Join community members at 5pm under West Asheville Park's upper pavilion for a potluck followed by a performance with Atlanta singer-songwriter Raury. Activists involved in the historic movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest will offer an in-depth overview of the campaigns.

Cop City is a proposed $90 million+ police training compound backed by the Atlanta Police Foundation and its corporate patrons. At over 300 acres, Cop City will be the largest police training facility in the United States and is slated to include a mock city where police will train with firearms, tear gas, helicopters, and explosive devices to repress protest and mass unrest, much as they did during the 2020 George Floyd protests. Cop City will hyper-militarize law enforcement, equipping police with a site to train for the suppression of Atlanta's diverse Black and working-class communities.

Slated to be twice the size of already oversized police training facilities in New York and Los Angeles, Cop City, if completed, will serve as a national model of police militarization and budgetary bloat. The land slated for development into Cop City has long been the site of racialized violence: the land was violently stolen from the Muscogee (Creek) nation, later became the site of a 19th century slave plantation, and was a forced labor camp (the Old Atlanta Prison Farm) as late as the 1990s.

Note: This info session is not taking place at our bookstore—it’s in a park! If you can make it for the first half of the event, please consider bringing a vegan and gluten-free food item to share.