The Cop City project has become a national flashpoint for the struggle against police excesses and the underfunding of social programs and organizations. In this episode we go deeper into some of the background behind Cop City, and what it means for the city of Atlanta to make these funding choices, at the expense of defunding social programs. Our guest is Ariana Brazier, a Black queer feminist mom who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the intersections of housing insecurity and the ways that Black children and families play – in Atlanta. We’ll be talking about Ariana’s piece for Scalawag Magazine that draws a direct line from the 2017 closure of the region’s largest homeless shelter Peachtree-Pine, and plans for creating Cop City. The piece is called: “The Taking of Peachtree-Pine and the Dawning of Cop City: The same rhetoric about safety surrounding Atlanta’s increased criminalization of homelessness and closure of the biggest shelter in the Southeast is being used to defend Cop City.”

Read Ariana Brazier’s piece on Peachtree-Pine: https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/05/peachtree-pine-cop-city/

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