Georgia Officials Target Bail Fund in Crackdown on ‘Cop City’ Protests

Plans for the roughly $90 million facility include areas for police trainees to learn vehicle skills, as well as a nightclub, a convenient store and homes, all intended to better prepare officers but also lift a police force that has been depleted of morale and manpower in recent years.

The development has been challenged not just by activists opposed to the aggressive police tactics and increased militarization of police forces that they argue the facility will support, but also by environmental advocates who want to protect a rare remaining expanse of green space near Atlanta.

Tensions came to a head during a violent confrontation between protesters and law enforcement officers in January, when a 26-year-old environmental activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was fatally shot and a state trooper was wounded.

Some of those concerned about the crackdown on protesters say that the debate over the training center has particular resonance in Atlanta because of the city’s deep ties to the civil rights movement and the role of protests in shaping the city’s identity.

“Because of our reputation, Atlanta has to set the bar in terms of what freedom of speech looks like,” said Liliana Bakhtiari, a city councilor representing the area in East Atlanta where the three were arrested, and a critic of the planned facility. “The state’s actions against us, and what they are conducting in our city, I find to be a direct threat to that legacy and to the spirit of what Atlanta is.”

Chris Carr, the state attorney general, said Georgia would press forward in prosecuting cases related to the protests. “We will not rest,” he said in a statement, “until we have held accountable every person who has funded, organized or participated in this violence and intimidation.”

But Ruwa Romman, a Democratic state representative from Duluth, northeast of Atlanta, expressed a sense of exhaustion — not just with the aggressive response to protesters, but also with the push to continue constructing the facility.

She said the project should have been paused after the shooting death of the activist, known as Tortuguita. “But,” she said, “the only message that I’m seeing being told to law enforcement is that, ‘No matter what you do, we will make sure you get whatever you need, at all costs.’”

Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.