OPEN LETTER TO THE HEAD OF DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION AT JPMORGAN CHASE
Dear Mr. David Miree,
We visited your office on the evening of March 9th. We were there to hold you to your values.
JPMorgan Chase’s (Chase) mission statement for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) states that you are committed to spending $30 billion by the end of 2025 “to advance economic growth and opportunity for Black, Hispanic and Latino communities,” to counteract structural barriers in the US by “helping close the racial wealth gap and driving economic inclusion,” and serving the financial health of these communities.
Yet by supporting the development of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (also known as Cop City), you are violating your own stated principles and aspirations. Chase’s Head of Regional Investment Banking, John Richert, serves on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is raising funds for building this enormous, militarized police training facility in the irreplaceable Weelaunee Forest.
This forest plays a key role in mitigating climate change-driven heat waves and floods in surrounding majority-Black communities. It provides clean air and protects the headwaters of the South River, which supplies drinking water to millions of people downstream and provides habitat for more than 175 species of wildlife.
What will Cop City provide? A 85-acre compound including a mock city for practicing urban warfare techniques, shooting range, roadway for high-speed chases, explosives detonation and Blackhawk helicopter landing pad. It will bring in police forces from around the country and the world to train in suppressing democratic political expression, criminalizing protest and activism.
For the past 500 years of colonization and nation-building, state violence and militarized policing has been aimed at securing the conditions for profit accumulation and resource extraction, concentrated in the hands of a wealthy and powerful elite micro-minority. This process has been devastating to the planetary ecology -- and it has been devastating to the people who get in its way: those who resist having their land, abundance and resources taken from them, or those whose lives are deemed expendable to the colonizing process.
You have the power to end this violence now.
Since 2021, Cop City has catalyzed an upsurge of popular resistance bringing together environmentalists, prison abolitionists, police reform advocates and community members of all ages and backgrounds. They have mobilized through all possible legal and policy avenues to protest the project, as well as organized demonstrations and nonviolent direct action, with many placing their bodies on the line in their beloved forest to block its destruction.
On January 18, forest defender Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Paez Terán was murdered by police bullets. Since then, activists all around the country have spoken up in solidarity against financiers of the Atlanta Police Foundation, against Cop City’s main contractor, Brassfield and Gorrie, and their insurer AXA in their own hometowns, and also converged upon Atlanta this week to support the frontline opponents of Cop City. The state has responded by bringing false domestic terrorism charges against these activists.
Who are the terrorists: those who destroy a forest that human beings and countless species depend on, or those defending that forest?
Chase has a long history of supporting oppressive police departments: in 2011, it gave $4.6 million to militarize the NYPD; Managing Director Katie LeGardeur sits on the board of the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation; and, as already mentioned, John Richert sits on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation.
We urge you, a member of Chase’s DEI team, to call upon your CEO, Jamie Dimon and the Operating Committee to terminate all associations with police foundations, and condemn the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center project.
YOU HAVE THE POWER TO HALT THIS DESTRUCTION AND INJUSTICE.