Police Academies Are Part of Higher Ed

The $90-million Atlanta Public Safety Center — known by its opponents as “Cop City” — is now under construction. The complex, where a forest currently breathes, is a police “training center,” among the largest of its kind, that will feature an array of learning facilities: classrooms, an auditorium, a shooting range, and a “mock city” for “urban-police training.”

Originally named the Atlanta Institute for Social Justice and Public Safety Training, this university for the police will instruct officers in the “most up-to-date methods of community policing, including de-escalation tactics and cultural awareness.” Some attendees will hail from Atlanta or Georgia, but an estimated 43 percent of attending officers will come from other cities and states.

The training center is being touted as “a beacon for what we call 21st-century policing,” according to Dave Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit group building the facility. As with many higher-education institutions, funding for the project comes from private and public sources. Originally the city was to pay $30 million, with the foundation and its donor network contributing the rest, but now it appears the city will pay as much as $67 million. City officials were probably aware of those budgeting arrangements much earlier than they admitted.

While Cop City’s scale and ambition are remarkable enough, the project also evokes the many public dramas regarding the place — literally and figuratively — of policing in our time. It is transparently a reaction to the urban uprisings of 2020, prompted by the murder of George Floyd, that accompanied the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis and the attendant demands to “defund the police.” If this rebuke to the activism of the recent past is extraordinary in its scope, the construction of Cop City also slots all too easily into the ordinary (if relentless) expansion of police funding and police power. It functions further to allay the fears of Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead district, home to much of the city’s corporate and political elite, which has threatened to secede from the rest of the city’s purported decline in order to form its own municipality. Cop City promises to show well-heeled residents and developers that their property will be protected should something like 2020 happen again.

Why should academics, in particular, concern themselves with those developments? For one thing, students are already closely involved in resistance to the project. The last year has seen numerous and coordinated campus walkouts, shutdowns, and other protests led by the Atlanta University Center Consortium, a group of four historically Black colleges, as well as the quiet arrival of students from across the country who have joined the “Stop Cop City” blockade, also known as “Defend the Atlanta Forest.”

Professors, too, have gotten involved. In February, Morehouse College faculty members wrote an open letter titled “There Is No Cop City in the Beloved Community,” one among many such offerings. “As members of the Morehouse College faculty,” it begins, “we have grown accustomed to consoling and counseling our students as they attempt to grapple with cycles of police brutality.” They conclude by invoking the college’s best-known graduate: “As an alumnus of Morehouse and a luminary of Atlanta, Dr. King articulated an inspiring vision of the beloved community. The dream has become a nightmare: There is simply no place for Cop City in the beloved community.”

Academic organizations have also begun taking official positions. The Society for Community Research and Action, a division of the American Psychological Association, recognized that Cop City development might prevent people of conscience from attending its annual conference, and affirmed its solidarity with students, faculty, and other workers at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges who oppose the project. There has also been a letter mass-signed by educators committed to a boycott of conferences in Georgia as long as the project continues. That action echoes both academic boycotts of educational events in states that do not recognize trans rights and the historic educational boycotts of Israel and South Africa.

Another reason academics should take notice of Cop City concerns the predictable entanglements of money and power that conjoin the Atlanta Public Safety Center and the c-suites of academe. The tripartite relations among universities, corporate developers, and policing have increasingly taken on a mutually reinforcing character. Universities are real-estate moguls, exempt from property taxes, that can develop property around or off campus while justifying greater municipal and campus policing of adjacent and displaced communities.

In the case of Cop City, the connections are even more elaborate and tangled than usual. Student and alumni researchers have highlighted the links between their colleges, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and other nonprofit groups involved in the project, such as the Atlanta Committee for Progress. Spelman graduates have noted President Helene D. Gayle’s seat on the Atlanta Committee for Progress board. A letter from the Georgia State University Student Coalition Against Policing and Militarism calls attention to the university’s Atlanta Police Leadership Initiative, a collaboration with the same Atlanta Police Foundation that is planning the training center. The letter is addressed to Brian Blake, president of Georgia State, who is also a board member of the Atlanta Committee for Progress, as are the presidents of both Emory University and Morehouse. It goes on to note the university’s participation in Operation Shield, a network of 3,000 police cameras, making Atlanta reportedly the most heavily surveilled city in the country.

But the plainest reason that Cop City should engage the attention of academics is that Cop City is already part of academe, writ large. It has been easy enough to imagine police academies as a phenomenon alien to higher education, existing in another world entirely — perhaps as we once imagined for-profit colleges tucked into strip malls, or the early appearance of online programs that seemed at first like night schools possessed of little but a URL. As those educational apparatuses and traditional academe have grown toward each other in scope and form, we have been asked to reconsider our kinship. Questions as quotidian as transferring credits, as technical as what learning platforms look like in the present, or as broad as the role of degree-granting colleges in a remade labor landscape have brought forth family resemblances that might not have been previously visible.

That applies even more strongly to an institution on the proposed scale of the Atlanta Public Safety Center, which resembles West Point more than it does some local police department’s accreditation shop. One of us wrote previously for The Chronicle about “When Universities Swallow Cities”; Cop City’s campus has already been vetted to swallow a forest that the Atlanta planning department called one of the city’s “lungs.” It is hardly the first academic campus with a narrow curriculum, extended opportunities for practical experience alongside book learning, and shiny new facilities on extensive grounds subsidized by the state and private capital. As such, it deserves the attention of all of us concerned with the fate of institutions of higher education, and with what they are already in the process of becoming.

If it behooves us to be concerned about the potential future consequences of the Atlanta Public Safety Center, we are equally responsible to the protests it has already summoned. “Stop Cop City” is a sort of synthesis of recent social movements in the United States and elsewhere. Like Occupy, it features a standing public gathering against the state/corporate nexus bent on imposing austerity on everyone but itself. Like the NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, it takes the form of an infrastructural blockade against the expansion of state and corporate power. Like the uprisings of 2020, the movement confronts the historically and racially unique scope of the U.S. carceral state and its deadly police wing. It also operates as a climate defense of the Weelaunee Forest, once home to the Muscogee Creek peoples, in a city with the highest percentage of tree canopy of any major metropolitan area in America.

That recent history only partly explains the almost incredible intensity of the backlash the organizers and protesters have faced. At issue for campus activists is the violent overreach by the Atlanta Police Department, in particular the selective use of absurd and draconian charges meant to ruin lives and chill dissent.

During a recent Week of Action for the Stop Cop City movement, police officers arrested dozens of people attending a music festival in the forest, and charged those who were from out of state with “domestic terrorism.” This is a conspicuous revival of the “outside agitator” trope used to prosecute out-of-state activists during the civil-rights movement. In a striking sign of fissures in the political class, the district attorney has withdrawn from those prosecutions, signaling her office’s belief that they indeed constitute overreach. The state’s attorney general and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have, to date, shown no such compunction.

Such a tactic is of particular concern to campus activists, including those who study out of state and those who travel as part of their research or other scholarly work. Police officers and prosecutors in Georgia have saddled dozens of protesters with that charge under purposefully vague new “critical infrastructure” laws. Leafleting activists have also been charged, ludicrously, with felony intimidation. Even more recently, the administrators of a bail fund that supports arrestees are being charged with charity fraud and money laundering.

Those unprecedented acts of blatant intimidation and political persecution demonstrate that the Georgia police and prosecutors are already pursuing the Cop City project of perfecting “21st-century policing” by testing the boundaries of allowable repression, up to and including fatal gunfire. Anti-police and anti-prison activists have seen precisely the kinds of tactics that police officers intend to practice at Cop City, in no case more clearly than the killing of a Stop Cop City activist, Manuel Terán. Also known as Tortuguita, Terán was sleeping in their tent during a raid on the encampment at the prospective site. Though the police claim Tortuguita fired at them, an autopsy showed no gunpowder residue. It did show that they were seated cross-legged at the time, with their hands in the air, when shot 57 times by the Georgia State Patrol.

In the face of this repression, members of the movement engage in their own experimentation and research. They have restored to the forest its original name in the Muscogee Creek language and documented its environmental importance in this warming city — as a heat sink, a filter for storm water, and a green space for neighbors. As an alternative form of education and training, organizers have narrated the long history of the site, from the violent displacement of its original inhabitants to its establishment as a slave plantation and then a jail farm.

The interlinked forms of depredation the Cop City project comprises — expansions of police and carceral power, corporate handouts, racialized displacement, climate damage, institutional complicity, needless expenditure — have inevitably summoned a similarly expansive movement for community justice. Native peoples and other forest defenders, abolitionists, students, teachers, the formerly incarcerated, and targets of gentrification have all joined in principled resistance. Because of the degree to which such institutional violence is routed through the culture of higher education, all academic affiliates must align with this growing movement. We must join with the forces of justice over deprivation, community over corruption, and, yes, life rather than death.