Despite popular opposition from city residents, the Atlanta city administration led by mayor Andre Dickens, a Democrat, is pushing ahead with formally opening a massive 85-acre militarized police training center this spring. The facility has been built at a cost of over $115 million in the ecologically crucial South River Forest.

To push ahead with the project, appropriately dubbed “Cop City” by its opponents, the Dickens administration, working in close consort with the utterly reactionary Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp, has constantly unleashed police violence against protesters. The city’s Democrats have formed an alliance with their state Republican colleagues over the past three years to force through the project with at least $67 million of city funds allocated to construct this facility.

So determined have been the Dickens and the Kemp administrations to suppress any opposition to Cop City, that they have given orders to suppress any form of opposition, including from peaceful demonstrators exercising their constitutional right to protest against the further militarization of police and the destruction of the environment.

It was within this wanton atmosphere in January 2023 that Georgia State Patrol troopers, who are well-known for their propensity for violence, killed 26-year-old protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán in a hail of 57 bullets. He had peacefully encamped in the forest where the police training center was yet to be built.

The month of March marks the second anniversary of the indiscriminate mass arrest of 35 music festival attendees, which took place as part of a protest. The concert was held about a mile away from the police training center construction site.

About an hour earlier, at around 5:30 p.m. that day, on March 5, 2023, several police and construction vehicles were set ablaze at the construction site. Several masked individuals clashed with the police at the site. It is not out of the question, and indeed very likely, that the masked group were agents provocateurs working with the police.  

Out of the 35 who were arrested, whose only crime was to attend the music festival as a part of a week-long protest against Cop City, 23 were absurdly charged with “domestic terrorism” and were thrown in prison for months without bail. This was in addition to three others who were arrested on the same day the police murdered Terán. 

The 23 arrestees were charged under the state’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations) statute, which is ostensibly aimed at organized crime syndicates such as the mafia. Subsequently, the city and the state rounded up several dozen protesters, some of them for distributing leaflets, and charged them under the same RICO act.

This legal intimidation and suppression of basic democratic rights has been spearheaded by the notorious right-wing Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr. In the indictment which Carr released with great fanfare during a press conference in September 2023, the overwhelming majority of the defendants have not been accused of committing violent acts but instead are accused of “trespassing,” “camping,” “sitting in the trees in the forest” and distributing flyers.

So blatantly outrageous are these draconian charges, carrying up to 35 years in prison, that one of the activists, Jamie Marsicano, filed a lawsuit this month in federal court accusing the Atlanta police of illegally targeting “Stop Cop City” protesters for years. 

Marsicano was arrested at the music festival in March 2023 and slapped with RICO charges. He was a third-year law student studying at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and was barred from entering the campus by the school chancellor. To justify this draconian move, the chancellor cited the bogus “terrorism” charges against Marsicano by the Atlanta authorities.

Despite experiencing extraordinary hardship, Marsicano completed his law degree remotely and graduated from UNC Law School in 2024. The lawsuit notes that Marsicano has had difficulty finding a job and securing housing because of the fraudulent charges against him.

The lawsuit also accuses the Atlanta authorities of treating any critic of the police training center as a criminal. It cites in support that the Atlanta city authorities have repeatedly made arrests without cause, depriving protesters of their First Amendment rights and their civil rights protections against false arrest and malicious prosecution.

Marsicano’s attorneys emphasized that he was not involved in attacking the construction site which was the pretext used by the police to indiscriminately arrest the 35 music festival attendees. The attorneys stated that Marsicano never left the festival grounds until he was arrested while walking back to his vehicle.

According to the lawsuit, Marsicano was caught up in an “indiscriminate mass arrest of legitimate festival attendees” that was part of a pattern targeting the “Stop Cop City” movement, spearheaded by Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum.

Atlanta city authorities have consistently used their power to muzzle any form of dissent, violating free speech rights that are guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

For example, as part of the action against Cop City, opponents demanded that city residents be asked in a referendum if they approve of the police training center. They collected more than 116,000 signatures in 2023 to put this issue to a vote. The city authorities refused to count and validate the signatures and it ended up in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals where it has remained in a legal limbo.

On February 24, Atlanta city attorneys urged the Circuit Court to throw out the referendum altogether. They arrogantly declared that “any referendum on the ground lease ordinance will not remove the Center from the site or prevent its use by the city for these purposes.” They stated that the construction of the militarized police training center is an accomplished fact and “any outcome of such a referendum would be merely academic at this point—the Center has been built and will not be torn down.”

The city has been working in “public private partnership” with the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the largest of the 150 such foundations raising funds for police forces across the country. 

The APF is to contribute $59 million from fundraising and donations from corporations for whose benefit the militarized police center is being built. The APF, whose governing board and trustees are all corporate executives, collected funds from sponsors such as Coca Cola, Norfolk Southern, Home Depot, Delta Airlines and UPS, who are all big supporters of the “law and order” campaign.

The city recently revealed that the cost of construction has now risen to $115 million, a 21 percent cost overrun. It is not clear as to who is footing the $25 million in additional funds.

Despite construction on the police training center being complete, the authorities continue their repressive measures. In February of this year, observation cameras were mounted on utility poles located outside the homes of several activists who organized protests against Cop City. It is not clear who placed the cameras and under what authority, since they are completely unmarked. 

Three of the cameras are pointed toward the homes of activists raided in February of 2024 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)—a heavily armed and notorious federal armed force—and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This terrifying pre-dawn raid was purportedly to collect evidence possibly related to the burning of several Atlanta police motorcycles in 2023.

All of these developments demonstrate that the authorities—Democrat and Republican—will go to any lengths to steamroll any and all opposition to the Cop City project. Under conditions where capitalism is impoverishing the majority of workers and youth, and the ruling class is abandoning any pretense of upholding democratic rights, violent repression becomes the sole “solution” available to the ruling class.