a pig lover so everybody else's opinion is moot

Is 70% of speakers during a single public comment session commensurate with the population? Or highly motivated people and activist types?

All five of them that showed up? This was comical, and the speaker was not great.

>So you complain about police being undertrained

i do? where?

the actual proposal comes from the atlanta police foundation—the city government, including the mayor, are just necessary to give it legitimacy. (for example, by having people think it was the mayor's idea in the first place!)

good question! i don't know. i highly doubt that most of those commenters weren't from atlanta, though—& i imagine the same is true of the other 30%.

So corporate interests will win at the expense of the environment and people? Just like DAPL?

This guy licks boots

You say that like it’s a bad thing

Fuck cops

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"Police need better training"
"Okay, we'll build a whole facility to better train them"

"How dare you, let's protest"

Dudes definitely a cop. And a bad cop if he’s this much in denial about how shitty cops are

Are highly motivated people and activists not part of the population? Do they not get to have an opinion?

The point is if it's commensurate with the population. It isn't.

Do you have a reliable study that says that? Or are you just assuming that the population is siding with you?

Do I have a study to show that the few people that show up to a public comment event do not represent the rest of the population? No.

Cool. So you’re just talking out your ass then? Glad you’re admitting it

Edit: Bro is such a loser he had the suicide watch message sent me. He’s also transphobic and an anti-vaxer. So slay dude

Everybody here seems to have been demanding better training for police and now are condemning a new police training facility. Morons.

Do you perchance have a study for that? Or just talking out of your ass?

I can understand opposing this but fighting by being savages is gross. I truly hope its just a protest and doesn't become another riot.

"We want to protect the forest!" But set heavy machinery on fire which is going to pour toxins into the air? Have all the gas, oil, antifreeze pour out into the earth? Spread garbage and trash all over which will go into the forest? Attack innocents who havent done anything? Yeah I'm all set joining THAT kind of protest.

Lies there is no such forest. Execution style? They were shooting at cops moron. Look at the map and take a step back and stop falling for propaganda. They even matched the bullet to he/she/xir's fucking handgun give it up.

https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/ga-original-forest-of-atlanta-dekalb-county

Any chance you have the full text of this article? I don't have a subscription.

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Who gives a rats ass if the mayor is black? PersonalIy, I don't see color.

If you think a person's skin color determines the legitimacy of their opinions, you're just as kooky as the radical liberals pushing "standpoint epistemology" and the "progressive stack." I suppose people like you were the target audience when they decided to call the place "The Atlanta Instutute for Social Justice"

If you want to know who supports this social justice institute, follow the money. The list of funders is easily accessible. Norfolk Southern has donated a lot more cash towards this project than your token negro politician.

ah yes the old tried n true 'outside agitators' lie lol
as old as the civil rights era with the freedom rides
nah.

We have this weird contingent of professional protesters who have a lot of time during the work day. Maybe their trust fund is dependent on them being there.

Then do not ever call them when someone steals your shit or tries to violently assault you

They wouldn’t help anyways

Are you living in a safe room? Or are you living in a gated community?

oh i got one of those too, now i have a better guess why!