ATLANTA — Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum led a tour inside the city’s broken-down, now-former police training center near Atlanta’s airport on Tuesday, and said he hopes both critics and supporters of a new training center will hear him loud and clear—the new one can’t be ready soon enough.
The tour was a walk through a past that Chief Schierbaum said he'd rather forget, and in recent years "the building had actually become unsafe.”
The future, he said, has to include the city’s new $90 million Public Safety Training Center, scheduled to be completed late next year, despite on-going protests over the location and plans.
"It's actually something that every citizen deserves,” he said, “that when they call 911, the firefighter knows what to do and the police officer knows what to do...As we looked at all the places this center could go, this was the optimal location.”
The Chief said his focus is simple: having the best-trained first responders.
"When we ask the brightest to come to Atlanta, to be the bravest for our citizens, to be able to go into those scary, chaotic and life-threatening situations, we want to make sure they know we value them and we've trained them properly to navigate those situations To save lives. So our citizens are safe and our officers and firefighters go home safely.”
It is training that, at the old location, was becoming impossible. Schierbaum said the department had to move out in 2021, after a quarter century there--moving to its current, temporary, rented location at Atlanta Metropolitan State College.
“I used to be the academy director” at the old training center, Schierbaum said, “and I would arrive early in the morning with some of our staff because we had to go through the hallways to make sure that all the dead cockroaches had been removed, that the traps that we had set out for rats and for mice were cleared out... You could not drink the water, you could not use the showers... Sewage was backing up into those showers.”
Schierbaum said the city ultimately was not able to maintain the the facility—originally built in 1955 as a public school, then converted into a “temporary” police training center in the late 1990s—because it was falling apart.
And city leadership at the time, he said, did not make a new training center a priority.
“For years, we have not spent the money we needed to properly train our first responders," Schierbaum said, citing situations such as responding to active shooters, life-threatening emergencies, and day-to-day public safety needs.
“There is not a price tag that could be put on the life of one Atlantan,” Schierbaum said. “And to spend $90 million to train your fire and your police department properly is actually the right and the wise investment. And for years we've neglected that investment.”
The chief was also asked about the recent Atlanta City Council meeting in which nearly 300 opponents of the project, which they call “Cop City,” stood in line for seven hours as one speaker after another asked the Council to reverse itself and vote down the training center.
“The vast majority of Atlanta wants a well-trained police force,” Schierbaum said. “The Atlantans I speak to, hundreds of them, thousands of them, throughout the city, they support this public safety training center."
Schierbaum also pushed back at accusations that the new training center is being designed to train a military-style police force.
“I don’t lead a military force. I lead a police department. And the emergencies we respond to do not require an Army tank. The emergencies we respond to don’t require an Apache helicopter. But they do require us to be equipped and prepared to handle the emergency,” he said.
Next month, the Atlanta City Council is expected to vote on funding the city’s share of the new training center--$33 million of the overall $90 million dollar cost, with the Atlanta Police Foundation funding the bulk of the cost from private donations.