#Atlanta community members warn of #environmental damage from ‘#CopCity’

The police training facility will harm the endangered South River and further contribute to #EnvironmentalRacism

by Ray Levy Uyeda June 15th, 2022

“Jacqueline Echols loves to take Atlanta residents kayaking on the South River, which begins at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and flows 63 miles into Lake Jackson. Echols says that it’s fun to bring people out on the river who have never paddled before. The river is shallow and bordered by undergrowth and native trees, rich soil, and the occasional deer, making it an unintimidating classroom for those new to the water.

“‘The South River and the green space around it have a lot to offer,' Echols says. 'If you’re going to invest in a community, the first thing you invest in is green space.'

“But in Atlanta, a privately funded police foundation is working double-time to expand the police’s reach at the cost of the community’s access to the city’s rich environment. The river and its surrounding forest have become the site of a major battle playing out in Atlanta between the city’s police department, backed by many members of the city council and county leaders, and the residents of the neighborhood adjacent to the #SouthRiverForest. At issue is whether or not nearly 400 acres of the #forest will be handed over to the police department to construct a new training facility, which activists have renamed 'Cop City' because of the proposal to build a mock city on the grounds for training. The facility will be constructed on 85 acres of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, where incarcerated people once grew food for those detained in the city’s jail.

‘’’#Green space holds value more than any other land, and [when] the environment goes, so does the community,' said Echols, who is also board president of the South River Watershed Alliance, an advocacy organization for the fourth-most endangered river in the U.S. 'What’s going on with the prison farm … is just devaluing people, devaluing communities, devaluing the #environment, and they’re doing it because these are very vulnerable communities, marginalized people, and they can get away with it. You know, they can’t get away with it in [a wealthy white area like] #Buckhead.’”

#SaveWeelauneeForest #StopCopCity

Read more:
https://prismreports.org/2022/06/15/atlanta-environmental-damage-cop-city/

Some background about the Weelaunee Forest and #StopCopCity

The New Fight Over an Old Forest in Atlanta

The plans for an enormous police-training center—dubbed Cop City by critics—have ignited interest in one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces.

By Charles Bethea, August 3, 2022

"Three years ago, Joe Santifer, a Black man in his early fifties, moved from the wealthy north Atlanta enclave of Buckhead to Glen Emerald Park, six miles southeast of the city’s downtown. Santifer, who owns a computer-consulting firm, raised triplets in Buckhead—all three are now in college—but his new neighborhood, he told me, is where he’d always wanted to live. He was attracted to its 'collage of humanity,' he said, and also its proximity to the #SouthRiverForest, one of #Atlanta’s largest remaining #GreenSpaces. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black part of unincorporated DeKalb County. 'Most people in Buckhead couldn’t find it on a map,' Santifer said, chuckling.

"After he moved, Santifer began making frequent visits to what he called a “verdant oasis,” where he often saw deer and rabbits. The forest also bears traces of the people who have lived in and around it over the years. Exploring by bicycle recently, I came upon giant stones with “HOMER,” “POE,” and “VIRGIL” carved into their nearly overgrown façades—relics from Atlanta’s old Carnegie Library, discarded here sometime after it was torn down, in the late nineteen-seventies, when the forest was a de-facto city dump. Underground are the much older remains of the Muscogee Creek people, who lived in what they called the #WeelauneeForest until they were forcibly removed by white settlers in the eighteen-twenties and thirties. Later, the forest was home to what has been called the “finest plantation in the county,” and the site of a famous Civil War battle.

"In 2017, the South River Forest was designated as one of four major city “lungs” in a report titled “The Atlanta City Design,” put together by Atlanta’s city-planning department. The report’s lead author was Ryan Gravel, a Georgia Tech alum whose graduate thesis led to the creation of the city’s ballyhooed BeltLine #greenway. Gravel and his co-authors envision the South River Forest as a great urban park and conservation corridor. The city council formally adopted the plan, and Gravel began working with the Nature Conservancy to make it a reality; in March of last year, a two-hundred-acre parcel surrounding a drained lake three miles south of the prison farm, which could have become another landfill, was approved for permanent preservation.

"Then, the following month, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, made an announcement: the area around the prison farm was going to be the site of a sprawling training facility for police and firefighters. This, Gravel said, was “a big surprise.” Many people in Atlanta were startled by the news—including Joe Santifer, who told me that he’d already been bothered by the police presence in the forest. For decades, the Atlanta P.D. has operated a firing range there, and, on his forest strolls, Santifer had begun hearing gunfire. Even from a distance, he said, it “sounds like a battleground.” He e-mailed a complaint to the city, and, a few days later, he got a response: “Call 911.”
[...]
"Other cities have lately built or proposed similar facilities, but, at eighty-five acres, Atlanta’s would be much larger than nearly all of the others. New York City, for instance, has a thirty-acre facility for a force fifteen times the size of the Atlanta P.D. The A.P.D. facility’s planned features include a firing range, a “vehicle skills pad,” a “burn building” for firefighters, and a “mock village” for staging simulated emergencies. It’s slated to cost around ninety million dollars, with a third of that money coming from public funds, and the rest coming from the Atlanta Police Foundation."
#StopCopCity

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-new-fight-over-an-old-forest-in-atlanta