The legacy of a deceased tent city resident
Atlanta’s recent approach to tent communities is shaped by the death of Cornelius Taylor, an unhoused man killed in January 2025 when a city bulldozer ran over his makeshift home during the destruction of an encampment. His death spurred procedural reforms, including new safety checks and clearer protocols for removals. But advocates say those changes do not address a larger question: Why are people being forced to move when the city still cannot provide enough stable places for them to go?
Roberts says the city’s public posture — that its recent homelessness work is not about the World Cup but about connecting people to housing — is undercut by its own policies. She points especially to the Atlanta Police Department’s (APD) Homeless Outreach Proactive Enforcement (H.O.P.E.) unit, whose standard operating procedures, she says, center on clearing encampments and bringing in police enforcement when people cannot or will not move.
APD declined to make the H.O.P.E. team’s commander, Maj. Jeff Cantin, available for an interview, but said in a statement that “We will enforce the law when safety concerns require it.”
But internal documents and communications obtained by SCHR and reviewed by Shelterforce depict the H.O.P.E. team as an operation limited by business hours — the team works only between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays — and largely driven by nonemergency “disturbance” calls, including complaints about people sleeping near businesses or eating out of trash cans. Essentially, the H.O.P.E. team shows up when people feel uncomfortable around unhoused residents and want something done—but its officers rarely request help from the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative (PAD), which is supposed to be the city’s go-to arrest alternative.
Emails and other public records also underscore tensions between the city and PAD. A ledger of the H.O.P.E. unit’s January 2025 calls for service, for instance, revealed that a police officer seeking assistance sheltering someone was told that the city “is no longer working with PAD” and that the H.O.P.E. team was unavailable that evening.
That call occurred during a contract dispute among the city, Grady Memorial Hospital, and PAD, which ultimately led to PAD’s reactivation but left it unable to assist at downtown’s Center for Diversion and Services, a Grady-operated facility where police can bring people instead of booking them into the local jails. Grady previously subcontracted with PAD and the Georgia Justice Project to provide case management and legal services at the center, but it did not renew PAD’s contract for 2026 and 2027.
PAD was originally funded to facilitate about 40 daily diversions — reroutes from a jail cell to supportive services — but “more often than not, less than 10 are actually being done” because coordination between the city and PAD has fallen apart, says PAD executive director Moki Macías.
“PAD continues to provide case management services to 150 people on our caseload, and we continue to accept diversions from law enforcement and jail,” Macías says. But without the renewed contract, PAD has stopped accepting referrals from the diversion center because it no longer has funding for intake staff there, she says.
“We have not had intake staff at the center for the last two months, which means that people diverted to the center are no longer being connected to PAD services,” Macías says. “Diversion away from jail without connection to community-based services is not diversion; it is just a nicer revolving door.”
“Atlanta is not ready, in part, because the city is attacking everything that is not within its own system,” Roberts adds.
That strife reflects the law enforcement–centric approach advocates for unhoused people say will shape the World Cup.
“If you look at the Downtown Rising plan and … the standard operating procedures for the H.O.P.E. team, what you see is [that] the primary goal is to remove people from encampments and to use enforcement to do that,” Roberts says. “If people can’t be housed, then the directive is essentially to jail them if there’s probable cause for an arrest.”
Atlanta’s public defender’s office has distributed these flyers to unhoused residents, warning of “increased enforcement” of quality-of-life ordinances. (Contributed photo)
APD responded that the department and Grady “continues to operate the Center for Diversion and Services to reduce arrests for non-violent offenses associated with mental health challenges, substance use, homelessness, and extreme poverty,” adding that in May alone, the center diverted 155 people from arrest “to immediate care and long-term support services.” The department added that, between January 2025 and June 2026, APD officers completed 1,885 diversions.
Nonetheless, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney echoed advocates’ concerns in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying the city’s plan to “eliminate” unsheltered homelessness through outreach and housing initiatives before the World Cup could result in mass arrests, “solely to make the city look nice.”
Since early June, Atlanta’s public defender’s office has been distributing flyers in homeless communities warning of “increased enforcement” on a list of what it calls “zero-tolerance activities,” including sleeping on sidewalks, panhandling, and public urination — so-called “quality-of-life” offenses that unhoused Atlantans are especially vulnerable to being charged with.
Chief Public Defender Kenneth Days says the flyers aren’t meant to threaten a police crackdown on homelessness; they intend to put houseless residents on notice: “I don’t think the intention is that there’s some kind of plan to arrest more people or use this as an opportunity to arrest anybody, but I think [the flyer] gets the message across that any behavior that might normally be tolerated may not be during such a large-scale event.”
APD spokesperson Chata Spikes says that the department was “not aware that this flyer had been created or distributed, and therefore cannot speak to the reasoning behind the use of the term ‘increased enforcement.’”
