Atlanta’s Cop City Is Funded by Some of the Same Billionaires Who Back AIPAC

Over the past few years, the battle against the proposed 85-acre Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — commonly known as “Cop City” — has emerged as a national flashpoint of resistance to militarized, corporate-backed police power. As it turns out, Cop City is also backed by some of the top donors to the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Initially approved in 2021 by the Atlanta City Council despite major community opposition, Cop City has faced criticism for being many things, including a grave misuse of resources and an attack on Indigenous rights and critical green space. But organizers also see another disturbing aspect to Cop City: It will deepen a policing ecosphere in Atlanta with close ties to Israeli forces that oppress Palestinians.

Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza has intensified longtime organizing around training exchanges between police forces in Georgia and Israel overseen by the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), housed at Georgia State University in Atlanta. GILEE and the Atlanta Police Foundation behind Cop City have an overlapping network of wealthy and corporate backers, some of whom are outspoken in defending Israel.

Moreover, as progressive criticism of AIPAC and its politically reactionary donor base grows, Truthout found that some of AIPAC’s top donors are significant backers of the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Amira Al-Subaey and K Agbebiyi are both organizers with Demilitarize Atlanta to Palestine, a coalition of local activists drawing connections between policing in Atlanta and Israeli occupation and apartheid against Palestinians. They told Truthout that the current assault on Gaza has heightened the need to oppose the alliance between Atlanta and Israel that Cop City will only strengthen.

“We want to make more clear the connections between the policing of Black people in Atlanta and the genocide in Palestine,” said Agbebiyi.

A Corporate Project for Militarized Police Power

Cop City is emblematic of the tight alliance between corporate power and police departments across the U.S. This alliance is bolstered by police foundations, which expand police power against a backdrop of Wall Street-driven gentrification and swelling popular protest against everything from rising housing costs to Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza.

The bulk of the $110 million behind Cop City is being funded by the Atlanta Police Foundation and its corporate donors who constitute the core network of Atlanta’s power elite. These backers of Cop City include major corporations across multiple sectors headquartered in Atlanta, such as Georgia Power, Home Depot, Bank of America, Chick-fil-A, Coca-Cola and Cox Enterprises, a massive conglomerate that owns the city’s main newspaper.

The project is also strongly backed by powerful business “growth” coalitions aiming to shape Atlanta around elite interests, including the Atlanta Committee for Progress (a group dominated by the city’s most powerful CEOs, who run its board) and Invest Atlanta, a major donor to the Atlanta Police Foundation fundraising campaign that appears to be bankrolling Cop City.

Police foundations like Atlanta’s play critical roles across the U.S. in cementing alliances between corporate elites and police forces. Corporate representatives serve on police foundation boards and corporations sponsor their annual galas and fundraisers. Police foundations funnel millions of dollars in corporate donations to police departments, evading transparency around police funding that comes with public budget allocations.

Through police foundations like Atlanta’s, corporations and police socialize and network, building a nexus that shapes power and control within cities. The Atlanta Police Foundation’s board represents a cross section of the city’s ruling class.

Among other corporate sectors, major real estate interests help bankroll the Atlanta Police Foundation and surveillance and police training projects. The foundation’s chairman is Robin Loudermilk, CEO of The Loudermilk Companies, a major Atlanta developer and huge donor to the city’s video surveillance integration center, which is named after the Loudermilks. Billionaire private equity baron Tony Ressler, who owns the Atlanta Hawks and is a major investor in downtown Atlanta properties, donated $1 million to the Cop City fundraising campaign.

“Cop City can’t be untangled from the rapid gentrification that’s happening in Atlanta,” Agbebiyi told Truthout, pointing out that “Atlanta is ground zero for corporate ownership of single family homes.”

GILEE and the Palestine Connection

Many local organizers also believe that the construction of Cop City will expand Atlanta’s role within the circuit of global policing exchanges. According to documents published by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, nearly half of Cop City trainees would come from outside of Georgia.

A major focus here is the Atlanta Police Department’s close and longtime relationship with the Israeli police fostered by GILEE.

For decades, GILEE has organized training between U.S. police forces and the Israeli police. During these exchanges, delegations of U.S. and Israeli police leaders visit each other to share and learn policing strategies and tactics.

The Atlanta Police Department and other Georgia law enforcement bodies have been core participants since the 1990s. “Often a GILEE delegation will take trips to Israel to train on the ground,” Atlanta’s WXIA reported. “Some years, the delegation hosts Israeli officers here in Atlanta.”

Atlanta police chiefs and statewide law enforcement leaders study Israeli policing strategies, tactics and technology, as well as “counterterrorism,” “emergency management” and “homeland security policies,” according to one report.

“I am proud to say our thin blue line stretches across the Atlantic Ocean to the State of Israel,” said one Atlanta police major after returning from a 2017 visit to Israel, as noted by the Atlanta Community Press Collective.

Last year, a 20-member delegation of Georgia police leaders spent two weeks in Israel and were hosted by Israel’s then-police commissioner, Kobi Shabtai, who made headlines for suggesting he’d send protesters within Israel — “anyone who wants to identify with Gaza” — to the Strip.

“I’ll put them on buses that will send them there, I’ll help them get there,” Shabtai said.

For years, local activists have criticized GILEE as a key node within U.S.-Israeli “deadly exchange” programs. The work of groups like Demilitarize Atlanta to Palestine, which demands that corporations divest from GILEE and that Georgia end the GILEE program, has intensified during the current assault on Gaza.

Organizers worry that Cop City will strengthen and expand the transmission to Atlanta of Israeli policing tactics and technologies honed under Israel’s illegal, brutal, decades-long system of occupation and apartheid against Palestinians. Some draw parallels between Cop City and Israel’s “Mini Gaza” training facility in the Negev Desert.

Built after the Second Intifada with U.S. support and officially known as the Urban Warfare Training Center, the 7.4 square mile replica city has narrow streets and around 600 structures that include storefronts, schools, apartments and mosques. “The tight alleyways, drab concrete buildings and open areas in the … facility are meant to simulate the urban environments in which Israel’s soldiers often operate,” says the Associated Press. The Guardian reports that the Israeli army even has a graffiti artist that decorates the walls with “Arabic slogans and portraits of Palestinian and Lebanese militants.”

The Israeli army has used Mini Gaza to train for its current siege of Gaza, and U.S. troops have also trained there. Some have suggested that Cop City has roots in the model of Mini Gaza, and organizers fear that Cop City could be used similarly to deepen militarized policing tactics in Atlanta and beyond.

“We’re sending billions of dollars in weapons for war instead of investing that money in our local communities,” said Al-Subaey. “And the genocide in Gaza is using technology and weapons that will inevitably make their way to the U.S. using through programs like GILEE.”

Common Donors to GILEE and the Atlanta Police Foundation

GILEE’s funding is opaque, but one major donor is Bernie Marcus, who is also a big donor to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Marcus is the co-founder and former CEO of Home Depot, Georgia’s biggest corporation. He is worth over $10 billion, and is one of the most influential figures in the Atlanta metro area.

Marcus has donated at least $350,000 to GILEE since 2020, and, according to one analysis, $1.25 million since 2005. In 2016, Mondoweiss suggested that Marcus’s contributions amounted to 38 percent of GILEE’s total funds raised between 2008 and 2013.

Marcus’s public comments indicate that he views GILEE as a key nexus between Georgia and Israel police forces. He praised GILEE at its 25th anniversary celebration in 2017, saying that the program “has been so beneficial to both the state of Israel and certainly to the state of Georgia,” with visits to Israel helping U.S. police “in not having to reinvent the wheel” and understanding “what systems could be used.” Marcus served as the honorary co-chair of GILEE’s 30th anniversary celebration in 2022.

Marcus’s stepson, Michael Morris, donated $9,500 to GILEE from 2020 to 2022. Morris is also the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, which publishes rosy coverage of GILEE exchanges and has provided a platform for GILEE founder Robbie Friedmann to denounce the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. Friedmann has elsewhere referred to “calls for academic boycotts” as “terrorism by other means” — an alarming statement from a major figure in Atlanta’s police training.

For years, Bernie Marcus has also been a major donor to the Atlanta Police Foundation. A Truthout analysis of public filings shows that Marcus, through his philanthropic arm, has given at least $500,000 to the police foundation since 2014, including $200,000 in 2022 toward Cop City.

Marcus’s 2014 and 2015 donations of $100,000 each were specifically earmarked to support the Operation Shield camera surveillance network, which the Atlanta Police Foundation launched in 2007 and still funds.

Atlanta’s WXIA reported that, according to GILEE founder Robert Friedmann, “much of Atlanta’s surveillance camera system is modeled after Israel’s while Israel seeks to create a public-private camera network much like Atlanta’s.” Atlanta has been called the most surveilled city in the U.S.

Another common backer between GILEE and the Atlanta Police Foundation is Jay Davis, the longtime former chairman and CEO of National Distributing Company, which also has a seat on the Atlanta Police Foundation board. Davis, who has long served as GILEE’s board chairman, donated $100,000 to Cop City in 2022 and has supported the police foundation for years.

In addition to having common funders like Marcus and Davis, GILEE and the Atlanta Police Foundation have worked together through the police foundation’s Atlanta Police Leadership Institute training programs.

Top AIPAC Donors Back Cop City

Marcus also spends millions every year funding far right politicians, Koch-aligned front groups and ultra-Zionist organizations.

He has donated millions toward electing Donald Trump over the past decade and showers additional millions upon right-wing groups like the Liberty Justice Center, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, Judicial Watch, and others that are part of the Koch-backed State Policy Network.

Marcus is also a huge donor to ultra-Zionist causes such as Birthright Israel Foundation, Christians United for Israel, the Israel on Campus Coalition, the Zionist Organization of America, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and others.

In recent months, progressives across the U.S. have stepped up their criticism of AIPAC and called on Democrats to reject campaign donations from the group, which has thrown millions of dollars toward crushing Democrats across the U.S. who have expressed criticism of Israel.

Marcus is one of the top donors to AIPAC’s electoral efforts. Earlier this year, the investigative news outlet Sludge identified Marcus as the fourth-highest donor in the current election to the United Democracy Project (UDP), an AIPAC super PAC. Marcus gave $2 million to UDP in 2023, as well as $1 million in 2022.

In addition to Marcus, another top AIPAC donor, Douglas Hertz, gave $33,333 to the Atlanta Police Foundation in 2022. The longtime chairman and CEO of United Distributors and a current trustee of Morehouse College, Hertz has given $200,000 to AIPAC’s UDP since 2022. Hertz also sits on the board of Bernie Marcus’s foundation that donates millions annually to right-wing causes and entities like GILEE and the Atlanta Police Foundation, and Hertz is also a board leader and former chair of the Atlanta Committee for Progress.

“Copied and Pasted Across the Country”

The sheer amount of money going to Cop City, which includes tens of millions in public funds alongside the Atlanta Police Foundation’s private bankrolling, could be better spent on Atlanta’s crumbling infrastructure, Al-Subaey and Agbebiyi say. Earlier this summer, for example, the city was hit with a major crisis in water services after several water main breaks.

Al-Subaey told Truthout that Cop City will “further entrench the global military-industrial complex locally and across the country.” She noted cities are planning similar projects modeled off Cop City.

“I think it’s really critical that people all around the country have eyes in Atlanta,” said Al-Subaey, “because what happens here is often copied and pasted across the country.”