Atlanta Fights to Save Its Forest  – UNICORN RIOT

Atlanta, GA – A harsh refrain of chants and drums erupted within the late afternoon silence of the upscale Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, Georgia, Monday, punctuated by the pops of fireworks and the barks of canines.

A bunch of 30-40 protestors chanting “Cease Cop Metropolis!” converged on the house of Shepherd Lengthy, Principal of Lengthy Engineering, an engineering agency subcontracted to do surveying and different pre-construction work on the Atlanta Police Basis’s Public Security Coaching Heart, at the moment scheduled to open in late 2023.

One member of the group learn aloud a ready assertion demanding the corporate pull out of their contract with Brasfield and Gorrie, the final contractor employed by the Atlanta Police Basis, the challenge’s major architect. “We would like our kids and neighbors to have the ability to breathe clear air and expertise the vastness of the Atlanta forest, NOT be victims of a home conflict zone,” they shouted. “You’ve the facility to cease that.”

The group distributed fliers alerting neighbors to the work Lengthy and his firm are doing in DeKalb County. Of their ready assertion, the protestors made a transparent request of Lengthy: “We maintain no sick will in the direction of you personally, we simply need you to make this one proper resolution. We all know Lengthy Engineering has many different contracts with many different firms. We’re solely right here to ask you to drop this one firm, Brasfield and Gorrie, till they drop their contract with the Atlanta Police Basis.”

After about ten minutes, the group shortly dispersed with out incident.

Representatives of each Lengthy Engineering and its father or mother firm, Atlas Technical Consultants, LLC declined to touch upon the protest.

“Week of Motion” vs. “Cop Metropolis”

The occasion was one in all many happening throughout a ‘week of motion’ towards the proposed coaching facility organized by the Defend the Atlanta Forest marketing campaign. The week’s schedule contains meals, discussions and tenting within the Atlanta Forest in addition to live shows, protests and movie screenings within the metropolis.

Activists from all through the nation have converged on Atlanta this week to oppose the development of the police coaching facility and the destruction of the forest upon which the challenge relies upon. Dubbed “Cop Metropolis” by its critics, the 85-acre police coaching facility carries a price ticket of $90 million for its preliminary part. In September, 2021, Atlanta’s Metropolis Council permitted a proposal to assemble the power inside an enormous swath of forested land in unincorporated DeKalb county southeast of Atlanta. 

The actual parcel of land slated to grow to be a police coaching heart is the previous house of a city-run jail farm, which operated within the space from 1920 to 1989. The power was used to deal with prisoners from Atlanta who have been pressured to work on the farm elevating meals for the town’s jail inhabitants. Since its closure, the town has maintained its possession of the land, utilizing it as a dumping floor whereas the forest round it slowly engulfed its collapsing carceral infrastructure.

Different sections of the forest are additionally at risk of destruction. Blackhall Studios, which operates a big campus for movie and tv manufacturing close to the forest, owns a number of tracts of land in and close to the Atlanta Forest which it lately swapped with DeKalb County. In alternate for his or her land, the county has granted Blackhall forty acres of forested land known as Intrenchment Creek Park simply west of the deliberate police facility.

The corporate plans to raze the forest to construct a $400 million movie studio to develop upon its present holdings within the space. The ensuing studio could be the most important within the state and would solidify Georgia’s new place because the “Hollywood of the South.” Environmental teams have filed a lawsuit looking for an injunction towards the swap, claiming that the deal made by the county was illegal.

A various coalition of organizations and people have coalesced in an try to forestall the destruction of the forest on a wide range of grounds—environmental advocacy, racial justice, police and jail abolition, indigenous rights, and the preservation of city inexperienced area. Resistance to the challenge has taken a wide range of shapes, from lawsuits and lobbying to building of barricades, sabotage, claims of tree spiking and occupation of the forest. Even a kids’s group has gotten involved within the marketing campaign. 

Environmental organizations, such because the South River Forest Coalition, have opposed each the police facility and the Blackhall swap, arguing towards the lack of inexperienced area, the destruction of forested land within the midst of local weather change, and the influence on water high quality and wildlife. The group Save the Outdated Atlanta Jail Farm has proposed an alternate imaginative and prescient for the forest, which features a canine park, group gardens, sports activities fields and a nature protect.

Those that oppose the growth of police energy have additionally come out towards the Atlanta Police Basis’s challenge, inserting it throughout the lineage of the growth of the “prison-industrial complicated.”  Such critics declare that the coaching facility will additional develop police militarization within the aftermath of nationwide calls in the summertime of 2020 and past to defund and even abolish policing infrastructure.

The proposed police coaching facility is slated to incorporate a “mock village” with a “fuel station/financial institution, bar/nightclub, college, residential properties, residences…park/splash pad” and “coaching warehouse” for coaching in police techniques.

The plans have raised issues that one factor the power is meant to do is prepare officers to place down city insurrections resembling people who occurred within the wake of the homicide of George Floyd in 2020.

Indigenous activists have additionally opposed the power’s building. In November 2021 and April 2022, Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek) individuals and different Indigenous activists gathered within the South River Forest, historically known as Welaunee, to have interaction in a “re-matriation” course of with the land. Welaunee, which implies “inexperienced/brown/yellow water,” was historically Mvskoke land earlier than a collection of wars, forcible elimination and coerced and one-sided treaties lastly pushed them from their land one 12 months earlier than the founding of DeKalb County in 1822.

Instantly after Mvkoke dispossession of the land, the tract that later turned the Jail Farm was acquired by George Key, who ran it as a plantation fueled by the pressured labor of African slaves till it was bought by the Metropolis of Atlanta in 1911. 

Lengthy Engineering is one in all a number of contractors focused by the marketing campaign to defend the forest. The coaching facility’s basic contractor, Brasfield and Gorrie, employed Lengthy Engineering to survey the location and supply different pre-construction assist.

In March, the Atlanta Police Basis quietly introduced that Reeves Younger, one other subcontractor employed for “preconstruction land prep,” had “concluded its work.” The announcement got here after the corporate was the goal of a robust strain marketing campaign demanding that it withdraw from its contract to help within the destruction of the forest. Protestors paid a go to to Reeves Younger’s corporate office and reportedly chased their employees out of the forest and attacked their gear. 

These opposing the power shortly declared victory, claiming that the corporate had pulled out of its contract due their marketing campaign. “The APF [Atlanta Police Foundation] would have us imagine that Reeves Younger was contracted to do nothing greater than rent a bulldozer and stroll alongside Lengthy Engineering work crews as they planted a couple of surveying stakes and did some soil testing,” the group main the marketing campaign wrote in a press launch.  

The Defend the Atlanta Forest marketing campaign’s week of motion has additionally included workshops, cultural and leisure occasions, yoga lessons and even a clothes swap. On Might 11, cyclists gathered on the Intrenchment Creek Trailhead for a gaggle bike ride across the Atlanta Forest. 

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