Honor Tyre Nichols: Stop ATL’s dumb ‘Cop City’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

”These are the good old days,” Carly Simon sang famously on 1971′s “Anticipation.” The NY-raised publishing heiress clearly was not a Philly sports fan, not back then when the Eagles were in the tank and the Sixers were on the brink of an NBA record for losing. But times have changed! Philadelphia has reached a World Series, an MLS Cup final, and now a Super Bowl in less than five months. These are the good old days. Savor every second.

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The lead story on CNN and other news outlets on Monday morning — after a weekend in which America struggled to process the utter senselessness of a Memphis cop beating that killed 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man — was that calls for “police reform” are again accelerating.

The headline struck me as — to use a phrase that normally makes me cringe — “fake news.” Those calls had been much louder and more forceful after a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd in 2020, and yet only a scattered hodgepodge of local-level reforms have even been attempted. Talk that President Joe Biden and Congress will revive a stalled federal bill to curb police brutality crashes into the blue wall of an inevitable filibuster by Senate Republicans. The nation’s weariness was reflected last weekend in relatively small protests, compared to the millions who marched nearly three years ago.

But if American leaders are serious in claiming that things are truly going to be different this time — that we are finally going to begin dismantling a deeply entrenched and militarized police-state culture that is drenched in white supremacy and treats Black and brown communities like occupation zones — then I know exactly where this project can start.

In the city that gave the world Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — Atlanta, Georgia.

There, of all places, law-enforcement leaders backed by the business and political establishment are using brute force and now demagogic false claims of “domestic terrorism” to impose a $90 million monument to everything that is wrong about police culture in America: a massive training center that will scar a vital urban forest with a mock city where cops will learn to put down unrest after the inevitable next Tyre Nichols or George Floyd.

Civic leaders are determined to forge ahead with the 85-acre project they call the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, which they claim is needed to “effectively train 21st-century law enforcement agencies responsible for public safety in a major urban city” — a city where a whopping one-third of the municipal budget is now spent on cops like the ones who gunned down Rayshard Brooks during a 2020 scuffle in a Wendy’s parking lot.

In this case, two-thirds of the funding for the project that opponents have rebranded as “Cop City” is coming from a private foundation whose board includes executives from Atlanta’s biggest corporations — Home Depot, Delta, Georgia Pacific, Wells Fargo, even Waffle House. So much for “woke capitalism.”

Cop City embodies the reality that there was never a movement to “defund police” in America, that instead an unholy alliance of late-stage capitalists, reactionary cop unions, and the craven politicos who beg for their cash and endorsements are doubling down after George Floyd on a repressive regime.

Ironies abound. It’s remarkable that the Cop City brouhaha has coincided with critical acclaim for filmmaker Sierra Pettengill’s stunning new documentary, Riotsville USA, which uses archival footage to show how America responded to urban unrest in the late 1960s over issues like police brutality, not by bringing relief to the neighborhoods held back by discrimination but by building two — wait for it — mock cities to train cops on suppressing civilian protests. You won’t be shocked to learn that one of these “Riotsvilles” was at Fort Benning ... in Georgia.

But the rot of the Cop City plan runs deeper than the repeating history of Riotsville or the facility’s location near the former site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, which was marred during its 20th-century run by racialized violence. Indeed, the plan for Cop City almost reads as if that new ChatGPT AI tool was asked to “describe a project that epitomizes everything wrong with modern America,” since it seeks to train Atlanta’s militarized police force at a facility that would take down irreplaceable forest wetlands that protect against climate change.

Who are the politicians backing Cop City so afraid of? Apparently not everyday voters, because much of the Atlanta public doesn’t want this. In 2021, more than two-thirds of the residents who spoke out over 17 hours before Atlanta’s city council were against the project. What’s more, Cop City is opposed by mainline environmental groups like the local Sierra Club, which has attacked not just the deforestation but the “huge investment into a system of policing and militarization that has already proven to be dangerous in this city and around the world.”

And yet most of America would have never heard of Cop City were it not for the hearty — and wildly controversial — small army of mostly young, left-wing environmental activists who’ve built encampments in the forest as part of a “Stop Cop City” effort to physically prevent the bulldozers that would clear a path for the training center. These treehouse-dwelling eco-warriors have kept Cop City in the news, but by using aggressive tactics that more mainstream Democrats from what I call “the Biden coalition” find it hard to endorse.

Those contradictions were heightened on Jan. 18 when a confrontation between heavily armed riot cops seeking to clear the protest area and the “Stop Cop City” activists ended with a Georgia state trooper fatally shooting one of the demonstrators — 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known to their comrades as Tortuguita, or “Little Turtle.”

The official police version is that Tortuguita had a gun and fired a shot that wounded the trooper, and that their killing was an act of self-defense. But we’ve seen far too many cases — like the Memphis murder of Nichols, who was described as experiencing “shortness of breath” — where the initial cop statement is a lie. The Georgia troopers — who claimed the officer wasn’t using a body cam — need to produce more than words for anyone to believe them.

But the murky circumstances around the killing — and the subsequent anger-sparked protest which included broken windows and the burning of a police cruiser, catnip for the producers on Fox News — are the backdrop that has made politicians and out-of-town liberals reluctant to oppose this monstrously bad project. Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has worked to build on this vibe by labeling the protesters as “domestic terrorists” — a misuse of authority that appalls legal experts and shows once again how the nexus of a post-9/11 national security state and militarized policing gets turned against political dissent.

Watching how police officers trained under the same mindset that wants to construct Cop City savagely beat the innocent Nichols to death ought to be a game changer. True, stopping Cop City would be only a small first step on a long journey toward reversing a warped policing culture built around social control, not keeping the public safe. But it’s a necessary step. Any politician who’s out there mouthing platitudes about “reforming the police” but not opposing Cop City is not a leader but a hypocrite.

Question: How exciting the Eagles are going to the SB! How depressing to see that a blue collar worker can’t afford to see them win in person! Over $9,000 for nosebleed seats! What’s your take? — Via Renée Ross Pratta (@ReneePratta) on Twitter

Answer: Sadly, Renée, the last affordable Super Bowl was probably the first one in January 1967 at the L.A. Coliseum, where fans paid an average of $12 a pop to watch the Kansas City Chiefs lose (as they will in 2023) and also some flying-jetpack dude — and even then the stands were one-third empty. Since then, the Super Bowl has become an orgy of conspicuous consumption for corporate-zombie pseudo-fans. Thankfully, true believers in the Birds have the pixels of modern high-def TV for what really matters — watching the game here with our loved ones and some gloppy five-layer nacho dip, which beats the heck out of sitting in a row of brain-dead lobbyists in Glendale. Yes, the Super Bowl ticket prices are outrageous, but I worry more about the cost of attending a random baseball game in June.

The great Inquirer sports columnist Mike Sielski was probably right Sunday night when he posited that this version of the Philadelphia Eagles is the best in its history. Their demolitions of the New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers by a combined margin of 69-14 were clinical and — let’s be honest — a tad boring by the end. It might be different against Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, but it was a lot different on the day the Eagles won the very first of their four NFL championships, on Dec. 19, 1948, at Shibe Park in North Philadelphia.

It was the last NFL title game played in leather helmets, and one of the first on this newfangled device called television. But that wasn’t the most incredible thing about the title rematch between the Eagles and the Chicago Cardinals, who’d downed the Birds at an ice-covered Comiskey Park in 1947. A last-minute blizzard (remember those?) belted Philly before the 1:30 p.m. kickoff, and the players from both teams and fans from the stands were drafted to drag the snow-laden tarp off the field. It was then the Eagles noticed who was missing: their superstar running back, the future Hall of Famer Steve Van Buren. The quirky Van Buren — said to be a descendent of pirates, born on an island off Honduras — was frantically taking a trolley, two subways, and walking through the drifts on Lehigh Avenue, desperately trying to get there on time.

Of course, if you peeked at the picture above, then you know that Van Buren would produce one of the greatest moments in Eagles’ history before the day was done. Triggered in 2010 by the controversy over the Eagles postponing a game at the Linc against the Vikings in an otherwise forgettable storm, I researched the unbelievable story of that 1948 pre-Super Bowl-era game and eventually wrote a short e-book for Amazon called “Give It to Steve!” I even had the privilege of spending some time with Van Buren himself, not long before he died in 2012 at age 91. The success of that 1948 team — at a moment when the city was brimming with returning vets and the blue-collar jobs of an ascendant middle class — is the beginning of a love story that ends with thousands of crazed people jamming Broad Street and climbing greased street poles. We didn’t start the fire, and learning Van Buren’s nearly forgotten exploits will make you swoon for today’s Eagles even more.