Garrison Davis

In contrast, the pseudo-paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only set in very late into the movement as a cumulative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics.

As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support, something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the urge to keep Stop Cop City in this sort of unalive zombie state, where you're still kind of acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local result is pretty clearly finished.

But in keeping this kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and using that for whatever comes next, which is, at this point, a burgeoning police state and right-wing power bloc.

Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist, quote, internalizing not just in terms of like lessons learned and things that you need to learn from and skill up on to keep that honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting on a larger scope than just Atlanta.

As the cops took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot of the way that ICE operations are currently happening, that necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and also go to a larger scale with them.

Also, if you never close the book yourself on this battle that you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount of trauma doing, at a certain point, this could just remain like an open wound on you forever if you let it.

And it is probably, like, unhelpful to keep seeing the movement to stop Comp City as doing a rally here, like, when it's built, it's there.

And now we need to move on to other things.

We need to move on to other things that are larger than Atlanta.

There's still a police state to engage with here.

You don't need the container of this struggle to justify going out and taking action against the police, unquote.

And there are other things happening in Atlanta.

There's ice raids happening in Atlanta in the north suburbs of the city.

Cop City is actively being inactive.

And if people want to continue stopping it, they'll have to actually stop what the effects are, which are now happening on a nationwide scale.

An early irony of the movement was that though Cop City was conceived as a training ground for police, first, it became a training ground for anarchists.

As Top Cop City became the first mass movement following the 2020 George Floyd protests, whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate

what activists have learned from the 2020 uprising, as well as influence what future movements against police expansion might look like.

Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training Center grand opening.

While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response, the state also used the movement to test out strategies for the next generation of counterinsurgency tactics, well before the Cop City facility was finished being built.