Policing Atlanta

Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

In Spring 2025, after a four year-long opposition movement, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Facility (Cop City) opened for business. In the most surveilled city in the U.S. with the most well-funded police foundation, Cop City highlights Atlanta’s role as a testing ground for new spaces and infrastructures of policing. In response, the Atlanta Abolition Research Collective formed in 2024 to serve as a home for research on Atlanta’s geographies of policing and incarceration. In our first article, we present a broad review of the history of policing in Atlanta across four periods. We begin with the violent policing and containment of Indigenous life and land in the 18th and 19th centuries. We then examine how policing worked to reproduce the threatened colonial gendered-sexual-racial order and coerce labor from newly freed peoples after emancipation. Third, we identify the emergence of a more racially integrative mode of policing that obscured yet extended the inherent violence of policing in the postwar period. We next trace the development of militarized policing during Atlanta’s neoliberal turn, when austerity measures worked with policing to prepare the city for gentrification. In the penultimate section, we provide a brief introduction to policing in Atlanta in the 21^st century, focusing on three roles: the protection of property, the disciplining of immigrants, and the violent repression of protest. We invite other scholars and abolitionists to connect with us by conducting research in conversation with this agenda or suggesting new questions and collaborations for our collective.