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THE QUIET ROLLOUT OF COP CITIES ACROSS THE US MEETS A GROWING
RESISTANCE  
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Victoria Valenzuela
September 9, 2024
Waging Nonviolence
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_ As Cop Cities spread to nearly every state, grassroots activists
are pushing back by forming coalitions that press for investment in
communities over militarized policing. _

No cop city on stolen land! The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe delivers
eviction notice to San Pablo Cop City, (X/@CURYJ)

 

On June 11, a week after a police training facility in Richmond,
California, broke ground, organizers from the Stop Cop City Bay Area
Coalition [[link removed]] marched to
the Overaa Construction headquarters in protest. Citing concerns over
rising police militarization and repression in the predominantly Black
and Latino area, the protesters — joined by local residents —
called on Overaa workers to boycott the $30 million construction deal
[[link removed]].

“By furthering the militarizing and surveillance of our city — and
coordinating law enforcement resources across the region, including
ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — they’re actually
making our cities into Cop Cities,” said Refilwe Gqajela, a
community organizer with the Anti Police-Terror Project
[[link removed]] in California’s Bay Area.

Gqajela said organizers in Northern California have been working to
form the coalition since the facility was announced in August 2023.
They’ve expressed their opposition at rallies and town halls
[[link removed]],
saying the money should instead be put into other programs that would
benefit the community.

Of course, California isn’t the only state where Cop Cities are
being built. The term first captured national attention in January
2023, when Manual “Tortugita” Teran was killed by police
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while protesting the Atlanta facility
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that’s displacing one of the largest urban forests.

The influx of these facilities parallels the emergence of the defund
the police movement, which — following the murder of George Floyd in
2020 — saw thousands of people across the country mobilize to decry
police violence against Black and brown communities. Within the last
five years, there has been a quiet rollout of over 80 multi-million
dollar Cop City-like facilities
[[link removed]] across the country. 

This development is raising concerns with anti-police organizers,
especially when it comes to the impact on marginalized communities and
movements. There is now a facility in almost every state and —
according to researcher and mutual aid organizer Renee Johnston — at
least 10 states have multiple police compounds. 

“This nonsense with ‘the training needs to improve’ has been on
a slow incline,” Johnston said. “2020 marks that period where, if
we’re looking at a graph, there would be a sharp uptick in how
quickly they were going up.” 

Groups like Stop Cop City Atlanta [[link removed]], Stop Cop
City Dallas [[link removed]] and Stop
Cop City Bay Area have been fighting these new police facilities in
their communities by way of canvassing, holding rallies, petitioning
and more — similar to the effort in California. 

At least seven cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, have allocated
over $100 million to their Cop Cities — and many are meant to host
international police training programs like the Israeli occupation
forces
[[link removed]].
Activists and scholars have said that Cop Cities are replicated after
Israel’s own Cop City, “Little Gaza,” where they
“battle-test” violence
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against Palestinians. This would be an expansion of already existing
police training exchange programs that many U.S. states and cities
have
[[link removed](OPT).]
with Israel
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“We’re told that police are here to serve and protect the public
and they care about the community, but I just don’t think any of
that is true,” Johnston said. “That’s why training doesn’t
work, because there is no training that you can give that’s going to
change the nature of a system.”

While Cop Cities have been rolled out largely under the radar
[[link removed]], activists
around the country have been vocal about their opposition. Many have
decried the multi-million dollar allocations to policing and called on
their local leaders to instead invest in resources needed by their
communities.

DIVESTMENT FROM POLICE, INVESTMENT IN COMMUNITIES

Tennessee lawmakers are throwing $415 million into their Multi-Agency
Law Enforcement Training Academy
[[link removed]],
an 800-acre facility to be built in a historically Black Nashville
neighborhood currently experiencing a housing crisis, extreme
displacement and gentrification, according to Erica Perry, executive
director of Nashville’s Southern Movement Committee
[[link removed]].

“$415 million is a huge amount of money, especially in a state where
we ranked low in health, literacy, education and housing,” Perry
said. “That’s extremely frustrating because we know that money
could be spent on things that would help people have healthy,
thriving, safe lives.”

In response, the Southern Movement Committee began advocating for a
proposed $10 million investment
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in the creation of an office of youth safety, community centers and
alternatives to police in schools — programs they say the community
actually needs. In June, $1 million of this budget was approved by
Nashville City Council.

“We’re trying to approach our budget work in a way that addresses
safety and creates alternative forms of safety that do not require
cops, courts and cages,” said Southern Movement Committee Arts and
Culture Director Mike Floss.

Activists in Chicago have shared similar concerns. In the years before
the planning of its Cop Academy in 2017
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the city had seen the closure of half its mental health clinics
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as well as the then-largest sweep of school closings
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in U.S. history. Naturally, many residents were outraged when the new
multi-million dollar police training facility was announced,
especially considering the Chicago Police Department already had seven
other training facilities in the area.

“Why is there suddenly this new investment available when we were
told that the city was broke, when we were asking for investments in
our own communities?” asked Benji Hart, an adult ally with the
youth-led No Cop Academy Coalition.

Chicago’s Cop Academy came after the police-killing of 17-year-old
Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times
[[link removed]] by a Chicago police
officer in 2014. Not long after, youth organizers from the Stop Cop
Academy campaign began spreading information by canvassing and passing
out fliers, as well as leading more disruptive actions like taking
over trains in large groups chanting, passing out flyers and talking
to other passengers about the campaign. They also blocked city council
building elevators. Eventually, they grew the effort into a coalition
of over 100 local organizations. 

 “The initial thought was that there has to be a challenge to this
narrative,” Hart said. “It can’t just be that the city announced
it was going to build this thing. There needed to be some evidence of
pushback and opposition to the construction, and calling for different
funding priorities on the part of the city and for investments in
community resources.” 

For many organizers, the work is about making it known that crime
isn’t the biggest threat — it’s houselessness, rising rents,
food deserts and the myriad other issues plaguing communities
competing for funds with Cop Cities.

“The safest communities in the United States are not the communities
that are over policed,” said Kamau Franklin, a lead organizer with
the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta. “They are the communities
that have resources that benefit the young people in their
communities, that give people outlets and make sure schools are
satisfactory and building your mind. Those are the ways in which these
resources could and should be used.” 

REPRESSION OF MOVEMENTS

Within the last two and a half years, local activists have been
leading the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta through canvassing,
demonstrations, rallies, town halls and creating petitions that
garnered over 116,000 signatures, growing the mobilization into a
national conversation.

They’ve faced pushback from the other side. Dozens of Atlanta
organizers have been jailed
[[link removed]]
and charged with domestic terrorism and racketeering
[[link removed]].
According to Franklin, this a coordinated effort to criminalize
activism and scare organizers. He said a large part of the facility
will be built by the end of the year, even though a poll from 2023
indicated
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that 59 percent of residents don’t support it.

Over the last year, repressive policing has extended beyond Stop Cop
City organizers to encompass Gaza solidarity student encampments as
well. Tamera Hutcherson, an organizer with Stop Cop City Dallas, said
the city council held secretive meetings and used vague language
around “public safety” to get voters to support a proposition
[[link removed]]
that gave $50 million to a police training facility. Soon after, Texas
State Troopers raided a peaceful
[[link removed]] Gaza solidarity
student encampment. 

“For students peacefully protesting, they came in riot gear and in
tactical gear, they looked like they were ready for war against
civilians,” Hutcherson said. “I think most residents are concerned
about what this means, not just for the city of Dallas, but for Dallas
county and North Texas as a whole.”

While Hutcherson said there are still not many people in Dallas who
are aware of the facility being built, she is starting to see more
conversations happen as organizers continue canvassing, going
door-to-door and making phone calls to community members. 

“Not just in Atlanta, but around the country, the militarized police
are on full display, meant basically to derail and destroy movements,
to scare people,” Franklin said. “Cop City is a way for them to
organize that policing and practice those tactics and strategies even
more so.”

In the Bay Area, Refilwe Gqajela said activists have faced increased
police and city council repression amidst their efforts to host
rallies and town halls. For example, when residents attended city
council meetings to speak out about Cop City, the normal three minute
public comment period would be cut down to one minute. The San Pablo
Police Department also shut down one of their attempted town halls at
Costa County Community College. Nevertheless, Gqajela and others have
continued to organize.

“We understand this to be a direct threat to our organizing — this
is a state repression tactic,” Gqajela said. “We know that this
isn’t just going to impact the people of San Pablo. It’s a
regional training facility to organize the policing forces in the Bay
Area to squash the kind of organizing that’s being done right now
for Palestine, for example.”

THE MOVEMENT CONTINUES

Activists vow to continue their advocacy, despite the pushback. Along
with Tennessee’s Black Youth Assembly, the Southern Movement
Committee has been meeting with Nashville city officials to get their
Varsity Spending Plan on the city council’s radar. 

“It’s our work to help people see what is happening — when it
comes to their health and education needs — is connected to the
state’s insistence on spending $415 million on this campus,” Perry
said. 

As the organizers with Stop Cop City Dallas continue to strategize and
mobilize, Hutcherson said that she sees the mobilizing of students
across the University of North Texas system as a victory. Four of the
five campuses have formed a Stop Cop City coalition of their own
[[link removed]]to
pressure administrators to back out of the partnership with the Dallas
Police Department through protests and organizing.

“We are continuing to educate the public, and also figure out and
strategize ways to continue applying pressure to ensure that this is
not built,” Hutcherson said.

The organizers with the Anti Police-Terror Project and the coalition
in the Bay Area have been holding town halls and rallies to stop their
Cop City from being built — and teachers, students, environmental
activists, residents and health care workers have been mobilized to
join the cause. They’ve also been organizing alongside the Ohlone
people, who are native to Northern California where this project is
being built and have been decrying a Cop City
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being built on their land. 

In Chicago, activists were able to delay the Cop City project, but not
its eventual construction. Undeterred, Hart said that some of the
youth organizers involved in the No Cop Academy coalition successfully
campaigned for a $21 million cut from Chicago public schools’
[[link removed]]
contract with the Chicago Police Department, which eventually led to
the contract’s end.

Around the country, activists and organizers have been building
solidarity with the struggle in Atlanta and other states, as well as
Palestine. As Hart noted, solidarity is important during this “clear
orchestrated push for militarization and hyper investment in police
— in the wake of arguably the largest protests in U.S. history
calling for the defunding of the police.”

“We need to be supporting each other across city and state lines,
and not just treating these as a bunch of little battles against
individual Cop Academies or Cop Cities,” he said. “Our response
needs to be as orchestrated as the police state’s response to our
organizing.”

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Victoria Valenzuela is an independent journalist in California
covering social justice and criminal justice issues. In the past, she
has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed News, LAist, Bolts, and
more. She is also a staffer at ScheerPost and has previously worked
with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, The Marshall
Project, and was part of ProPublica's emerging reporter cohort. She is
currently finishing graduate studies at the University of Southern
California.

* Cop City; Police protests;
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