Inside the Atlanta Training Center Critics Called Cop City

On Mondays, Atlanta firefighters climb onto rail cars parked on a stretch of track in southern DeKalb County and work a simulated chlorine leak. Down the road, police recruits spin patrol cars on a wet skid pad. Officers rappel face-first down a seven-story burn tower.

A year and a half after it opened, this is what the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center looks like on an ordinary week. The $117 million campus, which protesters spent years trying to stop and nicknamed “Cop City,” has trained about 650 police and fire recruits, according to city figures reported in May.

The fight over it hasn’t ended. It has mostly moved to the courts.

The center opened in April 2025 on 85 developed acres just outside the city limits, after roughly three years of construction. The Atlanta Police Department and Atlanta Fire Rescue train there, and police leaders say officers from outside agencies use it as well.

Before it existed, fire crews practiced driving engines and ladder trucks in grocery store parking lots and outside empty strip malls, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Recruits learned emergency driving on city streets or at borrowed sites in Forsyth County and Douglasville. Some older training buildings were in such poor shape that crews had to evacuate them.

Fire Chief Rod Smith called the new center a “monumental” improvement. Fire Rescue Section Chief Chris Grimaldi said crews can now train whenever they need to, day or night, seven days a week.

The campus includes:

a seven-story burn tower for firefighting and rescue drills
a 28-lane indoor shooting range
a mock gas station and convenience store for police scenarios
a rail line with cars donated by Norfolk Southern for hazardous materials training
a wet skid pad and closed driving course
a firehouse, classrooms, horse stables and buildings designed for active-shooter drills

Fire Capt. George Daykin told reporters the rail car drills are far more hands-on than the classroom videos crews used before. Some of those hazmat scenarios had previously been practiced only every few years, Atlanta News First reported.

Outside the mock store, officers walked reporters through a simulated arrest of a would-be robber using replica handguns. At the tower, they demonstrated the face-first rappel used for elevator shaft rescues and for reaching people threatening to jump from bridges or windows. Police Chief Darin Schierbaum has said the skills that save lives most often are basic ones: applying a tourniquet, performing CPR, stopping an active shooter.

City officials point to hiring numbers. The police department graduated eight academy classes in the center’s first year, adding 157 officers, Schierbaum said. He described the department as about 90% staffed. A spokesperson for Mayor Andre Dickens said recruitment was at an all-time high and attrition was down 16% year to date.

Departments nationwide have seen hiring rebound since 2020 and 2021, and pay, bonuses and local politics all play a part, so it is hard to isolate how much of Atlanta’s gain is due to the center. Our look at what police officers earn state by state shows how much pay varies across the country.

The cost has been a sore point from the start. Early public discussion suggested a smaller share from taxpayers, with the Atlanta Police Foundation raising private money for much of the rest. The city has also spent more than $2.8 million on litigation and consultant fees tied to the project, according to the AJC, and state prosecutors have cited about $50 million in property damage linked to protests and attacks on equipment and contractors.

The land is the other half of the story. The center sits on part of a roughly 380-acre tract that once held the Atlanta Prison Farm, which had grown back into woods over decades. Together with nearby parkland, it forms part of what conservationists call the South River Forest and many activists call by the Muscogee name Weelaunee. City officials have said the rest of the tract will remain green space.

The neighborhoods closest to the site are majority Black, and many residents live in unincorporated DeKalb County, which means they cannot vote for Atlanta’s mayor or City Council. Community organizer Cat Leatherwood has made that point repeatedly. Council member Kelsea Bond, an early opponent, has said residents were never given a real chance to shape the project.

Council President Marci Collier Overstreet, a supporter, has called the center a top-tier facility while acknowledging that the city took many wrong turns and should have done more to involve the public, the AJC reported.

Georgia State University criminologist Thaddeus Johnson, a former Memphis police captain, has questioned the spending when the city faces other needs, including homelessness. Volkan Topalli, who chairs GSU’s criminal justice department and sat on a planning advisory committee under former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, said recommendations for a broader overhaul of training and more investment in community crime prevention were not taken seriously. He left the group.

Activists gathered more than 100,000 signatures to put the project to a public vote. The signatures were never counted.

In 2023, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr indicted 61 people connected to the protest movement under the state’s racketeering law. A Fulton County judge signaled in September 2025 that the charges would be thrown out and formally dismissed the RICO case at the end of 2025, ruling that Carr needed the governor’s permission to bring it. Carr’s office appealed, and the appeal was heard in February 2026.

Carr has since obtained a separate indictment against three out-of-state protesters accused of vandalizing the Cobb County office of contractor Brasfield & Gorrie, this time with Gov. Brian Kemp‘s written backing, and has said more charges could follow.