This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 24th, 2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

Cops City is a massive police training facility in Georgia and it's the subject of no small amount of controversy

both for the military-style training it's meant to provide, and the strange circumstances

surrounding the death of a protester there.

Heato's Patrick Eddington provides some background.

In the post 9-11 era, what we have seen

are police essentially getting into what I think is best characterized as our former Cato

colleague Riley Balco has of this warrior cop mentality and these so-called police training centers are designed essentially to give them the ability to engage

in what I would describe quite frankly as almost urban combat and so the phrase

cop city actually is being used by the activist and it's it's stuck they've been

very successful from a PR standpoint in getting the media to pick up on this

This particular facility in Atlanta would include a mock city section for I'm assuming breach and clear operations among other things and so

that's how the name stop cop city basically you know has come to be and I should

point out that you know the New York City Police Department has a

massive facility like this that includes actually an under as I understand it an

underground component complete with a mock you know light rail light rail station, rail car, the whole nine yards.

So this has become a thing across the country, so it's not just in Atlanta, I should point out that, you know, I first learned about the FBI's interested in this

you know through the the Free Information Act requests that we submitted late last

year and what I learned was that in August of 2022 the FBI Chicago Field Office

had actually opened what's known as an assessment and for our for our

listeners the clarification here is that an assessment essentially is a form of

investigation that the FBI can open without any kind of criminal predicate.

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