This week, we continue sharing Haymarket Press’s panel, “the Abolitionist Struggle against Cop City.”  In this segment, Stuart Schrader and Micah Herskind fill in the past  40 years of historical context for why the Cop City project is being pushed through specifically in Atlanta.  Schrader teaches at Johns Hopkins University and wrote Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.  He speaks about the surprising connections during the 1980s between the local political class, civil rights leadership, and Atlanta’s role in the Guatemalan civil war and genocide of indigenous people.  The Atlanta Police Department started training counter-insurgent police in Guatemala and Cop City appears to be a continuation of this tragic history.  Herskind, on the other hand, discusses the contemporary context in Atlanta, focusing on the relationship between expanded police funding and broader trends in social cutbacks and carceral expansion targeted at Black people there.