Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said on Thursday that the city’s new Public Safety Training Center is about 40 percent complete, and he expects construction on the site’s buildings will begin in January.
Dickens (pictured above) told the Buckhead Young Republicans that the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is nearly halfway complete, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The training center is located in Buckhead, the uptown commercial and residential district of Atlanta that has sought to become its own city, and the outlet noted that 61 percent of residents supported its construction in a March poll.
“The reality is you go out there, there’s a whole sewer system, water system, there’s retention ponds, there’s a curb that being poured this week, asphalt to be poured by Thanksgiving,” Dickens said, according to the outlet. He added, “We’ve got a whole public safety training center out there that’s happening.”
Dickens reportedly told the Buckhead Young Republicans that public safety is his administration’s “number one job” and said that “a lot hinges on how safe we are.” The outlet explained the Republicans mostly questioned Dickens about “the training center, public safety,” and “the retention of Atlanta’s police officers.”
Protests over the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center gained national headlines when a protester was fatally shot after opening fire on Georgia State Troopers attempting to clear occupied protesters from the property.
Prosecutors eventually determined that the troopers involved in the incident should face no charges in a report. Investigators also revealed that one of the troopers who fired at the protester was himself shot first, which they determined lethal force “objectively reasonable under the circumstances of this case.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R) also indicted 61 individuals who allegedly participated in the efforts to occupy the public safety training center site to prevent its construction under Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
A poll released earlier this month showed just 12 percent of Georgia voters support the “Stop Cop City” petition for a public vote on the future of the public safety center, compared to 60 percent of voters who opposed the petition and 28 percent who were unsure.
The fate of the petition effort remains clouded in uncertainty. Volunteers returned the petitions to Atlanta City Hall, but due to legal complications, they might have missed the legal window to complete the signature gathering.
Atlanta has not counted the petition signatures but did scan and upload them to a government website for public review. Under scrutiny from the media, the petition signatures appear to contain duplicate entries and entries with addresses outside Atlanta.
Activists claim they received signatures from more than 116,000 Atlantans. If accurate, this means about one-fifth of the city’s population signed and means the petition had more signatories than the 2021 mayoral election had voters.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Georgia Star News and a reporter for the Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Andre Dickens” by Andre Dickens. Background Photo “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center” by atltrainingcenter.com.
