The movement to Stop Cop City is what democracy looks like in motion. The version of democracy embodied by the Stop Cop City movement calls into existence a robust, deep, and profound system that centers on agency, participation, and self-determination. If it’s going to work, democracy must be responsive to the people’s needs, rather than elite interests. But, instead of creating channels to hear and implement the people’s concerns, the government and the police narrowed avenues for democracy and punished anyone who dared to test the boundaries.

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. It’s right there in the name: Public Safety. The facility known to its opponents as “Cop City” is pitched as an essential investment to train officers to better protect the public from harm. However, marginalized communities often experience policing as a threat to their safety and a source of harm. Which raises the question, whose safety do police officers protect?

In Episode 2 of At the Root, we explore the environmental advocacy of the movement to Stop Cop City through the words of Dr. Jackie Echols of the South River Watershed Alliance, Matthew Johnson and the Forest Defenders, and Belkis Teran, the mother of Manuel Esteban "Tortuguita" Teran, the first environmental defender killed by law enforcement in United States history.

In Episode 1 of At the Root, we learn about the history of the forest and hear from Reverend Keyanna Jones and the ways in which Cop City presents a troubling set of threats: environmental harm, militarized policing, racial injustice, and the quality of democracy itself.

This is the trailer for the fifth season of Moral Courage Radio, At the Root: Policing and the Right to Protest.

In the final episode of the fourth season of Moral Courage Radio, we learn from Noni Session, third generation West Oaklander and founder of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, who insists that we can reorient our relationship to market forces by building power together.

In a volatile housing market, lenders, investors, and landlords determine who can afford to live where. To counter instability and profit motives, some of Oakland’s local organizations take a permanent and communal approach to land and housing, using the community land trust model to keep land off the market and in community control in perpetuity. In this episode we hear from Shekinah Samaya-Thomas and Chris Thomas, two homeowners with the Oakland Community Land Trust.

Forced from their homes and banned from the streets, Oaklanders are struggling to find a place to survive. In this episode, we hear from John, a resident of Cob on Wood, an unhoused encampment supported in part by a local organization, Artists Building Communities.

Gentrification is an act of erasure against the cultural character of a neighborhood. In this episode, we hear from people working to protect and preserve the historical legacies of places they hold dear.

In the first episode of our fourth season, we meet Oaklanders who teach us about how their communities are confronting the market forces that render housing security out of reach for so many.