Stop Cop City and the courage of resistance
In spite of profound repression, activists will continue to fight tooth and nail to ensure that Cop City will never be built.
This weekend, Stop Cop City activists have called for a mass mobilization on the construction site. Our communications director, Cody Bloomfield, will be on the ground covering it. Ahead of that protest, we present a recap of the movement to date.
Georgia tries to make the cost of protesting too high
When it comes to Stop Cop City, Georgia has used every tool in its arsenal to intimidate activists out of the movement. Domestic terrorism charges for 42 people, including a legal observer. Felony charges for posting flyers. Retaliatory arrests of journalists. RICO conspiracy charges. Legal challenges to the democratic referendum. Refusals to grant bond that landed some activists in jail for three months.
For three years now, activists have resisted the construction of what they’ve dubbed Cop City, a police training center that would include shooting ranges, a site for joint training of police and military forces, and mock towns to teach police urban counterinsurgency tactics. The project, as proposed, would decimate one of the forests known as “the fourth lung of Atlanta,” a greenspace formerly frequented by the predominantly-Black surrounding community.
Since the project was proposed, activists have used every democratic channel available. They held protest march after protest march, and showed up at public comment in droves to testify about everything from the land lease terms to preservation of heritage trees. Since elected officials couldn’t be relied upon to act in the peoples’ interest, activists turned to direct democracy, collecting 116,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot.
Activists have also used direct action tactics to delay the project, to cling to what’s left of the forest, to declare the peoples’ right to the space. Protesters occupied the forest on and off for over two years. When the Atlanta Police Foundation showed up with bulldozers, activists sabotaged equipment, leading to further delays in construction. Protesters dubbed the construction site “Weelaunee People’s Park,” and hosted music festivals and teach-ins at the site. Echoing the Red Power indigenous occupation tactics of the 1960s and 1970s, and drawing on the peaceful disruption tactics of the anti-nuclear and environmental movements, a relatively small group of forest defenders managed to block construction for over two years - until the state escalated repression.
Painting activism as terrorism
In 2017, in the aftermath of Dylann Roof’s murder of nine people at a Black church in Charleston, SC, Georgia passed an expanded domestic terrorism statute. Defending Rights & Dissent has continually raised the alarm about the collateral harm of terrorism statutes. Irrespective of how compelling the circumstances of passage, broad and vague expansions of the definition of terrorism and criminalization of aid to so-called terrorist groups leads to increased surveillance of Muslim activists, anarchists, radical environmentalists, and other usual targets of FBI obsession. Georgia’s statute expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include attempts to disable or destroy a government facility with the intent of altering policy. In the eyes of the state, nonviolent direct action against Cop City warped into terroristic intimidation.
Prior to December 2022, forest defenders and police maintained an uneasy equilibrium. On incursions into the forest, police slashed water tanks and cut down climbing ropes, but mostly permitted the occupation to continue. In December, something snapped. Police descended in droves upon the forest and began arresting activists on domestic terrorism charges. Arrest warrants cited First Amendment-protected activity, such as being a prison abolitionist and attending other environmental protests, as well as a DHS characterization of the protest movement as domestic violent extremism. A month later, police conducted another raid. On January 18, 2023, police assassinated activist Tortuguita Terán in broad daylight during park open hours. It was a grim first. While the US military had long materially supported deadly violence against environmental activists abroad, Teràn’s death marked the first police killing of an environmental activist on US soil.
Activists meet repression with solidarity, Georgia strikes back harder
At that point, the movement could have backed down. Relatively few people occupied the forest, and the state had succeeded in sidelining many of them using domestic terrorism charges. But instead of dying off, the movement caught fire. After the murder of Tortuguita, national news began reporting on the movement to Stop Cop City, and more activists flooded in. The protest infrastructure built gradually over the years since 2020 kicked into high gear, bailing out activists so they could continue protesting. Activists called for a March Week of Action, which was expected to draw higher numbers of protesters.
The second night of the Week of Action, police struck back hard. A contingent of the Stop Cop City protesters dressed in black bloc marched on the construction site, damaging several pieces of construction equipment, before returning to a protest music festival held elsewhere in the forest. Dozens of cops descended on the music festival, grabbing protesters more or less at random. Anyone wearing black with muddy shoes was a target. Dozens of activists were thrown in jail, including a clearly marked legal observer, even though some people appeared to have just had the bad luck of wearing the wrong color t-shirt to the music festival. Whereas the Atlanta Solidarity Fund had previously bailed out activists in a matter of days, Georgia began to deny bond. Some people spent 90 days in jail. Activists granted bond were restrained from returning to Georgia or contacting others in the movement, throwing up hurdles to the type of coordination of legal defense that had so successfully managed to get charges dropped, notably after the Trump Inauguration Day protests in Washington DC.
But Georgia wasn’t done yet. Early whispers suggested that prosecutors didn’t just have activists in their crosshairs; they’d go for the movement infrastructure too. First, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which bailed out activists and ran an expenses reimbursement account, was charged with charity fraud and money laundering in May. In September, the Georgia attorney general’s office dropped a sweeping indictment of 61 activists. Not all were associated with the Stop Cop City movement; one activist in the alleged conspiracy vandalized police headquarters during 2020 protests, months before the police training center was ever proposed. The statute at issue, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, requires that money change hands. The state argued that, through posting bail and reimbursing protest-related expenses, including camping equipment and portable bathrooms, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund was fueling a grand conspiracy to further “virulent anarchist ideals.” The RICO charges represent a marked escalation of the state’s power to chase activists out of the movement.
At each stage of state repression, protesters have responded by doubling down on organizing, by fighting for the cause ever more fiercely, and the movement has grown. Just days after the RICO indictment came down, five members of the clergy ventured onto the construction site and chained themselves to equipment. The same week, organizers announced a mass mobilization on November 10-13. All eyes will be on Atlanta. The state’s strategy has backfired. Every new charge has drawn prosecutors onto legally flimsier ground, and each time, more people have been watching. In spite of profound repression, activists will continue to fight tooth and nail to ensure that Cop City will never be built.
Defending Rights & Dissent responds to state repression of protesters
Since the first domestic terrorism charges came down in December, Defending Rights & Dissent has closely monitored the situation in Georgia. As an organization with a long track record of fighting against the conflation of activism with terrorism, we were an early responder to prosecutorial abuses in Atlanta. Here’s what we’ve done so far:
In February, we led an organizational letter calling for prosecutors to drop the domestic terrorism charges against Stop Cop City protesters, calling particular attention to infringements on First Amendment-protected activity. 68 other organizations signed on. National news organizations reporting on the new charges, including NPR, Vice, and Al Jazeera, cited our letter as an indication that the terrorism charges face broad criticism from civil liberties and human rights groups. We also organized grassroots activists to flood prosecutors’ inboxes.
After the March Week of Action, DRAD Communications Director Cody Bloomfield began reporting on political repression for Truthout. They reported on the June Week of Action in person and published pieces about repression of protest.
As early as January, DRAD began filing FOIA requests to uncover the extent of activist surveillance. We filed requests with DHS, the FBI, and all pertinent Georgia agencies. When we were met with obstructionism and delays, we began filing elsewhere. Through a FOIA submitted to the City of Boise, ID, we uncovered evidence that the NYPD Intelligence Bureau was spreading alarm about peaceful vigils, food distribution, and solidarity events, and was circulating these breathless reports to hundreds of jurisdictions across the country. When local agencies denied requests or attempted to price us out of receiving public documents, we found a law firm to begin suits against five agencies in Georgia.
After receiving obstructionist responses from Georgia authorities, we convened a group of Cop City FOIA filers to collect experiences, share advice, and uncover discrepancies in agencies’ responses. As this community of FOIA filers has extracted files from Georgia authorities, we’ve amplified those documents on social media.
As Georgia’s repression of activists has grown ever more egregious, DRAD has put out statements condemning Tortuguita’s murder, domestic terrorism charges, assaults on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and the RICO indictment.
Defending Rights & Dissent led a second organizational letter criticizing the RICO indictment. Nearly 100 organizations signed onto the letter. Within 48 hours of the indictment, Cody published a piece in Jacobin and DRAD issued an organizational statement.
Cody has spent the past several weeks reporting an upcoming piece about the November mobilization. In November, they will travel to Georgia to report on protest.