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Cop City Is A Disability Issue, and Disabled Organizers Must Fight To Stop It
In a society that prioritizes profits over people, disabled people are frequently marginalized and disposed of. Incarceration and police violence underscore the ways capitalism fails its most vulnerable.
Jan 10, 2025
Snce 2020, plans to build militarized police training facilities, also known as cop cities, have erupted across the country in an effort to maintain the status quo and quell political dissent from abolitionist and progressive organizers. As of July 2024, there are 80 projects either already being built or in the process of negotiating contracts to begin construction. Ten states have plans for multiple police compounds. The creation of these training facilities marks a new chapter of policing in the U.S.
Disability justice and disabled community organizers must be at the forefront of the nationwide movement to stop cop cities because this movement is a disability justice issue.
The movement to #StopCopCity emerged in the wake of nationwide uprisings in response to police killings of Black people, sparking critical conversations around the role of policing, the limits of police reform, community safety, and alternatives to the criminal legal system. Along with other organizations, I organized on the ground in Atlanta, where multiple police agencies used militarized tactics against community members. This occurred even as we mourned the loss of Rayshard Brooks, a member of our community who was killed by the Atlanta Police Department. All of this unfolded as we grappled with the profound impacts of a global pandemic—a mass-disabling event affecting countless lives.
We must listen to and follow the leadership of disabled people, especially those who are formerly or currently incarcerated.
Our collective grief transformed into action, fueling demands to end state-sanctioned violence and redirect investment into our communities. Our displays of solidarity angered and alarmed corporations, as well as local and national political establishments. In collaboration with major media outlets, those in power obscured the focus, reframing the narrative around rising crime rates and once again positioning police as the solution to our social, political, and economic challenges.
As a response to our organizing efforts, the city of Atlanta decided to build a $90 million complex equipped with military-grade facilities and a mock city for urban police training. If completed, this would be the country’s largest police training facility. Other municipalities have followed Atlanta’s misleadership. Cop city proposals have surfaced in Baltimore, Maryland; San Pablo, California; Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and Nashville, Tennessee all in response to demonstrations that took place in 2020. Meanwhile, other facilities have completed construction and are currently in operation like the cop cities in Semmes, Alabama; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Decatur and Chicago, Illinois; and Madisonville, Kentucky.
In a society that prioritizes profits over people, disabled people are frequently marginalized and disposed of. Incarceration and police violence underscore the ways capitalism fails its most vulnerable. Disabled people are often excluded from discussions about the criminal legal system, resulting in limited and ineffective strategies for addressing the root causes of incarceration (e.g., poverty, racism, and capitalism).
The overrepresentation of people with disabilities in prisons and jails illustrates how victims of capitalism are locked up and harmed. Approximately 66% of incarcerated individuals in the U.S. report having a disability, while half of all people killed by police are disabled, with disabled Black Americans disproportionately affected. Even people without a disability who are locked up develop some sort of disability over the course of their imprisonment because the prison system is disabling.
Each year, an estimated 350 people with mental health diagnoses are killed by law enforcement, and individuals with psychiatric disabilities are 16 times more likely to be killed during police encounters. People like Anthony Hill, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Deborah Danner, Alfred Olango, Daniel Prude, Magdiel Sanchez, Freddie Gray, and countless others were all disabled people who were murdered by police.
These risks are even greater for people of color, women, trans folks, and LGBTQIA+ people. An alarming statistic reveals that by age 28, half of all disabled Black Americans have experienced arrest, underscoring the urgent need to address police violence and brutality as an intersectional issue that includes disability justice. These statistics will continue to rise as more Cop Cities are built, which will place BIPOC disabled individuals in closer proximity to police and increase their risk of harm.
The estimated budgets for these police training facilities are staggering; meanwhile police funding already consumes the majority of municipal budgets at the expense of essential social services. As police budgets grow, funding for education, direct services, infrastructure, and healthcare falls, leaving many—especially disabled individuals—without access to the resources they need. For example, Baltimore’s training facility is projected to cost $330 million; San Pablo, California estimates a $44 million facility, and Richmond, Kentucky, has a $28 million project budget.
Investing more in police departments does not create safer communities. Increased training does not address the root causes of violence. The safest communities are those that are well-resourced and have minimal police presence. Our communities deserve better.
The changing landscape of policing in the U.S. is increasingly characterized by international police exchange programs (also known as Deadly Exchange programs), which expose officers to new surveillance methods, military tactics, and forms of political repression from countries with notorious human rights abuses.
The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program in Atlanta sends U.S. officers to train with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), who are responsible for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The IOF conducts urban warfare training in a mock city called "Little Gaza," a replica of the Gaza Strip designed to simulate combat scenarios. These practices serve as the blueprint for cop cities across the U.S.
In Baltimore, an Amnesty International report found that the Baltimore Police Department’s participation in deadly exchange programs with Israel contributed to “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and a culture of retaliation.” However, more police departments are participating in deadly exchange programs. Police officials from states including Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Washington, and D.C. have also trained with Israeli paramilitary forces.
Israel, a nation responsible for the killing and disabling of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, serves as the model for these military complexes. These tactics will disproportionately impact marginalized communities domestically and amplify surveillance and repression in already vulnerable areas. Disability Justice involves liberating Palestinians from the disabling effects of genocide.
Climate change is deeply connected to the issues of cop cities and disability justice. Projects like those in Atlanta and Nashville involve clearing large areas of urban forest, causing severe environmental harm. For example, Atlanta’s urban forest, which protects communities from flash flooding, has already been compromised, leading to increased flooding across the city. Such environmental degradation worsens health conditions for disabled people, leaving them to face the consequences with little support, as we saw during disasters like Hurricane Helene. This situation will only deteriorate further.
What is to be done?
The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” reminds us that there is no single solution to combat social injustice in this country. Addressing these challenges requires a diversity of tactics and a shared commitment to building a better world. Everyone has a role to play in movement work—whether it’s cooking for comrades, taking meeting notes, providing childcare so others can participate, or conducting research on targets. Every action, big or small, adds up, creating momentum when combined with the efforts of others. There is a place for you; come find it.
We must listen to and follow the leadership of disabled people, especially those who are formerly or currently incarcerated. Those directly impacted by oppressive systems possess invaluable knowledge of how these systems function and must be at the forefront of our movements. Yes, that means building relationships with people currently incarcerated.
It’s equally critical to learn from past campaigns, both their victories and setbacks. For example, the 2017 #NoCopAcademy campaign in Chicago, which sought to stop the construction of a police training facility, illustrates how grassroots organizing can achieve tangible wins. While the facility was ultimately built, organizers succeeded in cutting $21 million from school policing budgets, a significant step toward redistributing resources.
A new world is emerging, whether we are ready for it or not. It’s up to all of us to prepare and take action to shape what comes next. Liberation is possible, but we need you to make it a reality.
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Does Trump Know the NOLA Attacker Was a US-Born Veteran?
That Mr. Trump persists in deploying the politics of hate and bigotry is a bad sign for the U.S. Even if Jabbar had been a immigrant, his actions would have said nothing about immigrants.
Jan 03, 2025
I love New Orleans, and have been known to hit the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street into the wee hours myself. So what happened there is a gut punch, and I want to express my condolences to the families of the victims and to the community there for its trauma.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump jumped to the conclusion that the New Orleans attacker, who killed 15 people and wounded three dozen more was a career criminal and recent immigrant. In fact, he was an African-American veteran, born and bred in Beaumont, Texas. His conversion to Islam must have happened before 2004, when he tried to enlist in the Navy under that name. Instead, he ended up in the army, and deployed for a year to Afghanistan (2009-2010), as well as getting the training to become an IT specialist. He remained a reservist after his honorable discharge.
He was, in short, a patriotic American who did his part in fighting the war on terror. He was not an immigrant or a member of a foreign criminal gang.
I do know that if a white guy lost his family and his business, went tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and ended up living in a trailer home with livestock in his yard, and then went postal, sympathetic white reporters would be eliciting regrets from his white parents that he was suffering from mental problems.
That Mr. Trump persists in deploying the politics of hate and bigotry is a bad sign for the U.S. Even if Jabbar had been a immigrant, his actions would have said nothing about immigrants, who have low rates of criminality compared to the native-born population and whose productivity has been one key to American economic success. They don’t take jobs from the native-born on the whole, but do jobs that the latter typically won’t do.
Nor is Jabbar’s religion a reason to engage in Muslim-hatred. The NY Post‘s insidious and Islamophobic reporting ominously says that one of his neighbors in the trailer park in which he ended up only spoke Urdu. If that were true it would be because poor people live in trailer parks, including immigrants with limited English. However, it sounds fishy to me, since even poor Pakistanis of the sort who come to the United States tend to know English. It was the colonial language and still an essential language, like French in Tunisia. Then they say ominously that there was a mosque in the area. So what? Mosques are houses of worship where people go for solace when facing rough times.
The Post says ominously that Jabbar referenced the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture. D’oh. He was a Muslim. He also referenced the Qur’an when he was in Afghanistan as part of the U.S. army’s fight against the Taliban.
The Qur’an forbids murder and urges believers to forgive and do good to their enemies. See my study of these peace themes in the Muslim holy book at academia.edu.
If this guy had been a white Proud Boy found with guns and explosives, would the newspapers imply that it is suspicious that he quoted the Bible and that there is a Baptist church near his house? It is 2024, New York Post. Islamophobia is a disgusting form of racism. (Yes, Muslims are racialized in this country.)
I admire the hell out of veterans. I grew up in an army family, just as Jabbar’s children did. Most veterans are admirable citizens who come back and contribute to their communities, building businesses and providing key services. But the job undeniably can lead to trauma and stresses that a small minority deal with in dysfunctional ways. The suicide rate is tragically high. I’ve lost people I knew that way. Some end up homeless. Some are radicalized. It is not an accident that the leadership of the Proud Boys, convicted of sedition, were disproportionately veterans.
Jacqueline Sweet was able to screenshot some of Jabbar’s postings at Twitter / X.
In the first posting, from 2021, he says that a “scarcity mindset” is unhealthy in an environment of abundance, and that if you can’t turn off that scarcity mindset it becomes a kind of trauma. In the second, from the same year, he complains about the lack of Black protagonists in films after Marvel’s The Black Panther (2018) who are not “submissive, immoral or immature/ silly.”
Then in 2022, everything went to hell. His wife divorced him, he went deeply into debt, and the Post says he ended up living in a trailer home with chickens and sheep in the lawn.
Everybody goes postal in their own way. White nationalists try to invade the capitol and hang the vice president. Kahanaist Jews in Israel shoot up mosques and commit atrocities in the Occupied Territories. A handful of Muslim Americans have declared themselves ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), even though that organization barely exists and has no command and control. It is like a white supremacist declaring that he is acting in the name of Adolf Hitler even though the Nazi army was long ago defeated and Adolf died in his bunker.
It should go without saying that the fact that a tiny number of disturbed individuals act this way does not reflect on the 4 or 5 million Muslim Americans, who are our physicians, accountants, and local business people. Tarring a whole group with the actions of a few is the definition of prejudice. Likewise, the Proud Boys don’t reflect on all white people.
I’m not a psychiatrist and don’t play one on television. I therefore cannot pronounce on Jabbar’s state of mind. But I do know that if a white guy lost his family and his business, went tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and ended up living in a trailer home with livestock in his yard, and then went postal, sympathetic white reporters would be eliciting regrets from his white parents that he was suffering from mental problems. As I pointed out over a decade ago, however, the U.S. media treat white terrorists differently.
As a reminder, here are my Top 10 Differences between White Terrorists and Others:
- White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the U.S.? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”
- White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
- Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
- The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
- White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
- White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
- White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
- Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
- White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts, or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
- There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.
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The Wrath and Rage of Trump's America
If there is a lesson to draw from the outcome of the 2024 general election, short of giving up on politics, it is the need to cultivate a thicker, stronger democratic character.
Dec 30, 2024
A mob overruns the U.S. Capitol, prompted by the country’s outgoing and now re-elected president. A lone gunman vents his wrath by assassinating health-insurance CEO Brian Thompson and is cheered on social media. These are two among many examples of the eruption of political violence.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren allowed that the shooting of Thompson was a “visceral response” to “vile practices” in the country’s health-care system, a response that should be taken as a “warning” not to push people too far. “Violence is never the answer,” she added, “never a justification for murder.” The immorality of murder had to be stated. It could not be taken for granted.
Rage is unleashed among us. Unrestrained anger and furious violence mark our troubled times and signal the broken state of the body politic. This is not history’s first outburst of political rage; thus, it is important for us to recognize the present frenzy for what it is.
What is this scourge?
Rage is raw emotion—a toxic mixture of frustration, fear, anger, and hatred that can trigger uninhibited violence. Fury suppresses reason while focusing narrowly on targets of hatred. More than just an individual aberration, it is a cultural phenomenon, a socio-political breach of existent norms and constraints, the vehicle of demagoguery, the engine of war propaganda, the recourse of political movements that have renounced nonviolence. Once unleashed, fury seeks vengeance by mayhem and annihilation.
Are we about to succumb collectively to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?
Samuel Wells, in his 2023 essay entitled “The Emotion Standing in the Way of Peace,” depicts vividly the deadly dynamic of rage. In the exhilarating moment of an “intoxication of indignant furor,” when “a red mist descends,” we lose “all rational faculties.” All sense of restraint is abandoned in “our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance.” We tell ourselves that destroying everything in our path will restore justice. Nuance is absent from this justificative story; the raw narrative reduces to a “bellicose roar”—a scream to resolve every wrong by obliterating an enemy.
Rage carries a mythic charge of avenging injustice. Erinyes were the avenging goddesses in ancient Greece, the personification of righteous justice, known variously as the Furies. Their enduring spirit is a formative expression of rage. “Among all the gods, monsters, and spirits,” Mike Greenburg observes, these goddesses of the dark realm “with their particularly harsh view of justice” were “among the most terrifying.” Their calling was to hunt, punish, and torment wrongdoers until they died in agony and then to continue tormenting them in the afterlife. Orestes, pursued for the crime of matricide, could be saved from the Furies and exonerated only by the intervention of Athena who ordered his trial by a panel of twelve Athenian citizens. The Furies were tempered by a nascent democratic act.
Yet, democracy itself is victim to rage when anger, stoked by political elites, becomes an omnipresent force of politics. Political tolerance, on which democratic society is premised, succumbs to a profound antagonism between “us” and “them.” Rage undercuts the citizenry’s commitment to democratic norms and values (See Steven W. Webster, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2020; and also Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism. MIT Press, 2016).
The mythic force of righteous rage corrupts the pursuit of justice by resorting to means that pervert professed ends. The rhetoric of vengeance whips up an authoritarian insolence. Democratic values are debased, and democratic practices are diminished. Deliberation is silenced. Justice is defiled. The common good is sacrificed. Democratic polity is lost. Violence prevails, except by divine intervention, deus ex machina.
What explains this dysfunction?
The present demagogic moment reflects and exacerbates deep tensions created by economic displacement, demographic shift, and mass migration in a context of divisive new media that breed disinformation and construct opinion silos. The country’s loss of its imperial grip on world order is mirrored domestically in the destabilization of its timeworn racial hierarchy. Faith in the system is stretched to the breaking point. Tearing down a failing establishment feels right to the disaffected public that this November returned an authoritarian demagogue to the White House. Rage is the noxious product of systemic insecurity.
Wrath now dominates American politics. That has not always been the case, nor did it come about suddenly in the present instance. The country gradually changed over decades, argues anthropologist Peter Wood (Wrath: America Enraged, Encounter Books, 2021), from a nation that preferred self-control to one that relies on anger to wield political power. But to assume a national preference for self-control, Wood must overlook a history of national rage that includes, for example, the anticommunist McCarthyism of the late 1940s and the 1950s, the preceding Red Scare of 1917-1920, and multiple outbreaks of Ku Klux Klan domestic terrorism in the 1860s, 1920s-30s, and 1950s-1960s against Black Americans and other minorities. Unfortunately, Wood’s desire to celebrate American Greatness requires him to overlook these malign features of U.S. history.
Wood tells his story of civility’s current decline from the perspective of a scholar who sees the threat of righteous anger as emanating from the political left rather than the right. These are the barbarians, he believes, who use anger to acquire power and pervert American culture. Wood sees himself as a higher-education watchdog because the university is the point of origin, he maintains, for nearly all the bad ideas (such as critical race theory, White racism, climate alarmism, and gun control) that blight contemporary American culture. Wrath is a dangerous weapon of resistance, but in Wood’s view it is justified to save the country and its civilization from the ostentatious anger of progressive ideologues. They are the malignant force that provokes the justified wrath of ordinary Americans who have been denied “a legitimate voice in their own government” (p. vii). Echoing the interwar “conservative revolutionaries” who paved the way for fascism in 1930’s Europe, Wood stands for the defeat, and indeed the eradication, of progressivism in all its forms.
Here, boldly set out, is wrath’s circular raison d'être of rage on rage. Fury is acceptable in the service of the right cause, Wood insists, in response to the adversary’s perceived hostility. Those on the left, whom he accuses of taking sadistic delight in thwarting the popular will and harming the republic, deserve the wrath of the Furies. Yet, this harsh measure of justice is based on the troublesome premise of an absolute distinction between good and evil, a judgment at odds with the ethos of contingency, fallibility, deliberation, and the tolerance of a broader, more nuanced perspective that is at the heart of any meaningful democracy.
Taking the measure of social rage, sociologist Bonnie Berry observes that besides violence, per se, it encompasses “selfishness, rudeness, short-sidedness, aggression, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness.” The expression of rage, “replete with absolutisms and over-simplification,” is fraught with distortions and distractions irrelevant to addressing serious social problems. Demagoguery prompts a disenchanted public to target scapegoats based on their nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other markers of difference. The distraction of these socially created enemies leaves the ultrapowerful in charge and unaccountable. All of this makes social rage appear bigger than it is, Berry argues. Its “vociferousness, exaggeration, loudness, and vivid imagery” is a matter of “impression management” that makes it seem “pervasive and powerful”—and thus beyond resistance (Social Rage: Emotion and Cultural Conflict, Taylor and Francis, 1999, pp. x, 13-14).
Yet, questions remain: Are we about to succumb collectively to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?
The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not held up well to the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified.
Such questions are better raised than answered by Willard Gaylin with his focus on individual psychosis and paranoia, but he does point to social conditions, economic factors, and religious and political institutions that cultivate and exploit rage more broadly. The great danger, Gaylin concludes, lies with those who “cynically manipulate and exploit” the misery of people suffering “a sense of deprivation,” agitators who “organize and encourage hatred for their political ends” (Hatred: The Psychological Dissent into Violence, Public Affairs, 2003, pp. 215-15, 239-40, 246-7).
Rage over a deep sense of loss can be turned inward when a people no longer recognize one another as such, when they cannot empathize across differences and divisions, do not identify with the Other, and choose to render diversities in dehumanizing and demonizing terms to the point of losing sight of a shared humanity.
Domestic rage is akin to rage in international relations when the image of the enemy within reflects the projected image of the foreign enemy as the savage, the barbarian, the cause of trouble. The ancient Greeks protected their own polities from civil war by dedicating temples and altars to the Furies, which meant rage in hard times was redirected toward foreign enemies. Outsiders took on the bestial form that placed them beyond empathy. Yet, what may have preserved civility and contained rage in the ancient city-state does not hold in a disparate republic of over 300 million, where insiders are more easily marked as outsiders. As Rupert Brodersen suggests, resentment of the estranged Other produces rage without moral restraint or regard—indeed, a sense of moral imperative in an aggressor’s pursuit of justice, which can “plunge entire communities into chaos” when the target of rage is viewed as “undeserving of moral consideration” (Emotional Motives in International Relations: Rage, Rancour and Revenge, Routledge, 2018, pp. 4-7, 37-40). A baseless internet rumor that Haitian immigrants “are eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets” of Springfield, Ohio residents, repeated by Donald Trump in a presidential debate witnessed by 67 million viewers, was an unprompted lie, observed Politifact, that reinforced negative stereotypes and incited dozens of bomb threats, “stigmatizing the town and its residents in the name of campaign rage.”
Where does that leave us?
On the one hand, the present rage promotes authoritarian oligarchy over democracy. On the other, it signals democracy’s failure. We are more accustomed to fighting wars in the name of defending democracy than to enriching democratic culture. Rage is attuned to the culture of war, a culture that permeates and informs daily life in the U.S. and diminishes civic life. Trump’s first administration was a dire warning and a clear and present danger—a bleak reminder of what we have been before and should not become again—but a danger that mattered too little to too many people this past November. If there is a lesson to draw from the outcome of the 2024 general election, short of giving up on politics, it is the need to cultivate a thicker, stronger democratic character. The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not held up well to the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified. Whether we can deepen the sources of authentic democratic citizenship in the face of four more years of a Trump presidency remains an open question.
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