Stop Cop City with Jesse Pratt López & Nolan Huber-Rhoades

For the past couple of years, the City of Atlanta, George, has been pushing forward a project nicknamed "Cop City" — a tactical training compound featuring a mock city which has been referred to as a kind of war base where police will learn military-style maneuvers. The 90 million dollar compound would be built on somewhere between 60 and 300 acres of forest in Atlanta — a space known as the Weelaunee Forest, one of the largest urban forests in the country.

As a result of this controversial and extremely unpopular development, a grassroots response has taken shape to stop "Cop City." One of the responses has been by those known as forest protectors, forest defenders, or tree dwellers — activists who have camped out in the forest hoping to stop the clearcutting, bulldozing, and destruction of the forest from happening. On January 18th, one of these forest protectors, known by their forest name "Tortuguita," or "Little Turtle" was killed by police during a raid in the forest.

This killing has launched the story of "Cop City" — and the grassroots movement fighting against it — into national and even international headlines. In this episode of The Response we've brought on two individuals who are part of that movement to break things down for us.

Jesse Pratt López is a photographer, documentarian, and organizer involved in the stop cop city movement based in Atlanta. Nolan Huber-Rhoades is a community journalist and filmmaker currently working on a documentary on "Cop City" who has also been covering the events since April of 2021.

What are the forces behind "Copy City"? What has the community response looked like — not just to the development itself but also to the brutal police response which has terrorized those protecting the forest? And how does the Stop Cop City movement bring together police abolition, climate change, land back, surveillance capitalism, and the right to protest all in one place? We explore all of these questions and more in this episode with Jesse and Nolan.

Resources:

• The Atlanta Solidarity Fund
• GoFundMe for Family of Manuel "Tortuguita" Páez Terán
• Food not bombs Atlanta
• Community Movement Builders
• Defend the Atlanta Forest
• Little Turtle's War published by Bitter Southerner

You can find Jesse Pratt López on Twitter and Instgram & Nolan Huber-Rhoades on Twitter and Instagram.

Episode credits:

• Host, producer, and editor: Robert Raymond
• Presenter and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Theme Music: "Meet you on the other side" by Cultivate Beats

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