EXPLAINED: Georgia’s State of Emergency Over ‘Cop City’ Protest | Matthew Johnson | TMR

Interim director of Beloved Community Ministries Matthew Johnson joins the program to discuss the fight against 'Cop City' in Atlanta. Cop City will be the largest militarized police training facility in the country.

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Joining me now is Matthew Johnson. He is the interim director of Beloved Community Ministries down in the Atlanta area. Matthew is welcome to the program. Thank you for having me Sam. let why don't we start just with folks who are just I think hearing about cop city explain to us what cop city is. This has been something that has basically been in the works for about two and a half years if I'm not mistaken. maybe more than that. but give us a sense of what cop City hopes to be I guess. Great, this was passed through a middle-of-the-night deal that even our city council did not know about in the early spring of 2021. Only because of the work of activists was this brought to the fore. This was done by mayor Keisha Lance bottoms. well, there was the current mayor Andre Dickens who was still on the city council. that it was approved to use this land that had been a part of the city's master plan for parks in 2017 to instead be used as what would be the largest militarized police training facility in the country. The two largest police departments in the United States are the LAPD and the NYPD. This will be three times the size of the LAPD training facility. it'll be four times the size of NYPD's training facility. Meanwhile, Atlanta has about the 19th largest police force in the country. Atlanta is already the most surveilled city in the United States since Operation Shield was implemented in 2017. which was also done by the Atlanta police foundation. This cannot be separated from the fact that Atlanta is the largest or the most black large metropolitan area in the United States. where we also hold the record for the largest racial income disparity. for every one dollar of the median household income for black families, it is three dollars for the white median household income. even though Atlanta is touted as some type of black Mecca. African-Americans have a five percent chance of making it outside of poverty in the Atlanta area. What we're actually seeing is a black political class in a black upper class that has continually sold out the interests of the black working class for their own benefit. and also the thing to note is that Atlanta has held essentially so Georgia holds what I think the ranking of six for Fortune 500 companies. and you have many more moving in you've probably heard about it more so in rap songs than anything else. Bankhead Bankhead Highway is having 90 Acres taken out to be Microsoft's headquarters. Meanwhile, there's no affordable housing. and people are being continually pushed out. So what we're seeing is that this is a Confluence of factors that are probably far more impactful on the crime rate than anything else. and we've had a rising murder rate although, over the past three years, there's been a 32 million dollar increase in the police budget. so it's not really keeping us safer but it's really clearly protecting private interests. and so now let's bring this all together right. So now there was this idea to build the militarized police training facility that we call Cop City. that will be built in an area that's 80 black. that already has significant flooding issues.