A coalition of racial justice advocates and environmental defenders is fighting to save over 300 acres of forest land outside of Atlanta from becoming a massive police training center, dubbed Cop City by opponents.
The movement has achieved remarkable success — delaying the development of Cop City and forcing concessions from Atlanta officials.
But law enforcement officials have also responded with brutal force, culminating in the killing of 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán by police last month. Only then did the mainstream national news start covering the fight over Cop City — after over a year of police-friendly coverage from the press in Atlanta.
The Intercept has been on this case from the start, talking to advocates on the ground and reporting out the huge social and environmental costs of the Cop City development. While the major news outlets catch up, our team is hard at work filing public records requests and digging into who stands to gain from this monument to police brutality.
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The movement to defeat Cop City has been derided by city officials, the police, and their corporate backers as one of outside agitators and so-called eco-terrorists. Our reporters, who’ve been on the ground following the forest defenders from the start, know otherwise.
An Atlanta-based coalition of conservationists, police reformers, racial justice advocates, and Indigenous-rights proponents, the movement put out a call for solidarity, and people like Terán responded. It deployed a creative array of tactics including encampments, tree-sits, peaceful protest marches, and carefully targeted property damage.
The Intercept’s reporting has also shown the lengths police are going to repress the protestors: not just killing Terán, but also arresting 19 others on spurious charges of domestic terrorism that could yield up to 35 years in prison.
With Atlanta officials announcing a so-called compromise of planting new trees and installing a buffer around their proposed facility — and police doubling down on their claims that Terán shot first — the national news media is bound to move on.
But The Intercept has been reporting the story of Cop City from the beginning, and we won’t stop until the whole story is told — including why the police shot a protester dead.
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