On May 31 Eric Adams announced the City’s plan to build a $225 million “Public Safety Academy” alongside the New York Police Academy’s campus in College Point, Queens. The proposed academy will act as a “unified training facility” for 16 of New York’s municipal agencies, consolidating and coordinating their training under one roof.

As soon as it was announced, the project was decried by critics as a plan to build a “Cop City” in Queens, linking the proposed project to the more than 80 police training facilities being built across the country; the most contested, and perhaps best known, being the Atlanta Cop City — a multi-million dollar facility for training police in militarized tactics to suppress future uprisings like the 2020 George Floyd protests — planned to open this December.

Set to break ground in 2028 with a projected completion date of 2031, the Public Safety Academy’s roots date back to 2018, when it was fi rst presented as part of the “Roadmap to Closing Rikers Island.” After the city nominally committed to closing Rikers Island by 2027, it shared its plan for what would come in place of its theoretical closure: More jails.

The $15.6 billion Borough Based Jails Plan lays out the construction of four new jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, as well as a new Department of Correction training academy, which was fi rst allocated $100 million back in 2018.

In August 2021, the City announced that the academy that was supposed to improve the training of corrections officers would be repurposed to train personnel from 16 city departments.

Unlike the Atlanta Cop City, which will host militarystyle training facilities for the Atlanta Police Department — which New York City already has — the stated program of the Queens Cop City is to foster coordination between public services and the NYPD. Or, in other words, to further deputize the public services of the city.

“We will learn from the Department of Corrections and how they are able to identify gang behavior within their walls,” Adams said at a May 31 ceremony where he announced the Public Safety Academy. “So much information we can get from [the Administration for Children’s Services], as they are early advisors when they see young people in dangerous environments. Think about the coordination we could have.”

Among the agencies that will train in the “Public Safety Academy” are the Departments of Citywide Administrative Services, Correction, Environmental Protection, Health and Mental Hygiene, Homeless Services, Probation, Sanitation, the New York City Parks, the New York School of Urban Ministry, the Human Resources Administration Police, the NYC Sheri« , the Taxi and Limousine Commission, the Administration for Children’s Services, Health and Hospitals, and the FDNY.

While permits have been secured for the project, no construction contracts for the new facility have been awarded yet. What can be gleaned at the moment, however, is that the Queens Cop City will act to accelerate the ongoing consolidation and expansion of the carceral state.

What Got Us Here? What Comes Next?

The Queens Cop City’s plans to train the city’s municipal agencies alongside the NYPD hinges upon the notion of “public safety” being achieved through mass policing and an expanded carceral apparatus. Such a conception of “public safety” recreates the police as an entity deemed essential when responding to social problems.

The Adams administration has led the accelerated integration of the NYPD into the public sector as well as the decade’s highest surge in stop-and-frisks, which overwhelmingly and disproportionately targeted Black and Latine New Yorkers. In 2023 60% of recorded stops were of Black New Yorkers, who only make up 20% of the city’s population.

The wide reach of the NYPD can be traced back to the 1975 New York fi scal crisis, which the city responded to with a series of austerity measures. What emerged was a new urban neoliberal governance strategy premised on the tenet of slashing the social welfare net — and working instead to privatize public goods and invest in methods of social control.

These measures led to a surge in homelessness and untreated mental health crises in the ’80s, which in the ’90s were targeted under the policy of broken-windows policing, spearheaded in New York City by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton. Pursuing the aesthetics of an “orderly city,” Bratton directed the suppression of “disorderly behavior” and low-level offenses. This entailed more police on the streets and an increased police budget to grow the apparatuses of neighborhood surveillance.

Fuego, a member of the Bronx Palestine Solidarity Committee, an ad-hoc group of old-school Bronx organizers engaged in Palestine-solidarity and politicalconsciousness-raising work, sat down with The Indypendent to talk about how the Queens Cop City factors into the state’s drive to maintain an unjust status quo.

“People have been on the streets since Occupy. Then 2013 was the BLM movement nationally. It’s been a nonstop culture of resistance growing,” Fuego said. “People’s material conditions are unsustainable. Everything is unsustainable, and capitalism can’t save itself. So, of course, the United States’ answer is, ‘We need to control the population in a more militarized fashion. We need to build cop cities. ‘[These are] all of the hallmarks of a decaying empire that’s just reverting to authoritarianism.”

In mid-September the NYPD confronted and shot Derell Mickles after he walked through an open subway gate in the Sutter Avenue L train station in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The shooting of Mickles, a Black man over a $2.90 MTA fare — two bystanders (one now brain dead) and a cop were also accidentally shot — was a jarring reminder that more policing doesn’t mean more safety.

“The police already have a bloated budget. But they continue to create narratives that make them essential,” said Fuego. “They have made it so NYPD is an essential service. When you call an ambulance, the cop comes. You don’t fucking need the cop.”

As the struggle against Queens Cop City takes form, organizers are trying to apply relevant lessons from the Atlanta movement. Speaking to The Indy, a member of the NYC chapter of Weelaunee Defense, a network initially set up to fi ght Atlanta’s Cop City, called for a “diversity of tactics” and pointed to secondary pressure campaigns against construction contractors that have impeded the buildout of Atlanta Cop City.

Priscilla Grim, a long-time New York City activist, is among the 61 Cop City protesters facing felony charges for their participation in the Atlanta protests. Drawing on her Atlanta experience, Grim spoke to The Indy about what other strategies the New York City movement could pursue.

“We can be building our movements by engaging in the processes that are available to us, but remixing how they’re used,” Grim said. “City Council engagement — just through that alone, the activists down [in Atlanta] have made [Cop City] such a toxic subject that people are either distancing themselves from it or starting to make it part of their campaign … Everybody should be taking over City Council. All of New York City should be there.”

Adrita Talukder is an NYU student and a member of the university’s Student Liberation Action Movement

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