In late 2021, Atlanta decided to build a massive police training facility on forested land at the edge of the city, which was quickly dubbed “Cop City” by its opponents. The decision to pursue the project was made largely by the local political and business interests who have, in practice, long governed the city—a setup that is usually labeled “the Atlanta Way.” The prime mover behind the Cop City coalition was the Atlanta Police Foundation, a nonprofit funded by local corporate interests (a connection Joy James and Kalonji Changa documented in Inquest). The effort to oppose Cop City—and the use of the criminal legal apparatus to label activists as terrorists and conspirators—has been extensively documented, here and elsewhere.
The extensive RICO indictment brought by the state of Georgia against dozens of Cop City protesters as well as a number of loosely affiliated progressive organizers—and recently, after two years of proceedings, dismissed by the judge—contains a barely literate summary of the “Anarchy Background” of the anti–Cop City movement. This section of the indictment implies that Atlantans had never before protested the city’s police. Yet in reality, the Stop Cop City activists are part of a 150-year tradition of protest against the Atlanta police, and its close tie to the Atlanta Way, that began with the force’s formation in 1874.
As I’ve written elsewhere, seeing today’s protesters as part of a long history of resistance to police oppression allows us to better appreciate the political continuities over the past century and a half, and to see where openings for potential change may appear.
From the very beginning, Atlanta’s white leaders saw controlling the city’s Black population as a vital component of economic growth and development and decided that a modern police force was necessary to achieve that goal. During the decades following the Civil War, Atlanta’s white elite developed an ideological framework that connected criminal activity to Blackness and concluded that crime could only be prevented by active policing and harsh punishment on the local chain gang. Despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirements of formal racial equality, Atlanta’s leaders allowed police and local officials to use their discretion to enforce ostensibly color-blind state and local laws to achieve white supremacist outcomes. But Black activists challenged this elite consensus and demanded resources for the Black community rather than police violence and endless arrests.
To tell this history of policing and development in Atlanta, which culminates in the alleged conspiracy against Cop City, it is necessary to start in the years when a modern police force remained a distant fantasy of Atlanta’s first post–Civil War mayor.
Atlanta’s contemporary police force first developed in the decade after the Civil War from the pre-war “City Marshall” office. After emancipation, Atlanta’s white leaders recognized that the City Marshall, which employed only a handful of deputies with a wide variety of duties, would be insufficient to govern the growing city that they hoped to create. On January 3, 1866, newly elected mayor James E. Williams told the city council that “suppression of crime . . . especially such as may be attributable to the changed station of the negro” should be a top priority. He argued that, without slavery, local government would have to take on the role of the plantation and control Black Georgians. “To this end,” he concluded, “it will be our highest duty—to have a police of the greatest possible efficiency. Upon this more than else depends the security of our persons and property, the good name and prosperity of our city.” Williams’s rhetoric would, in a sense, create the mold for generations of Atlanta’s white political leaders to come, who would as a matter of course connect white supremacist policing to economic growth and to Atlanta’s future as a shining example of the New South.
But change did not come immediately. Over the next eight years, Atlanta made piecemeal reforms to the City Marshall’s office, for example removing its duty to regulate weights and measures. Nevertheless, as the Savannah Daily Advertiser noted with some irony in 1871, Atlanta’s officers “receive a dollar for every offender they arrest, wear citizens’ clothes, and are poorly paid, which, considering that Atlanta is the chief city of the South, is not flattering.” A modern police force would not arrive until Atlanta received a new charter in 1874 that created the force that polices the city to this day.
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The structure of the new police force answered the Savannah newspaper’s complaints. Policemen would now receive an increased salary, wear uniforms, and no longer receive fees for arrests. The most important change, however, was organizational. The new force was hierarchical, with a single police chief at the top, and devoted to discipline and to crime control. Although there was no legal requirement that police officers be white, the city did not hire its first Black policeman until 1948.
The police force grew in tandem with the city itself. In its first 15 years, the department expanded from 26 officers to 118, and Atlanta grew to be the largest city in Georgia and the second largest in the South. The city’s boosters frequently claimed that for Atlanta to become a regional leader, a strong police force was necessary to crack down on the crime that, in the words of the police chief, resulted from the fact that “our city is crowded with idle profligate negroes”—a statement legible within a white supremacist culture that promoted the racist stereotype that Black people are naturally idle, preferring crime to hard work.
After the creation of Atlanta’s modern police, arrests climbed rapidly, increasing 60 percent in the force’s first year. By 1900 the arrest rate for Black residents was roughly three times higher than that of their white counterparts. The disparity among women was even starker: Black women were approximately eight times as likely to be arrested as white women. The arrest rate for Black Atlantans peaked in 1901. That year, 11,502 Black men, women, boys, and girls were arrested, comprising 64.5 percent of total arrests. Atlanta’s Black population was approximately 36,000.
Atlanta’s astronomical arrest rates were not the result of a high level of violent crime. Instead, Atlanta’s police officers used their discretion to arrest Black residents for the same minor, order-maintenance offenses that were used to criminalize working-class people everywhere. From the perspective of the police, the virtue of disorderly conduct and similar violations was that they were discretionary “catch-all” offenses and could be employed to clean up the streets with little risk that the arrestee would be acquitted. Police took advantage of the fact that, in this period, there were effectively no constitutional restrictions on the vagueness of local ordinances. In every year in the late nineteenth century, drunkenness and disorderly conduct together comprised the majority of arrests. When the crime of “idling” (i.e., loitering) is included, the proportion of public order arrests is even higher. It peaked in 1904, when 83.5 percent of arrests in Atlanta were for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, or idling. Atlanta’s new, modern police force had been created to ensure that Atlanta became a successful modern city—which meant keeping Black residents at work, at home, or in jail.
After being arrested, Atlantans were booked into the dungeon-like jail beneath the police station. One newspaper noted, “Many a hardened criminal immured there would gladly have pleaded guilty to any crime” to be released. The next day, the accused would appear before the Recorder’s Court. The Recorder’s Court had jurisdiction over all offenders against city ordinances and had the power to arraign those who violated state laws. The recorder could exercise essentially unreviewable discretion to punish offenders with fines up to $100, a term of imprisonment of up to six months, or up to one year on the city’s chain gang.
Due to Atlanta’s high arrest rate, the Recorder’s Court was extremely busy. As early as 1872, twenty-two cases per day came before the court, but the caseload increased quickly with the creation of the police force. On one day in 1909, the court adjudicated a record 160 cases. Consequently, contemporary notions of due process had no place in the Recorder’s Court; trials lasted, at most, a few minutes. Defendants were allowed to be represented by counsel and to call witnesses, but nearly all defendants appeared without an attorney and approximately 65 percent of defendants had no witnesses testify in their defense. Consequently, most cases came down to the testimony of a police officer against the testimony of the accused. Reformist attorney Alexander Akerman described what happened next: “The result is inevitable. The prisoner is promptly found guilty of one or more of the charges, fined beyond his ability to pay, and in default thereof hustled to the chain-gang.”
This system of fines and chain-gang labor materially benefitted the city. In 1903 the value of fines paid amounted to almost a quarter of the police department’s budget. As early as 1875, the Police Committee argued that when “the benefit derived to the City from the labor of the Police Court convicts are considered, it will be readily seen that the actual expense [of the police force] is greatly reduced.” The next year, another committee reported that while it was regrettable that so many Atlantans violated the law, “we believe that these convicts furnish the cheapest and most efficient laborers we can get for our streets and we recommend that measures be taken to secure by legislation their continued service.”
From the earliest years after emancipation, however, Black Atlantans, like today’s anti–Cop City activists, challenged this elite crime and policing consensus. While there were important differences along class lines within Atlanta’s Black community, there was widespread agreement that white leaders were unjustified in connecting crime to Blackness. As W. E. B. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, declared in a 1904 study, “the Negro is not naturally criminal.” Du Bois and others instead attributed crime to the social conditions in which Black Southerners were forced to live.
Part of those social conditions, Black Atlantans argued, were the city’s police and punishment systems that served only the interests of the white elite. The Black writer who attacked the police most aggressively was Alonzo W. Burnett, editor of the aptly named Weekly Defiance. Burnett labeled the police “low down cut throats, scrapes and murderers” whose sole aim was to enforce white dominance. He challenged Black Atlantans to protest, asking: “Are we going to be murdered like dogs right here in this community and not open our mouths?” Though Burnett was more radical than most, he was not alone in criticizing police violence. Other Black writers attacked specific aspects of the criminal legal system. Du Bois, for example, attacked the chain gang, arguing that, when convicts were forced to labor, punishment became “a means of public and private revenue rather than . . . a means of preventing the making of criminals,” and the city was incentivized to arrest as many people as possible.
Atlanta’s Black working class was often more direct in its resistance to racist policing, engaging in what historian Tera Hunter calls “collective self-defense.” Working-class Black Atlantans frequently defended their neighbors by running off policemen as they attempted to make arrests for petty crimes. For the individual rescued from arrest, these collective actions could mean retaining a week of wages or avoiding a week on the chain gang and thus being able to see one’s spouse and children and keep one’s job. Such actions were so common that the Atlanta Constitution reported in 1883 that “whenever an officer visits a negro locality to make an arrest the negroes congregate and do all in their power to prevent the officers from doing their duty, and a hundred occasions the mobs have stoned the police.” Two weeks later, the Constitution reported that after an officer arrested a “small negro boy,” the boy’s mother and a half dozen other Black women surrounded the officer and successfully demanded the boy’s release.
The history of law enforcement in Atlanta over the past century and a half has been characterized by a cycle of racist policing in the interest of the city’s economic elite and resulting protest against that system. Taking the long view, one could assert the so-called conspiracy against Cop City began in 1874.
Police violence, and the use of discretion to lock Black Atlantans up for petty offenses, have remained central to Atlanta’s political-economic structure since the Civil War. Even as the city’s Black majority gained political office after the civil rights movement, white business interests ensured that the status quo remained largely the same. This alliance, of course, is not unique to Atlanta and studying this relationship between business, politics, and policing can help open paths to effective change. But any effective action requires a firm understanding of the history and institutional relations of the police. Understanding the continuity of oppression alongside the continuity of resistance can help us imagine a path forward away from the racist policing made concrete in Cop City.
Image: Police officers mounted on horses along Alabama Street in Atlanta, Georgia, c. 1905. From the Atlanta History Center’s Atlanta History Photograph Collection. Public domain.
