Atlanta residents opposed to the public safety training center being built in South River Forest — known as “Cop City” — protested its construction by dropping 116,000 ping pong balls during a City Council meeting on Monday.
Each ball was meant to symbolize one signature that organizers said they gathered for a petition to hold a ballot referendum to allow Atlantans to vote on the controversial facility, which would cost at least $67 million.
Last Wednesday marked a full year since the petitions were submitted to the city clerk. The signatures have yet to be counted.
“I feel disappointed and I feel activated,” said Christina Lazare, an East Atlanta resident who signed the petition and canvassed in her neighborhood to get others to sign.
Cop City has been polarizing since former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced the project in her 2021 State of the City address. While some believe it will allow better training for law enforcement, opponents feel it will further militarize the police, exacerbating the brutality experienced primarily by Black Atlanta residents.
Lazare was one of dozens of residents who spoke during public comment at Monday’s council meeting to ask that her signature be counted.
“This has activated me to speak up more, to fight more,” she said. “It shows the importance of why we all need to register to vote.”
In order to get an issue on the ballot, a petition needs to be signed by 15% of registered Atlanta voters — or 58,231 signatures. Only people who registered for the most recent general election, which took place in 2021, were eligible to sign.
An independent review of the petitions performed by The Associated Press, WABE, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Georgia Public Broadcast counted 108,500 signatures. A statistical analysis done on 1,000 signatures found just more than half matched a registered city of Atlanta voter, meaning it is possible enough signatures were collected to get the issue on the ballot.
The push for Cop City Vote
Cop City’s opponents began to mobilize almost immediately after the facility was announced in 2021 — less than a year after the respective police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks sparked widespread protests. The movement, dubbed Stop Cop City, united racial and environmental justice activists who opposed the city building the training center in one of the area’s largest remaining forests.
Last June, days after the City Council voted to approve $67 million in funding for the project, a coalition of local activists, community organizers, and residents launched Cop City Vote, a petition campaign to get Cop City on the ballot.
“It was the right thing to do a year ago,” said Jacqueline Echols, president of the South River Watershed Alliance. “Because if you don’t care about the environment, maybe you care about the vote.”
Echols’ organization has been involved in the movement to cease Cop City’s development since its inception, claiming its construction is polluting nearby Intrenchment Creek. The organization has tried to persuade the Environmental Protection Agency and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to intervene by enforcing the Clean Water Act.
Petitioners had 60 days to collect the required signatures, and the signatures had to be collected by an Atlanta resident. However, because the training center is being built outside city limits in unincorporated DeKalb County, a few people who live in the neighborhoods surrounding Cop City sued to be able to collect signatures, too.
A federal judge ruled in favor of the DeKalb residents and extended the deadline for 60 days.
In December, lawyers for the city argued in front of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that the judge ruled incorrectly and therefore they are not required to count or verify the signatures because they were not submitted within the original 60-day timeframe. By that time, Atlanta had spent $1.3 million on legal services and consultant fees related to the case.
“[The city doesn’t] even have the respect to look at our signatures. Instead, they’re spending over a million dollars of our money fighting not to count our signatures,” said Maryam Ahmed, an Edgewood resident who volunteered to collect signatures for the petition last summer.
The city won’t begin the signature verification process until the 11th Circuit Court makes a decision. While there is no timeline on federal rulings, organizers expected a decision to have been made by now.
“I think that the city has given up [its] power to the 11th Circuit Court in order to say that they have no responsibility and they can’t do anything,” said Mary Hooks, a local activist and community organizer.
Hooks was the first person to sign the petition last summer, and also helped to deliver the signed petitions to the city clerk’s office. Since then, Hooks has continued to organize with Stop Cop City and put pressure on the city to begin the signature verification process.
“[City] Council could today put this thing on the ballot,” Hooks added.
“Politicians are clamoring for people to get out and vote in November, yet there are 116,000 signatures sitting upstairs and no action is being taken,” Echols said while waiting for Monday’s council meeting to begin.
Some activists feel the refusal to count the signatures is more than just a failure of leadership; it’s a failure of local Democrats to keep their promise to protect voting rights.
In February, the City Council unanimously passed legislation for a referendum on a 1% sales tax to fund water and sewage projects. The referendum was held on May 21 during the primary elections.
“The fact that they have been unmovable [on the decision to count signatures] says to me that they did not sign up to represent the interests of the people,” Hooks said.
The office of current Mayor Andre Dickens did not respond to requests for comment.
