With just over 100 days remaining until Atlanta hosts its first World Cup match, activists and local officials are pushing the city not to repeat the same “cleanup the streets” program that led up to the 1996 Olympic Games.
An estimated 30,000 Atlantans were displaced from their homes in the six years prior to the Olympics, over 9,000 homeless people were arrested, and, for a final push, Fulton County began purchasing one-way bus tickets out of the city for homeless people.
Hours after Mayor Andre Dickens and Gov. Brian Kemp, who led the Atlanta World Cup Host Committee, rang the opening bell of the New York City Stock Exchange on Monday, the Atlanta City Council unanimously passed a resolution to ensure the Fulton County Jail’s overcrowding crisis doesn’t continue to balloon in the months leading up to the first kickoff.
The legislation designates pre-arrest diversion rather than arrest as the council’s preferred policy for Atlanta police officers whenever possible. It also asks for greater data transparency from the police department to the council’s Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee regarding the use of the Center for Diversion and Services and the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative.
“The jail has become our default response to poverty and crisis, and it was never built for that. Building more beds won’t fix this,” said Trindalin Browning, the reentry and office supervisor for Women on the Rise, a local advocacy organization run by and for formerly incarcerated women.
“If we want real change. We have to reduce the number of people entering the jail in the first place, and we already know we have a solution, and that’s diversion.”
Before it was passed, District 2 council member Kelsea Bond — who introduced the resolution — held a press conference and rally on the steps of Atlanta City Hall with Browning, local activist Devin Barrington-Ward, and representatives from other local advocacy groups to stress why this legislation was needed.
“We regularly hear reports on crime statistics from APD, but that similar level of attention is not given to diversion,” Bond said. “Given the horrific crisis that we’re dealing with at the Fulton County Jail — the overcrowding — [with] the upcoming World Cup, there’s never been a more important time to … figure out what’s working and not working.”
Though the Atlanta Police Department has increased its use of the diversion center since a very slow first few months, the $3 million facility is still greatly underused, said Barrington-Ward, who is also managing director of the Black Futurists Group.
“We would not be here if the diversion center was being used at the level that it is able to be used at,” Barrington Ward said.
Located in downtown Atlanta, the diversion center sits on the bottom floor of the Atlanta City Detention Center, a 1,300-bed jail opened in 1995 in anticipation of the Olympics.
Although it is owned by the city and not Fulton County, the detention center currently houses 437 people in county custody. The county pays Atlanta $50 per person every day under a four-year lease made in 2022. The agreement is set to expire this December, but with the current jail population at similar levels as when the lease started, advocates argue the problem can’t be solved while diversion remains underutilized.
A recent report on overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia found that the progress that was made in reducing the jail population in 2023 and 2024 had been mostly lost in 2025.
The report did not rest the blame entirely on underuse of available diversion options.
It acknowledged the setback caused by Senate Bill 63 — which added 30 crimes, including 18 misdemeanors, to the list of charges requiring a judge to impose cash bail — when it was signed by Kemp in May 2024.
However, the ACLU’s analysis of jail population data from last year found 449 people incarcerated for misdemeanor charges only, more than five times the 85 people incarcerated strictly for misdemeanors in 2023.
“This is not just a public safety issue. This is an issue around poverty and the lack of prioritization of the needs of the working class that is no more apparent than in our housing crisis, which has a direct correlation to the rates of incarceration inside of our local jails,” Barrington-Ward said.
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