The famed Atlanta, GA Cop City, a yet-to-open Mecca of $90 million worth of militarized police training, is not the only facility of this magnitude opening up in the United States, but it is the largest.
Formerly called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, Cop City is a police and fire services training facility under development on old farm acreage in Dekalb County, near Atlanta, Georgia. According to their own promotional material, it will become the main facility where trainees will learn cutting-edge techniques on how to make America safe, subsequently taking it back to small-town America to train others. This proposed facility is to be a beacon of efficiency for law and order.
When researching the funding behind Cop City, the main organization has very deep ties to militarization and violent training. This is because it is heavily funded by and collectively linked to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.
This is a pyramid scheme of mass proportions, as the roots of this connection disseminate with alarming veracity from well-funded police foundations to the cop that sits behind a bush at the end of a small town.
Federal police training centers are found in several locations across the US, and their open financing shows connections to 1,400 corporate donations and 22 principal police foundations throughout the country. These relationships extended across all industries, including telecommunications, real estate, banking, big tech, and oil and gas, as well as colleges, sports teams, and cultural organizations. This funding is widely acknowledged in their literature.
However, within these 22 police foundations, we find the source of funding to be a murky business of dark money. Millions upon millions are flushed through the back rooms, protected from public scrutiny by laws that Congress enacted. They are not required to disclose their funding bodies, thus shielding the roots of who, in fact, is influencing the training of our police forces. The Federal Government even puts out a guide on how to form an effective police foundation and protect sources of funding while helping to safeguard the integrity of police departments. They are also tax-exempt.
The Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) is covering a large portion of the $90 million tab, and Atlantans, through taxes, are required to pay an extra $30 million for the privilege of being hosts.
When many of APF’s corporate sponsors came out to support black and brown citizens of Atlanta after the death of George Floyd, Musa Springer, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace in Atlanta, tried to expose the truth behind this shadowy organization.
“The GILEE program is actually based out of Georgia State University, the Atlanta Police Department, and the Atlanta Police Foundation. People might recognize that name, Atlanta Police Foundation, because they’re also the ones behind Cop City,” Springer said.
GILEE stands for Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange. Dr. Robert Friedmann, who founded this private organization, is an Israeli-born citizen who is promoted on the Israeli Embassy website.
Friedmann is director of the GILEE and Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. He was the Distinguished Chair of Public Safety Partnerships (2007-2010) and served as Chair (1989-2002) of the Criminal Justice Department at Georgia State University. Dr. Friedmann received his B.S. (Sociology, Anthropology, and Philosophy) from the University of Haifa, Israel (1974); his M.A. and Ph.D. (Sociology) from the University of Minnesota (1978); and his M.S.S.W. (Social Work) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1981).
For the past 30 years, this man, from Israel to Atlanta, has made it his life’s mission to be an integral connoisseur of US police training by building the largest training center in the US.
While there are numerous bureaucratic levels to sift through that are under our own government’s protection and would reveal his direct involvement with Israel, it was a small story that surfaced after the violence in Gaza on October 7 that effectively connected all the players.
Atlanta police officers were only too eager to announce to their local stations how they are now mourning Israeli IDF officer, Lt. Col. JR Davidov, after his death in Gaza in early October 2023. Many members of the police force had taken inspiration from Davidov, who served as their trainer at the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
GILEE published his memorial on their website and stated that he was also trained for use in the Israeli Forces in the state of Georgia, in the United States.
Without the general public being aware of any connection, the kumbaya relationship between IDF forces, their method of combat, and a national group of police trainees sent through that facility or taught by those who graduated flourished for 30 years.
However, you can be sure that all members of Congress knew, as well as a few activists who were paying attention.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, the British actor Maxine Peake claimed the following in an interview with the Independent newspaper:
“The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services,” said Peake.
The woman who recorded the George Floyd video opened up about his killing and her raw emotions while revisiting the scene the next day (Exclusive) pic.twitter.com/TeaRfDvmCf
— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) May 27, 2020
According to Peake, his source was a small article published in the Morning Star, a reader-owned publication promoting peace and socialism in the United Kingdom. The article “Minnesota cops ‘trained by Israeli forces‘” hit the black and brown community like a bomb.
At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.
There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.
The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.
Israeli deputy consul Shahar Arieli claimed that the half-day session brought “top-notch professionals from the Israeli police” to share knowledge with their US counterparts.
A pro-Palestinian activist connected the Floyd murder with Israel.
Neta Golan, the co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said: “When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee as he cried for help and other cops watched, I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.
“They started twisting and breaking fingers in a particular way around the same time. It was clear they had undergone training for this. They continue to use these tactics — two of my friends have had their necks broken but luckily survived — and it is clear that they [Israel] share these methods when they train police forces abroad in ‘crowd control’ in the US and other countries including Sudan and Brazil.”
Evidently, Israeli troops train a large number of US police officers.
Amnesty International exposed that hundreds of police officers from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington State, and Washington, DC, had been flown to Israel for training.
Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have financed sponsored training in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories for police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and captains.
Amnesty International calls Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity. They blatantly call out Israel for their racism as the basis for their apartheid against Palestinians.
Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General
We are seeing this same accusation through statistics within the police forces of the United States.
Statistica.com states that the incidence of fatal police shootings in the United States varies greatly by ethnicity. Between 2015 and October 2023, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was 5.7 per million of the population per year, whereas the rate for White Americans was 2.3 per million of the population per year.
Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing. The rate of fatal police shootings among black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 5.7 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and October 2023.
In 2021, the incarceration rate of African Americans in local jails in the United States was 528 incarcerations per 100,000 of the population—the highest rate of any ethnicity. The second highest incarceration rate was among American Indians and Alaska Natives, at 316 incarcerations per 100,000 of the population.
Black males account for around 13% of the male population but account for approximately 35% of those jailed. One in every three black males born today will be jailed in his lifetime, compared to one in every six Latino men and one in every 17 white men.
Black women are equally impacted: one in every 18 black women born in 2001 will be jailed at some point in her life, compared to one in every 111 white women. The fundamental causes of this disproportionate representation have their roots in American history, and current judicial system policies continue to support them, all stemming from a deeply rooted racist philosophy.
The criminal justice system reflects America’s history of racism and oppression, and an overview of studies demonstrates how the system maintains uneven treatment of black people. The research proves that it contributes to understanding the massively disproportionate effect of mass imprisonment on millions of black individuals, their families, and communities.
For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly cautioned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right violent organizations it investigates often have ties to police enforcement. Despite officially acknowledging the problem, there is still no national strategy in place to safeguard the communities these dangerously compromised law enforcement officers serve.
Even President Biden, Israel’s world brown-noser, connects the knee-on-the-neck refrain with racism in one of his signal-virtue speeches.
The death of Manuel Paez Terán is one of the most repugnant examples of IDF-influenced policing we are to expect from the trainees at Cop City and other police training centers.
Terán took 57 bullets from police while sitting in his tent after being there for a year in a peaceful protest.
The police claim that Terán had shot at them first; however, they could not release any film from the bodycam proving that, though every officer who was in the woods that day had a bodycam as part of their militarized uniforms.
They claim the state police there that day did not wear a bodycam, and that was the team that shot Terán. All the major national news outlets have made that very obscure point several times, as if to enter it into the conversations at our dinner tables at home.
Cop City originally planned on opening “at the end of 2023”, but at this writing, the media outlets have yet to announce exactly when this will take place.
The connection between Israel and their racist approach to apartheid and mass genocide and the growing violence and death toward underserved and maligned communities of color is not ambiguous.
It’s shamelessly in our faces.