Atlanta’s democracy disconnect

One year after organizers delivered 116,000 signatures to city hall in an effort to get the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, widely known as “Cop City,” onto a ballot referendum for voters to make their voices heard, the community dissent over the project took center stage at a city council meeting on Monday. 

“Stop Cop City” activists flooded the chambers with ping pong balls during the Sept. 16 meeting and displayed a banner reading, “Andre Dickens, you dropped the ball on democracy.” Chanting “the people will decide” and “let us vote,” citizens took over the meeting for about 20 minutes, and the city council cut the live broadcast feed. 

For hours of public comment before and after the protest, elected representatives heard from constituents about the lived experience of police brutality, including from the grieving mother of Devon Anderson, who was shot and killed by an off-duty Atlanta Police Department (APD) officer in South Fulton last month. Speakers also confronted city officials about the lack of affordable housing and resources for the unhoused, as well as environmental concerns surrounding development along the South River, including a mulch fire last week that resulted in a significant loss of fish and other wildlife. 

On Friday morning, at a much more serene and cloistered scene in the midtown offices of King & Spalding, Mayor Andre Dickens and CEOs from the largest companies in the metro area convened for the quarterly Atlanta Committee for Progress (ACP) meeting. 

Top of mind for business and political leaders was the city’s improved credit score, Dickens said in an interview with SaportaReport after the meeting, which was closed to the press and the public.  

“All of these CEOs are very excited about the city’s credit rating and how great that is for the city — what it means for the economic forecasts that come with that, which says that Atlanta is a safe bet, a good bet for the future,” he said. 

While the Dickens administration is putting an emphasis on forward-looking innovation and tech solutions that cater to business interests — considering self-driving pods for Beltline transit and envisioning a digital concierge system for those without shelter, according to the mayor’s comments after the ACP meeting — the people of Atlanta are asking the city to deliver on the basics.

The disconnect between the outcry at city hall on Monday and the rosy outlook from the Mayor after meeting with the region’s corporate leaders underscored Atlanta’s deal-making culture, which can prioritize decisions that cater to big business over the needs of its most vulnerable citizens.

In the Sept. 14 interview, Dickens highlighted the progress on the controversial public safety training center under construction in DeKalb’s South River Forest, which is on track for completion in December and has received donations from many of the companies whose CEOs attend the closed-door ACP meetings.

He said questions regarding the referendum were out of his hands, claiming some people seem to think he’s “omnipotent and all-powerful” and reiterating that “right now, the mayor has no role in this” and the process is tied up in the state courts. 

“If the courts were to tell me to tell the clerk to start counting petition [signatures], that would be music to my ears. I literally don’t have anything to do with the courts. That’s their decision,” he said.

The legal battle mounted by the city has been stagnant in the 11th Circuit court since oral arguments in December 2023, and an attorney representing the plaintiffs in Baker et al. v. City of Atlanta confirmed that the case is on hold until that court issues a decision. 

But in an email, Wingo F. Smith, an attorney at Spears & Filipovits, maintained that the Dickens administration’s goal is to “prevent the referendum from being on the ballot and to vigorously oppose any effort by its residents to stop the construction or operation of the training center in the forest.”

“The administration was worried it could lose the political fight if the Court allowed non-city residents to circulate petitions in line with the First Amendment as interpreted in nearly every other circuit court,” Smith said. “Nevertheless, the administration or City Council could choose to verify the signatures, withdraw the City’s appeal, and stop opposing the referendum at any time.”

When asked whether it was true that the city could move forward at any point to verify the signatures, Dickens replied, “You can find a lawyer to tell you anything.” 

The mayor was candid, saying that he is impatient to see the referendum effort struck down and doesn’t believe that the signatures collected will hold up during the verification process. 

“I know they don’t have the necessary number to necessitate a referendum vote,” Dickens said, citing analysis of a sample of signatures by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and other news organizations that raised questions about verifiability. The AJC is owned by Cox Enterprises, which has donated $10 million to the police training center and whose CEO and President Alex Taylor, a 2021 Chair of the ACP, reportedly heads the Atlanta Police Foundation’s fundraising campaign for the project. 

“I think they are going to be woefully short of 15 percent whenever it’s counted,” Dickens said. “If it was counted last year, I would have been extremely happy because these folks would have been defeated. But now, construction is still underway because we have a contract to fulfill,” 

When asked whether, in hindsight, he wished that anything could have been handled differently in the attempt to build trust with citizens about the construction of the facility, which has been marred by a lack of transparency, Dickens said, “No.” Then added that it would have been helpful if the benefits of the $90 million training center were more clearly communicated to residents when the project was first proposed in 2020, during Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms administration. 

On Monday, APD shared a video of the recently opened driving skills pad, built for training police and emergency responders at the site. The community stakeholders group, created to provide resident input on the police training facility, scheduled and canceled another meeting this week.

But the turn-out by Atlantans opposed to the police training center at the city council meeting that same day shows that a December ribbon cutting for the facility won’t be the end of the policing discussion between citizens and Atlanta’s elected leaders.

Many public comments lamented the absence of a process for direct democracy in the city and connected the expansion of local police budgets to the underfunding of other essential services like housing and water infrastructure and a lack of action on other problems that impact residents’ daily lives, like environmental racism and climate resilience, as well as to global issues, including the violence against Palestinians and partnerships between Georgia law enforcement and the Israeli military.

“We have two social workers for the entire county. We have 33 branches,” Fig White, a Fulton County employee who works in the library system and sees the needs of unhoused Atlantans day-to-day, said during public comment at the city council meeting. “We need resources. We can’t keep funding the police.”