Over the past year and a half, a protest movement has erupted in Atlanta to oppose the construction of a police training facility on a city-owned patch of forest in majority-black DeKalb County. The Public Safety Training Center would encompass 85 acres of a 265-acre property and serve as a training facility for police and fire safety personnel.
Opponents, who derisively call the development "Cop City," worry it could exacerbate several existing problems in Atlanta. "The environmental ramifications of clearcutting a wide swath of one of the last remaining undeveloped forests in our city and replacing it with this facility would be significant and long-lasting," Nina Dutton, chair of the Sierra Club's Metro Atlanta Group, told The Guardian in 2022. Dutton added that the facility "would constitute a huge investment into a system of policing and militarization that has already proven to be dangerous in this city and around the world."
