After listening to nearly 15 hours of public comments opposing the controversial project, the Atlanta City Council voted early Tuesday to provide additional funding for a police training center known as “Cop City.”
After listening to nearly 15 hours of public comments opposing the controversial project, the Atlanta City Council voted early Tuesday to provide additional funding for a police training center known as “Cop City.”
No, not really. The term is used as a dog whistle, it’s an indicator that you want to both criminalize and punish in very particular ways. “Crime” is down over the last several decades and the folks following this line have only gotten louder. “Crime” is a huge category that ranges from theft from faceless megacorporations to serial murder, there’s no such thing as just “reducing crime” as an inherently good thing. Some things are unjustly criminal and it would be good to see those crimes increase. Example: it is criminal in many places to set up an organizing and feed the homeless. Repeat offenders will get arrested, jailed, and in some places imprisoned.
“Tough on crime” is and has been a dogwhistle for the racialized criminalization and punishment of poverty, which is closer to what is happening in Atlanta. Elevating misdemeanors to felonies (criminalization), prosecuting more misdemeabor thefts from businesses, harsher sentences (more punishment). This has a history closely tied to policing in the US, itself drawing from slave patrols, Jim Crow, and an enclosure of common spaces in favor of private business interests - such as the invention of the offense of “loitering”. Cops in the US, i.e. “law enforcement” gangs, are organized chiefly around the defense of private property both reactively and proactively. They arrest people for stealing diapers but do jack about wage theft. The articles about “crime” increases nowadays are often little more than press releases by companies like Walgreens, uncritically passed on by “journalists” and used to manufacture consent for politicians to serve those business interests by more thoroughly opnishing petty thefts rather than directing focus and resources to the underlying precarity that drives it.
Poverty has been highly racialized in the US due to the legacy of creating social structures that justified chattel slavery, and the criminal punishment system is a central component of American poverty.
So when people claim to want crime reduction, what they really mean is they want more cops to protect business interests and they want the people acting against business interests to be punished and hurt even more. And, at best, they don’t care that this will disproportionately impact the marginalized, and particularly along anti-black lines.