Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC)

Background and Activities

Atlanta Community Press Collective describes itself as “abolitionist.” ³ It claims to be a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, and was previously fiscally sponsored by Open Collective Foundation. As of late March 2024, the ACPC page on Open Collective stated that the group could not receive contributions since it was transitioning to a new “Fiscal Host.” ⁴

ACPC is primarily concerned with the construction of “Cop City,” or the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a proposed zone for training police officers and firefighters that has been under construction since 2021 and is priced at $90 million. Left-of-center activists, including writers for ACPC, argue that the center aims to militarize America’s police forces. Both anti-police and environmentalist activists traveled to the site to set up barricades, interrupt construction, engage in vandalism, camp out in tree forts, and directly fight with police officers and others in charge of the site. ²

Bryan Thomas, a spokesperson for Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (D), explained the site will train police officers to deal with “increasingly common situations like convenience store robberies and mass shootings,” according to the New York Times. He claimed the center is committed to the left-of-center concepts of “community based policing” and “de-escalation techniques.” ²

In 2024, ACPC partnered with Lucy Parsons Labs to sue the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) over claims that the foundation withheld requested information about the “Cop City” police training facility outside of Atlanta. ⁵ In 2025, it was determined that the APF was subject to the Georgia Open Records Act, and nearly 300 pages of documents detailing the foundation’s involvement in the police training facility were released. The documents revealed that the APF lobbied Atlanta city officials in 2023 to block a proposed referendum that would have allowed residents to vote on the construction of the “Cop City” project. It was also revealed that the foundation  deployed 40 police officers and 8 surveillance cameras on-site to guard the construction area from activist interference. ⁶

Publications

Atlanta Community Press Collective publishes articles concerning Georgia, but occasionally covers left-wing protests in other states such as Arizona and Texas, especially when those protests concern Atlanta, such as a “Stop Cop City” protest that occurred in Tucson or when protestors disrupted Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (D) from speaking at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin. ^{7 8}

In February 2024, two writers for ACPC wrote an article critical of a proposed state law in Georgia that would prohibit political nonprofit organizations, criminal justice reform groups, and others to pay the bails of criminals. The ACPC authors suggested the bill “will cause significant harm in justice impacted communities.” ⁹

In March 2024, ACPC covered the arrest and charging of activist Michael Czajkowski at a “Stop Cop City”-related protest. For about two hours on March 7, Czajkowski and fellow activists successfully disrupted construction at a site operated by Brasfield & Gorrie, a construction company that had received a contract to build part of “Cop City” for the government. ¹⁰

Funding

Atlanta Community Press Collective makes its donations visible on the website of Open Collective Foundation. ¹¹ As of late March 2024, the ACPC page on Open Collective stated that the group could not receive contributions since it was transitioning to a new “Fiscal Host.” ⁴

Leadership

The editor of Atlanta Community Press Collective is Matt Scott. Its advisory board is comprised of the founder of Community Movement Builders Kamau Franklin, director of programming for the Center for Just Journalism Hannah Riley, and labor organizer of Union of Southern Service Workers Mariah Parker. ³