DON’T STOP: CONTINUING THE FIGHT AGAINST COP CITY

From CrimethInc.

Six More Months in the Movement to Defend the Forest

Starting in April 2021, people in Atlanta, Georgia set out to defend Weelaunee Forest, where politicians and profiteers are attempting to build a police training compound known as Cop City. Over the past two and a half years, this movement has given rise to one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Opponents of Cop City have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project, while the authorities have killed one forest defender and pressed outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective.

In the previous chapter of our chronicle of the struggle against Cop City, we described the difficulties that the movement faced after the murder of Tortuguita on January 18, 2023 and the police raids on the South River Music Festival and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. In the following account, we trace the trajectory of the movement from the June 5 City Council vote in favor of Cop City through the November Block Cop City mobilization and its aftermath.

Comparing the movement that began in 2021 to the struggle as it exists at the close of 2023 feels nearly impossible. Many of the horizons that were open to the movement when it began have been definitively blocked. It has become impossible to defend the forest by occupying it; construction of the facility is underway, though it has been repeatedly delayed. Yet the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest has continued to evolve despite the attacks of the Attorney General, federal agencies, and local police. In this chapter, we will explore how the movement has managed to maintain a participatory and confrontational character, even under tremendous pressure.

“Thought it would be over by now, but it won’t stop”

-Destiny’s Child, “Survivor”

For background on the first two and a half years of the movement:

• “The City in the Forest,” chronicles the first year of the movement.
• “The Forest in the City,” chronicles the second year of the movement.
• “Beneath the Concrete, the Forest” collects first-person accounts from the occupation of Weelaunee forest through the first half of 2022.
• “Balance Sheet,” explores and evaluates the strategies that different currents in the movement have employed.
• “Living in an Earthquake” chronicles February through June of 2023, including the fifth week of action, the repression that followed, and the City Hall mobilizations.

THE HOUR IS DRAWING LATE
Three and a half years ago, twenty million people rose up to fight police and the structural white supremacy that they exist to impose. For a short time, it appeared that police abolition could become a realistic possibility in the United States; but politicians, universally dependent upon the police, ultimately blocked any attempts to so much as defund or reform police departments. Afterwards, people in Atlanta, Georgia set out to use direct action to block the flow of public resources to police by preventing the construction of Cop City.

A great deal has changed in those three and a half years.

On September 27, a Philadelphia judge dismissed all charges against the police officers who murdered Eddie Irizarry. In response, people organizing via social media began vandalizing businesses, looting stores, and setting fires in various part of the city. This mobilization built on social tensions that have been percolating since the protests in response to the murder of Walter Wallace by local police in 2020. Yet this time, the activist left largely stayed home. Those who are already on the receiving end of most of the violence of the police were left to go it alone, as they were in the days before the George Floyd rebellion.

The following month, protesters returned to the streets in response to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, blockading transportation infrastructure and stopping work at arms manufacturers like Raytheon. As early as October 19, a poll showed that most US voters (including 55% from the Republican party and 80% of Democrats) supported a ceasefire.

Undeterred, the United States government is sending tens of billions of dollars of military aid to the Israeli military. This is essentially a gift card, in that most of the aid must be spent on weapons supplied by US-based firms. This war stimulus to the US economy enables Washington to channel a secret budget into the pockets of arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin that is not included in the annual Congressional allocation. War is making a small number of people extremely wealthy.

Some large firms, including Wells Fargo, worry that the war is creating an atmosphere of “deglobalization” that could hurt their profits in the long run. But this has not shifted US foreign policy any more than the mass murder of thousands of Palestinian children has. It appears that some elements of the ruling class anticipate a future in which it will be more profitable to bank on war than on peace.

This has serious implications for us all. If we don’t organize accordingly now, our future may be bleak indeed.







Fall of 2023 was the first time since the beginning of the movement to stop Cop City that large numbers of protesters mobilized around any issue in the United States. The movement in Atlanta emerged after the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, during the period of social peace and political disorganization that typically follows large protest movements. If the echoes of the 2020 uprising were never entirely suppressed, we owe that to the initiative of the movement in Atlanta and those who acted in solidarity with it elsewhere, as well as the persistence of young Black and Brown people who continue to resist state terror in places like Philadelphia.

To overcome the obstacles confronting the movement in Atlanta will require long-term, large-scale mobilization. The actions of individuals and small dedicated groups have created a context in which a mass outbreak of revolt could have the most radical content currently imaginable, possibly paving the way for a more serious movement against carceral infrastructure all over the country. But such an outcome is by no means guaranteed. The movement has already experienced several flashpoints, including the murder of Tortuguita; these have given it greater visibility without mobilizing massive numbers of new participants.

Nonetheless, the story is not over, and the stakes are high. Now is not the time for backing down.







The authorities in Atlanta appear to be prepared to prioritize channeling millions of dollars to the police above all else, including their own democratic protocols—even if it leaves them standing atop a pile of ash. A photograph of the aftermath of the demonstration of March 5, 2023.


THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU
On June 6, 2023, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve an additional $67 million for Cop City after more than thirteen hours of public comment against the project—the largest participation in a City Hall meeting in Atlanta history. After the vote, the names and addresses of the councilmembers who voted “yes” appeared online. Various local outlets subsequently published articles platforming the councilmembers. Councilmembers Bakhtiari and Westmoreland, the former who voted “no” and the latter who voted “yes,” met at a local restaurant and posed for pictures together, reasserting their alliance as gay councilmembers, denouncing radical politics, and calling for “calm” in the face of angry responses to the charade that the City Council had choreographed on June 5 and 6. The next day, June 7, Mayor Andre Dickens was doxxed.

These doxxings appear to have been conducted by the same group that had published the names and addresses of the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Buckhead Coalition. The documents were signed by a group calling itself the “Free & Rowdy Party,” a reference to one of the early political organizations in Atlanta history, colloquially known as the “party of militant disorder.” The Rowdies frequently clashed with the other major party, known as the Moral Party.

The following Monday, on July 8, a group of protesters associated with the Stop Cop City Coalition announced the formation of a new organizing group called Cop City Vote. The idea was to collect signatures for a petition demanding a referendum. If successful, this would compel the City to place the land-lease contract between the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation on a popular ballot, enabling Atlanta voters to decide the future of the project.

THE REFERENDUM
The new group got to work with great haste, establishing online platforms, writing statements, and building an organizational model that would enable a large number of people to volunteer to canvass the public. The referendum process only allows for registered City of Atlanta voters to participate—excluding most of those who live closest to the forest, which is just outside city limits. The participants had to cover a large area in short time: according to Georgia law, from the day a petition is filed, the petitioner has only 60 days to turn in signatures in order to initiate a referendum. In this case, the petitioners would have to submit 70,330 signatures (15% of the city population), collected in less than two months. By comparison, only 97,000 voters altogether participated in the 2021 mayoral election. Collecting so many signatures was a bold ambition, and it faced illegal obstruction from the beginning.

On June 7, Cop City Vote delivered a referendum petition to City of Atlanta Clerk Vannessa Waldron. This legal document initiates the process of signature collection upon approval, thus starting the 60-day countdown. In order to place Cop City on the November ballot, organizers would have to submit the signatures they collected by no later than August 15. If the signatures were turned in after that date, the referendum would go on the March ballot. Clerk Waldron denied the petition, citing obscure legal technicalities. A week later, on July 14, Waldron denied the second petition, again on obscure clerical premises. This second denial prompted popular outcry.

By denying the petition on July 14, the city government hoped to make it impossible for the organizers to deliver the signatures by the August 15 deadline. This was a pre-emptive attack on the referendum—the first stage of a long campaign targeting the initiative. It’s worth noting that while in times of social peace, the authorities would presumably have welcomed the opportunity to channel a combative movement into electoral reformism, in this case, they were not prepared to make any compromises, not even permitting citizens to utilize their legal rights.

In response, organizers filed a lawsuit against the Clerk. Public figures such as Senator Raphael Warnock called on the city government to permit the process to move forward. On July 21, Waldron approved the petition. Signature collection could finally begin.

A month later, on July 27, a US District Court ruled in favor of the canvassers. This was one of the first legal rulings in favor of the movement since it began in April 2021. The court ruled that the illegal restrictions placed on the petition-collection process, specifically the clause that disqualifies non-residents from so much as knocking on doors to collect signatures, violates the First Amendment. Consequently, the judge gave organizers an additional 60 days to collect signatures.







Organizers petitioning for a referendum on Cop City established a presence across Atlanta, building offices and information points in community centers and places of worship.


WHAT MASS ORGANIZING MAKES POSSIBLE
Organizing efforts around the City Hall protests and the referendum enabled the movement to overcome a few barriers. Nearly 800 people volunteered to collect signatures for the referendum process. Dozens of abolitionists and radical organizers composed a curriculum to train those volunteers and strategized about how to best distribute their energies across the city. From mid-June to mid-September, these volunteers could be seen everywhere. Posters, stickers, signs, and memorabilia filled coffee shops, bars, local grocery stores, tattoo parlors, bookshops, farmers markets, and art galleries. On busy avenues, volunteers walked up and down the sidewalks, speaking with all passersby. In just a few months, hundreds of thousands of residents spoke with canvassers; this gave them a chance to ask them questions, learn about Cop City, and discuss the resistance to it, generating a new level of mass sympathy with the movement.

In the canvasser trainings, aspiring canvassers were explicitly instructed not to denounce sabotage, vandalism, or clashes with law enforcement. If they did not feel comfortable explaining those phenomena, they could simply change the subject, or they could humbly listen, then find a way to reassert the purpose of the petition. The referendum organizers themselves asserted continuously that the strength of the movement derived in no small part from sabotage, vandalism, and other combative tactics. They published written statements affirming the validity of “all tactics.” Contrary to the anxieties of some internet commentators, the referendum campaign was not intended to suppress or compete with direct action. Most participants in the effort simply wanted to establish a path for the movement that could involve a large number of metro Atlanta residents.

The movement has had many strengths, but mass participation has never been among them. Despite continuous attempts to foster a creative and contagious movement, despite robust media coverage locally, nationally, and globally, no more than 2000 people have ever participated in any one event opposing Cop City. Despite the accessible action framework demonstrated by the groups targeting contractors and funders, only ideologically driven and risk-tolerant groups have participated in those actions, usually using a clandestine approach. The largest event by far was the South River Music Festival, which drew in a couple thousand people over two days in March 2023. Most protests, rallies, and marches have drawn between ten and two hundred people. When Tortuguita was killed, only 300 people showed up downtown in response, two thirds of them hooded militants in black masks. This has consequences for what those who do participate can actually do, because some kinds of action are only possible in large crowds.

The movement has made considerable headway nonetheless. It has found ways to turn its small size to its advantage. Centering a small, dedicated core has enabled the participants to advance revolutionary discourse throughout the movement and to conduct militant actions with greater tactical agility.

Yet countless historical examples suggest that this pattern cannot be maintained forever. If frontline fighters cannot keep supply lines open, take breaks, receive new assistance, and rely on the resources and security provided by sympathizers and newly radicalized people, they will eventually lose. This concern is not derived from abstract political concepts or folded-and-stapled booklets; it has been proven time and again across centuries and continents. For example, the legendary focoista campaigns of the 20th century drew together some of the most dedicated, audacious, and extreme sectors of the Latin American revolutionary left in clashes with the armies and paramilitaries of various CIA-backed dictatorships. Aside from exceptions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, and El Salvador, these campaigns resulted in the near-complete decimation of an entire generation of revolutionaries. An isolated vanguard—however dedicated or secretive—is doomed to defeat.

Counterinsurgency strategy explicitly seeks to create a gulf between dedicated militants and the rest of society in order to target the former and immobilize the latter. Acknowledging this does not oblige committed militants to pursue populist strategies to appeal to an imagined mass of people, but it does open the question of what the alternatives might be.

Some participants in the movement insist that all strategies oriented towards “society” in general are naïve and “liberal.” A few go further, asserting without any measurable criteria that only clandestine sabotage “works.”1 But without widespread participation, even the fiercest vanguard cannot move beyond hit-and-run actions. They will never be able to advance to open confrontations (which the historic proponents of guerrilla warfare understood as a necessary step in their strategies). Without more participants, actions such as the march in downtown Atlanta on January 21 or the march to the construction site on March 5 will remain the high points of combativity from the movement. Those actions did not succeed in bringing about the cancellation of Cop City. In order to move from clandestine attacks to winnable confrontations, the movement needs a more robust way of understanding the relationship between the actions of anonymous saboteurs and more accessible, participatory forms of widespread self-organized activity.

If a few thousand more people dedicated themselves to the fight, that would increase the capacity of the fighters by an order of magnitude. There are worthwhile and necessary tasks to conduct in clandestinity, in public organizing, and in fundraising. The relatively small size and ferocity of the movement so far has contributed to a kind of mythologizing of the protagonists, so that the most dedicated participants are seen as heroes (or demons, depending on who you ask) while most of the supporters and public remain passive spectators. When a movement is structured as a small, sharp, edge passively observed by spectators, the latter, as a consequence of their inactivity, will tend to oscillate wildly between sympathy and skepticism. To succeed, movements must inspire the self-organized activity, theoretical development, and participation of as many people as possible. Real militancy is not showing people bold actions; it is enabling them to act for themselves.

Those who are skeptical of the value of mobilizing people to speak at City Hall or organizing people to petition for a referendum must accept that they will remain a marginal force in the movement unless they themselves take on the burden of organizing alternative strategies to engage large numbers of people. So far, the proponents of no other strategy have succeeded in doing so, and few have even tried.







Police intimidation of ordinary protest activity has become the norm in Atlanta.


THE SIXTH WEEK OF ACTION
Not everyone pursued the referendum strategy, although everyone was affected by the shifting landscape of repression. On June 23, Dekalb County District Attorney Sherri Boston announced that her office would no longer participate in the terrorism cases against the movement. In a televised press conference, she referred to the “fundamentally different” philosophies of prosecution that distinguished her office from the office of Chris Carr, Attorney General of Georgia. She also cited pressure applied against her by the public in the form of incessant phone calls and letters as a factor in her decision. This shifted all legal responsibilities and initiative into the hands of the most reactionary forces in the state, signaling that the Dekalb County Government hoped to wash its hands of the ongoing public relations disaster that they have helped to create by participating in the lethal raid on January 18 and closing Intrenchment Creek Park (a part of the Weelaunee Forest).

The following day, June 24, the sixth Week of Action began. It shared almost no common features with the previous four, though it was somewhat reminiscent of the first such week, held in October 2021. Rather than Weelaunee Forest, workshops and talks took place in Brownwood Park, located in East Atlanta Village. Rather than centering the capacities of the movement to leverage nationwide support with concentrated militancy, the sixth Week of Action involved very few protests, no mass encampment, and few cultural events. It was so different from previous Weeks that it was as if an altogether different constellation of groups had organized it.

On the first day, over 100 people gathered in Brownwood Park. By late afternoon, they were surrounded by police vehicles and surveilled by drones and helicopters. At 8:30 pm, Belkis Teran, the mother of Tortuguita, gathered people in the park to host a vigil and ceremony for her deceased child. At that point, dozens of officers entered the area, barking orders and pointing at people, instructing those assembled that if they were not gone when the park closed (three hours later), they would be subject to arrest. The crowd did not hesitate to confront the officers, yelling at them and telling them to leave the premises. When a few people with tactical experience began encircling police and calling for others to do the same, the officers quickly withdrew. This brief confrontation was cathartic for participants, but nonetheless had the intended chilling effect. After the vigil, everyone left the park. Later in the evening, deep in the Weelaunee Forest, hundreds of people gathered for an illegal dance party. Music blared late into the night as forest defenders and ravers shared the comforting embrace of the trees. However, this was not the section of the forest slated for demolition. No encampment was established there, nor in the park, nor anywhere else.

The following day, June 25, over 100 people re-assembled in the park. The atmosphere was jubilant and friendly. Participants shared food and assembled beneath a gazebo for a presentation on the limits of referendum strategies, conducted in a comradely and good-faith tone. Elsewhere in town, activists passed out fliers for forthcoming events. For the most part, the day was uneventful—with one exception.

That night, anonymous activists ventured onto the headquarters of the Brent Scarborough Company. Brent Scarborough, located almost an hour south of Atlanta in the suburb of Newnan, is the subcontractor that Brasfield & Gorrie hired to cut down trees and grade the land at the Prison Farm. Their facility is surrounded by trees and barbed wire fencing. They hired on-site security to park overnight at the office. This did not stop a few dedicated people from sabotaging their machines. According to an online communiqué, the activists hiked through the woods and scaled the fences using a cut-out square of carpet, as seen in the Hollywood film Fight Club. Sneaking past the security guards, they poured muriatic acid into the engines of multiple trucks and machines before escaping into the night.

Aside from a few movie screenings and workshops, no events were planned for the following days. Several were planned for June 28.

THE NEW BALANCE OF FORCES
At midday, a small crowd gathered outside of Cadence Bank in downtown Atlanta. The bank was slated to offer a multimillion-dollar loan to the Atlanta Police Foundation; activists wanted to give them cause to reconsider. After a few minutes, police chased and dispersed the crowd. In the skirmish, a few people were pulled free of the police, but two were arrested. One person was ultimately charged with Felony Obstruction. Between harassing the vigil for Tortuguita and this, police sought to establish a new balance of force in which they could control the streets, so that activists would be reduced to knocking on doors.

A few hours later, around 4 pm, two hundred people gathered in Gresham Park. Belkis Teran joined them. The crowd held reinforced banners. Scouts observed several dozen police vehicles in the parking lot of Intrenchment Creek Park and dozens of officers in riot gear. The crowd marched down the same bicycle path that another crowd had during the fifth Week of Action in order to re-occupy the park on March 4, 2023. Morale was high.

Approaching the wooden bridge passing over Snow Creek just east of Intrenchment Creek Park, the crowd encountered multiple police cruisers stationed next to the path, near Cottonwood Drive. Helicopters circled overhead. At the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, which marks the true entrance to Intrenchment Creek Park, police had erected cement barriers and formed a skirmish line. The crowd stopped before encountering any of this directly. Belkis took a megaphone and delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd. Others spoke as well, including demonstrators wearing balaclavas and gloves. Had the crowd been a few hundred more, this demonstration might have confronted the police and retaken the forest.

The crowd turned back, without losing morale, soberly assessing the situation. There were nearly as many police as protesters, and it was better to only fight when success was plausible. Any further advance would likely have provoked a dramatic clash in which police would have had the upper hand. If the movement had been in a phase in which it was necessary to assert its militancy, this might have been worthwhile. On the contrary, however, the movement had already demonstrated its militancy; what was necessary at this point was to show that it could win confrontations while minimizing losses.

At that point, the preparedness of the police could still be ascribed to the proximity to the forest. The authorities were clearly committed to preventing new encampments from being established there. But the protests the following day showed that this was not simply a question of the securing the forest, but of seeking to crush the whole movement.

On June 29, a small number of people assembled on Ponce de Leon, intending to picket Home Depot, a sponsor of the APF. They met a massive police mobilization. Police cruisers filled the parking lot, perhaps 100 yards long. The construction and hardware retailer closed for the day pre-emptively. A few dozen people stood on the sidewalk chanting slogans and holding signs for passing traffic. This did not appear to be a militant group; they were ostensibly not prepared to engage in confrontations with the authorities or their corporate sponsors. That did not protect them, however. Abruptly, Atlanta Police grabbed an elderly protester and handcuffed her. The demonstration was aggressively dispersed by officers barking orders and grabbing signs.







Protesters march down the bike path between Gresham Park and Intrenchment Creek Park during the sixth Week of Action on June 28, 2023.


ESCALATING TACTICS
The following day, June 30, over 100 people gathered again in Brownwood Park. Once again, the Weelaunee Coalition hosted a youth-led rally in defense of the forest and against Cop City. This may have been the only event of the week that was not harassed by law enforcement, including the movie screenings and talks. Thankfully, these children were not subjected to the direct intimidation that the rest of the movement experienced.

In the three days following the sixth Week of Action, clandestine groups claimed responsibility for several attacks against Cop City.

The first took place in California. Activists released a statement claiming credit for smashing the windows of four banks and the screens of three ATMs in San Francisco, Oakland, and Concord. Over the preceding two and a half years, several dozen offices and institutions had suffered broken windows due to their support for the Atlanta Police Foundation, but this was the largest number of locations targeted simultaneously—implying that the saboteurs were scaling up their numbers and coordination.

Anonymous saboteurs struck multiple targets in Atlanta on July 1 as well. A clandestine group calling itself the March 5th Movement—a reference to the March 5, 2023 attack on the Cop City construction site—vandalized police infrastructure in two locations. Tagging “M5M” on the hood of a police cruiser, they smashed the windows out of three cop cars on Memorial Drive and unsuccessfully attempted to set them on fire. Simultaneously, improvised incendiary devices appeared in the parking garage beneath the current Atlanta Police training facility located in an industrial area at the southern boundary of Atlanta. This second action resulted in the burning of eight police motorcycles. According to government press conferences, an additional improvised device failed to detonate. Police claim that if it had, it would have assured the burning of 40 additional vehicles. The Chief of Police and the Atlanta Journal Constitution published photographs of the device. Officials claim that the entire facility could have been destroyed if an off-duty officer had not been randomly driving by at the time. Apparently, no one was inside the building at the time of the action.

On July 2, protesters visited the residence of Cop City architect Anthony Kenny, vandalizing it with paint and slashing the tires of his car. Ambrish Baisiwala, who sits on the Atlanta Police Foundation Board of Trustees, received the same treatment that night.

ATLAS TECHNICAL CONSULTANTS DROPS OUT
The same day, July 2, protesters gathered outside the suburban home of a regional manager for Atlas Technical Consultants in Minnesota, chanting slogans and banging on drums in his yard. The regional manager stormed out his front door screaming and cursing at the demonstrators. He told those assembled that Atlas had already dropped the contract. When someone in the crowd asked him why, he answered “Because you guys are a fucking nightmare” and “You broke all of our fucking windows.”

After this news spread online, some people in Williston, Vermont visited the offices of Atlas on July 9, painting slogans on the work trucks and front doors of the facility. The next day, Atlas Technical confirmed with an independent journalist that they had backed out of the project. The following week, asked about Atlas’ decision at a press conference about Cop City, Atlanta Police chief Darin Shierbaum said “Well, if people were coming to your home, what would you do?”

Later, documents released on November 30 indicated that Atlas had apparently withdrawn from the project the preceding March. The company expressed the desire to withdraw from the project on March 4. By the 7, they were already off the contract. The document reveals much about the internal status of the project and its investigations into the movement, including the potentially illegal collusion of various agencies with Magnus Miller Gorrie over encrypted Signal chats. It also catalogues a number of actions for which no public claim of responsibility was ever made, such as February 21, 2023 burning of an Atlas Technical office and vehicle in Brecksville, Ohio.

The departure of Atlas represented a significant victory for the movement. In the winter of 2021, as detailed in The City in the Forest, 50 forest defenders had marched to the prison farm to resist the soil-boring and sampling conducted by Long Engineering, a subsidiary of Atlas Technical Consultants. Finally, after over two years of home visits, call-ins, letter writing, marches, rallies, vandalism, and clashes, a major Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractor had backed out of the project. Despite this success, the news did not catalyze a significant uptick in the pressure campaign against other subcontractors of Brasfield & Gorrie, other clients of the Atlanta Police Foundation, or the project itself. It did not give people the sense that greater resistance to Cop City was possible.

In view of this, it is worth reevaluating that campaign. More on that below.

SCOOPING THE MID-RANGE: REPRESSING PUBLIC RESISTANCE
In audio engineering, “equalization” (EQ) means adjusting the frequencies to produce the ideal sound and tone. Broadly speaking, these frequencies are divided into bass, mid-range, and treble. Insofar as taste is completely subjective, there is no “correct” way to EQ a song. In general, however, it is agreed that any EQ that completely obscures a frequency is undesirable, because that means that a given instrument or sound will be covered up by other sounds. For instance, there are many high-end frequencies in the snare drum and cymbals; without proper equalization, high-end frequencies in vocals, guitar, or keyboard can be completely covered up by the drum sounds, or all of them can bleed together in an unintelligible cacophony.

In music parlance, to “scoop the mids” is to turn down the mid-range frequencies below the bass or treble frequencies. In heavy metal, people often “scoop the mids” to produce an aggressive guitar tone, imitating the recordings of Metallica or Pantera. Unfortunately, if the mid-range of the guitars is “scooped” too much, a live audience will not be able to hear them over the drums and bass. Experienced bands know that to deliver a crisp, hard-hitting, intelligible sound, you need to include a certain amount of mid-range frequencies in the guitar EQ.

Imagine that civic efforts such as canvassing for the referendum and speaking at City Hall represent the “treble” of resistance, while nocturnal sabotage, vandalism, fire-setting, and clandestine attacks represent the “bass.” In this metaphor, the “mid-range” is comprised of public demonstrations, marches, forest encampments, walk-outs, and riotous protests—actions that are both combative and participatory. The police strategy since December 13, 2022 has been to “scoop” the mid-range of the movement, pushing down the middle frequency as much as possible.

This has created a situation that intensifies the contrast between underground and civic actions. Those who imagine that some forms of resistance are more intrinsically worthy than others welcome this situation, because it makes it easier to center their preferred approaches while deriding the others. The forcible suppression of space for participatory action protects participants from testing the viability of their concepts in open dialogue with alternative viewpoints. Prosecutors and police like this situation for the same reason: it makes the line very clear between those engaging in legal protest activity and those engaging in clandestine direct action.

But it is precisely the middle frequencies of a movement that give it its punch—making its rhythms infectious, enabling it to move people and draw them into a process of transformation. Without these frequencies, the results will be muddy and indistinct.

If activists cannot re-assert their right to gather publicly for “mid-range” activities, nocturnal sabotage and civic actions will drift further and further apart, becoming mutually unintelligible and incapable of reaching those outside the movement. Regardless of individual preferences, everyone must recognize the importance of participatory, confrontational activity.

THE STORM BEFORE THE STORM
On July 2, Governor Kemp released a statement describing the March 5th Movement attacks as “the tactics of organized criminals,” while avoiding using the name of the group. On July 3, activists visited the private residence of Keith Johnson, the pre-construction regional director for Brasfield & Gorrie. Protesters had visited his house repeatedly over the preceding two and a half years. As a result, his multi-house estate had hired full-time security to park in his driveway. This did not stop activists from climbing over the fence into his yard.

According to an online statement, saboteurs entered the Johnson estate and dumped paint on the main house, spray-painted slogans on his cars, and painted messages on his driveway next to the vehicle of the security guard. They also dumped motor oil into his swimming pool. Finally, they unloaded buckets of rotten fish into the pool and backyard. This may be among the most serious actions targeting an executive in recent US history.

The next day, on the Fourth of July, anonymous forest defenders torched two machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company in broad daylight. This action took place at the same site where other machines belonging to the Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractor had been sabotaged after the fifth Week of Action in spring 2023. Since the action in the spring, the site had been guarded nearly around the clock by private security. Activists targeted the location on the holiday, correctly predicting a lapse in security coverage.

These actions sent the Atlanta and Georgia administrations into a panic.

A month later, on August 2, Atlanta Police, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, Department of Homeland Security, the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) department, and the Fire Marshal held a joint press conference in which they publicized technical details of the previous months’ actions, including how and why they took place. The Police Chief announced an increase in the cash reward for the parties behind these actions; this suggests that the authorities did not have adequate information to go on. That did not stop them from baselessly claiming that the saboteurs did not represent the broader movement opposed to Cop City or committed to the defense of Weelaunee, alleging that they were a “very small” group. More likely, the anonymous saboteurs were not a “group” at all.

As the actions in Atlanta slowed and canvassers continued fanning out to talk with residents and acquire signatures, bold actions continued elsewhere, including the burning of multiple Asheville police cruisers just after Atlanta police announced they would host recruitment events in that city. A week and a half later, a raucous crowd disrupted another Atlanta police recruitment event in New York City, blocking the doors of the event despite the efforts of the NYPD. At the end of the month, on August 30, the March 5th Movement claimed credit for placing an incendiary device on the truck of Vertiv Corporation in Milwaukie, Oregon. Vertiv is a logistics and technology company providing technical aid to the Atlanta Police Department.

ESCALATING REPRESSION: RICO AND THE FURTHERANCE OF THE CONSPIRACY
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the “tactics of organized criminals” language Governor Kemp used on July 2 was not just boilerplate copy drafted by an intern, nor was the August 2 press conference simply propaganda to assure backers that the state could still protect their investments. These phrases and statements were shaping operations, carefully crafted interventions designed to position the government for their next operation: the blanket criminalization of the entire movement.







Governor Brian Kemp sets the stage for the RICO charges, seeking to isolate the defendants targeted by the state from their supporters in August 2023.


On August 29, the Attorney General of Georgia, Christopher M. Carr, filed an indictment with the Fulton County Superior Court, bringing charges against 61 people under Georgia’s version of the Rackeeter-Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act O.C.G.A. § 16-14-4. The indictment became public on September 5. The document, which is over 100 pages long and very poorly written, claims that the “conspiracy” (which it names “Defend the Atlanta Forest”) was “founded” on May 25, 2020—the day that Minneapolis Police officers murdered George Floyd, precipitating a nationwide uprising.

This was a serious escalation. It did not catch everyone by surprise: the Atlanta Solidarity Fund has been braced for such charges since February. The authorities and their extreme-right proxies had been demanding a full-scale crackdown on the movement for over a year, spreading a conspiracy theory that the movement was a mafia controlled by a shadowy and well-connected group (a narrative some left-wing and anarchist groups also reproduced, apparently with no sense of irony). According to one version of this conspiracy theory, circulated by far-right trolls, the Network for Stronger Communities (a Georgia-based nonprofit organization) operates a number of financial enterprises, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, that coordinate acts of terrorism in order to accumulate wealth and influence. Of the 61 accused, three were members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The 42 people already facing Domestic Terrorism charges were also indicted, as well as a number of other people whose connection to the movement was unclear. The indictment alleged that some people had committed acts in “overt furtherance of the conspiracy” such as buying glue sticks for sign-making.

The RICO indictment was not a legal procedure but a political act. It was not a judicial intervention to suppress criminal activity but a government measure to crush what the text describes as “anarchism,” “collectivism,” “social solidarity,” “mutual aid.”

It is not simply 61 people who are on trial. By dating the case to the murder of George Floyd, the prosecution showed that their real target was the entire population of millions that participated in the consequent revolt. This is not an unusual court case, but a new chapter in the fight between those who seek to preserve the hierarchies of a structurally white supremacist society and those fighting to destroy it root and branch. The indictment does not present a list of crimes. It describes the contours and values of a rival society emerging within the movement to stop Cop City, aspiring to reinvent the world according to a different logic.

The Fulton County Judge assigned to the RICO case immediately recused himself. Until then, judges had not recused themselves from cases related to the movement even when they possessed obvious ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

RICO IN GEORGIA
RICO cases are becoming a generic strategy of prosecution in Georgia. The local statutes are conveniently vague, allowing the government to bring conspiracy charges against people who do not even know one another, as in the case against the movement. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis uses RICO charges for a wide range of purposes, including sending teachers to prison for doctoring test answers in a low-income area.

In May 2022, Atlanta-based rapper Young Thug was indicted alongside 27 others under the Georgia RICO statute. In August 2023, former US President Donald Trump was indicted alongside 18 others on the same charges. Although the RICO cases currently in progress represent rival factions of the political class, the same grand jury that indicted Donald Trump is responsible for indicting those accused of “racketeering” for protesting Cop City.

The court system is the central infrastructure for directing state violence. Though naïve Democrats may imagine it to be a check on the aspirations of autocrats, it naturally lends itself to all forms of repression targeting the oppressed, and that is the chief role that it will always play.

YOU CAN’T BREAK US
The movement swiftly responded to the charges. The language of the indictment was specifically phrased to imply that any protest or action in the forest by nature of being in the forest constitutes an act of terrorism in “overt furtherance of the conspiracy,” i.e., racketeering. To challenge this framing, on September 8, clergy associated with the “Faith Coalition” rushed the construction site at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm and chained themselves to heavy machinery, stopping work for the day. Officers eventually arrived to arrest them, but only charged them with simple misdemeanors. Journalists captured this courageous action on video. In only three days, the movement had broken the state of shock that the charges had created. Nothing was finished.

In the following days, over 100 people marched to the Georgia State Capitol building, denouncing the charges. Sunrise Movement Ann Arbor marched in Michigan, demanding that Accident Fund drop its insurance coverage for the Police Foundation. In Kingston, New York, people held a vigil for those killed by state terrorism or charged with RICO. A crowd rallied outside the local “Safety Center” in Carbondale, Illinois. Graffiti denouncing the charges appeared throughout Minneapolis. In Phoenix, activists the blocked entrances to the offices of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the APF. Two activists in Elliston, Virginia locked down to construction equipment for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in solidarity with the lock-downs in Atlanta. On September 10, protesters in Chicago blocked streets and broke windows at a Chase Bank. The next day, anarchists in Olympia, Washington broke windows at an Arby’s, citing the connection that their parent company, Inspire Brands, had to the APF.

The RICO charges offered new clarity to the stakes of the struggle. The summer of 2023 had seen a lull for the combative part of the movement after the sixth Week of Action; the repression immediately catalyzed a response.

On September 11, the referendum organizers turned in 116,000 signatures demanding a popular vote on the future of Cop City—more than twice the number of votes Andre Dickens had received in the run-off election that made him Mayor.







Clergy chain themselves to machines belonging to Brent Scarborough company just days after the Attorney General indicts 61 people on RICO.


THE SCOPE OF REPRESSION BROADENS
The referendum initiative terrified the local administration and the Cop City funders. The specter of a popular vote unsettled the confidence of the pro-Cop City coalition because it called all the reassurances of the Police Foundation into question. If the contract was not a sure thing, what kind of institution would lend or donate millions of dollars to it? This question surely haunted the offices of the Police Foundation and Mayor’s office. They must have felt they needed to do something definitive to silence internal skepticism.

On September 29, 2023, Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon published the full legal names, phone numbers, and home addresses of the 116,000 Atlanta residents who had signed the petition for a referendum, posting them on the website of the Atlanta government. Taking her cue, fascist groups began sharing this list online. Many on the list feared that stalkers and abusers would hunt them down.

In response, within 24 hours, the Free & Rowdy Party doxxed the members of the Atlanta Committee for Progress, using Vanessa Waldon’s act of repression as an opportunity to catalyze further actions against Cop City. The Atlanta Committee for Progress is a coalition of powerful industrial and bourgeois delegates who collude to maintain the clientelist system known as the Atlanta Way, described in The City in the Forest. These delegates include the CEOs of many international corporations, universities, and institutions. No previous doxxes had targeted figures of such stature and influence.

A few days later, on October 1, an excavator belonging to Brent Scarborough Company caught fire. This was the third attack against the company at the location of Sawtell and McDonough, near the Federal Penitentiary. While this action did not address the 116,000 people who had been doxxed by the government, perhaps missing a chance to communicate with a huge number of people, it did demonstrate that the fighting spirit of the movement had not been extinguished by the RICO charges, nor the repression of the referendum petitioning process.







The delivery of 116,000 signatures demanding a referendum. Later, City Clerk Vannessa Waldron would publish them unredacted on the city government website in a retaliatory gesture.


THIS IS NOT A LOCAL REPRESSION STRATEGY
On October 3, a Georgia Open Records Act (GORA) request revealed that the office of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens had been speaking with the White House since at least June 2023. City officials had been communicating with White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs representative Julie Rodriguez. Rodriguez believes, according to these notes, that Cop City is “exemplary” of what President Biden “would like to see other municipalities emulate.” Finally, the White House offered to send “an official of your choice” to visit the site.

Another document made available through the GORA request revealed that the Department of Homeland Security published an overview analysis of the movement on January 3, 2023, two weeks before the killing of Tortuguita. Their report included a map of specifically destructive actions across the country, arguing that the movement would continue to inspire acts of “domestic violent extremism” if it was able to persist.







A map of Stop Cop City actions across the country, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security.


The picture is becoming clearer. Local authorities, unable to mitigate the effects of the movement against their project, have been drawing in greater and greater forces to assist them. This began with the coordination of interdepartmental raids (“security sweeps,” in the official doublespeak) on the forest in May 2022. This interdepartmental coordination slowly pulled in more agencies from across the metropolitan area, eventually culminating in a statewide raid on the forest in December followed by the infamous lethal raid led by Georgia State Patrol in January 2023. In March, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security in interrogating music festival attendees detained in or near Intrenchment Creek Park. Statements from the Governor’s office have become increasingly common, while Congresspeople like Marjorie Taylor Green have denounced the movement and demanded a clampdown.

It is now clear that some attention is being given to the fight to stop Cop City from the highest echelons of official government. In order to defeat the awkward coalition being built against it, the movement will have to combine at least as many forces and strategies.

ATTRITION AND CONFLICT
In the six months that have passed since the previous chapter of this story appeared, some of the forces described therein have disappeared. For instance, the “South River Forest Public Safety Training Center Task Force,” established by the Mayor’s office to rubberstamp Cop City blueprints and reforms, has either moved to illegal encrypted channels or vanished completely. The movement has paid no attention to Michael Thurmond, the CEO of Dekalb County, despite his decision to shut down Intrenchment Creek Park. Ryan Millsap, one of the movement’s chief antagonists in 2022, has also receded from view.

After the RICO charges became public, many participants stepped back from the movement, as well. As of October 2023, 108 people accused of participating in the struggle to stop Cop City faced charges of some kind. Presumably, the stress of awaiting trial and dealing with bond conditions has negatively impacted both the defendants and their various supporters. Hundreds of people were living with the stress of looming court cases and possible incarceration, not to mention those who did not know anyone facing charges but were emotionally impacted nonetheless. The challenges of constantly fighting, organizing, attending meetings, conducting research, deliberating, and thinking about the movement must have worn on the resolve of all participants.

One way to avoid burnout is to find a specific, concrete role to play, then change that role over time, taking breaks or periodically moving into less intensive roles before fatigue can take too much of a toll.

Not everyone who withdrew from the movement did so because of burnout. Some stepped back for other reasons. Some simply vanished, abandoning others in their time of need–neither engaging in public organizing, nor conducting clandestine activity, nor securing materials, resources, or funds for the movement or those facing charges.

At the same time, small number of people strained the solidarity of the movement by launching public denunciations and political attacks on other participants, violating the movement’s longstanding principles of discretion and private debate. It’s interesting to note that the timeline of these denunciations roughly matches the timeline of police escalation. Public denunciations appeared online in January, in March, and then again shortly after the announcement of the RICO case.

This is not all that unusual. Internal conflict often emerges as a consequence of repression. Those who study counterinsurgency understand that the chief effect of repression is usually not the direct impact of the blow, but the fault lines it opens up.

Some of those who have published denunciations may have sought to give themselves political cover for withdrawing from the movement, falling back on a narrative of “betrayal,” the only persuasive justification for leaving the movement in what otherwise might itself be understood as a betrayal. In the end, it was neither liberals nor pacifists—neither ecologists nor lawyers, students, canvassers, academics, socialists, abolitionists, Black nationalists, Marxists, or musicians—who drafted public condemnations of other participants in the movement to stop Cop City. It was anarchists targeting other anarchists.

Some of the other critics were apparently never involved in the movement to defend the forest at all, or only peripherally connected to it. Some do not even live in the United States. Conflict among participants in the movement is one thing, but it is sheer opportunism for those who only experience the movement as a distant projection screen for their own fixations to seek to capitalize on friction within it.

When analyzing the end of the forest encampments and the heartbreaking death of Tortuguita, we could well blame the billions of people who were not living in the forest in the winter of 2022—including most of the people making public denunciations in the first place. We would also have cause to criticize those in the forest who drove others out with their polarizing attitudes, behavior, and words. But apportioning blame and name-calling are for those who have given up on changing the world. The rest of us have to find ways to resolve our differences if we are to continue fighting our chief adversaries.

Despite the tensions among a few anarchists and their friends, many people have continued to push ahead courageously. What comes next will be determined by those who persevere.

FROM ATLANTA TO GAZA, NO COP CITY ANYWHERE
On October 6, District Attorney George R. Christian of the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit ruled that it was “objectively reasonable” for police to kill Tortuguita. While disturbing, this news did not shock many people. Perhaps because of the widespread cynicism around the investigation, which many considered a mockery from the outset, nobody mobilized in response to the ruling. At the same time, students and organizers on Emory University Campus were hosting meetings about Cop City and the attacks on the Gaza strip that the Israeli military was preparing.

After threats and intimidation on Morehouse, Spelman, Carter, Georgia State, and Georgia Tech campuses, it seemed that the prospect of campus resistance to Cop City had receded. On October 26, around 150 students and faculty rallied on campus. The group listened to speeches and chanted slogans. After an hour, the crowd began marching toward the Quad, where Atlanta police had forcibly dispersed an encampment in April 2023. Outside the administration building, the group stopped and organizers read out a list of demands. Those demands included the renunciation of Cop City by the Emory administration, the cessation of membership in the Atlanta Police Foundation and Atlanta Committee for Progress, and a number of specific demands relevant to the student body and their ability to organize on campus.

After reading the demands aloud, the larger part of the assembled crowd marched into the administration building to deliver them to the campus authorities directly. As they filled the atrium and stairwell, administration staff locked the doors to the office and hid from view. Eventually, a representative of the university came out to meet the students. Having accomplished their goals, the crowd dispersed onto the Quad and established a temporary information point there, distributing t-shirts and literature about the movement as well as free food and conversation.

In the days following this action, Zionists doxxed campus organizers. Across the country, academics, journalists, and workers in many industries have faced reprisals for objecting to the bombing and ethnic cleansing targeting the Gaza strip. Emory University has been no different. The administration released a statement denouncing student action, likening it to “anti-Semitism.” Jewish activists have not been spared this slander or the accompanying harassment.







Emory students demand that the university administration break ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation.


BLACK SELF-ORGANIZATION
In this context, a group of Black activists and organizers announced a Week of Action. Ostensibly, this was the first time an all-Black group had organized a series of events like this during the movement. Black activists felt that this was an important moment to mobilize Black residents and bring more into the struggle. Toward this end, they promoted a calendar of events.

Throughout this Week of Action, activists conducted workshops and presentations on a range of topics. Classes on herbalism and somatic care drew local participants. Students attended talks on Palestine solidarity and the colonial capitalism. Some of these events were ethnically mixed; many were intended to be majority-Black.

Canvassing took place every day of the week across the city. Outside of grocery stores and libraries, at shopping malls and low-income housing developments canvassers met up and passed out fliers, started conversations, and collected phone numbers. After months of canvassing for the referendum petition, some may have felt that it was urgent to continue reaching out to people, or that some communities had not been adequately canvassed. The results of this approach are seldom visible in the short term and require more durable and far-looking organizational structures to make use of the feedback and contacts arising from door-knocking and walking around with a clipboard. Some of the groups spearheading the Black Week of Action are organized into structures that are well-equipped to do this kind of outreach.

On November 9, a crowd assembled on Georgia State campus. After speeches denouncing the Israeli military and its US sponsors for the ongoing assault on civilians in the Gaza strip, the crowd marched to the location of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. The banners and signs of the processio

 

Consequence of GOP taking most offices in Georgia: Georgia Election Results 2022: Live Map | Midterm Races by County & District

 

Atlanta City Council ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT SUMMARY

https://www.atlantaga.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/1314/636245709418400000