Report-back from April Actions Against Cop City in NYC

4 min readMay 20, 2024

Football lovers and Cop-City haters UNITE!

During the last weekend of April, the connections between cop cities in Atlanta and NYC were made blatantly visible yet again—in farcical fashion. This time the Atlanta Police were recruiting police officers in NYC. Really hard to build a Cop City when you can’t find any cops, huh?

For those who are unaware, Cop City is a proposed $90-million state-of-the-art police training compound in Atlanta, Georgia, and a Hollywood movie complex. Building it would require clearcutting 381 acres of forest in Atlanta. The compound would train cops from around the world in militarized police tactics, and is built with the express purpose of suppressing Atlanta’s Black and working-class communities. Its construction is financed by the Atlanta Police Foundation and corporate patrons like Cox, Coca-Cola, Delta, the Koch brothers, and Home Depot. This police training center is enormous. If built, it sets a precedent for funding expanded policing, surveillance, and violent repression across the country. It would be twice the size of already oversized police training facilities in New York and Los Angeles, and serve as a national model of police militarization and budgetary bloat. The project would destroy precious forest, which Atlanta needs in order to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Ads recruiting for the Atlanta Police in the New York City Subway 🤮

On Saturday, April 27, Stop Cop City United players and other comrades and collectives from across NYC gathered at the Downtown Brooklyn Marriott Hotel to show the NYPD, APF, and APD (as well as the pushy and belligerent hotel worker who called us “clowns”) what folks in New York think of the ever-expanding carceral infrastructure from the Weelanee Forest to Lenape land. Comrades gathered in front of the hotel wielding signs, banners, and squeaky toy pigs. The night before, anonymous folks had released living crickets into the hotel, and so while demonstrators handed out flyers to passerby and hotel guests, both were greeted by the chant: “There’s bugs in this Marriot! Crickets in this Marriot! Ew!”

There was no amplified sound, but our voices were strengthened by one vuvuzela. NYPD Community Affairs aggressively corralled demonstrators, telling them that the small strip of land outside the hotel connecting to the next street was “private property,” even though it is technically “privately-owned public land,” a land fiction that could only be concocted by a criminally corrupt municipal system eager to privatize all that exists. Cops repeatedly whipped out a long tape measure, threatening the lively assembly with summonses for the alleged infraction of “being heard” at the doors of the hotel from less than 100 feet away. After about two hours, the group disbursed, heading to various Palestine solidarity encampments across the city. Some others went to the local police precinct to conduct jail support for a comrade who was arrested earlier for putting up flyers in the hotel.

Our efforts continued into Sunday, where we hosted a birthday party for Tortuguita, a forest defender who was murdered by Georgia state troopers on January 18, 2023. Tortuguita was shot at least 57 times while they were in a seated cross-legged position during a raid of the Stop Cop City encampment in the Weelaunee forest. On Sunday, we were joined by our friends, Queers Gambit, in a night of community, remembrance, and dedication to the fight for liberation from ATL to NYC to Gaza. Soccer-shaped candles topped multiple birthday cakes while we collectively sang and blew out Tortuguita’s candles. The night included soccer and chess matches, the distribution of zines and resources, meals for those who wanted them, and camaraderie.