#StopCopCity Movement Responds to South River Forest Task Force Recommendations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 2, 2023

#StopCopCity Movement Responds to South River Forest Task Force Recommendations

ATLANTA, GA — Today, a task force commissioned by Andre Dickens presented its final project recommendations. As members of the Atlanta community opposed to Cop City, we feel compelled to respond:

Many of the project recommendations stressed the importance of community input and involvement while ignoring the fact that the City of Atlanta recently received a over 15 hours in public comment in opposition to the Cop City project by Atlanta residents. Additionally, the City is currently combatting a grassroots effort to put the question of the Atlanta Police Foundation’s lease for Cop City on the ballot. The city cannot claim to value community input when it refuses to consider the growing number of voices from those opposed to the project itself. Community cannot be formed through coercion.

“When one of the main recommendations from the Task Force is to ‘create harmony with nature in all physical developments/buildings’ we know it’s all a bunch of hot air,” said labor organizer Mariah Parker

Other recommendations include a wide variety of community and ecological investment. Too often such public goods are needlessly tied to carceral systems, and these recommendations are no exception. Our communities deserve spaces to gather, access to community gardens, safe housing, and education regardless of the current goals of the City administration. We believe that community investment should never be contingent upon the construction of what would be the country’s largest police training facility in the middle of urban Atlanta, or whatever project the city wants built at that time.

We are painfully aware of the city’s tendency to overpromise and undeliver. For example, the city’s recently-formed Office of Violence Reduction has not had a director for months and has failed to launch its first initiative to reduce gun-related community violence. Instead, money from this program has been siphoned away to hire more police officers and install more surveillance infrastructure in the city. Another task force had previously recommended the full closure of the Atlanta City Detention Center. Shortly thereafter, Andre Dickens expanded the use of the jail by leasing beds to Fulton County. 19-year old Noni Battiste-Kosoko recently died after being transferred to the Fulton County Jail for a misdemeanor, despite being part of a protected class. While the task force recommending the closure was temporarily embraced by Dickens, he walked back on his promise as he has with many others. We expect the same of these task force recommendations, particularly when many of their conclusions is to now create another task force.

Andre Dickens claims he accepts all the proposals from the task force, but their implementation will requires significant additional financial resources and commitment to actualize. We fully expect many of these initiatives to whither and disappear in future years, when the Cop City project is no longer the focus of the administration. We encourage a deeper analysis of the recommendations that loosely call for broad community input programs as these are often dominated by homeowners’ associations who often have different interests from local residents. Community programs rather than open forums also allow the city to select which members it wants to truly listen to, often those with preexisting connections with city officials and their corporate backers.

We also must point out that many of the various sub-committees admitted to not having adequate access to relevant information to make their decisions, including the training curriculum sub-committee not having knowledge of what programs are currently being implemented. The historical preservation sub-committee admitted that their understanding of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm’s history is partly incorrect. The Atlanta Community Press Collective has provided a comprehensive history of the site after extensive research which does not appear to have been consulted by the sub-committee.

Finally, the credibility of the taskforce’s recommendations are further undermined by members’ pre-existing ties to the Dickens administration, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and other institutions with a financial and political stake in the Cop City project. It’s worth noting that Blake Fortune II, a member of the historical remembrance sub-committee, has publicly used racial and homophobic slurs on Twitter over a period of 10 years. Despite public outcry, the city administration never took action to remove him from the committee.

Ultimately, the movement to Stop Cop City as well as the greater Atlanta community continues to reject the Cop City project. We demand investment in the social determinants of societal health—housing, healthcare, education, healthy food systems, recreation—that foster a new level of stability and safety that policing will never provide.

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