Stop Cop City
Stop Cop City, also known as Defend the Atlanta Forest, was a decentralized movement focused on Atlanta, Georgia, in opposition to the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center or "Cop City". The facility was announced in 2021 as a partnership between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta, and completed in April 2025. The Stop Cop City movement has received international attention, especially after Tortuguita, a protestor occupying the disputed site, was killed by police during a raid in January 2023.
Opponents of the facility are concerned about destruction of the South River Forest and associated environmental justice impacts exacerbating economic disparities and ecological response to climate change in a poor, majority-Black neighborhood. Opponents also argue that the center will increase militarization of policing in the city—which had witnessed several protests against police violence following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.
Proponents of the training facility said that the project was necessary to fight crime and to improve police morale. They said there was no feasible alternate site for the training center and argued that the location is "not a forest".
The state charged several protestors with domestic terrorism and indicted sixty-one people for criminal conspiracy in September 2023. The protests have drawn participants from all over the United States, and many of those indicted are not from Georgia—leading the project's proponents to cast them as "outside agitators", while movement participants argue that the project will train many police officers from outside of Georgia. A petition for public referendum on the project also became embroiled in a lawsuit, and neither this nor the criminal suits had been resolved by April 2025 when the facility opened.
Background
Following Black Lives Matter protests in the US in 2014, funding for police training at all levels of government skyrocketed, and some cities proposed additional police training facilities. A similar facility was approved in New York City in 2015 following the police killing of Eric Garner, and also in Chicago following a string of police killings in that city between 2014 and 2016.In 2020, as part of the nationwide response to the murder of George Floyd, Atlanta witnessed a months-long series of protests against police brutality. Less than three weeks after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered Floyd on a public street, an Atlanta police officer shot and killed Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks, which resulted in protests, arson, and calls to defund the police.
Criticism of police and associated unrest reduced police morale. Authorities claim that Atlanta had struggled with rising crime, citing 149 homicides in 2021: the most in a single year since the 1990s. However, the city's crime compilation data showed a drop in overall crime rates and an inconclusive trend in homicides from 2009 to 2023. Advocates for the training facility said the facility would help address these problems.
The training center includes a shooting range and a mock village that led to the project being nicknamed "Cop City." The city was expected to pay one-third of the $90 million cost, with the Atlanta Police Foundation paying the rest. The eventual cost of the project was $118 million, with taxpayers contributing $67 million. The APF first proposed the 85-acre facility in 2017. According to the APF, the project provides "the necessary facilities required to effectively train 21st-century law enforcement agencies responsible for public safety in a major urban city." Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced the facility in her 2021 State of the City address.
Residents who support the construction of the training facility have said that they want a properly trained police force and hope the project would improve the quality of the Atlanta police force to make their communities safer.
Prison farm
The facility is located at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, which in 1999 the Department of City Planning recommended be preserved and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The majority of prisoners had been arrested for "public inebriation" and related crimes. Prisoners frequently went on strike to demand better food, sanitation, and medical care, and to protest the prison's habit of releasing prisoners downtown late at night with nowhere to go. Beginning in the 1970s, the prison's agricultural operations were "scaled back down to dairy and livestock—250 cows, 300 hogs, 145 prisoners—and abandoned field by field." It was closed officially in the 1990s.In the two decades before the Cop City controversy, the grassroots organization Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm advocated for converting the abandoned prison farm into a public park. Members built trails and led historical walking tours for neighbors as part of their advocacy, laying the foundation for the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest.
Opponents of Cop City have objected to placing the police facility on the site of alleged human rights violations. Environmental justice advocates and organizations have proposed that the OPF should remain a centerpiece in the urban green space called the South River Forest, citing "massive disparities" in Atlanta’s access to green space: African-American residentsincluding the area surrounding the OPFhave fewer and smaller parks.
Timeline
Cop City has been opposed by a varied coalition that includes residents and neighborhood associations as well as groups organized around racial, housing, food, and environmental justice. Plans were approved by the city in September 2021 after 17 hours of public comment from over 1,100 persons from Atlanta and elsewhere, 70% of whom opposed the project. Some expressed concern that the approval process was secretive with limited input from affected communities. The city appointed a community-advisory committee, and in 2022 Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens said that there was "a lot of room for input." The advisory committee did not include representatives from environmental groups, but does include representatives from the police and fire departments and the Dickens administration.DTF supporters led divestment movements against corporate sponsors of the APF, and four "week of action" campaigns in 2021–22 that featured live music, supply drives, skill shares, and history lessons about the area.
A portion of the South River Forest adjacent to the APF training center has also been threatened with development by Blackhall Studios—part of the Atlanta film industry. Two environmental organizations, the South River Forest Coalition and the South River Watershed Alliance, filed a lawsuit against the film studio development.
Forest defense actions
Beginning in late 2021, the contested forest was occupied by self-described forest defenders who barricaded the area and constructed tree-sits to prevent trees from being cut. Forest defenders had several conflicts with police, resulting in some arrests. They have also destroyed equipment being used by developers in the forest, vandalized property belonging to corporations connected with the APF and Blackhall studios, and committed arson. In May 2022 the corporate offices of Brasfield & Gorrie in Birmingham, Alabama were vandalized, and the message "Drop Cop City Or Else" was spray-painted on the building.There is wide variation in the political stance and approach of DTF forest defenders, and several sources describe the movement as leaderless and autonomous, with any participant able to act as they wish. Prison abolition was a strongly represented political philosophy among those camped in the forest.
In September 2022, the APF reported that it projected opening the first phase of the facility in late 2023. DTF estimated that it had delayed the project by at least a month and a half..
On December 13, 2022, a task force of multiple police agencies conducted a joint raid at the training facility site. Five people, none of whom were Atlanta residents, were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation stated that road flares, gasoline, and explosive devices were found in the area; when reporters asked police whether the explosive devices were fireworks or something more dangerous, the police declined to answer.
Fatal shooting by police
On January 18, 2023, Georgia State Troopers and other agencies launched another raid. During the raid a trooper was shot in the leg, and a Venezuelan protester, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, aka "Tortuguita", was shot and killed by police. Police stated that Tortuguita fired on them after they fired pepper balls into Tortugita's tent. Multiple groups, including other protestors, two independent journalists who had previously interviewed Tortuguita, and Tortuguita's family, have questioned whether they fired first or fired at all, pointing to the lack of body camera footage of the shooting and calling for an independent investigation. GBI conducted a forensic ballistic analysis that matched the projectile recovered from the officer's wound to the handgun found in Tortuguita's possession. The GBI said that there is no body camera footage of the shooting because Georgia State Patrol officers do not wear body-cameras.Documents released in 2025 appeared to confirm that Paez Terán shot at police, but also indicated that police may have precipitated a violent confrontation by casting forest defenders as domestic terrorists when previous conflicts had only involved fireworks and slingshots, and by escalating the encounter with pepperballs only three minutes after contacting Paez Terán.
In March, Terán's family released the results of an independent autopsy revealing that Terán was shot fourteen times while sitting cross-legged on the ground with their hands raised in the air.