The Atlanta Police Department has a plan to build a new $90 million “Public Safety Training Center” for their 2,000 police officers. The city argues that the facility will achieve a number of goals:
• improve morale, retention and recruitment of officers
• set a national standard for community engagement
• facilitate collaboration and joint training between the police and fire/rescue agencies
• provide a training area for high-speed vehicle chases
• provide a burn tower for firefighters to practice putting out large fires
• and provide a helicopter landing pad, a shooting range and other conveniences
In addition, the facility will include recreational areas“to the greater community with a new public space including walking paths, picnic areas, a community garden and a weekly farmers market.”
But it’s already received a ton of pushback from locals, who have dubbed the project Cop City. They include environmentalists, who are concerned with cutting trees down, and who have set up an encampment on the project’s property. Opponents also include Black activists, who feel the money could better be spent elsewhere. Some of those opposed have resorted to violence. In May, protesters threw rocks and at least one Molotov cocktail at police who were guarding the property of the proposed facility. Some of these same protesters may have been the ones who “spiked” trees to make them dangerous to cut down, and have sabotaged construction efforts in other ways.
Still, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF)—a privately-funded group that works with the city to help police officers live in Atlanta, thus fostering community policing, and also seeks to reduce crime through youth programs—continues to actively fund and support the facility, arguing that it will contain “the necessary facilities required to effectively train 21st-century law enforcement agencies responsible for public safety in a major urban city.”
Sounds like a good idea to me. Oakland could use something like Cop City. Currently, OPD’s training facilities, to the extent they even exist, are scattered across town. There’s a fire-training tower down near Jack London Square, but no place for officers to acquire the strategic skills required in high-speed chases, such as the one that occurred a few weeks ago on International Boulevard, in which a pedestrian was killed by a fleeing suspect.
Oakland has plenty of publicly-owned land where a Cop City could be constructed, for instance, in parts of the old Army Base. And here’s a partial list of other lands owned by the city. It includes the Coliseum site, which is going to be obsolete when the A’s either build their new Howard Terminal ballpark or move to Las Vegas. With all the suggestions about what could be done at the Coliseum, building a state-of-the-art training facility for OPD is one of the better ones and deserves consideration, although the Coliseum site itself is probably too small for a full-scale operation.
Of course, at the first mention of Oakland building a police training facility, the usual suspects of cop-haters will come out in droves, riling up their supporters, including the ones on the City Council who are adamantly opposed to giving money to OPD for any purpose whatsoever, even to protect peoples’ lives. To suggest to these folks that a Cop City will actually help to make Oakland safer (because cops are better trained) is a waste of time. Their minds are made up that OPD is beyond repair. The only thing they want to do with OPD is to defund it.
Still, the idea is worth considering. There’s been talk of building a new headquarters for OPD; Fife and Kaplan introduced legislation in February to demolish the current OPD headquarters on Seventh Street and replace it with affordable housing. (Even the police admit that their current building is obsolete.) Wouldn’t it make sense to take a big chunk of city property somewhere, build a brand new police headquarters there, and also include a Cop City with a beautiful new park?
Steve Heimoff