2022-05-18 02:38:50
“ I live in the Atlanta Forest & own a home in one of the neighborhoods that would be most impacted by Cop City. Today there was an interagency operation lead by Atlanta Police at the behest of Brasfield & Gorrie and Ryan Millsap of Blackhall Entertainment. The police raided a growing protest encampment in these woods, training SWAT rifles on environmental activists. This is an attempt to demoralize a vibrant and diverse movement lead by local community members against the replacement of the largest urban tree canopy in the U.S. with the largest police training compound in the United States.
The proposed site for Cop City is a historical site where human slavery and forced labor camp were used to work the land, following the forced removal of Muscogee people on the Trail of Tears. This land not only is the “lungs of Atlanta” due to being ecologically critical to the city’s survival, it’s a site of the scars of Atlanta’s past, with numerous unmarked graves. All of this police resource mobilization is to bulldoze it over and construct the $90 million Cop City not two years after George Floyd’s summary execution by Minneapolis police catalyzed a historic nationwide uprising of 20 million people against militarized police. They are not unaware of these history. At the last Community Stakeholder’s meeting, the APF suggested re-opening the forced labor camps as “gardens” on site and staffing them with children who are imprisoned at the adjacent Juvenile Jail, essentially re-vitalizing the Atlanta prison farm model.
Today, police attacked protestors in the forest because in the past year and especially in the past week, hundreds of community members and concerned people came to this camp and joined together to apply pressure against this project. The police will attempt to depict this movement as a small group of hardline activists, or “outside agitators.” We are not extremists. We are neighbors of the forest and residents of South Atlanta. Most importantly however this movement simply consists of intelligent people who know that the future of the world is on fire, and who are determined and willing to organize ourselves and act to defend what remains to sustain life in this city and life on this planet.
This is a site of migratory wading birds, a place where animals make their homes, where salamanders lay their eggs. This forest is defense against flooding of all nearby homes across historically Black neighborhoods in south Atlanta and southwest Dekalb. This forest if what prevents the urban heat island effect. This is why the movement has broad popular support from locals and people across the country and world alike. The city, like the world, is only getting hotter, rent is only getting more expensive, food and gas prices are only rising. The city has no answers for this except a more militarized police force. But floodwaters do not abide property or jurisdiction lines. The climate does not obey the police. You can’t prop up a free society with violence alone. That’s what they are attempting to do with the construction of Cop City. If we don’t want to be ruled over in this society by strongmen and bullies who meet behind closed doors and who deploy tasers and tear gas in order to enforce their control over our bodies, our homes, our livelihoods, our children and the earth, then we must resist this project & all others like it. We must resist the ongoing expansion of the police and their power. We must join together and fight for our home, this forest and the earth.
People worldwide support this movement. Everyone is welcome in this movement. For the last year, we have asked that you come to the Atlanta Forest. Even if you can’t come here, anyone can take action to pressure stakeholders, contractors and those with the power Stop Cop City. The fight to defend the forest is on many fronts.
Please donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.”
From the press conference today
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