"Stop Cop City" movement can't put Atlanta police training center on the ballot, court rules
Activists attempting to shut down the now-open Atlanta Public Safety Training Center through a citywide vote suffered a significant setback in federal court last week.
The 85-acre, $115 million project, nicknamed "Cop City" by opponents, officially opened last April. It features multiple mock buildings for officers and first responders to train for specific scenarios, a burn building, a shooting range, horse stables, dog kennels, and more.
Opponents say the facility will worsen police militarization and harm the environment in a flood-prone, majority-Black neighborhood. The debate over the training center embroiled the city and captured national attention, especially after state troopers fatally shot an activist protesting near the project in 2023.
In 2023, thousands of volunteers collected more than 108,000 signatures to put a referendum on whether to revoke the city's lease of the property on the ballot that year. The initiative turned into a court battle that has stretched on for more than a year after city attorneys argued that non-Atlanta residents couldn't gather signatures and that the referendum was prohibited by Georgia law.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals made its ruling on Friday, with one of the three judges dissenting. While the three judges disagreed with the city's argument that the case was now moot because the center was already created, they found that the four plaintiffs could not show "irreparable harm."
The court pointed to the Supreme Court of Georgia's 1998 Kemp v. City of Claxton case, in which the highest court in the state ruled that the petition procedure "applies only to amendments to municipal charters," not city ordinances like the one that created the training center.
"In other words, the plaintiffs and the coalition sponsoring the petition can not use the referendum process to repeal a local ordinance," the appeals court judges wrote in Friday's decision. "And because no petition for referendum can lie to repeal a local ordinance, the plaintiffs necessarily will not suffer any irreparable harm from being denied the right to gather petitions for a referendum process that is unavailable to them as a matter of state law."
With the court's ruling, the injunction is vacated, and the case has been remanded to a lower district court for further proceedings.
The thousands of signatures gathered in the effort remain uncounted by the city.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.