The BLM Scatterplot

Everywhere is Cop City

The most expensive "cop academy" to date is being built in West Baltimore for $330 million. On a historically Black university campus, the city's police and fire department's training center is inspired by Atlanta's controversial "cop city." A residential safety income tax will supposedly fund the massive center at Coppin State University. Chicago completed their protested cop academy, Atlanta is constructing cop city, and now Baltimore makes grand militaristic plans. I wonder what Black urban area is next?

The US surveillance state now includes mall or amusement park size law enforcement hub’s with fast food restaurants. These are military zones embedded in residential areas that politicians commission using citizen’s tax dollars. It seems as if defunding the police is politically unraveling despite Black representation politically present.

When did #BLM start, and where do Black bodies end?

The BLM movement cannot exist within a specific period because there has been no finite decline in collective dehumanization. It could have started in 1955 when 14-year-old Emmitt Till was lynched in Mississippi. The moment of suffering was politicized when Mamie Till, the child's mother, decided to have an open casket. In Chicago, fifty thousand people took to the streets while the media circulated the image of a black child brutalized to death.

Another parade of darkness appeared in 1965 when Rodney King was brutalized on camera by the Los Angeles PD. When of the four perpetrators three were acquitted, riots followed and once again, violence, brandished for all to see, mobilized people.

A person's name transformed into a hashtag on October 20, 2014, when Chicago PD murdered Laquan McDonald. Rahm Emanuel’s administration and the police department worked together to bury the body cam footage, but eventually, the public saw a 17-year-old Black boy be shot 16 times in his back. Due to the controversy, President Obama opened an investigation inside the Justice Department into Chicago's pattern of police brutality. The committee recommended building physical training facilities in disadvantaged neighborhoods to repair the police's relationship with the community.

The internet has tied Black people's names together from all over the country. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes before his lynching was recorded. He yelled, "I can't breathe," while multiple NYPD officers had him in a chokehold.

A year later, in 2015, Sandra Bland's un-recorded story was vague. The 28-year-old woman was pulled over, detained, and then three days later found dead in a Texas jail. She was lynched, but officially it was ruled suicide.

In 2016, during a traffic stop, Philando Castile's being murder by Minneapolis PD was caught on dashcam footage. The spontaneity of Black humanity and the mysterious ways in which it can be taken away is intergenerational.

In September of 2017, the Chicago Plan Commission approved a police and fire department training center on the West side of Chicago. That same year, #NoCopAcademy movement started as a group of Chicago Public School students who didn't appreciate that the city could fund the police but not their education. The grassroots movement bloomed when environmental justice groups, unions, and Garfield Park residents stood in solidarity with the youth. The campaign canvassed on the West side and found that 86% of residents believed the Cop Academy was not the best use of city funds. From a poll of 1103 community members, 95% recommended the city divest from the Police Department. In 2018, Chicago's first Black lesbian mayor said she was against the construction of the Cop Academy, but once in office, she reversed her stance. By the end of 2019, the construction of the Cop Academy was approved by the city council.

Elijah McClain was walking home when Colorado PD stopped him. Someone in the neighborhood had reported a suspicious character, but McClain was just a 23-year-old who loved music. In 2019, dancing along the sidewalk is on the list of freedoms coded as deviancy. Law enforcement officers put him in a chokehold, and paramedics on the scene administered ketamine without his consent. The young man had a heart attack, was hospitalized, and died three days later.

The new year started, and in March, Louisville PD murdered Breonna Taylor in her home, and then in May, Minneapolis PD lynched George Floyd.

A Cop City is being constructed in Dekalb County, a forest not far from Atlanta. The city announced plans for a new Public Safety Training Academy a month after Atlanta police killed Rayshard Brooks for sleeping in his car. The municipality justified the Cop City by saying the rising crime rate during the pandemic was causing a public health emergency. The land used to be a prison farm and is now being modernized into a state-of-the-art military complex. Atlanta's Cop City is modeled after Chicago's Cop Academy in that they both have a mock neighborhood, swimming pool, firing range, and food court. The fake cities are both educational facilities for practical police training.

In 2020, citizens did the policing for each other.

February in Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old, was jogging when a group of white vigilantes lynched him. The racist killers were caught because they uploaded the video on Facebook.

In June, Oluwatoyin Salau passed at 19 years old. The teenager routinely attended BLM protests in Tallahassee, so when a community member offered her a ride home, she gratefully accepted. She went missing for nine days then was found dead.

Jordan Neeley was known in New York as a houseless Michael Jackson impersonator. In May, after yelling on the subway, an ex-marine put Neeley in a chokehold and killed him while bystanders recorded. The white man was protecting himself and others on the train despite singing, screaming, disturbing the peace, or existing not being an inherent crime.

Living in a blue state does not mean a community is safe from militarization.

The Georgia State Police assassinated Manuel Esteban Paez Terán also know as Tortuguita on January 18, 2023, for occupying the Weelaunee Forest (Cop City's construction site). That same month, Chicago opened its public safety training facility in West Humboldt Park. The Cop Academy cost a total of 170 million dollars. Its corporate sponsors include Citadel, Bank of America, Motorial, and Verizon. Chick-fil-A, Home Depot, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola sponsor the Cop City in Atlanta.

Democrats respond to civil disobedience with an iron fist. Citizens of Atlanta have been using every method at their disposal to say Cop City is not what they want, and the state has consistently responded in an undemocratic fashion. The Atlanta City Council doxed over 100,000 citizens who signed a petition for a referendum to be added to the upcoming election to stop Cop City's construction.

On September 5, 2023, Georgia's grand jury indicted Forest Defenders and President Trump's administration with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The RICO charges identify the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund, as a domestic terrorist organization. For mutual aid efforts, sixty-one activists were charged as anarchists, sharing the same conviction with organizers of the Jan 6th insurrection, historically interlocking an abolitionist movement with a white supremacist one. The US government says a #StopCopCity criminal conspiracy started when George Floyd was murdered in May, but Cop City's construction wasn't even public knowledge then.

“The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.”

- James Baldwin, Letter From A Region In My Mind

I've seen that look in my mother's eyes. I love school and still find myself in trouble because the crux of learning is understanding that knowledge is not power.

In Harlem, while eating Ethiopian food, my homegirl asked me.

"When did you become an adult?"

It came in three waves. We both agreed that the first was some time in elementary school, when, as little girls, we were adultified. Sensuality and sexuality were bombs detonating in our subconscious.

The second wave for me was going away to school. The college admission process broke my perfectionism bone. Adulthood felt like another reality peeling off the walls. Poverty's lack of mobility left me disillusioned and numb with cold. I stopped watching the news, fell back in love with literature, and protested ritualistically during the pandemic.

The third wave is now. Everyday I am trying to understand myself outside of society. I used to think I hated the pigs; now, I know they shouldn't exist. Evidence shows that the police do not reduce crime but protect private property. My ancestors were private property. Drawing from that history, I see how crime is a symptom of social need. I used to be angry, but now I have resolve.

In high school, I was scared my friends would be killed for their activism. Tamir Rice would have graduated with us 2020 if he was not put to death by the Cleveland PD at the age of twelve. The older I get the more casual the grim reaper becomes.

Do any black people find themselves working against the grain of slavery? Constantly contextualizing your individual pain in the face of collective tragedy. What is power if not knowledge?

Power is slowly becoming less about the physical body (or its disposability) but about data particularly it’s malleability.

In 2021 ShotSpotter, a predictive policing technology, came under fire for its role in the killing of a Mexican American child from the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. ShotSpotter’s artificial intelligence accurately identified a gunshot and sent a law enforcement officer on site. Body cam footage showed that as the officer approached Toledo, threw his weapon onto the ground, raised his hands in the air (an act of surrender), and then was shot dead. I wonder how and why Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old, got a gun?

Using earthquake detection technology the goal of ShotSpotter was to help communities where gunshots often go unreported. However, The University of Michigan’s Journal of Law Reform concluded based on ShotSpotter’s model design that the tool's goal was to increase police interaction in specific neighborhoods, which happened to correspond with an increased rate of police brutality against Black and Latinx communities.

ShotSpotter is an acoustic sensor and cloud-based subscription software that detects the sound of gunfire. Data generated by the system includes precise lat-long locations and corresponding addresses where shots are detected, along with information like the number of rounds fired and type of gunfire over time patterns of gunfire near a particular home address or in a specific neighborhood can be seen. Twenty to twenty five powerful sensors are placed per square mile that suppress ambient noise and detect loud booms and bangs. The sensors begin recording 1 second before triggering sound and 1 second after. The data collected is sent to ShotSpotter’s 24/7 control centers where trained acoustic specialists confirm the location and whether the trigger was a gunshot. If it was a gunshot the local police department would be notified within forty five seconds.

The City of Chicago Office of the Inspector General’s Office reported the data model’s percent of accuracy in identifying gun related criminal activity in 2020-2021 was 9%. The study concluded that ShotSpotter influenced an increase in wrongful stop and frisk incidents on the Southside of Chicago and Calumet, both historically Black neighborhoods.

Through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, The MacArthur Justice Center secured data on ShotSpotter’s confirmed “gunshots” from July 1, 2019 through April 14, 2021. They found that 89% of all law enforcement deployments resulted in no gun related charge, 86% resulted in no criminal charges at all, and 40,000 resulted in law enforcement running into a dead end.

The confusion around how false positives affect perceived data quality is an issue of overfitting. Unclear and private data points are being used to make generalizations about patterns in city wide crime rates. The CSG is a police officer owned and operated company that did an efficiency test of ShotSpotter and asserted that ShotSpotter minimizes false negatives while keeping false positive rates low, however various sources dispute that through low accuracy ratings.

CSG said, “ While calls to 9-1-1 can either be confirmed as ‘true’ or left unsolved and ‘undetermined,’ a false positive report from the ShotSpotter GLS is easily debunked because of the system’s highly accurate geospatial capabilities. ShotSpotter’s accuracy means that the human resource may always be effectively deployed to find out whether a gunshot or other sound has occurred.”

ShotSpotter was not concerned about the presence of false positives because law enforcement was still receiving accurate locations for suspicious behavior. ShotSpotter tracks incidents internally and errors are only noted when a client reports them to SoundThinking. An incident is labeled in ShotSpotters system as false positive or negative. A false positive means a gunfire incident did not occur, but the data model alerts law enforcement as if it did. A false negative means a gunfire incident occurred but law enforcement were not notified.

In Oakland in 2019 ShotSpotter reported about 50 gun shots a day and about 10 of those were reported by the police department as gun fire incidents. That means 40 false positives were averaged a day and still ShotSpotter reports that in 2019 there accuracy rate for all data was 97.42%. ShotSpotter lumping false positives and accurate alerts together distorts an investigation into data quality and the perception of gun violence in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

ShotSpotter charges law enforcement agencies annual subscription fees from $65,000-$80,000 per square mile. The company's biggest contract is with the NYPD earning $28 million over five years for covering seventy five square miles. Currently ShotSpotter is deployed in 90 American cities and its data quality is at best vague and inaccessible and at worst is predatory and fabricated.

A success for the fight against predictive policing was achieved in Chicago. The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson played a cat and mouse game with the public regarding the expansive government contract. During his 2023 mayoral campaign, Johnson pledged to cancel the ShotSpotter contract within his first 100 days, but instead he extended the contract. During his first year in office his position would switch, due to pressure from alderpersons and CPD leadership, from in support of renewing the contract to vetoing it. Finally the city of Chicago stopped using ShotSpotter on Sept 23rd 2024. In total the city spent $100 million for 2,000 sensors.

Machine learning, better known as artificial intelligence, is being used to strengthen the carceral state from predictive policing to facial recognition software. If you have ever ridden on public transit in the United States, you are a victim of the police state. If you have ever gone through customs entering or exiting the United States, you are a victim of surveillance. Being on the internet is inherently exploitative.

Even the BLM movement has exploited it’s people.

Amanda Seales hosted a live discussion with Melina Abdullah, co-founder of BLM Grassroots Inc, about scamming within BLM. I wish I could quote Abdullah directly, but the video has been removed from social media. Abdullah is better equipped to tell this story than I am, but here is what I have gathered about the beginning, peak of notoriety, and fraud in #BLM.

2013 in Florida, when George Zimmerman murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and was acquitted, #BLM exploded on social media. Today, February 5th 2025, would have been Trayvon's 30th birthday.

By 2014, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" was being used as a slogan to contextualize the slaughtering of Michael Brown by Ferguson PD in Missouri.

Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi claim to have transformed #BLM from a colloquial proverb into an organized group. Soon after the group's formation, Garza and Tometi left the organization, leaving only Cullors. By 2015, BLM was a decentralized movement with a network of local chapters. Cullors has two published books– When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018) and An Abolitionists Handbook (2021).

From 2020-2021 during the racial uprising and global pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Foundation, spearheaded by Cullors, received $90 million in donations. That year, the foundation reported spending $69 million, $37 million on grants, real estate, and consultants, while the other $32 million went into various stocks.

In 2020, the BLM Foundation split creating a sister organization called BLM Grassroots, led by Melina Abdullah. According to the foundation, individual chapters within the BLM Grassroots Inc could receive up to $500,000 from a $12 million fund. Only one chapter in Denver reported receiving any money from the foundation. This was the beginning of the semantic and organizational confusion surrounding BLM.

The BLM Foundation is a non-profit affiliated but financially separate from the BLM grassroots and the various groups underneath that banner.

In May of 2021, Cullors resigned from the foundation and brought in Shalomyah Bowers as the foundation board secretary and his firm, Bowers Consulting. Cullors leadership was under intense scrutiny because the foundation purchased a $6 million mini-mansion in Los Angeles. BLM chapter organizers accused Cullors of using mutual aid to fund a lavish lifestyle. At the same time, the foundation asserts the property was not a private home but a campus for a Black Artist fellowship fund.

Shalomyah Bowers has financially controlled the BLM Foundation since Cullors resigned. In the fiscal year 2021-2022, the foundation had roughly 30$ million in assets. However, by 2023, the non-profit was in a $9 million deficit. In 2023, members of BLM Grassroots Inc., a total of ten chapters calling themselves #BLM10, filed a civil lawsuit in California against the BLM foundation for frauding the public and shutting activists out. LA County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Bowick dismissed the case.

Black Lives Matter Foundation is a DEI campaign that raised a lot of money, and it's still unclear where and how it was spent. Black Lives Matter Grassroots is a diverse group of activists who have been on the ground since 2013. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a corporate entity removed from the working class's material reality.

Yes, theoretically, research is helpful, but practically, people will die before privileges trickle down through academia. Under Trump's reign, I do not mourn DEI roles but the grant money that will be siphoned away. Research that will not feed the poor of today but plant the seeds for our grandchildren. I mourn liberalism's job security while feeling bitterness at the aesthetically radical positions to hold.

I fear being queer has become an identifier as opposed to a political movement. A symbol should be praised while a person is invested into. Protect trans people this, Black joy that, but reparations who? I don't need diversity or inclusion, only equity. Niggas die every day, abroad and at home. Power in pseudo-democracy can change hands. This political cycle, I'll call more people honkeys and coons!

In America, it is legal to murder a trans person of color. Identity politics won't free anyone from the material reality of a sprawling statehood rooted in surveillance. The state of Georgia is using Tortuguita's, the person killed at Atlanta's cop city, journal as evidence against their comrades. The martyred poet wrote, "My gender is a loaded gun pointed at capitalism's heart."

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Works Cited

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Ferguson, J., and Deborah Witzburg. "The Chicago Police Department’s Use of Shotspotter Technology." Chicago, IL: City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (2021).

City and County of San Francisco. “SFPD ShotSpotter Surveillance Impact Report.” San Francisco Government, 2021, sf.gov/sites/default/files/2021-02/SFPD%20ShotSpotter%20Surveillance%20Impact%20Report.pdf.

“End Police Surveillance,” End Police Surveillance. endpolicesurveillance.com/.

Gee, Harvey. "“Bang!”: ShotSpotter Gunshot Detection Technology, Predictive Policing, and Measuring Terry’s Reach." University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, no. 55.4, 2022, pp. 767

Leslie, Stuart W. “The Cold War and American Science; Chapter 9.” Dynamics.org, 1993, dynamics.org/SWOPSI/WEB/les09.ed.html. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.

Conarck, B., & Fenton, J. (2023, August 25). Proposed Baltimore Police and fire training facility has hefty price tag: $330 million. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/baltimore-police-department-fire-department-training-facility-M6N7PW4YN5H6FN3YYNQLD6C74Y/

Bagby, Dyana. ““Stop Cop City'' Referendum Petitions Scanned, Posted on Atlanta Clerk’s Website.” Rough Draft Atlanta, 29 Sept. 2023, roughdraftatlanta.com/2023/09/29/stop-cop-city-referendum-petitions-scanned-posted-on-atlanta-clerks-website/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Bauer, Kelly. “Controversial West Side Cop Academy Opens after Years of Pushback from Activists.” Block Club Chicago, 25 Jan. 2023, blockclubchicago.org/2023/01/25/controversial-west-side-cop-academy-opens-after-years-of-pushback-from-activists/.

Pratt, T. (2023, November 27). “it’s alarming”: Diary of killed Cop City activist to play role in Georgia lawsuit. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/27/cop-city-tortuguita-georgia-manuel-paez-teran

Berger , Dan . “RICO and Stop Cop City: The Long War against the Left.” LPE Project, 11 Sept. 2023, lpeproject.org/blog/rico-and-stop-cop-city-the-long-war-against-the-left/?fbclid=PAAaa3wz9tlV1QkgIN_RRU3Q-vkBX7v7CfcnwrbrKw60WJW0rgNWMiizk7CUA_aem_AXlOwRxQ-7wcxpo11CE5VpFt1NadmNaYHZTNmMgpu-ztsbNW056rZ6S7WOLtZp3SpvU. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Hart, Benji. “No Cop City Anywhere.” In These Times, 22 Feb. 2023, inthesetimes.com/article/cop-city-atlanta-police-violence-no-cop-academy-chicago-climate. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Jennifer Bamberg. “Controversial West Side Cop Academy Will Have Mock Neighborhood for Training. Here’s What It Will Look Like.” Block Club Chicago, 10 Aug. 2022, blockclubchicago.org/2022/08/10/controversial-west-side-cop-academy-will-have-mock-neighborhood-for-training-heres-what-it-will-look-like/.

Zickgraf, Ryan. “What Atlanta Residents Can Learn from Chicago’s Version of “Cop City.”” Atlanta Civic Circle, 9 Mar. 2023, atlantaciviccircle.org/2023/03/09/what-atlanta-residents-can-learn-from-chicagos-version-of-cop-city/.

Morrison, Aaron. “Fraud Lawsuit against Black Lives Matter Foundation Dismissed in California.” AP News, AP News, 29 June 2023, apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-fraud-lawsuit-donations-ruling-da8e7b25a5f2b1dc806af4d44a179078.

Morrison, Aaron. “BLM’s Patrisse Cullors to Step down from Movement Foundation.” AP News, 27 May 2021, apnews.com/article/ca-state-wire-george-floyd-philanthropy-race-and-ethnicity-0a89ec240a702537a3d89d281789adcf.

Morrison, Aaron. “AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter Opens up about Its Finances.” AP News, 23 Feb. 2021, apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-90-million-finances-8a80cad199f54c0c4b9e74283d27366f.

Rojas, Rick. ““Cop City” Prosecutions Hinge on a New Definition of Domestic Terrorism.” The New York Times, 26 Feb. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/us/cop-city-domestic-terrorism.html.

Davis, Justin A. “Tennessee Quietly Rolls out Its Own 810-Acre “Cop City.”” Truthout, Feb. 2024, truthout.org/articles/tennessee-quietly-rolls-out-its-own-810-acre-cop-city/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025.