Cop City

 Jeffrey St. Clair

Manuel Esteban Perez Terán was shot (13 times) and killed by Atlanta police for trying to stop one of the last remnants of public forest in black Atlanta from being leveled and transformed into a training center for police, a place where cops would be taught the same brutal tactics that were used to kill him.

After the shooting, many of Teran’s companions, some of whom had been occupying the forest for months, were rounded up and charged, ludicrously, with domestic terrorism, even though it was nightly acts of systemic terrorism descending on the streets of Atlanta that they were, in part, trying to prevent.

Cop city. It isn’t just a plan for a training ground, a kind of domestic school of the Americas in the heart of black and red Atlanta’s last forest refuge. It’s the plan for the whole city. A city swarming with police, who can detain, harass and kill with impunity. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Memphis police chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis, who’s Scorpion unit beat the life out of Tyre Nichols, once led the notorious “Red Dog” special operations squad in Atlanta, which left behind its own trail of broken bones, shattered families and dead bodies.

The Weelanunee (or South River) Forest is haunted by ghosts. The ghosts of the Muscogee people, run off their land at gunpoint two centuries ago. The ghosts of the Atlanta Prison Farm, which replaced the slave plantation house after Sherman torched the city and Reconstruction fell apart. And now the ghost of Terán. He may be the first environmental activist killed by cops in the US, as so many others have been around the world, from Ken Saro-Wiwa to Chico Mendes to Berta Cáceres. But he surely won’t be the last.

+ Doesn’t this sum up the state of policing in America: Anthony Lowe, the black double amputee shot by two LAPD cops as he hobbled away from them, had lost the lower half of both of his legs in a previous encounter with police in Texas.