Every year our school budget goes up for a popular vote. I would like to see that happen with the police budget.
85 acres is enormous. I think the Met Police in London (much bigger than Atlanta) manage with about a tenth of that amount of real estate, and that includes the Gravesend public order training area as well as Hendon Police College.
But the London police probably aren't so scared of real cities that they need a fake city for training.
160 acres is about as small as a corn field can be.
3: that is pretty much what Gravesend is - it's a fairly small city, admittedly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Specialist_Training_Centre
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2014/jun/24/police-riot-training-in-fake-kent-town-in-pictures
I spent a very enjoyable few days there many years ago learning how to do dramatic things like ripping the doors off cars and breaking into Tube carriages.
How many donut shops will there be in Cop City?
The really weird ones are places like Copehill Down and Imber which are used for urban combat training. Imber wasn't purpose-built; it was an actual functional village until 1943 or so when the inhabitants got moved out because it was needed for the war effort and just...never allowed to go home again.
They open it to the public about once a year, so the former inhabitants and their descendants can go to a service in their old village church.
ripping the doors off cars
TELL ME MORE.
A lot of the time, if the car's upright, it's easier just to rip the roof off.
If Cop City has a replica school, it will probably be one of the best funded public schools in Atlanta.
So how do you get your kids into it?
Get stealing an electric scooter to be classified as grand theft auto, then have one of the kids do that?
And none of it will be built up to code so it can't possibly be converted to housing later. Or so I would assume.
It sounds like it's massively unpopular but sailed through the Atlanta city council.
The mayor ran in favor of it and was just comfortably reëlected, so maybe we shouldn't take at face value claims of unpopularity put forth by people who have zero evidence of mass support for their positions.
I had more cranky things to say, but I decided to look into the forest, and , the very center of which would be taken for this*. So yeah, while I find the "forest protector" language extremely dubious--look at that map, it's a patch of woods amidst suburbs, not the last refuge of the snowy fucking owl--it's not pure pretext as I had suspected.
TBH Bouie nailed it the other day, tweeting something to the effect that police are beyond democratic ratio control at this point. Genuinely don't know how to fix that. We have not convinced a majority that cops are bad and need to be brought to heel.
*if you click the link, the undeveloped dark green area right in the center is the proposed site
Also I have no idea what "ratio control" means. All I meant to type was "democratic control", not sure how it autocorrected and entire additional word.
When people reply to your tweet but don't favorite or retweet it in similar proportions, that's ratio control. It's a core part of cancel culture, much worse than book banning. To put the police under ratio control is to subject them to the woke mind virus, the only virus for which vaccines are an acceptable public health measure. Thankfully, Lord Tesla, the Grand Wizard of Space Travel, Next Ruler of All the Planets, the Alt Right Honorable Elon Musk, is putting a stop to all ratios.
14: $90 million to build 85 acres of city from scratch? They'll be lucky to get cardboard cutouts.
I got curious about this and it's a way to procrastinate at work, so here goes. I found this site, which lets you draw boxes on maps and get their area. I started by drawing a box of 85 acres on my neighborhood (85.17 to be exact), estimating that there are 50 houses on my block, and estimating that there are 15 blocks like mine in the box. 50 x 50 = 750, 90 million / 750 = $120,000, and based on estimates I've got from a contractor for work, $120,000 would be on the right general scale for houses but still very cheap for building a house from scratch.
But wait! This site says that there are 32,379 homes in my neighborhood. If I redraw that box around my entire neighborhood, the total area is 178.76 acres. that divided by 85.17 is 2.1. 32,379 divided by 2.1 is 15,427, a huge difference from the my previous mental math. If that's the right number to divide $90 million by, they'd only have $5,834 per house. We're talking about literal cardboard houses.
But is that a fair number? According to Statista.com, my home city has a population density of 10,984 people per square mile and Atlanta has a population density of 3,848 people per square mile. I'm finding it difficult to get neighborhood-level density information, but if we just assume my neighborhood is typical of my city, then it's 2.85 times denser than Atlanta. So it would be reasonable of them to spend that much more per house, or $16,653. So... not cardboard but maybe shipping containers?
Here's a map of the proposal. Who knows how accurate, but let's take it as representative.
First, if that's the 85 acre tract, then half of it is simply untouched. Second, you can see there's a huge power line stripe through it (reinforcing my previous skepticism that "first" is really the best term for this--it's suburban woods amongst a bunch of sprawl).
Of the remainder, it's mostly open space: a driving loop, parking and lawns, and a dozen or so buildings. The idea that they're constructing a mockup city for practicing urban warfare or whatever appears to be complete bullshit from the protestors, which brings me back to the crankiness I was feeling at the start of 15. If this site plan is correct, it looks like the urban training area is literally 4 blocks with some buildings on it, although there's also a huge warehouse-looking thing that may host an indoor version.
"Don't cut down trees" protestors are the worst. They've been holding up the only major rail project in this country for decades by systematically lying about it, and they'll probably end up getting it cancelled completely.
As for the shooting it's worth noting that a police officer was shot in the stomach in the same incident. The GBI say that the gun used was owned by the protestor who was killed, and they can prove it through transaction records and bullet comparison. Now of course they may be making all that up, but while police go to great lengths to justify shootings, actually putting a round into their own stomachs seems a bit much.
24. Protesters aside, HS2 north of Birmingham is a pure vanity project. Upgrading the existing track would be cheaper and give better results. HS2 won't be able to use existing city centre stations, so it won't be easy to integrate it with public transport networks, and they're already saying that ticket prices will be beyond most non-business passengers' budgets.
On the other hand, it's providing opportunities for a lot of interesting archaeology.
"HS2 won't be able to use existing city centre stations"
This simply isn't true. It's running to Crewe and Manchester Piccadilly.
I thought Piccadilly was in London.
24: A prominent NIMBY with alcohol problems on the SF board of supervisors got his start as a student at UC Santa Cruz borrowing from his trust fund to sue the university for cutting down trees to build student housing.
Let's not blame alcohol just because consuming it associated with violence, ill health, and poor decisions.
To 15
The mayor ran in favor of it and was just comfortably
reelected, so maybe we shouldn't take at face value claims
of unpopularity put forth by people who have zero evidence
of mass support for their positions.
Dickens is in his first term. Lance Bottoms served until 2022. I'd be a little less confident in your statements about this if you aren't in Atlanta.
31: Sorry, was mis-paraphrasing an Atlantan. I actually ignored the story until an Atlantan that I follow and (roughly) trust spoke up.
I'm not aware of any polling on cop city. I don't think it's particularly a factor in electoral politics. The support or opposition will vary quite a bit by area and demographics.
I don't think popularity, or lack thereof, is the deciding factor here. I think cutting down forest is a bad idea and I think further strengthening and empowering the police is a bad idea. So I don't Atlanta to build cop city, regardless of popularity.
"Now of course they may be making all that up, but while police go to great lengths to justify shootings, actually putting a round into their own stomachs seems a bit much."
Spoiler that's not really a spoiler because it's always true: The cops made it all up. Shot their own guy and blamed it on the unarmed protester they killed.
Yeah. That's the way they run things these days.
