Opponents of Atlanta's police training center have been giving public comment for 8 hours (Update: 'If you build it, we will burn it')

Today is the day the Atlanta City Council is scheduled to vote to approve $30 million for the new police training center which opponents have dubbed “cop city.” Since this is their last chance to stop it, the opponents are going all out. That means showing up in numbers to offer a seemingly endless number of public comments denouncing the plan. The vote was supposed to take place at 1 pm but protesters have been haranguing the city council for about 8 hours.

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More than 350 people signed up to give remarks during a public comment period ahead of the vote.

In the first few hours, the vast majority of the testimonies were from people against the facility. Many said the center would not make the city safer but would perpetuate military-style policing and encourage use of force.

The legislative body voted in favor of amending its agenda to allow for more people who missed the sign-up period to speak.

They showed up a few hours before the start of the meeting and chanted in the atrium of the building.

Once the comments began it was just every left-wing agitator in the Atlanta area repeating the same talking points. Here’s a member of the Atlanta Democratic Socialists. Instead of investing in police training he wants to end crime by eliminating poverty. That should be easy.

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This woman has started an enemies list.

People in the room and online were excited when an EMT got up to criticize the plan. He was identified as a member of the DSA’s Marxist Unity Group.

They’ve already promised that even if they lose, the movement will go on.

This guy makes it pretty clear that they’re just going through the motions now but one way or another they plan to stop this.

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What does this mean exactly? It means that once legal avenues fail, they will resort to the illegal ones they were using before, i.e. Molotov cocktails, trespassing, arson and taking shots at police. Here’s one last speaker who made it clear that the only choice the members of the board had was to resign, be voted out or to “be removed violently.” “Tyrannical entities must be demolished by any means necessary,” he said.

If a conservative parent had said this at a school board meeting, you can bet it would be front page news locally if not nationally. As it is, I wonder if anyone else will mention it at all.

So we’ll have to see how long this will drag on tonight and whether or not this will work. As I write this, they are voting on taking a 15 minute break. Here’s the full 8 1/2 hours of testimony so far.

Update: Some of the late night speakers are pretty wild. Scroll forward to the little drummer boy who sings a song about his time in the woods. And a bit later another socialist gets up and tries to speak in place of someone else. That’s not allowed under the rules but she just starts screaming and making demands. There is a week’s worth of entertainment in that clip above.

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Hadn’t seen this clip before. They are chanting, “If you build it, we will burn it.” Again, I’m guessing this will not end up on the evening news or in the morning newspapers.

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