'Stop Cop City' Activists Arrested In Arizona Pretty Sure Nationwide Not On Our Side

The activists were arrested while targeting the insurer covering the project.

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The effort to stop Cop City — a massive police training facility outside of Atlanta — is spreading across the country. On Monday, more than 50 activists protested in front of Scottsdale Insurance Co. in Arizona, one of the primary insurers of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the group spearheading the effort, as well as at the gated community where a Nationwide executive is believed to live. Several were arrested, including three at the insurance company and six at the gated community.

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Video captured by Truthout’s Candice Bernd shows several activists holding a sit-in at the entrance of the gated community, while handcuffed to concrete-filled tires.

For the unfamiliar, multiple groups — environmental activists, anti-police brutality activists, local schools, members of the clergy — have been protesting the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, which they call “Cop City,” for the last three years.

Via Mother Jones:

The $90 million dollar facility is 75 percent completed, according to Atlanta officials. Activists have spent the last three years using a variety of legal, political, and legislative avenues, including a referendum that generated thousands of signatures that the city refused to verify for months, to stop construction of the facility, which they believe will further expose Atlanta residents to police violence and destroy one of the last remaining urban forests in the area. Activists have mobilized support from around the country and from key players in the Democratic Party like Stacey Abrams. As a result of their work, nearly 60 percent of Atlanta voters want the future of Cop City to be determined by public vote. 

The demonstrations came at the end of the four-day Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City, in which activists from Weelaunee Defense Society gathered in Tucson to participate in workshops and discussion panels about Cop City and other proposed police training facilities. (Weelaunee is what activists call the forest surrounding Cop City, it is Mvskoke for “watershed.”)

The website for the summit explains the reasoning for holding it away from Atlanta:

The contractors, funders, insurance providers, and politicians intent on seeing Cop City through to its completion do not confine themselves to one particular city or state. The movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest cannot be limited by the boundaries of the Weelaunee Forest or the city limits of Atlanta, either. With unprecedented political repression in Atlanta–the murder of Tortuguita in January 2023, and more than 100 forest defenders facing serious charges–it is more important than ever that the movement to defend the forest resonate and spread across the country. […]

Everyday people can fight Cop City anywhere there are contractors, funders, insurance providers, or politicians with ties to the project. Thousands of people in the Southwest and along the West Coast support the movement, yet mobilizations in Atlanta can be logistically difficult for them to attend. The Stop Cop City Summit in Tucson invites greater participation from these regions, which are rife with financial and political ties to Cop City.

Atlanta will not be the only area affected by the construction of Cop City — in fact, it will have worldwide repercussions due to the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), which trains and militarizes law enforcement officers around the world — like the School of the Americas for cops — including in areas of the world where police officers are even more enthusiastic about violating basic human rights than they are here.

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Now, some may be thinking “Well how do they expect people to get on their side if they’re annoying them like that!?!? The other people in that gated community are gonna be pissed!” However, the point of protest and civil disobedience is specifically to target those who have the power to do something — and given that it’s pretty highly unlikely that an executive at Nationwide Insurance is going to be won over with a plaintive explanation for why Cop City will hurt the larger Atlanta community, the best bet activists have is, yes, being a pain in his ass until he says “Fine, you know what? Not worth it!”

The targeting is really what’s important here — otherwise you end up like the Truckers for Trump thinking that refusing to take loads into New York City in the hope that starving the people there will somehow lead to a judge determining that Trump is not guilty and doesn’t have to pay a fine. Those two things are not related! But an insurance executive and the no-good-very-bad project his company is insuring? Yeah, something can be done.

There is still a decent chance that the ballot referendum in Atlanta will go through — despite the fact that the Atlanta City Council approved a measure that will require “signature verification” on referendum petitions, which is not terrifically reliable and could disqualify legitimate signatures. A poll conducted last October found that 43 percent of Atlanta residents oppose building the facility and 38 percent would keep it (with 18 percent not knowing where they stand) — but, as previously mentioned, 60 percent want the issue put to the voters either way. People need to be able to have a say when things affect their communities in this way, so hopefully they get that chance.

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