Activists have blockaded, resisted and fought for three years against Atlanta’s “cop city,” the $115 million police training facility being built. Despite their efforts and despite early complaints and arguments to Atlanta’s City Council and a campaign to add the project to the November ballot in 2023, construction is underway.
And there are over 80 more police training facilities across the country that have been built, are in the planning stages or are being considered since 2020, according to data compiled by Renee Johnston of Black Liberation Media, Black Alliance for Peace and the Green Party of New Jersey.
“Sounding the alarm is the objective of the ‘Stop Cop Nation,’ that this country not be allowed to hyper-militarize law enforcement to the degree that we become lambs to slaughter and that we build a culture, an awareness of what is happening in all quarters, not just in the Black community but across the board.
So that there is adequate resistance to prevent it,” Efia Nwangaza, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and founder and director of the Malcolm X Center for Self Determination, said to The Final Call. “If not prevent it, then at least be able to blunt its impact.”
The research
Ms. Johnston first started looking into Atlanta’s police training facility in early 2022. While researching, she wondered if Atlanta was the only location where police facilities were being built.
She found two dozen places either building a new police training center or expanding their police department. But she had only researched specific cities. She then expanded her search, looking state by state, and found a total of 47 police training facilities in October 2023.
By February of this year, the number had expanded to 69 facilities. By July 31, when she last updated her research, the number grew to over 80. She identified Wyoming as the only state that did not have a “cop city” project.
Ms. Johnston’s research looked at facilities that were being planned or under assessment, approved for construction, under construction, opened or under several phases of progress after 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the uprisings that occurred over his death.
“The George Floyd uprisings were a marker for when these things really started to expand,” Ms. Johnston said to The Final Call. “And that’s not to say they didn’t exist or weren’t in the works prior to 2020, but there was definitely an exponential growth after 2020 happened.”
She did not discriminate between the prices of the projects—which ranged from under $1 million to over $100 million—or the sizes of the facilities—which were as low as 3,500 square feet on three acres and as high as 366,000 square feet on 146 acres.
She also created a map to help people visualize how expansive the training facilities are.
Her spreadsheet shows states with multiple facilities, such as Minnesota, which has six, New York, which has five, and Washington, which has four. Many of the facilities also work in conjunction with other law enforcement agencies.
“In Nashville, there are (several) different law enforcement agencies that are associated with this one 800-acre facility that’s being built,” she said. “Why do we need something this expansive and this large?
I think the most glaring thing is the amount of money that is being put into expanding the police state when there’s so many other things that are falling by the wayside.”
Several cities on the spreadsheet are run by Black mayors. Activists said Black people in local governing bodies should be expected to stand against projects such as police training facilities, but too often, they don’t.
“Black faces in high places will not save us,” Baba Akili, national field coordinator for Black Lives Matter Grassroots, core team member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and the director of the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute, said to The Final Call.
“One of the first things that I hear, particularly city Black elected officials say, is that they want to represent all the people. Well, okay, but what part of all the people are most disadvantaged?” he questioned. “What part of all the people are most in despair? What part of all people needs more resources and support? If you answer that question, it’s going to be Blacks.”
National convening efforts
The Movement for Black Lives convened organizations and individuals for a national meeting in May due to concern over the militarization of police. The organization invited Ms. Johnston to participate and included her on the planning team as a member of Black Lives Matter Grassroots.
The purpose of the meeting was to “come together to plan, strategize and consider what to do in response to the growing number of efforts to militarize the police,” he said.
“We came together, first for a planning and strategy session in May, and then got back together in August to then say, here’s what’s being planned, here’s what’s being talked about. How do we build a national response, and what do we do?”
Mr. Akili said. “And from that formation that was built in August, a call for October 22, which is the national action against police brutality, and connecting that to stopping police nations.”
For the 29th annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, established by the October 22 Coalition, organizations rolled out a mass mobilization effort to “Stop Cop Nation.”
Ms. Nwangaza shared how the “Stop Cop Nation” movement fits within the larger history of Black resistance against police brutality in America, and she linked the current effort to the work the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation has been doing since 1996.
“(The government) is always upgrading its powers of conversion and its control of the use of force,” she said. “We have always been in resistance, and the state has always been in pursuit of being in the offense, so that it’s constantly upgrading its use of force, and that’s what cop cities represent.”
Police reform or backlash?
After the uprisings over the murder of George Floyd, some Americans attempted to chart a path of racial reckoning and police reform. But as a longtime activist, Mr. Akili has lived through the years of ups and downs, successes and backlash, over Black progress in America.
“Every time there seems to be an advancement for Black people, there has been an equal set of pushbacks from White people because of White supremacy, institutional racism, individual bigotry and mass denial,” he said.
“The idea that local government would seek to make sure that they could suppress future uprisings became real, and you can see it now exhibited in the way that the response to the free Palestine movement has developed;
At first a very harsh and very immediate response targeting the students and anybody that supports them, targeting, marginalizing and then punishing the students.”
Ms. Johnston also linked further militarization of police to the George Floyd uprisings and the movement to free Palestine.
“I think the intention was to ensure that they had enough police forces set up around the country to support the ability to shut s*** down. I think they were like, ‘Oh, we’re not doing this again, with all these people taking to the streets,’” she said.
“When you have students getting beat over the head and people getting dragged off the streets and all these things happening, none of this is new. It’s just more obvious, now.”
Cephus “Uncle Bobby” X was part of a live discussion and a call to action to “Stop Cop Nation” hosted by the Hip Hop Caucus on Oct. 22. He recalled the consequences of what he described as an early phase of today’s “cop cities”:
Urban Shield, a federally funded initiative organized by the sheriff of Alameda County, California, in 2007, that activists were fighting up until 2019, when it ended.
When his nephew, Oscar Grant III, was killed in 2009 by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in Oakland, those seeking justice learned that enforcement agencies from around the country had gathered in the city every year since 2007 for “a week of training in crowd control, emergency situations, urban rebellion, you name it,” Cephus X said to The Final Call.
Forming a Black united front
Mr. Akili said Black people must form a united front to fight police militarization and state-sanctioned violence.
“If you look at what is happening, say around the building of the ‘Stop Cop Nation,’ that’s an effort toward building a united front. But how do we build support and maintain these united fronts and build support and maintain, as Dr. Maulana Karenga talks about, operational unity,” he said.
Memphis-based Nation of Islam Student Minister Demetric Muhammad, an author and researcher, echoed the need for unity and local organizing in the Black community.
“It’s now time for the Black spiritual community, the Black business community, the Black cultural community, we all have to come together. We have to put aside any petty differences that we might have and come together and work to organize for the good of our people.
And then in unity, we’re able to push back against police brutality. We’re able to push back against all those things that would negatively impact the Black community,” he said to The Final Call.
He quoted the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, saying that “organized hate is more effective than disorganized love.”
“Every community needs to be organized. We need to have neighborhood watch so that we act in a policing capacity of our own communities. We need to have neighborhood cleanup, where we remove blight and trash from our neighborhoods.
We need to have all of the things that take us from being a colony to actually being a community,” he said. “So, it’s time for us to organize locally to make our community safe and decent places to live. And when we do that, then we greatly reduce the need for police to have a presence in our community.”
Student Minister Muhammad authored the book, “How To Police The Black Community: Divine Guidance for Law Enforcement From the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.”
He explained the need for police to be aware of the 400-year sojourn of Black people in America under chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, lynching and inequality.
“If you’re going to police in our community, you have to be aware of what the people who live in our community represent and have gone through and are the descendants of, otherwise you come into our community and you can do a lot of harm to a people who have already suffered a lot,” he said.
