News from Atlanta and Georgia on public safety, policing, city politics and the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
Atlanta’s $117 million training center is in its second year. The state’s racketeering case is on appeal, the Tortuguita lawsuit was dismissed and the referendum effort lost in court.
A year after it opened, the facility once known mainly for protests is training hundreds of police and fire recruits. What happens there day to day, what officials say it has achieved, and why critics remain unconvinced.
The movement against Atlanta’s public safety training center began with a 2021 land lease and grew into one of the longest-running protest campaigns in the country. A timeline of how it started.
Cities have long treated tree cover and public safety as competing goals. Planners and researchers increasingly argue the two can be designed to work together.
Atlanta’s public safety training center opened in 2025 after years of protests. What its opening changes for the city, and why opponents say the fight is not finished.
Long before the protests, the South River Forest was a former prison farm and a rare stretch of green space in southeast Atlanta. How it became the center of a national fight.
An 85-acre police and fire training campus in DeKalb County, the facility cost far more than first announced. What it includes, who paid for it, and where the “Cop City” name came from.
In January 2023, environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, was shot and killed by Georgia state troopers during a raid on the forest encampment. What happened and what followed.