Some background about the Weelaunee Forest and #StopCopCity

The New Fight Over an Old Forest in Atlanta

The plans for an enormous police-training center—dubbed Cop City by critics—have ignited interest in one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces.

By Charles Bethea, August 3, 2022

"Three years ago, Joe Santifer, a Black man in his early fifties, moved from the wealthy north Atlanta enclave of Buckhead to Glen Emerald Park, six miles southeast of the city’s downtown. Santifer, who owns a computer-consulting firm, raised triplets in Buckhead—all three are now in college—but his new neighborhood, he told me, is where he’d always wanted to live. He was attracted to its 'collage of humanity,' he said, and also its proximity to the #SouthRiverForest, one of #Atlanta’s largest remaining #GreenSpaces. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black part of unincorporated DeKalb County. 'Most people in Buckhead couldn’t find it on a map,' Santifer said, chuckling.

"After he moved, Santifer began making frequent visits to what he called a “verdant oasis,” where he often saw deer and rabbits. The forest also bears traces of the people who have lived in and around it over the years. Exploring by bicycle recently, I came upon giant stones with “HOMER,” “POE,” and “VIRGIL” carved into their nearly overgrown façades—relics from Atlanta’s old Carnegie Library, discarded here sometime after it was torn down, in the late nineteen-seventies, when the forest was a de-facto city dump. Underground are the much older remains of the Muscogee Creek people, who lived in what they called the #WeelauneeForest until they were forcibly removed by white settlers in the eighteen-twenties and thirties. Later, the forest was home to what has been called the “finest plantation in the county,” and the site of a famous Civil War battle.

"In 2017, the South River Forest was designated as one of four major city “lungs” in a report titled “The Atlanta City Design,” put together by Atlanta’s city-planning department. The report’s lead author was Ryan Gravel, a Georgia Tech alum whose graduate thesis led to the creation of the city’s ballyhooed BeltLine #greenway. Gravel and his co-authors envision the South River Forest as a great urban park and conservation corridor. The city council formally adopted the plan, and Gravel began working with the Nature Conservancy to make it a reality; in March of last year, a two-hundred-acre parcel surrounding a drained lake three miles south of the prison farm, which could have become another landfill, was approved for permanent preservation.

"Then, the following month, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, made an announcement: the area around the prison farm was going to be the site of a sprawling training facility for police and firefighters. This, Gravel said, was “a big surprise.” Many people in Atlanta were startled by the news—including Joe Santifer, who told me that he’d already been bothered by the police presence in the forest. For decades, the Atlanta P.D. has operated a firing range there, and, on his forest strolls, Santifer had begun hearing gunfire. Even from a distance, he said, it “sounds like a battleground.” He e-mailed a complaint to the city, and, a few days later, he got a response: “Call 911.”
[...]
"Other cities have lately built or proposed similar facilities, but, at eighty-five acres, Atlanta’s would be much larger than nearly all of the others. New York City, for instance, has a thirty-acre facility for a force fifteen times the size of the Atlanta P.D. The A.P.D. facility’s planned features include a firing range, a “vehicle skills pad,” a “burn building” for firefighters, and a “mock village” for staging simulated emergencies. It’s slated to cost around ninety million dollars, with a third of that money coming from public funds, and the rest coming from the Atlanta Police Foundation."
#StopCopCity

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-new-fight-over-an-old-forest-in-atlanta