In 2018, Tiffany Roberts, a 42-year-old lawyer, joined the Southern Center for Human Rights, a venerable civil-rights organization based in Atlanta. She had been a criminal-defense attorney moonlighting as an organizer for most of the previous ten years and now had a sense, based on a host of overlapping developments and controversies, that something terrible was about to happen.
Eleven months earlier, Georgia lawmakers had expanded the legal definition of domestic terrorism to include damaging certain types of property — deterrence aimed at the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, which had also inspired a wave of state bills that sought to give motorists immunity for hitting protesters with their cars. The backlash from lawmakers came just as the movement for Black lives was getting bolder, setting up a potential confrontation that could be far more explosive than anything Roberts had experienced. “The tactic of floating legislation that would authorize violence was emboldening folks who wanted to harm Black folks,” she says.
That confrontation erupted in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis. Opponents of police brutality in Atlanta and other cities flooded the streets, and their cries for justice, which had mostly gone ignored, suddenly had the support of a majority of Americans and the ears of lawmakers in statehouses across the country and on Capitol Hill. It is estimated that anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people participated in demonstrations that spring and summer, making it the largest protest movement in American history and an uncommonly multiracial one. While some people broke windows and set cop cars on fire and some politicians called for harsher crackdowns in response, the protesters appeared to be winning in the court of public opinion. Despite the underlying rage over Floyd’s death, it was a time of extraordinary hope and promise.
The significance of the uprising was felt acutely in Atlanta, where Black politicians and business leaders have long held sway but a Black underclass was still routinely brutalized by the police. The vaunted Atlanta Way was premised on the notion that a Black ruling class, with the help of white moderates, could make the city a site of stability, growth, and equality — an object of envy for its peers in the South and beyond. Now, Atlanta’s mandarins had to confront reality: Less than three weeks after Floyd’s death, a Black man named Rayshard Brooks who had been drinking fell asleep at a local Wendy’s drive-through and was killed by the cop who tried to arrest him. Brooks’s slaying further undermined Atlanta’s reputation for balancing civil rights with commerce and order. The mayor at the time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, recognized the problem. “The biases are still there,” she lamented at a CNN town hall.
But even amid this reckoning, Roberts saw signs that the city’s tolerance for disruption was limited. “There was already a political push to paint all of the protests as violent,” she says. “I didn’t think there was any way that Georgia was going to escape that.” Atlanta’s response to the George Floyd protests was heavy-handed from the start: nonviolent demonstrators kettled en masse, nearly 600 people arrested in just two weeks in June. The Southern Center was already embroiled in statewide fights against jail overcrowding and the death penalty. Now, it had to help huge numbers of detained protesters connect with defense attorneys. It went surprisingly well at first. The Center helped negotiate amnesty deals — 20 released here, 40 there — and charges were eventually dropped against most of the 2020 demonstrators. Still, Roberts was concerned by how officials were fixated on characterizing the protests as a foreign conspiracy. “That really wasn’t a Black protest,” Bottoms claimed dismissively.
Roberts started to suspect that officials were using these protests as a test. How many people could they criminalize at once? And would the crackdown be met with an outcry? It was not. On the contrary, the city’s response to the unrest was praised on television by soon-to-be-President Joe Biden. Roberts’s suspicions that the protesters had become targets were validated that summer when some demonstrators burned down the Wendy’s where Brooks had been killed and set up an occupation amid the rubble. After an 8-year-old was killed that July near one of the makeshift barriers, the mayor’s political opponents rushed to blame the death on Bottoms’s failure to maintain both order and police morale during the protests.
The central demands of the movement — which ranged from defunding the police entirely to merely reducing the outsize footprint of a draconian criminal-justice system — were quickly forgotten. The whole point of the Floyd uprising was not only to insist on an end to wanton police brutality but also to call attention to the way cops were being asked to address too many glaring social problems, such as poverty and mental health, that could be better handled without guns or jail. When urban crime briefly spiked during the pandemic, panicked officials who had previously expressed sympathy for the Floyd movement quickly shifted to spending even more resources on law enforcement. And no initiative symbolized that pivot more ostentatiously than Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center — what critics refer to as Cop City.
From the get-go, Bottoms’s 2021 announcement that an 85-acre plot of city-owned forest would be converted into a $90 million training facility, including a mock city for policing drills, was met with resistance. Police had already been using this area in unincorporated DeKalb County, seven miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, as a firing range — the pop-pop of live rounds could be heard by people taking walks along the forest trails — but nobody involved with the plan felt obligated to consult residents in neighboring communities. “We don’t want to spend six-to-nine months on hold while we are doing citizen engagement,” said David Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the pro-cop nonprofit that has been coordinating the project.
In September 2021, the city council heard more than 17 hours of mostly negative public comment focusing on both the project’s eye-popping reinvestment in cops and its environmental impact — the forest, one of the largest in any urban area in the U.S., acts as a protective sponge for flooding. The final vote was 10-4 in favor.
Cop City immediately became one of the first major tests of the post-Floyd political order. People had spent 2020 begging for an end to abusive policing. The city responded the next year with a massive expansion of the police state. And the project’s biggest supporters — a slate of power brokers that ranged from the mayor’s office to the corner offices at Home Depot and Delta Airlines — envisioned the facility as a national model and hub where cops from all over could travel to refine their tactics.
Protesters from around the country trickled into the city only to be faced with what had grown to be the most aggressive crackdown on activism the U.S. had seen in decades — a forerunner of the harsh police actions that have featured so prominently in the recent campus protests against the war in Gaza. Mass arrests became commonplace in Atlanta. Criminal penalties for protesting got harsher. Officials smeared dissidents as “violent agitators,” language Jim........