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Journey Beyond Cop Cities

Cover of Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Prisons on a ankara background with the words, "A Thread of Quotes" at the bottom

Cop City is here and has been for a while.

Well before this new administration reemerged and began to make good on its promises for 2025 onward (as stated in an in-depth manifesto, which borrowed from what had already been done in the mid 1900s), the impacts of repression and censorship were well trodden in Atlanta. This wasn’t knew. This country has a long history of squashing dissidence, and many states in the South wrote the blueprint. Cop City was a proposal that many Atlanta residents opposed. It required the destruction of a local forest and the siphoning of communal resources (it cost almost 100 million by the conclusion of its construction) to be put toward policing. They said it would make us “safer.”

For Black August, I read Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons ed. Joy James (Pluto Press, 2024). This text compiles a variety of perspectives on the subject of Atlanta’s new police training ground, and it breaks down the different methodologies of oppression community members faced as they attempted to do what democracy promises. They attempted to make their voices heard through protest, a misguided petition, direct conversation with politicians, and a call for a referendum that never occurred. All would suggest that democracy failed, but many of us know that these systems were put in place to fail us when our interests conflict with the interests of the ruling class—those with the money and the power to say “yes” or “no.”

Beyond Cop Cities includes several interviews, including one with Belkis Terán, the mother of Tortuguita, an Atlanta forest defender who was murdered by APD during a protest of Cop City in 2023. This is my favorite part of the book. As I think more about what it means to know and love and fight, what moves me most are the words of those closest to the fire (a positionality that changes depending on the contexts). As Belkis Terán calls for love, she also, she offers a window into what that love looks like. She draws from the Judeo-Christian narrative of Jesus, one who died for culture, belief, and love.

Cop City isn’t a place, or not just a place. It is a manifestation of carcerality, which is rooted in a desire to make inequity rigid—hard to break, hard to escape. Carcerality extends beyond prison walls, and it impacts us all. We feel its limits whether we acknowledge them or not.

Baby, cop city is where we are.

Revolutionary love is rooted in the desire to shatter inequity. I lean into that love. I’m trying to take its lead.

  • "“Tortuguita was an activist before they arrived to the United States…They were active. I plan to do the same. I plan to continue doing something, not only protest. Protest is important, but we have to change our ways of being. We have to spend more time doing something for the community” (67)" "Tortuguita’s Mother Speaks: Belkis Terán" in Beyond Cop Cities
  • “If we connect from our light, from our love, then we can make positive (changes) for our community and we can change the world. I think the world needs to be changed. I think I’m now becoming an abolitionist” (68) "Tortuguita’s Mother Speaks: Belkis Terán" in Beyond Cop Cities
  • “Colonialism is a contemporary threat to the stability of cities (and countries) facing attempts by corporations and governments to violate the rights of working-class and low-income communities, most often Black and brown. Addressing the complexity or puzzle of Cop City means acknowledging the historical trajectory of militarized violence, corporate dominance, and political corruption that preceded the present crisis” (19) "Urban Warfare and Corporate Funded Armies: Cop City as a Chapter in the Long History of U.S. Colonialism" in Beyond Cop Cities
  • “Colonialism is a contemporary threat to the stability of cities (and countries) facing attempts by corporations and governments to violate the rights of working-class and low-income communities, most often Black and brown. Addressing the complexity or puzzle of Cop City means acknowledging the historical trajectory of militarized violence, corporate dominance, and political corruption that preceded the present crisis” (19) "Urban Warfare and Corporate Funded Armies: Cop City as a Chapter in the Long History of U.S. Colonialism" in Beyond Cop Cities
  • “Black/Brown compradors will continue to cash in on the colonization of cities until they are forced to stop their exploitation and greed. A security apparatus can protect not only lives but also international boycotts, recalls, referendums, primarying incumbents brought by corporations and military industries. Increasingly forced into marronage with the theft of lands, waters and collective reparations, we mutate to better figure out how political kin and communities build concentric care and security” (29) "Letter of Concern to Black Clergy Regarding (Cop City)" in Beyond Cop City
  • “Every aspect of community and culture can be brought, from your church, through the high school principal, to the academic in the classroom. This is going to be a collective struggle where we will see that our opposition will include people who look very much like us and who, as you say, move the stickers and mask themselves as being concerned about civil rights, working-class people, Black people. It’s not true. They are masquerading in care, when really their ambition has to do. Lot with money” (46) "Resisting Cop City Corporate and Clergy Colonizers" in Beyond Cop Cities
  • “I always told my children the principle of life is that we have to respect and consider each other. Based on Jesus’s word that you must love your neighbor as yourself, I think this is the most powerful law in the universe. That love helps everybody grow and give the best of yourself” (65) "Tortuguita’s Mother Speaks: Belkis Terán" in Beyond Cop Cities
  • “In June 2020 an Atlanta police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks, less than a month after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota…Reverend Raphael Warnock…addressed the funeral gathering. Warnock spoke eloquently in the historic church: “Rayshard Brooks is the latest high-profile casualty in the struggle for justice and a battle for the soul of America. This is about him but it is so much bigger than him.” Neither of Georgia’s democratic senators—Warnock and Jon Ossoff—spoke of a ‘battle for the soul of America’ when three years later Georgia troopers assassinated Tortuguita in the forest” (12) "The Rubiks’ cube of Cop City: The Crisis of Colonized Cities and State Criminality" in Beyond Cop Cities

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