Garrison Davis

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

On April 29th, 2025, after almost exactly four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the construction of a state-of-the-art police training facility dubbed Cop City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially opened atop of the South River Forest in DeKalb County, Georgia.

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open.

A handshake between Governor Brian Kemp and a relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

The opening of the $118 million complex for police, fire, and E911 personnel, which includes academic, leadership, and simulation centers, came after not months, but years of public pushback.

This is It Could Happen Here.

I'm Garrison Davis.

I've been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest, Stop Cop City movement on this show since 2021.

I first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from inside of the protest encampments in spring of 2022, and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story more in depth in 2023.

My coverage has tracked the trajectory of the movement, as well as my ability as a reporter.

But this will be my last piece on the Stop Cop City movement.

Every other report or miniseries I've done on Stop Cup City was written while the movement was still ongoing, and the final outcome had yet to be fully determined.

Something that set the movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations of other anti-police, anarchist, or leftist struggles.

I believe that we will win and Cop City will never be built were common terms of phrase, and not just repeated mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed.

But now, six months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want to use this distance to offer a look at the whole movement, based on interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists, and force defenders, analyzing the movement's rise and fall in momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge between the 2020 protests during Trump's first term

and the current expansion of police surveillance, ICE activity, and increased state repression against quote-unquote radical left terrorists.

We don't have enough time to retread a complete, in-depth play-by-play of the movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to break down the movement into a series of discrete phases.

After organizers learned about the plans to build Cop City in April of 2021, the movement to defend the Atlanta forest first took form with an opening attack phase throughout the entire summer of 2021.

With tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to develop at the time in partnership with local government.