It’s kind of heartbreaking to read “The Atlanta City Design“, and to see the aspirations of a city “Aspiring to the Beloved Community”. And then find those goals usurped by designing a huge police training facility in a forested area of the city.
1 Equity
Our challenge for Equity is the continuous, contentious, and often unappreciated work of ensuring that all the benefits of Nature, Access, Ambition, and Progress accrue fairly
to everyone.
2 Progress
Our challenge for Progress is to protect people and places with meaning from the market forces that will otherwise overrun them.
3 Ambition
Our challenge for Ambition is to leverage the disruption of change to unlock new opportunities for people to do what they want with their lives.
4 Access
Our challenge for Access is to update our hub of transportation for a new generation while also building a sense of community and place.
5 Nature
Our challenge for Nature is to protect and expand the ecological value of our watersheds, forest, and habitat in the face of rapid urbanization.
In 2017, the South River Forest was designated as one of four major city “lungs” in a report titled “The Atlanta City Design,” put together by Atlanta’s city-planning department. The report’s lead author was Ryan Gravel, a Georgia Tech alum whose graduate thesis led to the creation of the city’s ballyhooed BeltLine greenway. Gravel and his co-authors envision the South River Forest as a great urban park and conservation corridor. The city council formally adopted the plan, and Gravel began working with the Nature Conservancy to make it a reality; in March of last year, a two-hundred-acre parcel surrounding a drained lake three miles south of the prison farm, which could have become another landfill, was approved for permanent preservation.
Then, the following month, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, made an announcement: the area around the prison farm was going to be the site of a sprawling training facility for police and firefighters. This, Gravel said, was “a big surprise.” Many people in Atlanta were startled by the news—including Joe Santifer, who told me that he’d already been bothered by the police presence in the forest. For decades, the Atlanta P.D. has operated a firing range there, and, on his forest strolls, Santifer had begun hearing gunfire. Even from a distance, he said, it “sounds like a battleground.” He e-mailed a complaint to the city, and, a few days later, he got a response: “Call 911.”
The New Fight Over an Old Forest in Atlanta. The plans for an enormous police-training center—dubbed Cop City by critics—have ignited interest in one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces. By Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, August 3, 2022
The A.P.F. (Atlanta Police Foundation), which was founded in 2003, is one of many police foundations created in the past two decades. These private nonprofits typically channel corporate money into policing initiatives, expanding police budgets and, in some cases, producing apparent conflicts of interest. Some of Atlanta’s most influential people—the C.E.O.s of Waffle House and of the Atlanta Hawks, V.P.s from the Home Depot and Delta Air Lines—sit on the A.P.F.’s board; Coca-Cola and Cox Enterprises, a media conglomerate based in Atlanta, are among the corporations that have acknowledged their contributions to the foundation. Cox’s C.E.O., Alex Taylor, is the chair of fund-raising for the training facility. Cox owns the city’s largest newspaper, the Journal-Constitution, which has published a number of editorials in favor of the facility and has only sometimes disclosed its owner’s contributions to the A.P.F.
Atlanta’s city council solicited public comment on the facility in September of last year, and received more than seventeen hours of remarks—including a few minutes from Joe Santifer. “I said the location isn’t congruent with the neighborhood,” he told me. “It’s outsized for the number of officers that Atlanta has, and the process has been rushed.” Santifer said that he’d also listened to most of the other remarks, which were recorded, and that “about seventy per cent” were opposed to the development. (A crowdsourced tally reached the same conclusion.) The other thirty percent, he said, “were mimicking what they had been told—that this was gonna solve Atlanta’s crime problem and the problem with low morale in the police force.” Santifer began researching alternative sites, including a dilapidated mall in southwest Atlanta and a few industrial properties. He also took to social media to alert his neighbors to what was going on.
The New Fight Over an Old Forest in Atlanta. By Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, August 3, 2022
Quakers and Mutual Aid 