Cop City or People's City? Atlanta at the Crossroads

This article from S.A. Reed originally appeared in Cosmonaut at https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/06/cop-city-or-peoples-city-atlanta-at-the-crossroads/

At around 8:00 in the morning on June 5th, the first wave of Stop Cop City demonstrators arrived at Atlanta City Hall for what will no doubt be remembered as one of the most significant flashpoints in the modern history of the abolitionist and environmental justice struggles. I arrived roughly two hours later and remained in the building with other demonstrators for nearly twenty hours until after the city council voted at close to 6:00 AM the following morning, marking the twenty-second consecutive hour of protests against Cop City. Though this spectacular demonstration of popular outrage failed to dissuade the city government from moving ahead with plans to fund the project, there is much we can learn from it as the movement moves forward to new and more intense stages.

The fight over Cop City started more than two years ago, when then-mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms—famous for her tearful pleas against the Black uprising that shook the city, as it did the rest of the country, in the summer of 2020—announced plans to build a major police training facility in April of 2021. That September, the city council approved a proposal to level a large swath of Weelaunee People’s Park in southwest Atlanta to build a model city, including a mock school, bar, streets, and other structures designed to simulate military-style raids on civilians and violent suppression of civil unrest. Resistance to these plans intensified over time, leading to protest encampments at the proposed site of construction. The Atlanta Police Department and Georgia state law enforcement have responded to these encampments with extreme brutality, infamously killing Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán by shooting them fifty-seven times while they sat cross-legged with their hands in the air, and later conducting a SWAT raid on a peaceful music festival with children in attendance. Dozens of participants in these encampments have been arrested on trumped-up charges of domestic terrorism since December of 2022, putting them at risk of decades of imprisonment. Just this month, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested three organizers from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund on fabricated money laundering and charity fraud charges in a blatant attempt to isolate current and future defendants by destroying their support network.

The demonstration at City Hall on June 5th-6th was the latest of three such mobilizations in the spring of this year, each centered around public comment sessions at city council meetings where a new round of funding for Cop City was up for approval, and each one overwhelmingly opposed to the new funding (unanimously, in the case of the meeting on May 15th). I participated in DSA-led canvassing in the weeks leading up to the June 5th meeting, where we knocked over two thousand doors in a Black working-class district represented by councilmember Jason Winston. The residents we encountered were almost exclusively against Cop City, and large majorities expressed a strong desire to see affordable housing, good public education, healthcare, and elder care funded instead. These neighborhoods suffer from social neglect and the imminent existential threat of gentrification. 

When protesters arrived at City Hall the morning of the 5th, the situation nearly took a turn for the worse straight away, when they found the entrance unexpectedly locked. One councilmember’s decision to unlock the doors and let the crowd in may have averted a riot. From 8:00 until roughly 10:45, the crowd grew in the lower atrium as a line of heavily-armed police stood watch from the second- and third-floor balconies. Chants of “Cop City will never be built!” and “Viva, viva, Tortuguita!” periodically erupted. A line began forming to sign up for public comment shortly before 11:00; I found myself roughly halfway through at first and took over an hour and a half to reach the signup table. The mood grew increasingly militant as the line grew longer, especially as word spread that the police had cut off access to the building and would allow neither new waves of protesters nor food and water deliveries to enter. By half past noon, the crowd had what felt like total control of the first floor of the atrium. The chanting was nonstop at this point, and most of the police who had remained on the first floor in the morning withdrew to join their compatriots on the balconies. A mass of organizers leading chants from the landing of the lobby’s central staircase declared, “This is the people’s house today!”

Just before 1:00 PM, the city council opened for business and the chamber was immediately filled to capacity. Few people in the audience stood for the pledge of allegiance. Council president Doug Shipman then announced that signups for public comment were closed, despite no more than half of the line having signed up, which sent the audience into an uproar that forced the council to amend the agenda to allow for a second period of public comment as a pacifying measure. During the first fifteen minutes of comment, four speakers, including a police officer and a bureaucrat from a public sector employees’ union, declared their support for Cop City. They would be the last. For the remaining thirteen hours of comment by over 300 people, opposition to Cop City was unanimous and uncompromising. The revolutionary spirit of 2020 was invoked numerous times throughout. City Hall was permeated with a common understanding of what was at stake, and the people cried out in a harmonious voice of opposition. Nonetheless, just before dawn the following morning, the city council voted overwhelmingly to disburse a further $31 million of taxpayer money, plus an additional $1.2 million a year for thirty years, to finish the construction of the facility.

The balance of forces involved in the campaign to stop Cop City thus far can best be described as a loose popular front. DSA’s canvassing was done via the “People’s Campaign to Stop Cop City,” a coalition that included environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club and the South River Watershed Alliance. From the socialist perspective, there are good and bad popular fronts, and I would consider this a bad one. From my estimation, DSA members and people brought aboard via Atlanta DSA did the large majority of the legwork at our canvassing outings, but the nature of our alliance with these liberal environmentalist groups prevented us from approaching community members as DSA. The script for our doorstep pitch did not include any reference to DSA or socialism and did not frame the situation in any way that might push the boundaries of liberal progressivism. 

On the day of the city council meeting, the multifarity of the forces aligned against Cop City was apparent. The multiracial, multigender, and religiously diverse crowd at City Hall that day included representatives of the Muscogee Indigenous nation whose land is being defiled for this project, unaffiliated anarchists, Black radical organizations like Community Movement Builders, Marxist-Leninist and Marcyite party-sects like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the Workers World Party, Atlanta DSA, including Atlanta’s nascent Marxist Unity Group cell represented by myself and Cliff Connolly, working-class organizations like the Housing Justice League and the Union of Southern Service Workers, Black clergy professing what could be described as a form of liberation theology, Quakers, left-liberal formations like the Working Families Party, environmentalist NGOs, and even candidates for office from the Libertarian and Republican parties. 

In a situation like this, such diversity is inevitable, and when it comes to the racial and gender diversity, very much desirable. But politically speaking, the lack of leadership from a working-class united front with a common program of action, within which forces equipped with a socialist theory of change could exercise hegemony, produced some telling effects. The politically diverse forces at City Hall remained rhetorically cohesive throughout the first thirteen or so hours of protest, but around hour eight of the public comment session, paths began to diverge. Throughout the night, the audience grew increasingly belligerent towards the council, in particular councilmember Michael Julian Bond, who was seen as abusing his right (per council bylaws) to respond at indefinite length to any commenter who mentioned him by name, frequently disrupting proceedings to deliver say-nothing statements that agitated the crowd with lines like “What you’re asking is illegal—we have a fiduciary duty to build facilities like this” or “The City of Atlanta does not have the legal ability to provide healthcare or social services.” These confrontations reached a fever pitch around 9:00 PM as the chamber went into total revolt, rising with our backs to Bond and drowning out both him and president Shipman’s vain attempts to restore order with our chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Shipman, seeing that he had lost all practical control of the meeting, threatened to move it to a separate room with no audience, at which point liberal-progressive councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari advanced a motion for a surprise recess where she pleaded with the audience to stop the heckling so the council would not eject us from the proceedings. What value a live audience would serve if it muzzled itself in this fashion is beyond me—the benefit of having a mass of demonstrators in the chamber is so they can demonstrate. In any case, liberal organizers joined Bakhtiari at the front of the room to make an appeal to pragmatism, seemingly under the illusion that the councilmembers, the majority of whom were already likely ayes, would be more likely to vote down the funding if they were less intimidated. The audience quickly grew frustrated with Bakhtiari’s attempt to walk both sides of the line and shouted down her and her proposed no-heckling pledge before the meeting resumed. 

Lines of fracture within the movement again came to bear when the second public comment period ended at around 2:30 in the morning and it came time to vote. The chamber flew into such a state of disorder that the council called most of the police in the building into the room, presumably fearing the situation was on the brink of turning violent. As the council began to evacuate to a secondary chamber without an audience, the liberal faction of the audience called on us to back down, demanding we “listen to our organizers.” Why the liberal organizers attempting to defuse the situation were supposed to be the de facto organizers of the movement as a whole is unclear, as is why the rank-and-file of the movement were supposed to move at a pace set by the layer of professional organizers rather than vice-versa. Perhaps this confusion would not have been an issue if a militant party of the working class had enjoyed the mass support necessary to define the objectives and acceptable tactics that day. 

While the liberals’ attempts at defusement did not succeed in stopping the heckling outright, and in fact the council buckled under the pressure and reconvened in the original chamber, they did divide the crowd between the increasingly agitated and the increasingly passive, which robbed us of the strength we derived from our cohesion and sent the energy in the room into a slow degeneration. When the council strategically moved the Cop City vote from the beginning of the regular agenda to the very end in a maneuver designed to wear us down and thin us out so as to minimize the threat of unrest when they voted yes, the audience began to settle into passivity as we sat through over an hour of committee reports and councilmembers’ personal requests for roadwork and street sign alterations in their districts, with only sporadic outbursts of the rage that had dominated proceedings continuously for hours on end earlier in the night. At one point, when councilmember Alex Wan introduced a feeble “compromise” measure to appoint elected officials to the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation to make it more “transparent,” one of the clergy who had advanced a militant vision of liberation many hours earlier actually stood up to defend the measure from the heckling it engendered. When the council at long last voted to approve the funding, the audience was again up in arms, but by this point we were nearly outnumbered by the AR-15-toting police officers who rushed the chamber. We dispersed fully by 6:00. Outside City Hall, a bitter argument broke out between “burn it all down” anarchists and “when you riot, we get killed” liberals. I left alone. On the way back to my car, I passed several of Atlanta’s 2,000-plus homeless people camped out a block from the Georgia State Capitol, a reminder of the sinister irony of what the city had just spent tens of millions of dollars on in the name—supposedly—of public wellbeing.

The fight isn’t over, but the different components of the movement appear divided on where to take it next. The anarchists, unsurprisingly, want to focus on direct action in the Weelaunee forest in an escalation of the previous encampment battles. A section of the liberals seems to want to attack Cop City in court based on the possibility, raised by a lawyer during public comment, that the project might be illegal on a technicality. The party-sects are all-in on propaganda and political education, with the PSL hosting an educational event on June 10th and the WWP offering nothing, as far as I can tell, except their newspaper. 

None of these approaches are exceedingly promising. 

Making good on the slogan “if you build it, we will burn it” might delay construction, but it will also put dozens of good comrades in jail or in the morgue without creating a movement capable of reproducing itself in the long term. Movements that fetishize direct action to the exclusion of other methods typically evaporate as soon as all of their fiercest organizers are behind bars. 

A legal assault on Cop City is likely a fool’s errand. Under our capitalist regime, courts are auction blocks where a profaned “justice” is generally sold off to whoever can put up the highest price for it. With multibillion-dollar corporations rallying to Cop City’s defense, assisted by a levée en masse of wealthy professionals from deep suburban gated communities and beacheads of gentrification downtown, a bidding war for the desired verdict can only end with the double-defeat of a loss in court and a gross waste of funds at a time when they are desperately needed elsewhere. 

Little needs to be said about the sects’ dead-end approach of revolution-by-education. Political education is vital to the movement’s success, but these parties expect to build a mass base and transform themselves into the capital-p Party by simply instilling the masses with the right ideas. It isn’t going to work, and more to the immediate point, it isn’t going to stop Cop City.

Atlanta DSA has settled on an option that I think stands the best chance of both stopping Cop City from being built and uniting the movement on grounds favorable to the emergence of mass socialist politics. On June 8th, a coalition of anti-Cop City groups announced a campaign to place the issue on the ballot for a referendum in November, which—if the multiple public comment sessions thus far have been any indication—would be very likely to result in the project’s cancellation. Like with the “People’s Campaign to Stop Cop City,” the referendum campaign is a popular front with liberal forces, but in these specific circumstances this is unavoidable. The absurdly high obstacles to getting a referendum on the ballot, designed specifically to prevent issues like this from being settled in the public arena, require that we collect approximately 75,000 signatures in a sixty-day window, or 1,250 signatures every day for two months. To pull this off will require effort an order of magnitude higher than what Atlanta DSA exerted during our canvassing for the June 5th rally. If we are going to stop Cop City (and we must), Atlanta socialists can’t do it alone. The critical question, then, is how to make this a good popular front, meaning one that does not hobble us in exchange for advancing our immediate goals.

First, to the extent it is possible, Atlanta DSA should participate in the campaign as DSA. This could be as simple as wearing prominent DSA apparel during canvassing and adding some mention of DSA to our doorstep pitches. It will also mean taking the initiative on organizing demonstrations rather than merely attending ones put on by other groups, holding our own informational tabling sessions that present the situation in a uniquely socialist framework, and distributing our own DSA-branded campaign materials which do not shy away from connecting Stop Cop City to our socialist politics. In general, Atlanta DSA should approach this as a DSA project when seeking buy-in from our own membership. Members who get the ask to participate in this campaign at meetings and unrelated events should feel they are being asked to contribute to DSA’s intervention in this campaign, not to help with a larger nonsocialist campaign that simply happens to include other DSA members.

Second, to make DSA stand out as a distinct part of the coalition making distinct contributions, Atlanta DSA needs to apply pressure to the National Political Committee to make this an issue of national importance for our organization. If Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and AOC were to come down to Atlanta at some point during the two weeks when the House is in recess in late June and early July, the increased turnout for volunteer canvassing and the enhanced publicity could be game-changing. This is the kind of thing DSA should expect of our electeds. From what I understand, an officer of Atlanta DSA has already reached out to national DSA leadership about arranging something like this.

Third, to foreground the demands of workers and tenants in this movement, Atlanta DSA must build a working-class united front within the popular front, or rather, one that exists both within and without it. In addition to our relationship with the coalition as a whole, we should seek to establish separate channels of communication and coordination with distinctly working-class and socialist organizations within the popular front, and bring others into it for this express purpose.  Examples of organizations that we should take special care to form these sorts of relationships with are Community Movement Builders, the Housing Justice League, and sympathetic labor unions like the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, Home Depot Workers United, and the Teamsters. Tying the struggle against Cop City to the rank-and-file Teamster struggle may prove particularly fruitful as a strike against UPS looms on the horizon. Not only could these organizations improve the odds of immediate victory by canvassing in working-class neighborhoods, collecting signatures in the workplace, and coordinating out-of-state support, but merging their economic struggles with our political struggle, in this case against the police state, will also be essential in the longer term for the re-emergence of socialism as a formidable force in this country. This process has already begun on the housing front thanks to the efforts of CBM and the HJL. A city-wide general strike is not a feasible tactic here and now, but this kind of organizing is how it could become one in the years to come.

Finally, Atlanta DSA should be aware of the fact that, win or lose, the liberal wing of this campaign will abandon it when the dust settles, not necessarily out of malice but out of a deficit of the kind of political vision necessary to see the movement through to a higher stage. If we win, the liberals will be in no great hurry to mount a general assault on the Democrats who engineered this project, and altogether incapable of transforming the campaign against Cop City into a more holistic campaign against the police state and the anti-democratic constitutional framework on which it metastasizes. In the event we lose, they will have no solutions to offer except to try to elect a different batch of liberal Democrats who talk a different talk in the primaries but, under the monetary discipline of the same roiling mass of capital which birthed Cop City, will inevitably walk the same walk in office. We have to be ready, willing, and able to take the campaign and run with it when the liberals drop it. This means we should cultivate cadre candidates to run for city council in 2025 and the Georgia House of Representatives in 2026. These candidates should run on a platform that connects the demands raised during the struggle against Cop City—defunding the police, rent control, robust public education, regreening the city—to a set of political demands calculated to destroy the antidemocratic structures that allow the stewards of the capitalist class to so flagrantly disregard the will of the people. At the local level, a strong minimum program might include the replacement of the current strong-mayor system of municipal government with a council-only system, short terms and snap recallability for city councilors, a steep reduction in the signature threshold to get referenda on the ballot, and the replacement of the current corrupt budgeting and contract bidding processes with top-to-bottom participatory budgeting. Once in office, DSA candidates should push for transformational reforms, yes, but also strive to be a disruptive force. For example, a socialist councilmember should encourage rather than scold heckling in a situation like what we saw the night of June 5th, and exploit procedural rules to cause bedlam when the rest of the council tries to force through antidemocratic measures. In contrast to the rulebook worship of liberal councilmembers like Bakhtiari, a socialist elected to city council should be a walking violation of decorum.

The campaign to stop Cop City could become a defining moment for the U.S. socialist movement. We have to stop the police state in its tracks here and now. If we don’t, this specific facility will by necessity become the focal point of the struggle against police terror for years to come, as police forces from out of state and even overseas travel to it to improve their capacity for repression. If we do, we will impart the joy of hope, that most elementary building block of revolutionary consciousness, to potentially millions of people. An intervention in this campaign has the potential to be transformative not just for the base, but for DSA itself, as it points towards the convergence of two critical fault lines within the organization. 

The first is political independence. Cop City is, after all, a local Democratic pet project, and the most egregious example of the Democrats’ utter incapability of defeating fascism. Rather than fighting it head-on, they seek to pre-empt it by outdoing far-right Republicans on the “law and order” front, creating a frenzied cycle of police repression, popular unrest, and law and order panic from the propertied classes, the precise conditions fascists will use to try to seize power, whereupon they will find a sprawling police state ready-made for their own use, courtesy of the liberal Democrats. 

The second is the centrality of the democratic question. Challenging the enforcement of the law by a caste of professional paramilitaries is a fundamental challenge to the rule of the capitalist class, and of course, there is no better demonstration of the false republic we live in than the Atlanta city council’s ability to completely bypass popular sentiment. As a representative of Community Movement Builders said during the public comment session on June 5th, “if we lived in a democracy we wouldn’t be here.”

A nationwide mobilization for the Stop Cop City referendum campaign could parallel the Freedom Summer of ‘64 in terms of historic significance. DSA can and should involve itself at a national level and stake out the only sensible position for the country’s largest socialist organization in over a century: at the head of the column, pressing the movement onwards towards new terrain and the socialist sun rising on the horizon.