Statement: Stop Cop City
The Defend The Atlanta Forest Coalition is a working class movement to halt the expansion of anti-democratic forces locally, in the state of Georgia, and nationally. Since April 2021 this movement has deployed a variety of tactics opposing a planned police training facility. Atlanta City Council leased 85 acres of the Atlanta Prison Farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation for the construction of a $90 million facility. The movement has dubbed this project “Cop City'' because it would be the largest police training facility in the country. Plans include a mock city where police can practice brutalizing working class people in the streets. Due to its size, this project can be expected to be shared with police departments across the country, not just Atlanta, where they can come together and trade notes on how to best repress the people. In spite of hours of public comment against the proposal, and an occupation of the Weelaunee Forest which Cop City will destroy, City Council and mayor Andre Dickens continually advanced the project. In January, Atlanta police assassinated the beloved forest defender Tortuguita.
Since 2020 and the uprising for Black Lives, the ruling class has moved to solidify in the face of worsening standards of living and heightened working class consciousness. The fragile social safety net built to sustain our society through the Covid-19 pandemic has since been shredded. An emboldened bourgeois law enforcement system has not ceased killing and maiming the poor, Black Americans, Latines, immigrants, our disabled and elderly family, transgender and gay people. At the same time American Fascism is emboldened.
The MAGA threat has not been thoroughly extinguished despite Trump getting booked at Fulton County Jail. The same grand jury that indicted the January 6 coup plotters for conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election has now indicted 61 forest defenders with bogus racketeering charges for engaging in solidarity with one another through grassroots traditions like mutual aid. Our two-party flawed democracy is straining under severe contradictions that expose our status quo’s crisis. Fascists are recruiting alienated members of society through vile bigotry and coordinating with reactionary elements of state power. Increasing militarization of our society by way of the “War on Drugs, the “War on Terror” and now Cop City sow fertile ground for fascists to divide the working class and disorganized their opposition.
The Philadelphia Young Communist League condemns the Georgia Attorney General’s anti-democratic assault on brave defenders of the Weelaunee Forest. These last three years of struggle in Georgia and beyond have demonstrated how unpopular Cop City is. These charges are an act of desperate legal warfare by the APF, their political allies and the corporate interests they serve.
Coordinating Committee, Philadelphia Young Communist League