Activists have flocked to Atlanta to fight plans to build a police and fire training complex in an urban forest. Officials say the complex would ‘reimagine’ policing. Critics say it would train officers in urban warfare and destroy public woodlands.
‘We may descend into a dangerously failing country’: Police militarization amid protests spreads concernDuring a January raid, a Georgia state trooper shot and killed 26-year-old activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán. Authorities said Paez Terán, a Venezuelan who had studied at Florida State University in Tallahassee and went by the forest name of Tortuguita, fired first and injured a trooper — a charge activists dispute.
On March 5, after hundreds had gathered for a week of action, about 100 protesters left a music festival, changed into black and camouflage clothing and chanted, “Viva, viva Tortuguita” as they breached the construction site.shows activists lobbing rocks, Molotov cocktails and fireworks at retreating police. Protesters also set fire to heavy construction equipment and the base of a transmission tower that supplies power to downtown Atlanta, including Grady Memorial Hospital.
Jeffrey Simms, 61, a retired fishery biologist from Tucson who flew to Atlanta to join his 21-year-old daughter and volunteered to negotiate with police on behalf of the activists, said he was not surprised by the militancy of some protesters. Bluebird said that she had not participated in destroying property or attacking officers, but that she agreed with her new friends’ message and was happy they had incited fear in the police.
Environmentalists and urban planners worked on a plan to link the site — in a working-class area southeast of Atlanta that is home to landfills and newer prisons — to neighboring forests to create a 1,200-acre network of public green space.
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