First of all, Atlanta has a “strong Mayor, weak Council” system. With the Mayor apparently having come out as a vehement card-carrying fascist (despite giving basically zero hint of such before the election, by the way), there are a lot of tricks he could use to push this shit through even against the opposition of Council.

Second, the Council basically has three factions: the rich white people from Buckhead, the mostly-poor (but not entirely poor – a point I’ll come back to) black people from Bankhead (more southwest Atlanta, but I liked the symmetry), and the and the middle-class progressives from the east side.

• The Buckhead people are perfectly happy to support Cop City – and its location as far away from themselves as possible, along the dividing line between the progressives and the poor blacks – because of course they are.

• The poor black people are (perhaps surprisingly) often also inclined to support it because they’re so beaten-down by both crime and institutional racism that they think more police presence + “development” (even shitty development) will help them. Moreover, Atlanta is called “the city too busy to hate” for a reason, and that reason is because of the long-standing alliance between the black leadership of the city (centered on HBCUs like Morehouse, plus the black churches) and the Buckhead business community.

• So, the east side progressives are the pretty much the only faction in strong opposition (in part because it’s a fascist training camp, but also because the location for it is close to some of the east side neighborhoods).

In other words – and less charitably, but accurate – too many poor black people in Atlanta are class traitors.