What is Cop City? The Atlanta protest and police training dispute explained.

Paez Teran was one of the many protesters who had occupied parts of the forest. Some demonstrators have torched construction equipment and thrown rocks at police.

Since the death, there have been other violent protests — including a March 5 incident in which scores of people charged a construction site, causing police officers to flee as they torched construction equipment and threw rocks at police.

With no end in sight, here’s an explanation of Cop City and how things got to this point.

What and where is Cop City?

Cop City is the nickname for the Public Safety Training Center, which is slated to become an 85-acre compound to teach firefighters and 911 operators along with police how to serve and protect communities. The $90 million facility will include a mock city, a “burn building” for firefighters to practice, a firing range, a driving course, stables and pastureland for police horses and kennels for K-9 units, along with classrooms.

The facility as proposed will sit within a 300-acre forest in southwest unincorporated DeKalb County, an area largely made up of Black residents — one of the groups most at risk of over-policing. Activists call the forest by its Muscogee name, Weelaunee. Atlanta forged the modern civil rights movement and housed many of its greatest thinkers. Atlanta sits mostly in Fulton County, but a portion of the city lies within DeKalb County.

Why are people against Cop City?

Protesters say this is a facility to pump out police officers who have been trained in military-style tactics inappropriate for local police officers.

The Atlanta City Council voted to lease the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation in September 2021. The City Council approved the lease despite 17 hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment. Many residents said they didn’t know the center was coming.

“To be clear — cop city is not just a controversial training center. It is a war base where police will learn militarylike maneuvers to kill black people and control our bodies and movements. … They are practicing how to make sure poor and working-class people stay in line,” Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders is quoted as saying on the Stop Cop City website.

The group is a coalition of people against the training center who organize campaigns and call out the many corporate sponsors that support building the center. The group also collects mutual aid and holds weekly supply drives for demonstrators in the forest.

Among the corporate sponsors is the James M. Cox Foundation — the charitable arm of Cox Enterprises, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper notes in some of its stories that the foundation has given money to the training center’s fundraising campaign.

The ratio isn’t clear, but there are people who’ve taken up residence both from Atlanta and from out of town.

After the March 5 incident, police detained 35 people and the next day announced that they had charged 23 people with domestic terrorism. Of those 23, only two were from Georgia. Most were from the United States, but there was one person charged who is from Canada and another from France.

The Journal-Constitution has reported that some demonstrators arrested are professional environmental activists, linking at least one to the Dakota Access pipeline protests.

In Atlanta, a deadly forest protest sparks debate over ‘domestic terrorism’

During the nationwide outcry against police killing unarmed Black men in summer 2020, the police killing of 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta incited outrage. His death caused a new wave of Atlantans calling for a kind of public safety that doesn’t structurally cause innocent Black men to be shot.

Not a year later, the Atlanta City Council approved the building.

Local journalists and independent media have covered skirmishes small and large between police and protesters.

Protesters quickly set up camp within the forest and began to entrench. They have vandalized work trucks and broken windows to discourage civilian contractors at the site. Some protesters have “spiked” trees with nails to destroy deforestation equipment.

When police came in May 2022 to break up the camps, they were met with molotov cocktails, according to local media. Those providing legal support to protesters have said that police used rubber bullets and pepper spray during arrests.

After the killing of Paez Teran, a vigil for them in downtown Atlanta turned violent. In late January, protesters smashed windows and lit fireworks — targeting Wells Fargo Bank, Chase Bank and another building that reportedly houses the Atlanta Police Foundation, according to The Washington Post. An Atlanta police car was set on fire outside a Hooters.

After the March 5 incident in which construction equipment was torched, Atlanta police said they were preparing for more protests in the coming days.

An unknown number of demonstrators, who appear to be well-stocked, remain in the forest.