This is the idea behind the “cool roof.” Last month, Atlanta joined a growing number of American cities requiring that new roofs be more reflective. That significantly reduces temperatures not just in a building, but in the surrounding urban environment. “I really wanted to be able to approach climate change in the city of Atlanta with a diversity of tactics,” said City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who authored the bill, “because it’s far easier to change a local climate than it is a global one.”

Because cities set their own building codes, they can regulate roofs regardless of the whims of the Trump administration, which is aggressively rolling back climate policies. Experts say cool roofs are a simple, relatively cheap, and effective way to save people from extreme heat. “I like to say that reflective materials transform rooftops from problem to power,” said Daniel J. Metzger, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Cool roofs give homeowners the power to improve health outcomes and air quality while saving money on their own energy bills.”

Other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, have also passed cool-roof ordinances, but they often only cover flat roofs, like you’d see on a commercial building. Atlanta’s ordinance covers all roofs, though it only mandates that new ones be made cool — it’s not forcing anyone to rip theirs off if it’s not time to replace. So it’ll take some time for every roof in the city to change, but Atlanta is also rapidly growing with new construction. “It’s going to be kind of a gradual, ongoing, but ideally a permanent response to rising temperatures,” said Brian Stone, director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech. “This is pushing Atlanta into one of the more forward-looking cities.”

The Smart Surfaces Coalition — a nonprofit that works with cities to enact cool roof ordinances — estimates that Atlanta’s new building code will cool the city overall by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit during peak summer temperatures, and by as much as 6.3 degrees in the city’s hottest neighborhoods. It further calculates that over a 35 year period, the ordinance will result in $310 million in energy savings, due to residents having to run their air conditioners less. “It’s a super cost-effective way to make the city healthier, more competitive, cut energy bills, and protect jobs,” said Greg Kats, founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition.

A cool roof is a passive technology that keeps working on its own. For the flat roof of a commercial building, a simple coat of white paint will do. Manufacturers also make special cool roof shingles that reflect more sunlight. Whatever the strategy, cool roofs are no more expensive to install than traditional ones, and can even be cheaper. They also extend the life of a roof because there’s less wear and tear of the material expanding in the heat, then contracting when it cools down. 

Like any other city, Atlanta is struggling with the urban heat island effect: As a summer day wears on, the built environment of asphalt, brick, and concrete absorbs more of the sun’s warmth. This raises temperatures perhaps 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the surrounding countryside, where there’s more vegetation releasing water vapor to cool the air. At night, that stored heat slowly releases from a city, keeping temperatures abnormally high into the morning. 

The urban heat island effect gets especially bad in lower-income neighborhoods, where there’s typically less tree cover than in richer areas. “These folks are getting the triple whammy,” said Mark Conway, a councilmember who sponsored Baltimore’s cool roof ordinance. “Not only is it hotter in those areas of the city, but then also, they don’t have the trees and the shade to help them, nor can they pay for the AC.” 

The urban heat island effect gets extra dangerous during heat waves that stretch several days, because human bodies can’t get a break from relentlessly high temperatures. The stress builds and builds, in particular imperiling those with asthma and heart conditions, as the body tries to pump more blood to cool itself off. Infants and the elderly are also at higher risk because their bodies don’t cool as efficiently as other people. Accordingly, extreme heat kills twice as many people in the United States each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

While getting more air conditioners into more homes will help save lives as cities get hotter, it’s not a cure-all. For one, the units use a lot of energy, and Atlanta’s residents already deal with some of the highest energy burdens in the country, meaning a significant proportion of their income goes to electric bills. Two, air conditioners actually make urban heat worse: They work by extracting heat from indoor air and pumping it outside — that’s why you feel a blast of hot air if you walk by one of them. And if the grid goes down because too many people are running their AC and other appliances at once, everyone’s now at much higher risk. “When a house loses power, if its only intervention to stay cool is air conditioning, it’s very likely that people inside of that home are going to quickly overheat,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager of climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit thinktank.

At the same time, American cities are complementing cool roofs with more trees — Cleveland, for example, has set a goal of getting all its residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by 2045. Trees provide shade and also release cooling water vapor, like rural vegetation does. Parks and gardens also soak up rainwater, preventing flooding. “There’s just a long litany of good reasons to plant as many trees as possible, and cool roofs don’t take away from that,” Metzger said. “They work together to overall cool the city.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Atlanta is embracing a cheap, effective way to beat urban heat: ‘cool roofs’ on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

This is the idea behind the “cool roof.” Last month, Atlanta joined a growing number of American cities requiring that new roofs be more reflective. That significantly reduces temperatures not just in a building, but in the surrounding urban environment. “I really wanted to be able to approach climate change in the city of Atlanta with a diversity of tactics,” said City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who authored the bill, “because it’s far easier to change a local climate than it is a global one.”

Because cities set their own building codes, they can regulate roofs regardless of the whims of the Trump administration, which is aggressively rolling back climate policies. Experts say cool roofs are a simple, relatively cheap, and effective way to save people from extreme heat. “I like to say that reflective materials transform rooftops from problem to power,” said Daniel J. Metzger, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Cool roofs give homeowners the power to improve health outcomes and air quality while saving money on their own energy bills.”

Other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, have also passed cool-roof ordinances, but they often only cover flat roofs, like you’d see on a commercial building. Atlanta’s ordinance covers all roofs, though it only mandates that new ones be made cool — it’s not forcing anyone to rip theirs off if it’s not time to replace. So it’ll take some time for every roof in the city to change, but Atlanta is also rapidly growing with new construction. “It’s going to be kind of a gradual, ongoing, but ideally a permanent response to rising temperatures,” said Brian Stone, director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech. “This is pushing Atlanta into one of the more forward-looking cities.”

The Smart Surfaces Coalition — a nonprofit that works with cities to enact cool roof ordinances — estimates that Atlanta’s new building code will cool the city overall by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit during peak summer temperatures, and by as much as 6.3 degrees in the city’s hottest neighborhoods. It further calculates that over a 35 year period, the ordinance will result in $310 million in energy savings, due to residents having to run their air conditioners less. “It’s a super cost-effective way to make the city healthier, more competitive, cut energy bills, and protect jobs,” said Greg Kats, founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition.

A cool roof is a passive technology that keeps working on its own. For the flat roof of a commercial building, a simple coat of white paint will do. Manufacturers also make special cool roof shingles that reflect more sunlight. Whatever the strategy, cool roofs are no more expensive to install than traditional ones, and can even be cheaper. They also extend the life of a roof because there’s less wear and tear of the material expanding in the heat, then contracting when it cools down. 

Like any other city, Atlanta is struggling with the urban heat island effect: As a summer day wears on, the built environment of asphalt, brick, and concrete absorbs more of the sun’s warmth. This raises temperatures perhaps 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the surrounding countryside, where there’s more vegetation releasing water vapor to cool the air. At night, that stored heat slowly releases from a city, keeping temperatures abnormally high into the morning. 

The urban heat island effect gets especially bad in lower-income neighborhoods, where there’s typically less tree cover than in richer areas. “These folks are getting the triple whammy,” said Mark Conway, a councilmember who sponsored Baltimore’s cool roof ordinance. “Not only is it hotter in those areas of the city, but then also, they don’t have the trees and the shade to help them, nor can they pay for the AC.” 

The urban heat island effect gets extra dangerous during heat waves that stretch several days, because human bodies can’t get a break from relentlessly high temperatures. The stress builds and builds, in particular imperiling those with asthma and heart conditions, as the body tries to pump more blood to cool itself off. Infants and the elderly are also at higher risk because their bodies don’t cool as efficiently as other people. Accordingly, extreme heat kills twice as many people in the United States each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

While getting more air conditioners into more homes will help save lives as cities get hotter, it’s not a cure-all. For one, the units use a lot of energy, and Atlanta’s residents already deal with some of the highest energy burdens in the country, meaning a significant proportion of their income goes to electric bills. Two, air conditioners actually make urban heat worse: They work by extracting heat from indoor air and pumping it outside — that’s why you feel a blast of hot air if you walk by one of them. And if the grid goes down because too many people are running their AC and other appliances at once, everyone’s now at much higher risk. “When a house loses power, if its only intervention to stay cool is air conditioning, it’s very likely that people inside of that home are going to quickly overheat,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager of climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit thinktank.

At the same time, American cities are complementing cool roofs with more trees — Cleveland, for example, has set a goal of getting all its residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by 2045. Trees provide shade and also release cooling water vapor, like rural vegetation does. Parks and gardens also soak up rainwater, preventing flooding. “There’s just a long litany of good reasons to plant as many trees as possible, and cool roofs don’t take away from that,” Metzger said. “They work together to overall cool the city.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Atlanta is embracing a cheap, effective way to beat urban heat: ‘cool roofs’ on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

CPJ wrote a letter to DeKalb County Chief Executive Officer Lorraine Cochran-Johnson requesting that charges against Guevara be dropped and has not immediately received a reply from the office.

“We are deeply concerned by the ongoing detention of Spanish-language journalist Mario Guevara by authorities in DeKalb County, Georgia. He must be released immediately and the charges against him dropped,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Guevara was doing his job and reporting the news at the time of his arrest. It is alarming that the charges he is now facing could be a pretext to begin deportation proceedings against him.” 

Guevara, an Emmy-winning reporter who covers immigration on his “MGnews” Facebook page, and other social media platforms was livestreaming the protest in the Embry Hills neighborhood northwest of Atlanta when he was detained by police. At the time of his arrest, Guevara was wearing a press pass and clearly identified himself as a journalist to law enforcement, according to video footage of his arrest.

Originally from El Salvador, Guevara has work authorization in the United States and has been in the process of obtaining a green card through his son, who is a U.S. citizen. 

Guevara was charged with improperly entering a roadway; obstruction of law enforcement officers; and unlawful assembly, according to reports. During a court appearance yesterday, a judge granted Guevara bond. However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a “detainer” against the journalist, which often precedes the deportation process, his lawyer, Giovanni Díaz, told reporters. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

• Biden and Trump meet in first presidential debate in Atlanta.
• Supreme Court strikes down a bankruptcy deal with the owners of Purdue Pharma that would’ve funded fight against opioid crisis.
• The NTSB sanctions Boeing over its handling of a mechanical failure on one of its jets earlier this year.
• High Court rulings, or delays in rulings, likely to play a role in the election.
• House Democrats warn on a disaster for reproductive freedom in the event of a second Trump presidency.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 27, 2024. Biden and Trump meet in first presidential debate in Atlanta. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

As a wave of student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza continues to spread from coast to coast, schools and law enforcement have responded with increasing brutality to campus encampments. One of the most violent police crackdowns took place at Emory University in Atlanta on Thursday, when local and state police swept onto the campus just hours after students had set up tents on the quad in protest against Israel’s war on Gaza as well as the planned police training center known as Cop City. Police used tear gas and stun guns to break up the encampment as they wrestled people to the ground, and are accused of using rubber bullets. Among those arrested were a few faculty members. We hear from two of the arrested professors: Noëlle McAfee, chair of the philosophy department, and Emil’ Keme, professor of English and Indigenous studies. We also speak with Palestinian American organizer and medical student Umaymah Mohammad, who describes how Emory has repeatedly suppressed activism on campus since the start of the war in October, and says law enforcement in Georgia work closely with Israeli authorities as part of a police training exchange. “We no longer accept our tuition dollars and our tax money going to fund an active genocide,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ryan Millsap, a powerful Atlanta movie executive who has relied on relationships with Black and Jewish leaders to advance his business endeavors, has issued an apology after an investigative report that exposed his racist and antisemitic messages was published by ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The apology comes as several influential government and entertainment figures acquainted with Millsap said they were disappointed by his derogatory rhetoric about “Fucking Black People” and “nasty Jews,” revealed in public records tied to an ongoing legal dispute with Millsap’s former attorney.

“Those comments were deplorable, and I don’t appreciate them,” said DeKalb County commissioner and CEO candidate Larry Johnson, who is Black.

Millsap, who is white, is a mainstay in Atlanta real estate, political and entertainment circles. He responded to the report with a statement issued three days after publication. He’d been made aware of the contents of the story weeks ahead of publication, but he did not respond to questions after journalists sent him the material that would be reported.

The messages, filed publicly as exhibits in two separate Fulton County Superior Court cases, contained racist and antisemitic comments made between Millsap and his girlfriend at the time, who was also an investor in his real estate business. In those messages, the couple complained about how Black people smell and how Jewish people do business. In a subsequent hearing, Millsap chalked up some of his rhetoric about Jewish people to “locker room” talk, according to transcripts.

“Unfortunately, in the course of this litigation, comments which I never intended to share publicly have come to light, and people I care about and who have put their trust in me have been hurt. I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” Millsap wrote on Sunday.

“My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks. I intend to work privately with all of you to use this as an opportunity to have a healthy and authentic dialogue about race and culture, in a productive, not destructive, manner.”

In emails to ProPublica and the AJC that were cited in the story published last week, Millsap’s ex-girlfriend apologized for the texts and wrote: “I severed all personal and professional ties with Mr. Millsap years ago because our values, ethics, and beliefs did not align. As a passive investor in Blackhall, I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, nor have I been party to any of the lawsuits involving Blackhall. I consistently encouraged Mr. Millsap to treat his investors and community supporters with fairness and respect.”

Todd “Speech” Thomas, a Grammy-winning artist and the front man for Atlanta hip-hop group Arrested Development, issued a blistering statement on Wednesday criticizing Millsap and his comments. Thomas was a guest on Millsap’s podcast last year.

“While I previously had a positive experience interacting with Millsap, the gravity of his words cannot be ignored or excused,” Thomas said. “His recent ‘apology’ rings hollow without concrete actions to address the harm caused. Mere words are not enough; we demand meaningful steps toward education, understanding, and genuine change.”

Millsap, the former owner of Blackhall Studios, has been celebrated for his commitment to diversity in the workplace.

In 2019, as he planned to expand his movie studio, he courted a South DeKalb Black community in his effort to get the approval of county commissioners like Johnson for a land swap. Millsap had promised the community $3.8 million in improvements — including trails and a public park — as a perk for the swap. He sold the studio in 2021, and the 40 acres of land that he acquired a year earlier (and still owns) is now part of a fierce environmental dispute tied to an area that will house the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — a $90 million police training facility that is under construction. (Critics call the project Cop City.)

Johnson, who was among the government officials who publicly supported the swap, said the proposal would not have gotten his vote had he known of Millsap’s messages.

Had Millsap’s texts been made public at the time he was pursuing the land swap, “he would have never gotten a chance to talk to me or anybody, with the community and myself — he would have been ran out of there,” Johnson said, adding. “It would have never gotten to this point. He talked about African Americans and our people, and you don’t do that.”

Johnson said Millsap presented an alternate public persona to the majority Black area as neighbors largely supported the land swap.

“We can’t go back in time on those things, but my goal is to use this as a learning opportunity to talk about how we have to combat that stuff,” Johnson said.

Millsap, in a written statement issued Wednesday, responded to Johnson’s comments and defended the land swap deal.

“I care about DeKalb County and its citizens and would hope Commissioner Johnson feels the same way,” he said. “The commissioners, including Commissioner Johnson, agreed at the time of the land swap that it was the best thing for the county, and they voted for it on that basis. That’s what good leaders should do, and that’s exactly what they did.”

DeKalb CEO Michael Thurmond, who is Black, said he was advised by the county attorney against speaking about the text messages because of pending litigation involving Millsap, his real estate company and the county.

One of those matters is a state Court of Appeals case in which environmentalists have sued Millsap and the county over the swap, claiming changes made by the Trust for Public Land and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to a deed agreement violated original terms that confirmed the land “shall be used in perpetuity as park property.”

It’s unclear what Millsap’s plans for the land are.

Millsap’s text messages have also caused a stir within the entertainment industry, where he allied himself with Black leaders and spoke publicly about the importance of the Black community’s contributions. Several people contacted by reporters said they didn’t want to speak publicly about such a discomforting subject.

Isaac Hayes III, founder of the Atlanta-based social media platform Fanbase and a record producer, was a guest on Millsap’s podcast in an episode posted in December 2022.

In an interview on Monday, Hayes said Millsap’s disparaging text messages were distasteful, but he’d be willing to talk with Millsap if he reached out.

“I wish him success in finding the pathway to, you know, dialogue — constructive dialogue — that results in those types of conversations for him in his life,” Hayes said. “I don’t speak about, you know, races of people in that fashion. It’s disappointing, but I wish him luck.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr, ProPublica, and Mike Jordan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When Ryan Millsap arrived in Atlanta from California a decade ago, the real estate investor set his sights on becoming a major player in Georgia’s booming film industry. In just a few years, he achieved that, opening a movie studio that attracted big-budget productions like “Venom,” Marvel’s alien villain, and “Lovecraft Country,” HBO’s fictional drama centered on the racial terror of Jim Crow America.

As he rose to prominence, Millsap cultivated important relationships with Black leaders and Jewish colleagues and won accolades for his commitment to diversity. But allegations brought by his former attorney present a starkly different picture. In private conversations, court documents allege, Millsap expressed racist and antisemitic views.

Various filings in an ongoing legal fight show Millsap, who is white, making derogatory comments regarding race and ethnicity, including complaints about “Fucking Black People” and “nasty Jews.”

“Ryan’s public persona is different from who he is,” John Da Grosa Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, alleges in one filing, adding: “Ryan works hard to mislead and hide the truth. And he is very good at it.”

Smith submitted troves of text messages between Millsap and his former girlfriend as evidence in two separate cases in Fulton County Superior Court. The messages, reviewed by ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, represent a fraction of the evidence in a complex, yearslong dispute centered on compensation for the work Smith performed for Millsap.

In response to a request for an interview about the text messages and related cases, Millsap wrote that this “sounds like a strange situation,” asking “how this came up” and requesting to review the material. After ProPublica and the AJC provided the material cited in this story, he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Many of the text messages filed with the court were sent in 2019, an important year for Millsap. He was planning an expansion of his Blackhall Studios that would nearly triple its soundstage space. Instead, Millsap ended up selling Blackhall, now called Shadowbox, for $120 million in 2021. The following year he announced plans to build a massive new complex in Newton County, about 40 miles east of Atlanta.

Smith started working for Millsap in August 2019, representing the film executive and his companies in a lawsuit brought by a business associate who claimed a stake in Blackhall. In May 2020, Smith became Blackhall Real Estate’s chief legal counsel.

Their relationship soured in early 2021. In the ensuing feud, Smith claimed that Millsap had promised him a third of his family company, as well as compensation for extra legal work — and, in a letter from his attorney, demanded that Millsap pay him $24 million within four business days: “We, however, have no interest in harming Mr. Millsap or disrupting his deal, his impending marriage, his future deals, or anything else.”

In the arbitration proceeding that followed, Millsap’s attorneys described the letter as “extortionate” and claimed that Smith was trying to “blow up” Millsap’s personal and business life and stall the sale of Blackhall Studios. _“_Smith breached the most sacred of bonds that exist between a lawyer and his or her clients: the duty of loyalty,” lawyers for Millsap later wrote.

In the same proceeding, Smith accused Millsap of firing him after he raised allegations of a hostile and discriminatory workplace, referencing Millsap’s text messages. Smith’s late father was Jewish.

In January 2023, an arbitrator sided with Millsap, ordering that Smith pay him and his companies $3.7 million for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. She ruled that Smith’s conduct was “egregious and intended to inflict economic injury on his clients.”

Through his attorney, Smith declined to be interviewed. In response to a list of questions, he wrote, “This has been a tireless campaign of false narratives and retaliation against me for more than three years.” He claimed that his employment agreement with Millsap guaranteed him a cut of the profits he helped generate and that an expert estimated his share to be between $17 million and $39 million.

Even as Millsap won his legal fight with his former attorney, Smith has continued to press the court battle. In an April 2023 motion to vacate, Smith called the arbitration process a “sham” and the award a “fraud,” and he is now appealing a judge’s decision to uphold the award. In January, a lawyer for Smith filed hundreds of pages of Millsap’s texts in a separate legal dispute in which Millsap is not a party.

In a city with dominant Black representation and a significant Jewish population, maintaining a positive relationship with these communities — or at least the appearance of one — is essential to doing business.

“Mr. Millsap knows,” Smith alleged in one filing, “these text messages are perilous for him.”

On a Thursday night in January 2019, Millsap stood near the pulpit at Welcome Friend Baptist, a Black church 10 miles from downtown Atlanta in DeKalb County, near where he was planning the expansion of his movie studio.

Securing support from the community would be key in convincing the county commission to approve a land-swap deal that would be necessary for the expansion. Several commissioners saw the project, including Millsap’s promise to create thousands of jobs, as a way to revitalize the area.

Dozens of longtime residents, most of them Black, sat in the sanctuary’s colorful upholstered chairs. The attendees received information sheets on Blackhall’s plans, which cited $3.8 million in public improvements, including the creation of a new public park. They asked about internship opportunities for their children and restaurants Millsap might help bring.

Millsap raised the possibility of a restaurant, one he said could offer healthy meals. Several older Black women in the church nodded in agreement and one clapped, Millsap’s pitch seemingly helping him appeal to those whose buy-in he needed.

Two months later, Millsap sent his then-girlfriend a text that Smith’s lawyers later alleged shows he “laments his political work with African Americans and his distaste for having to do it.”

In the text exchange, which was filed in court, Millsap wrote: “Well, it’s like me w black people in ATL!! Bahahahahaha!! Political nonsense everywhere!! … I’m so ready to be finished w that.”

In another text filed in court, Millsap’s girlfriend alluded to the damage she’d caused another vehicle in a car accident: “So the black girl wants $2500 to fix her car on a quote that was $1800.” He responded that she should pay the woman rather than filing an insurance claim, adding, “Fucking Black People.”

Court records and Millsap’s own testimony show that his girlfriend at the time, Christy Hockmeyer, was an investor in his real estate company, and their text messages show she played an active role in his business dealings. In a filing that claims the company had a “hostile and discriminatory work environment,” Smith alleged that Blackhall Real Estate “through its CEO, Ryan Millsap, and one of its influential investors, Christy Hockmeyer, disfavors African- Americans and Jews.”

When Hockmeyer texted Millsap after a doctor’s visit, complaining that a nurse was “retarded,” Millsap responded: “Not shocked. Black or Asian?” Hockmeyer wrote back: “Black.” Millsap replied, “Yes.”

In other exchanges filed with the court, Hockmeyer complained to Millsap, “My uber driver smells like a black person. Yuck!” He echoed her sentiment, writing back, “Yuck!” While on a flight, Hockmeyer wrote to Millsap that a “large smelly black man is seated next to me.” Millsap wrote back, “Yucko!!”

And while passing through an airport in France, Millsap texted Hockmeyer, “The smells here are unreal” and “I can't even imagine if your sensitive nose was here!!”

Hockmeyer responded, “I am so self conscious about bodily smells because there is nothing worse. I mean. Makes you dread it when you see a black person.”

Smith alleged that the conversations between Millsap and Hockmeyer reveal how they think about people with whom they conduct business. “The insidious belief that ‘black’ people are beneath them and not worthy of being hired is a theme that persists in their private writings to one another,” Smith said in the filing.

At a time in 2019 when Millsap was looking to hire an executive with a track record in the Atlanta film industry, Hockmeyer texted him that he might consider bringing on someone from Tyler Perry Studios, a 12-stage southwest Atlanta lot named after its founder, one of the highest-profile Black film producers in the country. “And taking someone from Tyler Perry would be fine too,” she wrote in a text exchange filed with the court. “As long as they are white.”

She also offered another name for Millsap to consider, adding: “He’s even a Jew. That’s good for this role.” Millsap responded, “Teeny tiniest Jew.”

On another occasion, Hockmeyer “opined that Anglo-Americans do not do business with Jewish people,” Smith alleged in a court filing, referencing a text message exchange in which she wrote to Millsap: “You know why wasps won’t do deals with Jews? Because they know that Jews have a different play book and they might get screwed.” Smith also claimed in a court filing that Millsap described to Hockmeyer “a terrible meeting with one of the most nasty Jews I’ve ever encountered.”

In an email to ProPublica and the AJC, Hockmeyer wrote: “I severed all personal and professional ties with Mr. Millsap years ago because our values, ethics, and beliefs did not align. As a passive investor in Blackhall, I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, nor have I been party to any of the lawsuits involving Blackhall. I consistently encouraged Mr. Millsap to treat his investors and community supporters with fairness and respect.”

In a subsequent email, she apologized for the texts between her and Millsap. “There were times when I may have become angry or emotional and tacitly acknowledged statements he made or said things that do not reflect my values or beliefs, and I deeply regret that,” she wrote, adding: “I made comments and used language that was inappropriate. I referred to people in ways I shouldn’t have. I’m sincerely sorry for what I said. Those comments do not reflect who I am and I disavow racism and antisemitism as a whole.”

Smith claimed in a court filing that Millsap regularly expressed disrespect toward Jewish people, describing three of his Jewish colleagues and investors as “the Jew crew,” calling one of them “a greedy Israelite” and saying another had “Jew jitsued” him. Millsap concluded, according to Smith, that “no friendship comes before money in that tribe.”

During the arbitration, Millsap testified in August 2022 that his remarks about people of the Jewish faith constituted “locker room talk.”

In December 2019, Millsap received several warnings from Hockmeyer, according to arbitration records that highlight excerpts from some of her text messages. (Other exhibits in the case show the couple’s relationship had become strained around that time.)

“Ryan you have to understand why people are over your bulls**t,” she wrote that month, according to the records. “They feel lied to taken advantage of and stolen from.”

The following month, she wrote: “Wow. You are going to get lit the f**k up. Holy s**t you are such a bad person. You are a f**king crook!”

During the arbitration hearing, one of Smith’s attorneys asked Millsap about some of Hockmeyer’s December 2019 warnings. He responded, “These are the text messages of a very angry ex-girlfriend.”

As Smith began taking on more responsibility for his client in 2020, Millsap continued to connect with Black influencers and cement himself as a cultural force in Atlanta.

In December of that year, Millsap was a guest on an episode of actor and rapper T.I.’s “Expeditiously” podcast. After discussing the differences between the Atlanta and Los Angeles entertainment markets, Millsap praised what he called “a very robust, Black creative vortex” in Atlanta. And he went on to offer more praise. “There seems like a particular magic in Atlanta about being Black.”

He also talked about his studio expansion plans amid the land-swap deal in a majority-Black DeKalb County neighborhood, telling T.I., “It’s been a fascinating study in race actually.”

Millsap went on to explain how his business interests aligned with the desires of residents. “What pushed this through was Black commissioners supporting their Black residents who wanted to see this happen, right?” he said. “They’re fighting against one white commissioner and a lot of her white constituents who took it upon themselves to be against this when they’re not even the residents who live nearby.”

One evening in August 2021, Millsap stepped onto the stage at the Coca-Cola Roxy theater in Cobb County. He and a dozen other people had been named the year’s Most Admired CEOs, an honor awarded by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. The CEO’s were recognized for, among other things, their “commitment to diversity in the workplace.”

As the dispute between Smith and Millsap unfolded, Millsap expanded his business interests to Newton County, where he purchased a $14 million, 1,500-acre lot in 2022. He said at the time that his vision is to make Georgia a “King Kong of entertainment” by building a production complex on the site and launching a streaming service that, in his words, would be “something on the scale of Netflix.” He later invested in a vodka brand with the aim, he said, of it becoming “quintessentially” Georgia, “like Coca-Cola and Delta.”

Earlier this year, Millsap sat down in his stately home office, decorated with Atlanta-centric trinkets like a model Delta plane, to record an episode of his “Blackhall Podcast with Ryan Millsap.” T.I. has been a guest, as have Isaac Hayes III, son of the iconic soul singer Isaac Hayes and a social media startup founder, and Speech, the frontman for the Atlanta-based, Grammy-winning musical act Arrested Development.

On this day, Millsap talked about race and culture, pointing out that one of his best friends is a “Persian Jew in LA”

Millsap noted that his understanding of “Black and white” was formed on the West Coast, where he had “a lot of Black friends” — “very Caucasian Black people” who had adopted white cultural norms.

“I grew up thinking like I had no racial prejudice of any kind,” Millsap said. “I thought we were beyond all that stuff.”

Rosie Manins of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr, ProPublica, and Mike Jordan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

WANF television reporter Asia Wilson and photographer Lauren Swaim were held hostage for about an hour and a half in the late evening of Dec. 11, 2023, while on assignment in Jonesboro, Georgia. Neither journalist was injured and the man who threatened them was arrested.

Wilson and Swaim were preparing to go live from the parking lot of the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office shortly before 11 p.m. when a man approached their marked news vehicle, the station reported. The man allegedly said he had a gun and would shoot them if they called for help.

Allen Devlin, an anchor at WANF, told the station that the newsroom lost all contact with the journalists until they started receiving surreptitious texts from Wilson at approximately 10:44 p.m. that Devlin called “bone-chilling.”

“It was just things like — sporadic, not even in complete sentences — ‘we need help,’ ‘we’re scared’ and ‘he’s going to shoot,’” he said.

The newsroom alerted the sheriff’s office and, when they did not receive confirmation of the crew’s safety, called 911.

Assignment Editor Gary Stilwell said an officer called him back and said that he had spoken with the crew — a man and a woman — and that they were safe. Gary responded that both journalists were women, and asked the officer to go back.

As time continued to pass, three WANF employees took it upon themselves to drive the 20 minutes to the sheriff’s office, flagging down a police officer along the way.

WANF reported that approximately an hour and a half after Wilson and Swaim were taken hostage, police arrived at the scene and arrested the man, later identified as Brandon R. Logan. Neither journalist was injured and police did not recover a firearm.

Logan was charged with false imprisonment, simple battery, simple assault, terroristic threats and loitering or prowling, among others. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 24, 2024.

According to WSB-TV, Logan allegedly shoved one of the station’s employees and attempted to strike the other.

WANF Vice President and General Manager Erik Schrader said the broadcast outlet’s focus is on getting answers on how law enforcement responded.

“What we’re really looking for is to figure out what took so long,” Schrader said. “Where was the breakdown, what caused this to last seemingly a whole lot longer than it needed to last.”

Neither journalist nor WANF responded to requests for additional comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

WANF television photojournalist Lauren Swaim and reporter Asia Wilson were held hostage for about an hour and a half in the late evening of Dec. 11, 2023, while on assignment in Jonesboro, Georgia. Neither journalist was injured and the man who threatened them was arrested.

Swaim and Wilson were preparing to go live from the parking lot of the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office shortly before 11 p.m. when a man approached their marked news vehicle, the station reported. The man allegedly said he had a gun and would shoot them if they called for help.

Allen Devlin, an anchor at WANF, told the station that the newsroom lost all contact with the journalists until they started receiving surreptitious texts from Wilson at approximately 10:44 p.m. that Devlin called “bone-chilling.”

“It was just things like — sporadic, not even in complete sentences — ‘we need help,’ ‘we’re scared’ and ‘he’s going to shoot,’” he said.

The newsroom alerted the sheriff’s office and, when they did not receive confirmation of the crew’s safety, called 911.

Assignment Editor Gary Stilwell said an officer called him back and said that he had spoken with the crew — a man and a woman — and that they were safe. Gary responded that both journalists were women, and asked the officer to go back.

As time continued to pass, three WANF employees took it upon themselves to drive the 20 minutes to the sheriff’s office, flagging down a police officer along the way.

WANF reported that approximately an hour and a half after Wilson and Swaim were taken hostage, police arrived at the scene and arrested the man, later identified as Brandon R. Logan. Neither journalist was injured and police did not recover a firearm.

Logan was charged with false imprisonment, simple battery, simple assault, terroristic threats and loitering or prowling, among others. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 24, 2024.

According to WSB-TV, Logan allegedly shoved one of the station’s employees and attempted to strike the other.

WANF Vice President and General Manager Erik Schrader said the broadcast outlet’s focus is on getting answers on how law enforcement responded.

“What we’re really looking for is to figure out what took so long,” Schrader said. “Where was the breakdown, what caused this to last seemingly a whole lot longer than it needed to last.”

Neither journalist nor WANF responded to requests for additional comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Freelance journalist Carlos Berríos Polanco was tear-gassed and pushed by police while documenting a demonstration against the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center on Nov. 13, 2023.

Berríos Polanco told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that approximately 500 protesters had gathered in Gresham Park for a “Block Cop City” protest march to the construction site for the center in a forest southeast of Atlanta.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Activists march toward the construction site for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center as part of the Block Cop City march in Atlanta on Nov. 13, 2023.

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Dozens of protesters began gathering early Monday morning in a small, unremarkable park in southeast Atlanta. By 9 a.m., over 400 people — a coalition of local Atlantans and visiting activists from around the country — had assembled to attend a day of protests dubbed “Block Cop City.” The event was just the latest mass demonstration in over two years of resistance against the construction of a vast police training facility, known as Cop City, over hundreds of acres of Atlanta’s forest land.

Cops reacted to the day of action by attacking a slow-moving, peaceful march with tear gas and rubber bullets, just the latest reminder of why the compound, designed to further militarized counterinsurgency policing, should never be built.

Organizers were clear from the start: The protest activities — as had been agreed on in hourslong meetings in the prior days — would not involve property damage to construction vehicles at the site of the planned police facility. The tactic had been tried before, when a small amount of vandalism during a March day of action led to indiscriminate arrests and overreaching state domestic terrorism charges against 42 activists.

Monday’s participants planned simply to march, carrying banners and giant handmade puppets, to the Cop City construction area in the Weelaunee Forest, where they would plant nearly 100 saplings on cleared forest land.

Soon after the march turned onto a road with almost no traffic on it, lines of cops in riot gear amassed to block demonstrators’ route to the forest. Dozens of police vehicles swarmed the area, including an armored urban tank dubbed “the Beast.” As the marchers pushed slowly forward, the police moved in with shields and batons, shooting rubber bullets and launching flash-bang grenades and tear-gas canisters at the tightly packed group. Clouds of tear gas rolled over dozens of nearby, clearly identified journalists, myself included.

The protesters stayed in formation; they turned and marched back to their starting point, with a handful of activists hurriedly planting the tree saplings along the roadside.

Journalists and protesters move away from a cloud of tear gas thrown by Georgia law enforcement personnel in Atlanta on Nov. 13, 2023.

“Ready to Plant Trees”

Now deep into its second year of organized, multifaceted resistance, the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Atlanta forest has again and again brought to glaring light the old lie: that police can be trusted to respect civil rights.

“Despite numerous stated commitments from religious leaders and city officials to honor the right to protest, armed riot police terrorized the crowd with tear gas grenades, attack dogs, clubs and ballistic shields,” said the Block Cop City organizers in a statement following the march.

The Cop City project was, of course, not blocked on Monday, but the abolitionist, environmentalist movement once again proved its staying power against aggressive police repression. Since its inception, activists opposing the $90 million police training facility have been attacked by police, mass arrested, and, in the intolerable case of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddled with 57 police bullets and killed.

Protesters face felonies for handing out flyers and fundraising for camping supplies. The government explicitly deemed opposition to Cop City a criminal enterprise when, in September, it announced racketeering charges against 61 activists, most of whom already face state domestic terror charges, for typical social justice activities like information sharing and mutual aid organizing. One such defendant, Indigenous activist Victor Puertas, was handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and remains in detention facing deportation in addition to the egregious criminal charges.

“Now planting shovels are weapons. What’s next? Midnight raids for owners of muck boots?”

Meanwhile, an activist effort to get a public vote on Cop City on the recent November ballot had garnered sufficient signatures from the public — over 100,000 of them — but was obstructed by the city government in a blatant assault on democratic processes.

Following Monday’s demonstration, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum held a press briefing to defend the cops’ use of tear gas and other weapons. He claimed the protesters were “prepared to do harm” and pointed to a line of gardening tools — dibbles specifically — police had taken from the march site. These were, of course, the tools activists were using to plant saplings.

“People were really ready to plant trees,” said an organizer who helped bring 75 oak seedlings, 25 pines, and elderberry cuttings to the event. (She asked to remain anonymous for fear of police harassment.) “First it was terrorism if you had muddy clothes,” Sam, a Texas-based organizer with the Austin Weelaunee Defense Society who asked for anonymity, told me. Police had used mud on the shoes of activists, in a forest, to justify the March arrests for domestic terrorism. “Now planting shovels are weapons. What’s next? Midnight raids for owners of muck boots?”

A sign is discarded by a protester after tear gas was deployed by police during the Block Cop City day of action on Nov. 13, 2023, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

“People Are Determined”

Despite the blunt, repressive instruments deployed by police, those fighting to defend the forest have never stopped. Instead, they adapted and shifted tactics. None of the activists I spoke to on Monday, many with skin and eyes still burning from tear gas, felt the march was a failure. They are already planning for their next steps.

A campaign, Uncover Cop City, is underway to put public pressure on insurance companies Nationwide and Accident Fund to end their subsidiaries’ liability contracts with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-backed nonprofit behind Cop City. Without the insurance contracts, Cop City’s construction is dead in the water. Previous direct targeting of companies involved in the project have led several contractors to drop out.

“People are determined to see this struggle through to the end,” May Johnson, a resident of the neighborhood next to the forest imperiled by Cop City who has been active in the movement since its beginning, told me. “The movement is quick to adapt its strategies and persist despite repression.”

The fight to defend the forest matters on its own terms for those living nearby. The forest’s destruction, air and noise pollution, flooding risks, and the considerable increase in police presence it will bring is a threat to the adjacent majority Black and low-income neighborhood. The cab driver who drove me to the protest staging ground, a Black lifelong Atlanta resident, was unequivocal. “Nobody wants that thing built,” he said. My Airbnb host opposes Cop City; his father grew up in the neighborhood on the forest’s edge.

The widespread opposition is how a small group of activists, in a matter of weeks, collected 100,000-plus signatures from locals who wanted a chance to vote down the project through a ballot measure.

Protesters collide with a police line during a Block Cop City demonstration in opposition to a new police training center on Nov. 13, 2023, in Atlanta.

It’s no secret that public funds into training police in urban warfare will not serve public safety. Cop City is an invitation for corporations and investors to see Atlanta as an attractive hub, a city with its own mini city for training defenders of private property. Greater funding and more training for police has not led to fewer police killings and less racist police violence. As Atlanta community organizer Kamau Franklin noted in a rousing speech prior to Monday’s march, “In 2022, police killed more people than ever.”

“We Know Why We’re Here”

Organizers insist on seeing beyond the local: Protests like Monday’s are intended to invite out-of-state participants. The old and racist canard of “outside agitators,” peddled by Atlanta law enforcement and other officials since Stop Cop City began, falls flat against a locally led effort that wins national and international support. 

“While there are hundreds of locals here, there are many who have come in solidarity,” Block Cop City organizer Sam Beard, an environmental activist from Chicago, told the assembled protesters on Monday. “We have descended into Atlanta because a call was made. And front-line activists in this struggle said, ‘We need your help.’ And we said, ‘We’ve got you.’”

The crowd roared with applause.

The Block Cop City march in Gresham Park in Atlanta on Nov. 13, 2023.

In an era of mass movements crushed swiftly and violently, the persistence of the fight for the Atlanta forest — even if relatively small in size — demands attention from those of us interested in forms of resilient resistance. It is consistent proof that anti-racist, environmental, Indigenous, and class-based battles can and must intersect.

Chants of “free, free Palestine” reverberating throughout the march made clear that Stop Cop City participants see their struggle over the forest acreage outside Atlanta as one among many fights to see land and territory liberated, rather than violently bordered and occupied.

“We’ve made the connections between the police, militarized complex, and international policing,” Franklin told the gathered crowd. “The murderous tactics of the Israeli police and military against the Palestinians. We’ve made those connections.”

Tortuguita’s father, Joel Paez, addressed the crowd, too, along with Belkis Terán, the late forest defender’s mother. “We know why we’re here.” Paez, who has regularly spoken out with fervor against Cop City since Tortuguita’s killing, told the protesters. “Do what you have to do.”

Within an hour of his speech, and within a mile of where his child was gunned down by police, cops beat slow-marching protesters and tear-gassed journalists.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

—Ruby Freeman, Georgia election worker

“Hey, you stupid slave nigger…You are in our sights, we want to kill you. If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch.”

—Abigail Jo Shry, Texas Trump cultist’s threat to Judge Tanya Chutkan

“They must serve as examples for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

—Donald Trump on the Central Park Five

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

—Richard Nixon,

Revenge porn is the GOP’s new black.

“I am your retribution,” Donald Trump, America’s bloated, bloviating Batman, declares.

“We’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” promises Ron DeSantis, glitchy governator of Florida, the state where history goes to die, and being comatose is touted as a virtue.

Meanwhile, in congressional hearings, the queen of laptop porn, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, parades explicit photos of a naked Hunter Biden and his redacted junk to score MAGA points against President Joe Biden. This conduct is relatively tame for the rabid Greene, who has labeled Pelosi a “traitor,” advocated for her assassination, and spread baseless innuendos when a homicidal home intruder fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.

It seems that Trump and his supporters will not be satisfied until MAGA cultists take down his political enemies and, ultimately, the country.

They are encouraged by Trump, who has always spoken, unfiltered, the language of vengeance and violence. In 1989, as a real estate mogul, he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five since 2002, although Trump, who was found liable for sexual assault in the E. Jean Carroll case, refuses to acknowledge their innocence or to apologize. As a 2016 presidential candidate, he boasted of sexually assaulting women and condoned an attack on a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his campaign rallies. As president, he “joked” that police should rough up suspects they take into custody and once asked former Defense Secretary Mark Esper why White House demonstrators protesting the murder of George Floyd couldn’t just be shot.

Trump’s language, however inciteful, is protected by the First Amendment. His actions are not. And while Trump is many deplorable things – racist, psychopath, pathological liar, xenophobe, misogynist, and cis-supremacist – a fool is not one of them. He may notoriously boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” but, like the mafia dons he channels, he knows that rather than risk the consequences of committing such an act himself, it’s best to leave the dirty work to others. That is what minions and co-conspirators are for. After all, this is the bone-spurred no-show who promised his followers on January 6 that he would join them at the Capitol.

Despite his threats and intimidation, Defcon Don remains an imperiously impervious and untouchable pariah who, his 20-minute, whirlwind excursion to the Fulton County Jail aside, may never see the insides of an actual jail cell. The norms of the criminal justice system simply do not apply to him: mugshots are optional, perp walks are negotiated, arraignments are breezily expedited. Does anyone doubt that, unlike social media influencer Kai Cenat, if Trump had conjured up a flash mob in front of Trump Tower for a giveaway of mugshot¹ NFTs and a riot broke out, he and his followers would have been allowed to leisurely broker their arraignment dates, not arrested on the spot?

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 400,000 Americans are currently being detained pretrial – but not the quadruplely indicted Trump. In Georgia, the “billionaire” braggart’s bond was set at a mere $200,000, $300,000 less than that of his former fixer Michael Cohen who was convicted of hush money payments to a porn star on Trump’s behalf. One would think that conspiring to subvert democracy is a more serious offense.

Trump has already orchestrated one insurrection and is determined to incite another. Yet he remains not only a free man but the GOP presidential frontrunner, converting his many indictments into political currency. Of the eight “law and order” Republican presidential hopefuls on the debate stage in Milwaukee, all but two declared they would support Trump for party nominee even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” These duplicitous defenders of the Constitution see nothing wrong with backing a man for president who has proven himself incapable of upholding and protecting it.

After much stalling, it appears that with Trump’s Georgia booking our system of justice is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before, including two impeachments and a civil case, only to see him evade accountability.

This matters little to his supporters who hold his First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights more important than the rule of law, despite the threat of inciting stochastic terrorism Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric poses to the nation.

Trump has made no secret about whom he deems to be his enemies. His words have already endangered the lives of Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, New York County D.A.Alvin Bragg, New York A.G. Letitia James, and Washington, D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan. Encouraged by their puppet master, Trump supporters wasted no time doxing the Fulton County grand jury. That most of his targets are black and women should surprise no one.

Fulton County Jail’s nominal “inmate” No. P01135809 has been repeatedly warned about his threats. Yet despite a few tentative toe-dips in the shallow pool of judicial equity, everything so far indicates that Trump is above the law, where he will remain so long as optics takes precedence over principle and the equal application of justice.

The optics of concern here is not that of a two-tiered justice system. Rather, it is that the sight of Trump’s conviction and imprisonment would send the wrong message to the world that America has become a Third World “shithole country.” Sadly, concern over such optics overrides any about the fate of our democracy should his crimes go unpunished.

Some seem to think that Trump’s disgrace and humiliation are punishment enough. The media point to the dilapidated, overcrowded conditions of the Fulton County Jail, which are good enough (or bad enough) for mundane criminals but apparently too “extreme” for the former president. Crocodile tears fully primed, the media mouths concern about the “nightmarish public health” conditions at the jail, fully aware that the odds of Trump spending a night – or any time – behind its bars are nil. And even if Trump were incarcerated, does anybody believe that he would be treated like any other inmate or come to share the same fate as LaShawn Thompson, whose body was found “dehydrated, malnourished, and infested inside and out with insects”? Or would maggot removal be added to the roster of duties of the Secret Service?

For some, the optics of Trump’s booking and scowling mugshot might inspire optimism that the system is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before with Trump, only to witness the gravity-defying farce of trickle-up justice. Of course, it has yet to be proven in a court of law that Trump conspired to steal the election, but the question remains: What consequences will he face if and when it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he has? Moreover, what happens if Trump is convicted of his felonies in New York and Georgia but wins the Republican primary and the general election? Will he be imprisoned? Will the big house become the new White House?

The threat remains that if Trump is not convicted, he will run for president in perpetuity if only to stay out of prison. As early as August 2020, years before his serial indictments, Trump telegraphed his intent to cling to the presidency “4eva.” The means to thwart his authoritarian ambitions exist, but their use will require a measure of political will that those currently in a position to act lack.

Some comfort may be taken in the fact that legal scholars have revisited the theory that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the so-called disqualification clause, which bars elected officials who have violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and engaged in insurrection against the United States from running for and holding political office, could be invoked to derail a Trump dictatorship that would see him and his allies enact political retribution against individuals and institutions responsible for his present predicament.

Realpolitik, however, reveals that its successful use is far from guaranteed. Except for New Mexico County Commissioner Couy Griffin, attempts in 2022 to invoke the clause to remove insurrectionist Republican officials from office have uniformly failed. In Georgia, the non-profit group Free Speech for the People invoked the clause in a suit to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene’s name from the ballot there. Similar campaigns were launched against North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar. None succeeded. And while Republican New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is reportedly listening to those advocating use of the clause to block Trump’s name from appearing on ballots in his state’s presidential primary, and Florida lawyer Lawrence Caplan has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, it is unlikely that other Republican secretaries of state will cooperate in these efforts and far more likely that they will move to stymie them.

Still, a bevy of legal scholars and jurists, including Lawrence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig and William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, have argued that the disqualification clause is “self-executing,” claiming violators are automatically disqualified from running for and holding political office and that disqualification does not require a criminal conviction. As Luttig explained on CNN,

All officials, federal and state, who have a responsibility to put on the ballot candidates for the presidency of the United States…are obligated under the Constitution to determine whether Donald Trump qualifies to be put on the ballot. That is, they must determine themselves whether he is disqualified from being listed on the ballot by Section 3. Now, here’s how this will work: Any secretary of state or other state election official who’s charged with that responsibility will make the determination. Now, whether that person decides that former President Trump is qualified or whether he or she determines that he is disqualified by Section 3 and therefore doesn’t list him, that decision will be immediately challenged in federal court, and it will quickly move to the Supreme Court of the United States, where this decision will have to be made prior to the 2024 election.

Nonetheless, some serious doubts temper any optimism. Congress, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, can remove the disqualification, something it has done twice: In 1872, in the name of national reconciliation, it enacted the Amnesty Act, which lifted restrictions barring former Confederates from voting and holding office, and in 1898, it voted to end Section 3. The only other time Congress invoked the clause was in 1919 when it refused to seat socialist Victor Berger for his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, a decision that was later overturned (Berger eventually served three terms). On the other hand, in the 1970s, Congress passed joint resolutions to grant Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis posthumous Section 3 amnesty. Here, too, the aim was national reconciliation in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War. According to New York City Bar, there is currently no congressional legislation to enforce Section 3.

Given its rightwing majority, placing one’s faith in the Supreme Court seems criminally naïve. Aside from the fact the initial intent of the clause has repeatedly been nullified by a desire for “national unity,” and with rumors of impending civil war now indelibly a part of the zeitgeist, it seems unlikely that Congress or SCOTUS will rise to the challenge.

Note

1. The Fulton County mugshots have proven anticlimactic, as they are little more than mostly dour DMV portraits. I had envisioned front view and side view shots, height backdrops, and handheld slates with names and inmate numbers on them. But I guess what’s good for Young Thug is good for Old Thug and his gang of eighteen.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

A makeshift memorial for environmental activist Manuel Teran, killed by law enforcement during a raid to clear the construction site of “Cop City,” a police training facility near Atlanta, Ga., on February 6, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

The city of Atlanta is signaling its intention to preemptively invalidate a referendum campaign to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — “Cop City” — on Atlanta forest land.

A federal court filing late last week, made on behalf of the city by attorneys from elite Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore, calls the effort to put a Cop City referendum on the November ballot “invalid” and “futile.” Meanwhile, organizers are still gathering the necessary 70,000 signatures to move forward with the petition.

The city’s filing is not a direct challenge to the entire referendum campaign, but it makes clear that Atlanta officials will act to nullify the democratic effort in court, should organizers succeed in getting Cop City on the ballot.

The Vote to Stop Cop City coalition launched their campaign a day after the Atlanta City Council voted to approve $67 million in city funding for the facility — more than double the original estimate — after at least seven hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment.

While success is a tall order, the referendum petition is an attempt to formally capture the public opposition to Cop City that has again and again been voiced in City Council hearings and protests, particularly by working-class, Black residents who live nearest to the planned complex.

The referendum would ask voters directly whether they want to repeal the 2021 ordinance that authorizes the lease of the city-owned land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organization behind Cop City. The city filing argues that even if voters choose to revoke the authorization, it would not invalidate the lease agreement itself. In other words: It’s too late.

“Repeal of a years’ old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that has already been done,” the city’s attorneys said in the filing.

“It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

“For a city that spends a lot of time talking about its commitment to democracy, I’d say responding to a referendum effort by attempting to fully shut it down via the courts looks pretty bad,” Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer who has been involved in the referendum effort, told me. “It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

The city’s court filing came in response to a lawsuit brought by a group of residents of DeKalb County. Like the proposed site for the cop training complex, the residents in the lawsuit live in unincorporated parts of the county, outside of Atlanta’s boundaries. As non-Atlanta residents who are directly affected by Atlanta’s Cop City decisions and subjected to the violence of the Atlanta police, they are suing to be able to officially collect signatures for the referendum petition, even if they cannot sign themselves.

The DeKalb County residents’ lawsuit asked the court to prohibit the city from enforcing residency restrictions on the plaintiffs. They requested that the city clerk reissue copies of the referendum petition removing the residency restriction and restart the time frame in which the signatures for the referendum petition must be collected. The city clerk, after numerous delays, granted the original petition approval on June 22, after which point organizers have 60 days to gather signatures.

In their response to the plaintiffs, the city’s attorneys not only argued against changing residency restrictions on the signature collection, but also dismissed the entire referendum as invalid, even if it were to succeed without allowing DeKalb County residents to sign.

The pattern is a familiar one, especially for those involved in the two-plus-year fight to stop Cop City: Activists seek to use official channels — including City Council hearings, appeals to politicians, and ballot measures — only to be stonewalled by political forces committed to serving corporate interests and seeing Cop City built. For this very reason, the Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City movement has wisely never relied on one set of tactics or shied away from targeted direct action and confrontation.

The referendum effort is just one among an array of tactics — from rallies to protests, to politician appeals and call-ins, to encampments, to blockades and property destruction — that activists in Atlanta and beyond have deployed to defend the forest and oppose the police facility.

In turn, protesters have been met with extreme police violence, including a deadly multiagency raid in which police shot and killed activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddling their body with 57 gunshot wounds. Excessive, ill-founded charges abound: Forty-two people face state domestic terror charges on the weakest of police claims, while three others face felony charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to Terán’s killing.

Police violently cleared the protesters’ long-standing Weelaunee Forest encampment in March, but the movement has remained nimble and resilient. Organizers host “weeks of action” to raise awareness and maintain a visible presence, while supporters in Atlanta and beyond have engaged in pressure campaigns at the offices and homes of corporate funders and contractors involved in Cop City’s construction.

According to movement participants, these direct, confrontational actions have led to Reeves Young Construction, Atlas Technical Consultants, and Quality Glass Company all stepping away from the project. In corporate statements, however, the companies each said that their work had simply concluded with the Atlanta Police Foundation, claims which movement researchers viewed with skepticism. In a press conference earlier this month, a journalist asked the chief of the Atlanta Police Department, Darin Schierbaum, whether he believed the pressure campaigns had influenced contractor decisions to back out of the project, following Atlas’s announcement. He replied, “Imagine someone tried to intimidate you from being a journalist. Would you go into work?”

“Because their contractors keep backing down due to pressure, the city government feels that the courtroom is one of the last battlefields left to manipulate in their favor,” said Jack, a resident of Decatur, a city northeast of Atlanta, and longtime movement participant. He asked to withhold his last name for fear of police harassment.

Whether or not the pressure campaigns can claim victory in subcontractors stepping away from Cop City, it’s clear that a continued commitment to tactics beyond the ballot box will be necessary. With Atlanta’s political machine firmly set against the movement, reliance on conventional political mechanisms alone will be insufficient.

“From delays to intimidation and now this, it’s clear that the city will go to any lengths to ensure that every day Atlantans have no recourse when they disagree with city decisions,” Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the referendum, said in a statement.

The fight to stop Cop City, like every struggle against environmental decimation and structural anti-Blackness, requires finding any and every recourse against a power that says there is none.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

A makeshift memorial for environmental activist Manuel Teran, killed by law enforcement during a raid to clear the construction site of “Cop City,” a police training facility near Atlanta, Ga., on February 6, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

The city of Atlanta is signaling its intention to preemptively invalidate a referendum campaign to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — “Cop City” — on Atlanta forest land.

A federal court filing late last week, made on behalf of the city by attorneys from elite Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore, calls the effort to put a Cop City referendum on the November ballot “invalid” and “futile.” Meanwhile, organizers are still gathering the necessary 70,000 signatures to move forward with the petition.

The city’s filing is not a direct challenge to the entire referendum campaign, but it makes clear that Atlanta officials will act to nullify the democratic effort in court, should organizers succeed in getting Cop City on the ballot.

The Vote to Stop Cop City coalition launched their campaign a day after the Atlanta City Council voted to approve $67 million in city funding for the facility — more than double the original estimate — after at least seven hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment.

While success is a tall order, the referendum petition is an attempt to formally capture the public opposition to Cop City that has again and again been voiced in City Council hearings and protests, particularly by working-class, Black residents who live nearest to the planned complex.

The referendum would ask voters directly whether they want to repeal the 2021 ordinance that authorizes the lease of the city-owned land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organization behind Cop City. The city filing argues that even if voters choose to revoke the authorization, it would not invalidate the lease agreement itself. In other words: It’s too late.

“Repeal of a years’ old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that has already been done,” the city’s attorneys said in the filing.

“It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

“For a city that spends a lot of time talking about its commitment to democracy, I’d say responding to a referendum effort by attempting to fully shut it down via the courts looks pretty bad,” Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer who has been involved in the referendum effort, told me. “It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

The city’s court filing came in response to a lawsuit brought by a group of residents of DeKalb County. Like the proposed site for the cop training complex, the residents in the lawsuit live in unincorporated parts of the county, outside of Atlanta’s boundaries. As non-Atlanta residents who are directly affected by Atlanta’s Cop City decisions and subjected to the violence of the Atlanta police, they are suing to be able to officially collect signatures for the referendum petition, even if they cannot sign themselves.

The DeKalb County residents’ lawsuit asked the court to prohibit the city from enforcing residency restrictions on the plaintiffs. They requested that the city clerk reissue copies of the referendum petition removing the residency restriction and restart the time frame in which the signatures for the referendum petition must be collected. The city clerk, after numerous delays, granted the original petition approval on June 22, after which point organizers have 60 days to gather signatures.

In their response to the plaintiffs, the city’s attorneys not only argued against changing residency restrictions on the signature collection, but also dismissed the entire referendum as invalid, even if it were to succeed without allowing DeKalb County residents to sign.

The pattern is a familiar one, especially for those involved in the two-plus-year fight to stop Cop City: Activists seek to use official channels — including City Council hearings, appeals to politicians, and ballot measures — only to be stonewalled by political forces committed to serving corporate interests and seeing Cop City built. For this very reason, the Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City movement has wisely never relied on one set of tactics or shied away from targeted direct action and confrontation.

The referendum effort is just one among an array of tactics — from rallies to protests, to politician appeals and call-ins, to encampments, to blockades and property destruction — that activists in Atlanta and beyond have deployed to defend the forest and oppose the police facility.

In turn, protesters have been met with extreme police violence, including a deadly multiagency raid in which police shot and killed activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddling their body with 57 gunshot wounds. Excessive, ill-founded charges abound: Forty-two people face state domestic terror charges on the weakest of police claims, while three others face felony charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to Terán’s killing.

Police violently cleared the protesters’ long-standing Weelaunee Forest encampment in March, but the movement has remained nimble and resilient. Organizers host “weeks of action” to raise awareness and maintain a visible presence, while supporters in Atlanta and beyond have engaged in pressure campaigns at the offices and homes of corporate funders and contractors involved in Cop City’s construction.

According to movement participants, these direct, confrontational actions have led to Reeves Young Construction, Atlas Technical Consultants, and Quality Glass Company all stepping away from the project. In corporate statements, however, the companies each said that their work had simply concluded with the Atlanta Police Foundation, claims which movement researchers viewed with skepticism. In a press conference earlier this month, a journalist asked the chief of the Atlanta Police Department, Darin Schierbaum, whether he believed the pressure campaigns had influenced contractor decisions to back out of the project, following Atlas’s announcement. He replied, “Imagine someone tried to intimidate you from being a journalist. Would you go into work?”

“Because their contractors keep backing down due to pressure, the city government feels that the courtroom is one of the last battlefields left to manipulate in their favor,” said Jack, a resident of Decatur, a city northeast of Atlanta, and longtime movement participant. He asked to withhold his last name for fear of police harassment.

Whether or not the pressure campaigns can claim victory in subcontractors stepping away from Cop City, it’s clear that a continued commitment to tactics beyond the ballot box will be necessary. With Atlanta’s political machine firmly set against the movement, reliance on conventional political mechanisms alone will be insufficient.

“From delays to intimidation and now this, it’s clear that the city will go to any lengths to ensure that every day Atlantans have no recourse when they disagree with city decisions,” Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the referendum, said in a statement.

The fight to stop Cop City, like every struggle against environmental decimation and structural anti-Blackness, requires finding any and every recourse against a power that says there is none.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

A makeshift memorial for environmental activist Manuel Teran, killed by law enforcement during a raid to clear the construction site of “Cop City,” a police training facility near Atlanta, Ga., on February 6, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

The city of Atlanta is signaling its intention to preemptively invalidate a referendum campaign to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — “Cop City” — on Atlanta forest land.

A federal court filing late last week, made on behalf of the city by attorneys from elite Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore, calls the effort to put a Cop City referendum on the November ballot “invalid” and “futile.” Meanwhile, organizers are still gathering the necessary 70,000 signatures to move forward with the petition.

The city’s filing is not a direct challenge to the entire referendum campaign, but it makes clear that Atlanta officials will act to nullify the democratic effort in court, should organizers succeed in getting Cop City on the ballot.

The Vote to Stop Cop City coalition launched their campaign a day after the Atlanta City Council voted to approve $67 million in city funding for the facility — more than double the original estimate — after at least seven hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment.

While success is a tall order, the referendum petition is an attempt to formally capture the public opposition to Cop City that has again and again been voiced in City Council hearings and protests, particularly by working-class, Black residents who live nearest to the planned complex.

The referendum would ask voters directly whether they want to repeal the 2021 ordinance that authorizes the lease of the city-owned land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organization behind Cop City. The city filing argues that even if voters choose to revoke the authorization, it would not invalidate the lease agreement itself. In other words: It’s too late.

“Repeal of a years’ old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that has already been done,” the city’s attorneys said in the filing.

“It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

“For a city that spends a lot of time talking about its commitment to democracy, I’d say responding to a referendum effort by attempting to fully shut it down via the courts looks pretty bad,” Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer who has been involved in the referendum effort, told me. “It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

The city’s court filing came in response to a lawsuit brought by a group of residents of DeKalb County. Like the proposed site for the cop training complex, the residents in the lawsuit live in unincorporated parts of the county, outside of Atlanta’s boundaries. As non-Atlanta residents who are directly affected by Atlanta’s Cop City decisions and subjected to the violence of the Atlanta police, they are suing to be able to officially collect signatures for the referendum petition, even if they cannot sign themselves.

The DeKalb County residents’ lawsuit asked the court to prohibit the city from enforcing residency restrictions on the plaintiffs. They requested that the city clerk reissue copies of the referendum petition removing the residency restriction and restart the time frame in which the signatures for the referendum petition must be collected. The city clerk, after numerous delays, granted the original petition approval on June 22, after which point organizers have 60 days to gather signatures.

In their response to the plaintiffs, the city’s attorneys not only argued against changing residency restrictions on the signature collection, but also dismissed the entire referendum as invalid, even if it were to succeed without allowing DeKalb County residents to sign.

The pattern is a familiar one, especially for those involved in the two-plus-year fight to stop Cop City: Activists seek to use official channels — including City Council hearings, appeals to politicians, and ballot measures — only to be stonewalled by political forces committed to serving corporate interests and seeing Cop City built. For this very reason, the Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City movement has wisely never relied on one set of tactics or shied away from targeted direct action and confrontation.

The referendum effort is just one among an array of tactics — from rallies to protests, to politician appeals and call-ins, to encampments, to blockades and property destruction — that activists in Atlanta and beyond have deployed to defend the forest and oppose the police facility.

In turn, protesters have been met with extreme police violence, including a deadly multiagency raid in which police shot and killed activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddling their body with 57 gunshot wounds. Excessive, ill-founded charges abound: Forty-two people face state domestic terror charges on the weakest of police claims, while three others face felony charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to Terán’s killing.

Police violently cleared the protesters’ long-standing Weelaunee Forest encampment in March, but the movement has remained nimble and resilient. Organizers host “weeks of action” to raise awareness and maintain a visible presence, while supporters in Atlanta and beyond have engaged in pressure campaigns at the offices and homes of corporate funders and contractors involved in Cop City’s construction.

According to movement participants, these direct, confrontational actions have led to Reeves Young Construction, Atlas Technical Consultants, and Quality Glass Company all stepping away from the project. In corporate statements, however, the companies each said that their work had simply concluded with the Atlanta Police Foundation, claims which movement researchers viewed with skepticism. In a press conference earlier this month, a journalist asked the chief of the Atlanta Police Department, Darin Schierbaum, whether he believed the pressure campaigns had influenced contractor decisions to back out of the project, following Atlas’s announcement. He replied, “Imagine someone tried to intimidate you from being a journalist. Would you go into work?”

“Because their contractors keep backing down due to pressure, the city government feels that the courtroom is one of the last battlefields left to manipulate in their favor,” said Jack, a resident of Decatur, a city northeast of Atlanta, and longtime movement participant. He asked to withhold his last name for fear of police harassment.

Whether or not the pressure campaigns can claim victory in subcontractors stepping away from Cop City, it’s clear that a continued commitment to tactics beyond the ballot box will be necessary. With Atlanta’s political machine firmly set against the movement, reliance on conventional political mechanisms alone will be insufficient.

“From delays to intimidation and now this, it’s clear that the city will go to any lengths to ensure that every day Atlantans have no recourse when they disagree with city decisions,” Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the referendum, said in a statement.

The fight to stop Cop City, like every struggle against environmental decimation and structural anti-Blackness, requires finding any and every recourse against a power that says there is none.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

A makeshift memorial for environmental activist Manuel Teran, killed by law enforcement during a raid to clear the construction site of “Cop City,” a police training facility near Atlanta, Ga., on February 6, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

The city of Atlanta is signaling its intention to preemptively invalidate a referendum campaign to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — “Cop City” — on Atlanta forest land.

A federal court filing late last week, made on behalf of the city by attorneys from elite Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore, calls the effort to put a Cop City referendum on the November ballot “invalid” and “futile.” Meanwhile, organizers are still gathering the necessary 70,000 signatures to move forward with the petition.

The city’s filing is not a direct challenge to the entire referendum campaign, but it makes clear that Atlanta officials will act to nullify the democratic effort in court, should organizers succeed in getting Cop City on the ballot.

The Vote to Stop Cop City coalition launched their campaign a day after the Atlanta City Council voted to approve $67 million in city funding for the facility — more than double the original estimate — after at least seven hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment.

While success is a tall order, the referendum petition is an attempt to formally capture the public opposition to Cop City that has again and again been voiced in City Council hearings and protests, particularly by working-class, Black residents who live nearest to the planned complex.

The referendum would ask voters directly whether they want to repeal the 2021 ordinance that authorizes the lease of the city-owned land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organization behind Cop City. The city filing argues that even if voters choose to revoke the authorization, it would not invalidate the lease agreement itself. In other words: It’s too late.

“Repeal of a years’ old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that has already been done,” the city’s attorneys said in the filing.

“It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

“For a city that spends a lot of time talking about its commitment to democracy, I’d say responding to a referendum effort by attempting to fully shut it down via the courts looks pretty bad,” Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer who has been involved in the referendum effort, told me. “It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

The city’s court filing came in response to a lawsuit brought by a group of residents of DeKalb County. Like the proposed site for the cop training complex, the residents in the lawsuit live in unincorporated parts of the county, outside of Atlanta’s boundaries. As non-Atlanta residents who are directly affected by Atlanta’s Cop City decisions and subjected to the violence of the Atlanta police, they are suing to be able to officially collect signatures for the referendum petition, even if they cannot sign themselves.

The DeKalb County residents’ lawsuit asked the court to prohibit the city from enforcing residency restrictions on the plaintiffs. They requested that the city clerk reissue copies of the referendum petition removing the residency restriction and restart the time frame in which the signatures for the referendum petition must be collected. The city clerk, after numerous delays, granted the original petition approval on June 22, after which point organizers have 60 days to gather signatures.

In their response to the plaintiffs, the city’s attorneys not only argued against changing residency restrictions on the signature collection, but also dismissed the entire referendum as invalid, even if it were to succeed without allowing DeKalb County residents to sign.

The pattern is a familiar one, especially for those involved in the two-plus-year fight to stop Cop City: Activists seek to use official channels — including City Council hearings, appeals to politicians, and ballot measures — only to be stonewalled by political forces committed to serving corporate interests and seeing Cop City built. For this very reason, the Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City movement has wisely never relied on one set of tactics or shied away from targeted direct action and confrontation.

The referendum effort is just one among an array of tactics — from rallies to protests, to politician appeals and call-ins, to encampments, to blockades and property destruction — that activists in Atlanta and beyond have deployed to defend the forest and oppose the police facility.

In turn, protesters have been met with extreme police violence, including a deadly multiagency raid in which police shot and killed activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddling their body with 57 gunshot wounds. Excessive, ill-founded charges abound: Forty-two people face state domestic terror charges on the weakest of police claims, while three others face felony charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to Terán’s killing.

Police violently cleared the protesters’ long-standing Weelaunee Forest encampment in March, but the movement has remained nimble and resilient. Organizers host “weeks of action” to raise awareness and maintain a visible presence, while supporters in Atlanta and beyond have engaged in pressure campaigns at the offices and homes of corporate funders and contractors involved in Cop City’s construction.

According to movement participants, these direct, confrontational actions have led to Reeves Young Construction, Atlas Technical Consultants, and Quality Glass Company all stepping away from the project. In corporate statements, however, the companies each said that their work had simply concluded with the Atlanta Police Foundation, claims which movement researchers viewed with skepticism. In a press conference earlier this month, a journalist asked the chief of the Atlanta Police Department, Darin Schierbaum, whether he believed the pressure campaigns had influenced contractor decisions to back out of the project, following Atlas’s announcement. He replied, “Imagine someone tried to intimidate you from being a journalist. Would you go into work?”

“Because their contractors keep backing down due to pressure, the city government feels that the courtroom is one of the last battlefields left to manipulate in their favor,” said Jack, a resident of Decatur, a city northeast of Atlanta, and longtime movement participant. He asked to withhold his last name for fear of police harassment.

Whether or not the pressure campaigns can claim victory in subcontractors stepping away from Cop City, it’s clear that a continued commitment to tactics beyond the ballot box will be necessary. With Atlanta’s political machine firmly set against the movement, reliance on conventional political mechanisms alone will be insufficient.

“From delays to intimidation and now this, it’s clear that the city will go to any lengths to ensure that every day Atlantans have no recourse when they disagree with city decisions,” Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the referendum, said in a statement.

The fight to stop Cop City, like every struggle against environmental decimation and structural anti-Blackness, requires finding any and every recourse against a power that says there is none.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

A makeshift memorial for environmental activist Manuel Teran, killed by law enforcement during a raid to clear the construction site of “Cop City,” a police training facility near Atlanta, Ga., on February 6, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

The city of Atlanta is signaling its intention to preemptively invalidate a referendum campaign to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — “Cop City” — on Atlanta forest land.

A federal court filing late last week, made on behalf of the city by attorneys from elite Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore, calls the effort to put a Cop City referendum on the November ballot “invalid” and “futile.” Meanwhile, organizers are still gathering the necessary 70,000 signatures to move forward with the petition.

The city’s filing is not a direct challenge to the entire referendum campaign, but it makes clear that Atlanta officials will act to nullify the democratic effort in court, should organizers succeed in getting Cop City on the ballot.

The Vote to Stop Cop City coalition launched their campaign a day after the Atlanta City Council voted to approve $67 million in city funding for the facility — more than double the original estimate — after at least seven hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment.

While success is a tall order, the referendum petition is an attempt to formally capture the public opposition to Cop City that has again and again been voiced in City Council hearings and protests, particularly by working-class, Black residents who live nearest to the planned complex.

The referendum would ask voters directly whether they want to repeal the 2021 ordinance that authorizes the lease of the city-owned land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organization behind Cop City. The city filing argues that even if voters choose to revoke the authorization, it would not invalidate the lease agreement itself. In other words: It’s too late.

“Repeal of a years’ old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that has already been done,” the city’s attorneys said in the filing.

“It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

“For a city that spends a lot of time talking about its commitment to democracy, I’d say responding to a referendum effort by attempting to fully shut it down via the courts looks pretty bad,” Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer who has been involved in the referendum effort, told me. “It’s clear that Atlanta leadership knows how unpopular Cop City is, and they’re scared.”

The city’s court filing came in response to a lawsuit brought by a group of residents of DeKalb County. Like the proposed site for the cop training complex, the residents in the lawsuit live in unincorporated parts of the county, outside of Atlanta’s boundaries. As non-Atlanta residents who are directly affected by Atlanta’s Cop City decisions and subjected to the violence of the Atlanta police, they are suing to be able to officially collect signatures for the referendum petition, even if they cannot sign themselves.

The DeKalb County residents’ lawsuit asked the court to prohibit the city from enforcing residency restrictions on the plaintiffs. They requested that the city clerk reissue copies of the referendum petition removing the residency restriction and restart the time frame in which the signatures for the referendum petition must be collected. The city clerk, after numerous delays, granted the original petition approval on June 22, after which point organizers have 60 days to gather signatures.

In their response to the plaintiffs, the city’s attorneys not only argued against changing residency restrictions on the signature collection, but also dismissed the entire referendum as invalid, even if it were to succeed without allowing DeKalb County residents to sign.

The pattern is a familiar one, especially for those involved in the two-plus-year fight to stop Cop City: Activists seek to use official channels — including City Council hearings, appeals to politicians, and ballot measures — only to be stonewalled by political forces committed to serving corporate interests and seeing Cop City built. For this very reason, the Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City movement has wisely never relied on one set of tactics or shied away from targeted direct action and confrontation.

The referendum effort is just one among an array of tactics — from rallies to protests, to politician appeals and call-ins, to encampments, to blockades and property destruction — that activists in Atlanta and beyond have deployed to defend the forest and oppose the police facility.

In turn, protesters have been met with extreme police violence, including a deadly multiagency raid in which police shot and killed activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddling their body with 57 gunshot wounds. Excessive, ill-founded charges abound: Forty-two people face state domestic terror charges on the weakest of police claims, while three others face felony charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to Terán’s killing.

Police violently cleared the protesters’ long-standing Weelaunee Forest encampment in March, but the movement has remained nimble and resilient. Organizers host “weeks of action” to raise awareness and maintain a visible presence, while supporters in Atlanta and beyond have engaged in pressure campaigns at the offices and homes of corporate funders and contractors involved in Cop City’s construction.

According to movement participants, these direct, confrontational actions have led to Reeves Young Construction, Atlas Technical Consultants, and Quality Glass Company all stepping away from the project. In corporate statements, however, the companies each said that their work had simply concluded with the Atlanta Police Foundation, claims which movement researchers viewed with skepticism. In a press conference earlier this month, a journalist asked the chief of the Atlanta Police Department, Darin Schierbaum, whether he believed the pressure campaigns had influenced contractor decisions to back out of the project, following Atlas’s announcement. He replied, “Imagine someone tried to intimidate you from being a journalist. Would you go into work?”

“Because their contractors keep backing down due to pressure, the city government feels that the courtroom is one of the last battlefields left to manipulate in their favor,” said Jack, a resident of Decatur, a city northeast of Atlanta, and longtime movement participant. He asked to withhold his last name for fear of police harassment.

Whether or not the pressure campaigns can claim victory in subcontractors stepping away from Cop City, it’s clear that a continued commitment to tactics beyond the ballot box will be necessary. With Atlanta’s political machine firmly set against the movement, reliance on conventional political mechanisms alone will be insufficient.

“From delays to intimidation and now this, it’s clear that the city will go to any lengths to ensure that every day Atlantans have no recourse when they disagree with city decisions,” Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the referendum, said in a statement.

The fight to stop Cop City, like every struggle against environmental decimation and structural anti-Blackness, requires finding any and every recourse against a power that says there is none.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

As Georgia prosecutors pursue increasingly aggressive tactics against Cop City protesters, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr intervened to double down on domestic terrorism charges against a legal observer, previously unreported meeting minutes reveal.

Thomas Webb Jurgens, a legal observer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is facing charges of domestic terrorism after being swept up in arrests made back in March at the forest-turned-construction-site outside Atlanta where activists have been protesting a multimillion-dollar police training center for more than a year.

But when Dekalb County’s district attorney called to drop charges against Jurgens, who was wearing bright green clothing to identify him as a legal observer at the time of his arrest, Carr, a conservative Republican with a Federalist Society pedigree, overruled the objections.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Director Michael Register, an appointee of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, reported the exchange at a Georgia Board of Public Safety meeting in April. After confirming the state planned to pursue controversial racketeering charges against those arrested following a concert at the site on March 5, Register added that “Dekalb County wanted to drop the charges on the attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center who was arrested from this incident, and the Attorney General said no.”

After the concert in the park on March 5, a group of black-clad provocateurs broke away and began damaging construction equipment and throwing Molotov cocktails at police, according to law enforcement officials’ statements. The website Defend the Atlanta Forest, which activists have used for public communication, acknowledged that “a separate protest group with hundreds of people marched to the forest” during the group’s “week of action” concert, in response to the killing of environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán at the hands of police in January.

“Police retaliated viciously by raiding the entire forest, arresting at least 35 people at the nearby music festival, including people with no connection to or awareness of the action on the other side of the nearly 600 acre forest,” activists wrote.

Police charged 23 people after arrests at the event. Most are facing domestic terrorism and state racketeering charges, which are being prosecuted by the state attorney general’s office.

Carr has held a series of increasingly powerful institutional and politically appointed positions in Georgia’s Republican firmament, beginning with work as general counsel for the Koch-backed Georgia Public Policy Foundation, then as chief of staff for former Sen. Johnny Isakson, culminating in a 2016 appointment to succeed Sam Olens as Georgia’s attorney general. Carr has since won two statewide elections as attorney general and is widely expected to run for higher office.

Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature took a swipe at the autonomy of local prosecutors this year when Senate Bill 92 created the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, a statewide oversight council aimed at reining in locally elected prosecutors who engage in the “willful and persistent failure to carry out statutory duties.” Initially conceived as a reaction to prosecutorial failures in the Ahmaud Arbery case, Republican lawmakers more recently appeared to be motivated by a progressive prosecutor in Clark County — home of the University of Georgia college town Athens — who had begun refusing to prosecute minor drug cases.

Other Democratic district attorneys around the state have objected to the new commission, suggesting that it is designed to punish prosecutors who refuse to enforce the state’s newly empowered abortion laws or, in the case of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the potential prosecution of former President Donald Trump and alleged 2020 election interference conspirators.

Register’s comments suggest that decisions about prosecuting protesters on serious charges like racketeering or domestic terrorism are coming from the state’s Republican officeholders and not necessarily local law enforcement officials in overwhelmingly Democratic metro Atlanta counties.

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to inquiries seeking comment. Jurgens’s attorneys, however, did.

“We are appreciative of GBI Director Register for bringing into the public light that the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office correctly wanted to dismiss the charges against our client Tom Jurgens,” said his attorneys L. Burton Finlayson and Andrew Hall. “Tom is not a domestic terrorist. Tom is a locally-raised, University of Georgia undergraduate and Law School graduate (‘Double-Dawg’), practicing Georgia attorney who was working as a volunteer legal observer to ensure that all [protesters’] constitutional and civil rights were protected. Ultimately, we believe (and hope) that cooler heads among the prosecution team will prevail and that, upon a sober examination of the facts, all charges against him will be dismissed.”

Earlier this month, apparently under the direction of Carr, police arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund on charges of money laundering and charity fraud. The warrants for their arrest were sworn out by a GBI agent and not local law enforcement officials, describing them as “domestic violent extremists” as designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The term has become a flashpoint in the case. While the Department of Homeland Security used the phrase in a May 24 security bulletin referring to protests in Atlanta, the department — for the second time — denied using the term as a formal designation for the Cop City activists.

A spokesperson for Carr refrained from comment for this story. A spokesperson for the GBI acknowledged Register’s comments, noting that it was his practice to provide updates about major activities around the state to other law enforcement leaders.

The office of DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston also abstained from commenting directly on the protest case “because we cannot comment on an open case,” a spokesperson said. But her office did have something to say about the process.

“Domestic terrorism is one of only a handful of charges for which the state and county have concurrent jurisdiction,” Boston’s spokesperson said. “Early on, our office decided to join the multijurisdictional task force on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in order to protect the people of DeKalb County and represent their interests. While the Attorney General can prosecute these cases without input from the Office of the DeKalb County District Attorney, DA Boston and our team continue to advocate for charging decisions that align with the alleged actions of each individual defendant, as well as the mission and values of the DeKalb DA’s office.”

Register’s comments to the Georgia Board of Public Safety are somewhat more expansive than other statements made about law enforcement’s response to Cop City protests, possibly because these staid meetings of the state’s senior law enforcement officials — usually held somewhere other than a metro Atlanta location — are rarely covered by the media and generally draw little public attention.

In previous comments to the board from March 9, four days after the protest arrests at the Cop City site, Register described the incident from law enforcement’s perspective in detail. Police reacted to approximately 150 people walking up a cleared Georgia Power corridor through the forest, he said, who “had protective clothing on and some had shields made out of 55 gallon drums. The officers had to retreat across the roadway to a fenced in area and into another fenced in area to lock themselves in. The subjects came into the construction site and were using fireworks to shoot at the officers and throwing objects, such as rocks, at the officers. While a portion of the subjects was doing this, the other individuals went to various pieces of equipment and burned two four-wheelers and a front-end loader, a trailer, as well as the cameras that caught the assault.”

Of the 23 people arrested by the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia State Patrol that night, only Jurgens and another protester, Jack Beaman of Decatur, were from Georgia, Register emphasized, according to the meeting minutes. “21 were from out of state and out of those, 2 were from out of country — Canada and France. Director Register stated the Bureau worked with its federal partners, as well as the State Department to contact their counterparts in Canada and France on these two individuals to dig a little deeper on them.”

Activists’ answer to this line of thought has been to suggest that police have deliberately targeted out-of-state protesters for prosecution, releasing people with local addresses after detaining them during demonstrations to inflate the perception of “outside agitators” spurring violence.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

As Georgia prosecutors pursue increasingly aggressive tactics against Cop City protesters, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr intervened to double down on domestic terrorism charges against a legal observer, previously unreported meeting minutes reveal.

Thomas Webb Jurgens, a legal observer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is facing charges of domestic terrorism after being swept up in arrests made back in March at the forest-turned-construction-site outside Atlanta where activists have been protesting a multimillion-dollar police training center for more than a year.

But when Dekalb County’s district attorney called to drop charges against Jurgens, who was wearing bright green clothing to identify him as a legal observer at the time of his arrest, Carr, a conservative Republican with a Federalist Society pedigree, overruled the objections.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Director Michael Register, an appointee of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, reported the exchange at a Georgia Board of Public Safety meeting in April. After confirming the state planned to pursue controversial racketeering charges against those arrested following a concert at the site on March 5, Register added that “Dekalb County wanted to drop the charges on the attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center who was arrested from this incident, and the Attorney General said no.”

After the concert in the park on March 5, a group of black-clad provocateurs broke away and began damaging construction equipment and throwing Molotov cocktails at police, according to law enforcement officials’ statements. The website Defend the Atlanta Forest, which activists have used for public communication, acknowledged that “a separate protest group with hundreds of people marched to the forest” during the group’s “week of action” concert, in response to the killing of environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán at the hands of police in January.

“Police retaliated viciously by raiding the entire forest, arresting at least 35 people at the nearby music festival, including people with no connection to or awareness of the action on the other side of the nearly 600 acre forest,” activists wrote.

Police charged 23 people after arrests at the event. Most are facing domestic terrorism and state racketeering charges, which are being prosecuted by the state attorney general’s office.

Carr has held a series of increasingly powerful institutional and politically appointed positions in Georgia’s Republican firmament, beginning with work as general counsel for the Koch-backed Georgia Public Policy Foundation, then as chief of staff for former Sen. Johnny Isakson, culminating in a 2016 appointment to succeed Sam Olens as Georgia’s attorney general. Carr has since won two statewide elections as attorney general and is widely expected to run for higher office.

Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature took a swipe at the autonomy of local prosecutors this year when Senate Bill 92 created the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, a statewide oversight council aimed at reining in locally elected prosecutors who engage in the “willful and persistent failure to carry out statutory duties.” Initially conceived as a reaction to prosecutorial failures in the Ahmaud Arbery case, Republican lawmakers more recently appeared to be motivated by a progressive prosecutor in Clark County — home of the University of Georgia college town Athens — who had begun refusing to prosecute minor drug cases.

Other Democratic district attorneys around the state have objected to the new commission, suggesting that it is designed to punish prosecutors who refuse to enforce the state’s newly empowered abortion laws or, in the case of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the potential prosecution of former President Donald Trump and alleged 2020 election interference conspirators.

Register’s comments suggest that decisions about prosecuting protesters on serious charges like racketeering or domestic terrorism are coming from the state’s Republican officeholders and not necessarily local law enforcement officials in overwhelmingly Democratic metro Atlanta counties.

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to inquiries seeking comment. Jurgens’s attorneys, however, did.

“We are appreciative of GBI Director Register for bringing into the public light that the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office correctly wanted to dismiss the charges against our client Tom Jurgens,” said his attorneys L. Burton Finlayson and Andrew Hall. “Tom is not a domestic terrorist. Tom is a locally-raised, University of Georgia undergraduate and Law School graduate (‘Double-Dawg’), practicing Georgia attorney who was working as a volunteer legal observer to ensure that all [protesters’] constitutional and civil rights were protected. Ultimately, we believe (and hope) that cooler heads among the prosecution team will prevail and that, upon a sober examination of the facts, all charges against him will be dismissed.”

Earlier this month, apparently under the direction of Carr, police arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund on charges of money laundering and charity fraud. The warrants for their arrest were sworn out by a GBI agent and not local law enforcement officials, describing them as “domestic violent extremists” as designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The term has become a flashpoint in the case. While the Department of Homeland Security used the phrase in a May 24 security bulletin referring to protests in Atlanta, the department — for the second time — denied using the term as a formal designation for the Cop City activists.

A spokesperson for Carr refrained from comment for this story. A spokesperson for the GBI acknowledged Register’s comments, noting that it was his practice to provide updates about major activities around the state to other law enforcement leaders.

The office of DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston also abstained from commenting directly on the protest case “because we cannot comment on an open case,” a spokesperson said. But her office did have something to say about the process.

“Domestic terrorism is one of only a handful of charges for which the state and county have concurrent jurisdiction,” Boston’s spokesperson said. “Early on, our office decided to join the multijurisdictional task force on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in order to protect the people of DeKalb County and represent their interests. While the Attorney General can prosecute these cases without input from the Office of the DeKalb County District Attorney, DA Boston and our team continue to advocate for charging decisions that align with the alleged actions of each individual defendant, as well as the mission and values of the DeKalb DA’s office.”

Register’s comments to the Georgia Board of Public Safety are somewhat more expansive than other statements made about law enforcement’s response to Cop City protests, possibly because these staid meetings of the state’s senior law enforcement officials — usually held somewhere other than a metro Atlanta location — are rarely covered by the media and generally draw little public attention.

In previous comments to the board from March 9, four days after the protest arrests at the Cop City site, Register described the incident from law enforcement’s perspective in detail. Police reacted to approximately 150 people walking up a cleared Georgia Power corridor through the forest, he said, who “had protective clothing on and some had shields made out of 55 gallon drums. The officers had to retreat across the roadway to a fenced in area and into another fenced in area to lock themselves in. The subjects came into the construction site and were using fireworks to shoot at the officers and throwing objects, such as rocks, at the officers. While a portion of the subjects was doing this, the other individuals went to various pieces of equipment and burned two four-wheelers and a front-end loader, a trailer, as well as the cameras that caught the assault.”

Of the 23 people arrested by the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia State Patrol that night, only Jurgens and another protester, Jack Beaman of Decatur, were from Georgia, Register emphasized, according to the meeting minutes. “21 were from out of state and out of those, 2 were from out of country — Canada and France. Director Register stated the Bureau worked with its federal partners, as well as the State Department to contact their counterparts in Canada and France on these two individuals to dig a little deeper on them.”

Activists’ answer to this line of thought has been to suggest that police have deliberately targeted out-of-state protesters for prosecution, releasing people with local addresses after detaining them during demonstrations to inflate the perception of “outside agitators” spurring violence.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

As Georgia prosecutors pursue increasingly aggressive tactics against Cop City protesters, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr intervened to double down on domestic terrorism charges against a legal observer, previously unreported meeting minutes reveal.

Thomas Webb Jurgens, a legal observer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is facing charges of domestic terrorism after being swept up in arrests made back in March at the forest-turned-construction-site outside Atlanta where activists have been protesting a multimillion-dollar police training center for more than a year.

But when Dekalb County’s district attorney called to drop charges against Jurgens, who was wearing bright green clothing to identify him as a legal observer at the time of his arrest, Carr, a conservative Republican with a Federalist Society pedigree, overruled the objections.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Director Michael Register, an appointee of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, reported the exchange at a Georgia Board of Public Safety meeting in April. After confirming the state planned to pursue controversial racketeering charges against those arrested following a concert at the site on March 5, Register added that “Dekalb County wanted to drop the charges on the attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center who was arrested from this incident, and the Attorney General said no.”

After the concert in the park on March 5, a group of black-clad provocateurs broke away and began damaging construction equipment and throwing Molotov cocktails at police, according to law enforcement officials’ statements. The website Defend the Atlanta Forest, which activists have used for public communication, acknowledged that “a separate protest group with hundreds of people marched to the forest” during the group’s “week of action” concert, in response to the killing of environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán at the hands of police in January.

“Police retaliated viciously by raiding the entire forest, arresting at least 35 people at the nearby music festival, including people with no connection to or awareness of the action on the other side of the nearly 600 acre forest,” activists wrote.

Police charged 23 people after arrests at the event. Most are facing domestic terrorism and state racketeering charges, which are being prosecuted by the state attorney general’s office.

Carr has held a series of increasingly powerful institutional and politically appointed positions in Georgia’s Republican firmament, beginning with work as general counsel for the Koch-backed Georgia Public Policy Foundation, then as chief of staff for former Sen. Johnny Isakson, culminating in a 2016 appointment to succeed Sam Olens as Georgia’s attorney general. Carr has since won two statewide elections as attorney general and is widely expected to run for higher office.

Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature took a swipe at the autonomy of local prosecutors this year when Senate Bill 92 created the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, a statewide oversight council aimed at reining in locally elected prosecutors who engage in the “willful and persistent failure to carry out statutory duties.” Initially conceived as a reaction to prosecutorial failures in the Ahmaud Arbery case, Republican lawmakers more recently appeared to be motivated by a progressive prosecutor in Clark County — home of the University of Georgia college town Athens — who had begun refusing to prosecute minor drug cases.

Other Democratic district attorneys around the state have objected to the new commission, suggesting that it is designed to punish prosecutors who refuse to enforce the state’s newly empowered abortion laws or, in the case of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the potential prosecution of former President Donald Trump and alleged 2020 election interference conspirators.

Register’s comments suggest that decisions about prosecuting protesters on serious charges like racketeering or domestic terrorism are coming from the state’s Republican officeholders and not necessarily local law enforcement officials in overwhelmingly Democratic metro Atlanta counties.

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to inquiries seeking comment. Jurgens’s attorneys, however, did.

“We are appreciative of GBI Director Register for bringing into the public light that the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office correctly wanted to dismiss the charges against our client Tom Jurgens,” said his attorneys L. Burton Finlayson and Andrew Hall. “Tom is not a domestic terrorist. Tom is a locally-raised, University of Georgia undergraduate and Law School graduate (‘Double-Dawg’), practicing Georgia attorney who was working as a volunteer legal observer to ensure that all [protesters’] constitutional and civil rights were protected. Ultimately, we believe (and hope) that cooler heads among the prosecution team will prevail and that, upon a sober examination of the facts, all charges against him will be dismissed.”

Earlier this month, apparently under the direction of Carr, police arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund on charges of money laundering and charity fraud. The warrants for their arrest were sworn out by a GBI agent and not local law enforcement officials, describing them as “domestic violent extremists” as designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The term has become a flashpoint in the case. While the Department of Homeland Security used the phrase in a May 24 security bulletin referring to protests in Atlanta, the department — for the second time — denied using the term as a formal designation for the Cop City activists.

A spokesperson for Carr refrained from comment for this story. A spokesperson for the GBI acknowledged Register’s comments, noting that it was his practice to provide updates about major activities around the state to other law enforcement leaders.

The office of DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston also abstained from commenting directly on the protest case “because we cannot comment on an open case,” a spokesperson said. But her office did have something to say about the process.

“Domestic terrorism is one of only a handful of charges for which the state and county have concurrent jurisdiction,” Boston’s spokesperson said. “Early on, our office decided to join the multijurisdictional task force on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in order to protect the people of DeKalb County and represent their interests. While the Attorney General can prosecute these cases without input from the Office of the DeKalb County District Attorney, DA Boston and our team continue to advocate for charging decisions that align with the alleged actions of each individual defendant, as well as the mission and values of the DeKalb DA’s office.”

Register’s comments to the Georgia Board of Public Safety are somewhat more expansive than other statements made about law enforcement’s response to Cop City protests, possibly because these staid meetings of the state’s senior law enforcement officials — usually held somewhere other than a metro Atlanta location — are rarely covered by the media and generally draw little public attention.

In previous comments to the board from March 9, four days after the protest arrests at the Cop City site, Register described the incident from law enforcement’s perspective in detail. Police reacted to approximately 150 people walking up a cleared Georgia Power corridor through the forest, he said, who “had protective clothing on and some had shields made out of 55 gallon drums. The officers had to retreat across the roadway to a fenced in area and into another fenced in area to lock themselves in. The subjects came into the construction site and were using fireworks to shoot at the officers and throwing objects, such as rocks, at the officers. While a portion of the subjects was doing this, the other individuals went to various pieces of equipment and burned two four-wheelers and a front-end loader, a trailer, as well as the cameras that caught the assault.”

Of the 23 people arrested by the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia State Patrol that night, only Jurgens and another protester, Jack Beaman of Decatur, were from Georgia, Register emphasized, according to the meeting minutes. “21 were from out of state and out of those, 2 were from out of country — Canada and France. Director Register stated the Bureau worked with its federal partners, as well as the State Department to contact their counterparts in Canada and France on these two individuals to dig a little deeper on them.”

Activists’ answer to this line of thought has been to suggest that police have deliberately targeted out-of-state protesters for prosecution, releasing people with local addresses after detaining them during demonstrations to inflate the perception of “outside agitators” spurring violence.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

As Georgia prosecutors pursue increasingly aggressive tactics against Cop City protesters, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr intervened to double down on domestic terrorism charges against a legal observer, previously unreported meeting minutes reveal.

Thomas Webb Jurgens, a legal observer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is facing charges of domestic terrorism after being swept up in arrests made back in March at the forest-turned-construction-site outside Atlanta where activists have been protesting a multimillion-dollar police training center for more than a year.

But when Dekalb County’s district attorney called to drop charges against Jurgens, who was wearing bright green clothing to identify him as a legal observer at the time of his arrest, Carr, a conservative Republican with a Federalist Society pedigree, overruled the objections.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Director Michael Register, an appointee of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, reported the exchange at a Georgia Board of Public Safety meeting in April. After confirming the state planned to pursue controversial racketeering charges against those arrested following a concert at the site on March 5, Register added that “Dekalb County wanted to drop the charges on the attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center who was arrested from this incident, and the Attorney General said no.”

After the concert in the park on March 5, a group of black-clad provocateurs broke away and began damaging construction equipment and throwing Molotov cocktails at police, according to law enforcement officials’ statements. The website Defend the Atlanta Forest, which activists have used for public communication, acknowledged that “a separate protest group with hundreds of people marched to the forest” during the group’s “week of action” concert, in response to the killing of environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán at the hands of police in January.

“Police retaliated viciously by raiding the entire forest, arresting at least 35 people at the nearby music festival, including people with no connection to or awareness of the action on the other side of the nearly 600 acre forest,” activists wrote.

Police charged 23 people after arrests at the event. Most are facing domestic terrorism and state racketeering charges, which are being prosecuted by the state attorney general’s office.

Carr has held a series of increasingly powerful institutional and politically appointed positions in Georgia’s Republican firmament, beginning with work as general counsel for the Koch-backed Georgia Public Policy Foundation, then as chief of staff for former Sen. Johnny Isakson, culminating in a 2016 appointment to succeed Sam Olens as Georgia’s attorney general. Carr has since won two statewide elections as attorney general and is widely expected to run for higher office.

Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature took a swipe at the autonomy of local prosecutors this year when Senate Bill 92 created the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, a statewide oversight council aimed at reining in locally elected prosecutors who engage in the “willful and persistent failure to carry out statutory duties.” Initially conceived as a reaction to prosecutorial failures in the Ahmaud Arbery case, Republican lawmakers more recently appeared to be motivated by a progressive prosecutor in Clark County — home of the University of Georgia college town Athens — who had begun refusing to prosecute minor drug cases.

Other Democratic district attorneys around the state have objected to the new commission, suggesting that it is designed to punish prosecutors who refuse to enforce the state’s newly empowered abortion laws or, in the case of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the potential prosecution of former President Donald Trump and alleged 2020 election interference conspirators.

Register’s comments suggest that decisions about prosecuting protesters on serious charges like racketeering or domestic terrorism are coming from the state’s Republican officeholders and not necessarily local law enforcement officials in overwhelmingly Democratic metro Atlanta counties.

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to inquiries seeking comment. Jurgens’s attorneys, however, did.

“We are appreciative of GBI Director Register for bringing into the public light that the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office correctly wanted to dismiss the charges against our client Tom Jurgens,” said his attorneys L. Burton Finlayson and Andrew Hall. “Tom is not a domestic terrorist. Tom is a locally-raised, University of Georgia undergraduate and Law School graduate (‘Double-Dawg’), practicing Georgia attorney who was working as a volunteer legal observer to ensure that all [protesters’] constitutional and civil rights were protected. Ultimately, we believe (and hope) that cooler heads among the prosecution team will prevail and that, upon a sober examination of the facts, all charges against him will be dismissed.”

Earlier this month, apparently under the direction of Carr, police arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund on charges of money laundering and charity fraud. The warrants for their arrest were sworn out by a GBI agent and not local law enforcement officials, describing them as “domestic violent extremists” as designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The term has become a flashpoint in the case. While the Department of Homeland Security used the phrase in a May 24 security bulletin referring to protests in Atlanta, the department — for the second time — denied using the term as a formal designation for the Cop City activists.

A spokesperson for Carr refrained from comment for this story. A spokesperson for the GBI acknowledged Register’s comments, noting that it was his practice to provide updates about major activities around the state to other law enforcement leaders.

The office of DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston also abstained from commenting directly on the protest case “because we cannot comment on an open case,” a spokesperson said. But her office did have something to say about the process.

“Domestic terrorism is one of only a handful of charges for which the state and county have concurrent jurisdiction,” Boston’s spokesperson said. “Early on, our office decided to join the multijurisdictional task force on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in order to protect the people of DeKalb County and represent their interests. While the Attorney General can prosecute these cases without input from the Office of the DeKalb County District Attorney, DA Boston and our team continue to advocate for charging decisions that align with the alleged actions of each individual defendant, as well as the mission and values of the DeKalb DA’s office.”

Register’s comments to the Georgia Board of Public Safety are somewhat more expansive than other statements made about law enforcement’s response to Cop City protests, possibly because these staid meetings of the state’s senior law enforcement officials — usually held somewhere other than a metro Atlanta location — are rarely covered by the media and generally draw little public attention.

In previous comments to the board from March 9, four days after the protest arrests at the Cop City site, Register described the incident from law enforcement’s perspective in detail. Police reacted to approximately 150 people walking up a cleared Georgia Power corridor through the forest, he said, who “had protective clothing on and some had shields made out of 55 gallon drums. The officers had to retreat across the roadway to a fenced in area and into another fenced in area to lock themselves in. The subjects came into the construction site and were using fireworks to shoot at the officers and throwing objects, such as rocks, at the officers. While a portion of the subjects was doing this, the other individuals went to various pieces of equipment and burned two four-wheelers and a front-end loader, a trailer, as well as the cameras that caught the assault.”

Of the 23 people arrested by the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia State Patrol that night, only Jurgens and another protester, Jack Beaman of Decatur, were from Georgia, Register emphasized, according to the meeting minutes. “21 were from out of state and out of those, 2 were from out of country — Canada and France. Director Register stated the Bureau worked with its federal partners, as well as the State Department to contact their counterparts in Canada and France on these two individuals to dig a little deeper on them.”

Activists’ answer to this line of thought has been to suggest that police have deliberately targeted out-of-state protesters for prosecution, releasing people with local addresses after detaining them during demonstrations to inflate the perception of “outside agitators” spurring violence.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation then charged these trustees of the Network for Strong Communities Inc. with charity fraud and money laundering.

Charges under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a very expansive state version of federal RICO laws, may also be pending.

As a charity expert who researches nonprofit governance, I am struck by how unusual this scenario is.

This story strikes close to home for me as well. A friend of mine was arrested three months ago by the Atlanta police while attending a related music festival organized by the “Stop Cop City” protesters.

What’s the charity?

Network for Strong Communities Inc. was founded in 2020. The Internal Revenue Service approved its application to operate as a public charity under federal law, and the Georgia secretary of state’s office reports the organization is in good standing. An open records request I filed on June 5 with the Georgia secretary of state’s office returned only routine charity documents.

Among its community engagement activities, the network operates the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has, since 2016, provided local activists with legal support, including bail bonds and attorney fees. Bail funds pool donated money to pay bail for people who can’t afford it. They help low-income people who are facing legal charges to avoid the economic hardship of pretrial detention.

There’s another charity with the same name based in Missouri, but the two organizations aren’t connected.

What is the organization doing?

The Network for Strong Communities has provided legal assistance to dozens of people who have been arrested since 2022 during marches, demonstrations and other events opposing plans for the
Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. That’s a controversial facility under construction in Atlanta’s largest urban forest.

A loose environmental and civil rights coalition calling itself Defend the Atlanta Forest has spearheaded the actions, which stem from fears of police militarization and environmental harm. But concerns about the facility are widespread among city residents.

Most of the environmental and civil rights activists objecting to the training center they call “Cop City” have used constitutionally protected tactics. But some have allegedly committed criminal acts of sabotage.

The protests have expanded and garnered international attention after Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an environmental activist, was shot and killed by a Georgia State Patrol trooper in January 2023 during an encounter with law enforcement, as officers sought to clear protesters from the site.

Georgia has relied on its state domestic terrorism law and an unusual state-of-emergency declaration that Gov. Brian Kemp issued on Jan. 26, 2023, to jail the arrested activists and deny them bail for extended periods.

But the three Network for Strong Communities board members were released only two days after their arrest. The judge in charge of deciding on their bail expressed skepticism about the strength of the state’s case. Their attorney has argued that the charges are unconstitutional.

The earlier arrests of more than 40 activists generated widespread concern among human rights experts who challenged the absence of evidence and observed that the activists were also involved in constitutionally protected activities.

The Atlanta City Council approved the remainder of US$90 million in funding for the training center on June 6, over the objections of more than 350 Atlanta residents who stood in line for over 14 hours to publicly comment.

Are these charity arrests unusual?

Charity fraud charges can be lodged in any state when regulators suspect a charity is deliberately misleading the public about its activities. In this case, prosecutors claim the network’s board members diverted charitable funds for personal use and misled donors about activities. The evidence relies mainly on financial and phone records obtained under a search warrant and receipts for such items as gas and yard signs obtained from board members’ trash.

Georgia authorities have said the money laundering charge is based on evidence of a fund transfer to another organization, but they had not disclosed any details about this transaction by a week after the arrests. Network for Strong Communities makes grants to community groups, which is routine for charities involved in community organizing.

Normally, an employee tip or donor complaint initiates a charity fraud investigation. Prosecutors claim donor complaints here but did not disclose details at the bail hearing. It’s also unusual for fraud charges to be applied without a full forensic investigation involving the Georgia secretary of state, who has this statutory authority.

Even Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr, who is currently prosecuting this case, would normally direct inquiries by someone who suspects wrongdoing to the secretary of state’s office.

I can’t recall a SWAT team ever being involved in the prosecution of charity fraud charges. When I asked my fellow charity experts if they knew of a U.S. precedent, nobody did.

Charity leaders may legally reimburse themselves for work-related expenses as long as they keep receipts and records and there are appropriate checks and balances in place.

U.S. charities also legitimately make payments to other entities to carry out their mission. Any transfer of funds would need to be mission-related and reported in mandatory annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service.

If found guilty, the three Network for Strong Communities board members could have to pay fines of more than $500,000 and spend up to two decades in prison, according to the Atlanta Community Press Collective, a media outlet closely covering the story.

What could happen next?

The free speech rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment belong not just to individuals but also to institutions.

It is not a violation of anti-racketeering law to communicate among organizers to coordinate legitimate charitable work. And despite the astonishing claim by Georgia Deputy Attorney General John Fowler that these arrests could be justified because the board members “harbor extremist anti-government and anti-establishment views,” a charity leader’s political viewpoints are protected free speech, as are those of all Americans.

If past history is any guide, and unless the evidence becomes more compelling, I believe that these charges will be dropped. Calls to end such prosecutorial overreach will mount, and legal observers have already called for a federal investigation.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Beth Gazley.

Residents in Atlanta shattered the record for turnout at a city council meeting Monday, as thousands lined up to voice their opposition to the construction of a massive police training facility known as Cop City. Ultimately, the Atlanta City Council voted 11-4 to approve $30 million in additional funding for the project, bringing the total to $67 million — more than double the original estimate. The contentious vote comes after a SWAT team raided the Atlanta Solidarity Fund last Wednesday and arrested three people who had been raising money to bail out protesters opposed to Cop City, charging them with money laundering and charity fraud. Forty-two protesters still face charges including domestic terrorism for opposing Cop City, and activists continue to demand answers over the fatal police shooting of environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán in January. For more on Cop City, we speak with Reverend James Woodall from the Southern Center for Human Rights, who spoke at the City Council meeting, as well as Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizer Marlon Kautz, one of the three people arrested in last week’s SWAT raid. Kautz says the charges are “malicious political prosecutions” with the intent to “suppress a political movement.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This house in the Edgewood neighborhood is where police arrested three key organizers who have been aiding protesters against the city’s proposed police training center on May 31, 2023, in Atlanta.

Photo: Kate Brumback/AP

On Wednesday morning, a heavily armed Atlanta Police Department SWAT team raided a house in Atlanta and arrested three of its residents. Their crime? Organizing legal support and bail funds for protesters and activists who have faced indiscriminate arrest and overreaching charges in the struggle to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — dubbed Cop City — atop a forest in Atlanta.

In a joint operation with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Atlanta cops charged Marlon Scott Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson — all board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — with “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”

The arrests are an unprecedented attack on bail funds and legal support organizations, a long-standing facet of social justice movements, according to Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

“This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way,” Regan, whose organization has worked to ensure legal support for people resisting Cop City, told me. “And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.”

While the Atlanta Solidarity Fund has been a crucial resource for activists facing harsh repression for their involvement in Stop Cop City, the nonprofit predates the movement and has been providing bail funds, jail support, and assistance with legal representation for Atlanta activists since the 2020 Black liberation uprisings.

The fund, a project of the registered nonprofit Network for Strong Communities, has also provided grants to support an array of anti-repression work in Atlanta, including to groups working with unhoused trans youth, Black worker-owned cooperatives, and abolitionist community builders.

“Providing mutual aid to people exercising their constitutionally protected rights to protest and dissent is not a crime.”

“What happened this morning is a terrifying escalation by the state, and a chillingly direct attack on the First Amendment. This is fascist political repression,” Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer, told me. “Providing mutual aid to people exercising their constitutionally protected rights to protest and dissent is not a crime.”

A public statement from the GBI said that “[a]gents and officers executed a search warrant and found evidence linking the three suspects to the financial crimes.” The warrants for all three arrestees cite “records and reports of certain currency transactions” and “fraudulent, misrepresenting, or misleading activities regarding charitable solitations.” (“Solitations” is, of course, not a word, but the apparent misspelling of the word “solicitations” appears on all three arrestees’ warrants.)

A more detailed arrest warrant for Patterson notes that the alleged “money laundering” charge relates to reimbursements made from the nonprofit to Patterson’s personal PayPal account for minor expenses including “gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, covid rapid tests, media, yard signs and other miscellaneous expenses.” Targeting the organizers with a militarized SWAT raid based on such expenditures only clarifies the desperation of law enforcement agencies in going after the movement.

According to the GBI statement, “All three charged will be booked into a local jail and will have a bond hearing scheduled soon.”

Wednesday’s arrests are just the latest in extreme law enforcement persecution of the popular Stop Cop City movement. A total of 42 activists are currently facing state domestic terror charges on the flimsiest of police claims, while three others face hefty felony intimidation charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to the brutal police killing of 26-year-old forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán.

Kautz, one of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers arrested on Wednesday, had previously shared numerous reflections with The Intercept on the Atlanta cops’ extreme repressive tactics. He noted that the indiscriminate arrests and use of state domestic terrorism charges against protesters represented “an unprecedented level of repression” and a “strategy of blatant malicious prosecution.”

It is a vile irony that for his own role in legal support work and rightful criticism of police violence, Kautz is now part of this same pattern of apparent prosecutorial abuse.

In targeting the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, police and prosecutors are attempting to further the groundless narrative that the multifaceted movement against Cop City is a “criminal organization,” enabling profoundly unconstitutional arrests based on no more than association with a resilient anti-racist, environmentalist movement.

Politicians keen to see Cop City built in Atlanta have doubled down on the pernicious line, none more so than Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “These criminals facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism,” said Kemp in a statement responding to Wednesday’s arrests, despite the fact that no one has been convicted in the weak domestic terrorism cases.

Organizing bail funds and legal support for protesters facing charges, however serious, is a decades-old social justice movement practice. As the Atlanta Community Press Collective noted on Twitter, “When Dr. King was held in Birmingham Jail, churches and community groups including the NAACP came together to fund his $4000 bail – the equivalent of $39,000 today.”

Like the overreaching domestic terrorism charges, if any established legal standards and precedents are upheld in these cases, no financial crimes or money-laundering charges will stick. Yet even unsuccessful malicious prosecutions exact a painful toll on movements, especially when a resource hub like the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is targeted.

“They are trying to drain our morale and trying to drain our resources. These arrests send a message.”

“They are trying to drain our morale and trying to drain our resources,” another person associated with the fund told me, withholding their name for fear of police persecution following their associates’ arrests. “These arrests send a message that if you run a nonprofit that they find to be at odds with their colonial project, they will target you.”

The charges indeed risk setting a dangerous precedent in criminalizing bail funds and legal support networks. “Bailing out protestors who exercise their constitutionally protected rights is simply not a crime. In fact, it is a historically grounded tradition in the very same social and political movements that the city of Atlanta prides itself on,” said Regan, the attorney, in a separate press statement. “Someone had to bail out civil rights activists in the 60’s–I think we can all agree that community support isn’t a crime.”

Wednesday’s arrests come just days after it was revealed by reporters that Atlanta officials have known for some time that the cost of building Cop City to the city of Atlanta would amount to at least $51 million in public funds, instead of the $30 million that city officials promised since 2021.

Local opposition to the project has been strong, with hundreds of people attending a recent city council meeting to speak out against Cop City during a public hearing. The city council will vote on whether to approve the growing cost of the vast militarized policing facility on June 5. “The charges against organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund come as the public becomes increasingly aware of the corporate funding and interests backing the Cop City project and the Atlanta Police Foundation non-profit,” Nora Scholl from the Atlanta Community Press Collective told me. “Law enforcement agencies are using force and imprisonment against protestors to buffer them from widespread opposition to the project.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

Blank has tried to set himself apart from the other land barons of the New West. His philanthropic organization’s Western U.S. arm, AMB West, has given heavily to local causes. As of 2019, that includes $25,000 to the Livingston food pantry, $13,268 to the Park County Environmental Council, $17,500 to Yellowstone Forever and $110,600 to the Park County Community Foundation. He often invites local nonprofits to use one of his several luxury ranches for meetings and retreats. According to his statements and company websites, his interest in owning large swaths of my home state is driven not by profit, but by his environmental vision.

“This purchase is about conservation, not development,” Blank said in a statement after buying his third south-central Montana ranch in 2019. “We will respect the tradition of ranching while keeping our lands in their original, intact state for the sake of beauty and wildlife.”

I stumbled across Blank’s name again recently, this time in a different context—on a list of major donors to the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the group funding the destruction of an urban forest near Atlanta to make way for the massive police training facility that activists, who have positioned themselves as defenders, have dubbed “Cop City.”

The sprawling South River Forest, which forest defenders have taken to calling by its Muscogee name Weelaunee, lies in a poor, majority-Black area of South Atlanta and is one of the last large, undeveloped green spaces in the metro area. In 2021, the Atlanta City Council approved a plan to clear 85 acres of the forest to build the $90 million police training center, which would include a shooting range, a driving course and “a mock city for real-world training,” according to the APF website.

The project has proved unpopular: Of the more than 1,000 people who called into the public comment period during the city council vote, around 70% opposed it. Community groups and environmental defenders have confronted the project with stiff—often militant—resistance, with some camping in the forest, blocking construction and sabotaging equipment. If built, these opponents argue, Cop City would destroy scarce wildlife habitats and a natural carbon sink, damage the watershed, facilitate further police militarization and more police violence, and introduce more police to already over-policed neighborhoods. Proponents, on the other hand, argue the new facility is necessary to boost police morale and help the department overcome difficulties recruiting more cops.

The issue has blown up from a local conflict into a battleground in the national fight over environmental justice and policing.

The conflict had been escalating for months when, during a January sweep to clear defenders from the forest, police shot and killed 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a forest defender who went by the nickname Tortuguita. The official autopsy found more than 50 bullet wounds in Tortuguita’s body, including—according to an independent autopsy commissioned by Tortuguita’s family—exit wounds in the palms of both hands. The independent autopsy says the activist was likely sitting down when police fired. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says police shot in self-defense after Tortuguita wounded a Georgia state trooper.

Police have also arrested dozens of other forest defenders and charged them with domestic terrorism.

Despite the vehement opposition and the killing of Tortuguita, the city is pushing ahead. It’s a massive undertaking—and expensive. The APF, which is pushing the project as the “Public Safety First Campaign,” says the City of Atlanta will fund one third of the $90 million price tag. The APF will fundraise the remaining $60 million from private donors.

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation pledged $3 million to the Public Safety First Campaign, according to a September 2022 report presented at an APF board meeting, which the movement-aligned Atlanta Community Press Collective said it obtained through a public records request and shared publicly earlier this year.

According to the document, other major donors to the campaign include the Woodruff Foundation ($13 million), the James M. Cox Foundation ($10 million), and the Coca-Cola Company ($1 million).

In response to a request for comment, Caroline Huston, a spokeswoman for the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, said the “information included in this document about our grant is inaccurate.” The Blank Foundation actually pledged $4 million to the APF in 2019, Huston said, for a police affordable housing project, with the final installment paid in 2021. She’s not sure why this APF document lists the donation as part of the Public Safety First Campaign, but said “it’s not correct.” The APF did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Despite any discrepancies, what’s clear is that the Blank Foundation has been a major donor to the APF for some time. In addition to the grant at issue here, the foundation donated $1 million to the APF in 2017 and $737,000 in 2016. I asked Huston whether Blank saw any contradiction between conserving Montana’s wild land and funding an organization that is destroying part of an urban forest in Atlanta. Huston responded this way: “We’re proud of our track record and efforts in conservation beyond what you already know about in Montana. This is evident across the Blank Family of Businesses.”

Around the time the Blank Foundation made its most recent pledge to the APF, and around the same time many families in Montana were searching desperately for ways to hang on as a wave of rapid gentrification displaced workers and longtime locals, Blank was adding a fourth Montana ranch to his portfolio—the 5,300-acre Dome Mountain Ranch, listed for $45 million.

For many Atlanta residents, meanwhile, the South River Forest may be the closest thing to a “ranch” they will ever have access to.

Blank isn’t alone in this kind of hypocrisy. I’ve noticed that a great many of the wealthy elites so interested in “conserving” my home state have no such environmentalist sentiments about other landscapes.

This incongruity is part of a larger, longer tendency in U.S. conservation politics, which too often fixates on dramatic, mountainous landscapes at the expense of flatter, more easterly, less pristine places populated by poorer people. It’s the logic that creates a national park here and a national sacrifice zone there. And it’s the tendency at work now, gentrifying rural Montana into a picturesque playground for the rich and destroying one of the last urban forests in a poor neighborhood of Atlanta. This tendency can be called by other names too, like “environmental injustice” or “environmental racism.”

But what’s happening in the two places is not so much a contradiction as two sides of a coin: Blank’s philanthropy and conservation in Montana provide cover for the violence against the forest and its defenders perpetrated by the group he helps fund in Atlanta. In this way, the nonprofits and conservation NGOs that take Blank’s money in Montana and elsewhere collaborate in environmental injustice by greenwashing and burnishing his image. If they really care about environmental justice, they should immediately and publicly cut all ties with Arthur Blank—unless, and until, he cuts ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Shadowbox Studios was affiliated with a construction project in Intrenchment Creek Park.

This content originally appeared on In These Times and was authored by Joseph Bullington.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on Thursday said that former NFL quarterback and racial justice activist Colin Kaepernick will pay for an independent autopsy for Lashawn Thompson, a mentally ill man who died last September in a filthy, insect-infested cell in an overcrowded Atlanta jail.

Crump spoke at a rally and news conference outside the Fulton County Jail, where Thompson, who was arrested last June for alleged misdemeanor simple battery, was held for three months before his death.

"We want to thank Colin Kaepernick for helping this family get to the truth and soon," Crump said, flanked by Thompson's relatives.

"What happened to Lashawn Thompson is a human rights violation," the attorney added. "If we don't ask the questions and we don't get the answers and we don't get to the truth, then next time it could be your loved one. This isn't just about Lashawn Thompson. This is about every citizen in Fulton County, Georgia."

Thompson, who suffered from mental health issues, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to the jail's psychiatric wing. According to jail records, on September 13 an officer saw Thompson slumped over in his cell, which was so dirty that a staff member who entered it wore protective gear. Inside, Thompson lay dead with his eyes open, his body covered with what Crump said were over 1,000 insect bites. Thompson was 35 years old.

Jail records show that medical and correctional staff repeatedly noted—and voiced concerns about—Thompson's deteriorating health but did not help him.

"They literally watched his health decline until he died," Michael Harper, another attorney representing Thompson's family, said in a statement.

Harper asserted that Thompson "was found dead in a filthy jail cell after being eaten alive by insects and bed bugs."

An official autopsy could not determine the cause of Thompson's death but noted an "extremely severe" insect infestation on his body.

"Can you imagine him screaming and him hollering, saying 'They biting, they biting' and nobody come," Thompson's aunt, Mamie Norman, said at Thursday's rally. "Nobody. Nobody. I still have no understanding until y'all find out what happened to him."

A report obtained last year from NaphCare—an institutional healthcare services contractor repeatedly accused of neglect—revealed widespread medical negligence in Fulton County Jail's mental health unit, where more than 90% of inmates were so severely malnourished that they developed cachexia, a wasting syndrome often associated with diseases like advanced cancer or AIDS.

Additionally, "100% of inmates" in the unit "had either lice, scabies, or both."

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat—who called Thompson's death "absolutely unconscionable"—earlier this week asked for and received the resignation of three top jail officials, including Chief Jailer John Jackson.

"It's clear to me that it's time, past time, to clean house," Labat said in a statement on Monday.

An October 2022 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that a record number of inmates are dying in Georgia's five largest county jails, and that Fulton County Jail has led the state in such deaths since 2009.

Overcrowding and understaffing plague the facility, where around half of the more than 3,000 inmates have not been charged with any crime. Labat admitted that more than 400 inmates were sleeping on the floor because of overcrowding.

"The type of infestations that contributed to Mr. Thompson's death are going to be a recurring problem in a jail where hundreds of detainees do not have cells and have to sleep on the floor," the sheriff said on Thursday.

Sakira Cook, vice president of campaigns, policy, and government at the racial justice group Color of Change, said Thursday in a statement that "like Lashawn Thompson, countless individuals are currently enduring completely inhumane conditions at the severely overcrowded Fulton County Jail—often waiting for months at a time for frequently minor offenses and small amounts of cash bail."

"This must end. Despite years of scrutiny, the neglect and inhumane conditions within the jail have persisted, with little to no meaningful changes in prosecutorial practices or conditions," Cook added. "The current dark reality of mass incarceration is not accidental, but rather the consequence of intentional policies crafted by a dominant white culture that perpetuates and profits from the suppression of Black individuals through the jailing system."

On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who chairs the Senate Human Rights Subcommittee, announced the launch of an inquiry into conditions of incarceration in Georgia and nationwide. Previous Ossoff-led probes of U.S. carceral conditions revealed nearly 1,000 uncounted deaths, widespread sexual crimes, corruption, abuse, and misconduct at prisons and jails across the nation.

According to the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, there are nearly 2 million people locked up in U.S. prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the past 40 years and more than any other country in the world, by far.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Family members of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán embrace during a news conference in Decatur, Ga., on March 13, 2023.

Photo: Alex Slitz/AP

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

In Atlanta, Georgia, the family of a prisoner says he was “eaten alive” by insects and bedbugs in his cell there last year. The family of 35-year-old Lashawn Thompson, who was being held in the jail’s psychiatric wing, is demanding a criminal investigation and that the jail be shut down. In an exclusive interview, we speak to Thompson’s brother Brad McCrae and sister Shenita Thompson, as well as Michael Harper, a lawyer representing the family.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Atlanta is a city built inside a forest, one that Indigenous Muscogee people call the Weelaunee Forest. In recent years, the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, has led an effort to build what would be the nation’s largest police training center on hundreds of acres of that forest land. The move sparked the creation of a broad coalition to protest the project, some opposed to forest destruction and others against police expansion. Together, these organizers are calling on Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, and the city council to “Stop Cop City.”

Authorities have cracked down on the protests with mass arrests and, in some cases, are charging organizers with domestic terrorism. In January 2023, police raided an area where protesters were camping in the Weelaunee Forest, killing an environmental justice protester named Tortuguita.

"We have to get back out in the streets. We have to continue organizing. And that is the way that we fight back against police violence and police terror"

Organizers designated March 4–11, 2023, a week of action in Atlanta aimed at shutting down Cop City. Kamau Franklin, the founder and director of the Atlanta-based grassroots organization Community Movement Builders, has been involved in the protests, pressuring city officials and organizing events. The organization’s website says, “CMB has been the leading Black organization on the ground fighting to StopCopCity since its construction was announced.” On March 7, Franklin spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about the organizing efforts and the police crackdown, and why the effort to Stop Cop City is a story of national significance.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Tell me about this facility. The official name isn’t “Cop City”—that’s what it’s been sort of dubbed. It has a rather benign title of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center—that’s what the Atlanta Police Foundation calls it, which I imagine you consider a euphemism?

Kamau Franklin: [Laughing] Sorry, you caught me off guard there!

Yeah. Yes, we do consider [it] a euphemism for a militarized training center, which is meant to continue to over-police, particularly Black communities here in Atlanta, and, what we believe, is meant to train the police on how to stop and to criminalize social justice movements—particularly movements against police violence.

So, the very adoption of this idea of a militarized training center came after the 2020 uprisings, and that’s when Atlanta decided that it needed this sprawling militarized training center to be built in a forest in order to, again in our estimation, stop movements and continue to over-police Black and Brown communities.

Kolhatkar: So, this training center, if it is built, will it be something that just Atlanta-area police are trained in? Or, is it something that police from outside Atlanta, and even outside Georgia, are going to be invited into? Why would it be the nation’s largest police training center? Why does Atlanta need that?

Franklin: Exactly. Atlanta doesn’t need it. In fact, the Atlanta police are no bigger than the 20th-largest police department in the whole country. And so, why it needs the largest police training center is beyond me—except for the fact that this is part of a larger national strategy, we believe, around training police officers in common tactics and strategies, in essence, the building of some sort of nationalized police force.

Through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, we’ve received information that the Atlanta Police Foundation, in its attempt to receive additional funding for this site, has [specified] that up to 43% of the police officers to be trained will be from outside of Georgia. So, this site is not just for Atlanta police, but this site is going to be a place of training for police officers across the country.

In addition, Georgia already has a program where it works directly with the Israeli police force. And so, what we tell people is that the training and tactics and strategies that the Israeli Police use against Palestinians are going to be exported here to the United States against Black communities, and that the training, tactics, and strategies used against Black communities are going to be exported to Palestine to be used against Palestinians.

And so, we know that this is not just a local effort, but the scope and size of this, the additional officers that are being trained from around the country, this is truly a national effort to train police—again, what we think coming out of 2020—to train police to stop movements, particularly to stop movements against police violence.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk about what’s happened with the resistance. In January, there was a lot of activism against “Cop City,” and, in fact, tragically, police killed a person who went by the name Tortuguita. Tell me about who they were, why they were killed, and who killed them.

Franklin: Yeah, Tortuguita was one of the “Forest Defenders” who was camping in Weelaunee Forest to try to prevent, as an act of civil disobedience, the police foundation from going forward and cutting down nearly a hundred acres of forest.

We should state that, again through another Freedom of Information Act, we became aware, months before the killing of Tortuguita, that there was a task force that was formed—a task force of policing agencies including the Atlanta police, the DeKalb County police, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even Homeland Security—that this task force got together to talk through bringing state terrorism charges against protesters who are opposed to Cop City. That these charges were something, that this state law had never been used before, but yet they were putting out the idea of doing this against organizers and activists.

In December, these different policing agencies made their first raid in the forest and arrested approximately six organizers, or six Forest Defenders, and charged them with the charge of domestic terrorism. As you mentioned, on Jan. 18, they made a second raid in the forest, and during that raid, they arrested another seven activists and charged them with domestic terrorism. And it was during that raid that they killed the young Forest Defender Tortuguita, claiming that that person took one shot at them and that they responded back in kind.

From other information we’ve received from people in the community, it has become obvious to us that that police narrative cannot be trusted and it’s basically a lie. The police narrative fell apart instantly when people in the community said that they heard a sudden burst of gunfire. And later, that was backed up by videotape evidence that was released by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, that in the background you could hear a sudden burst of fire, and the police themselves remarked, who weren’t on the scene, that that was “suppressed fire,” which [is] code for cop fire.

We find it incredibly difficult to believe that of all the different agencies that I named earlier—Atlanta police, DeKalb County police, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia troopers, interagency SWAT teams, and, by some news accounts, even the FBI—that no agency had body cameras on during the time of their confrontation with Tortuguita.

They had other body camera images that could be seen in different places, but somehow, over a dozen police officers surrounding a tent did not have one body camera on to film the incident.

They expect us to believe that someone sitting in a cloth tent—that they described as “barricaded”—that someone sitting in a cloth tent decided to shoot once at the police, and then the police returned fire.

Tortuguita was shot over 13 times. So many times was the young person shot that the autopsy, which was done by the family, couldn’t determine the exact amount [of shots], because [you] couldn’t tell what was an entry wound and what was an exit wound.

So, we feel that this obviously needs an independent investigation. But more importantly, this is the first time that a Forest Defender, a climate justice activist, has been killed by the police in the United States.

And this very violence is one of the reasons why we oppose Cop City, because it’s these militarized actions which lead to the death of not only protesters, but people out in the street, who are going about their daily business when they interact with the police.

Kolhatkar: So, tell me about the coalition that has formed to resist Cop City. Tortuguita considered themselves a Forest Defender. A lot of people outside Atlanta don’t know this—I didn’t realize this—that Atlanta is actually a city in a forest. It’s called the Atlanta Forest. Indigenous folks call it the Weelaunee Forest. So, there’s been a coalition of many different kinds of progressive groups coming together to oppose this Cop City from various angles, who are united with one goal, right?

Franklin: Yes, I mean, there’s folks who are climate justice activists and organizers, environmental organizations, civil rights groups, groups like ours that are grassroots organizers, folks of many different ideological persuasions, autonomous organizers, anarchist organizers. There has been a great amount of ideological and ethnic and racial diversity in terms of what this movement has been.

And so, when folks try to suggest that this is a movement of outsiders, it’s because they’ve never seen that the homegrown Atlanta organizers, or the people who’ve lived here for over 10, 15, 20 years, are the people who are centered in this movement to stop Cop City.

This movement has gone on for over two years. And it invites folks to come in from outside, right? We don’t buy into the “outside agitator” narrative that the police and the political class like to throw on us. We invite organizers and activists to come from around the country, in fact, from around the world, to take part in these demonstrations. We see that as part of the history, or historical roots of organizing and activism.

Let’s just remember that people like Dr. King were called “outside agitators,” people in the civil rights movement were called “outside agitators.” Anytime people fight for justice, the politicians of the status quo usually like to call people “outside agitators” when they’re fighting for justice. And so, this has been a diverse movement, a movement of many, many, many different stripes, and it’s one that’s continuing to this day.

Kolhatkar: So, this week is a week of action, but it began with more arrests on Sunday, and also what seemed like a really aggressive action, if you will, by activists? Tell me what happened on Sunday—there was one vehicle that was set on fire, and, of course, usually when there’s any kind of property destruction, the police like to cast this as equivalent to when human bodies and human beings are harmed. And so, the groups, the activists participating in that, and, by extension, everybody else has been cast as “violent” and “aggressive.” So, what actually happened this past weekend?

Franklin: Sure. Well, you know, the actual week of organizing started on the Saturday, and on that Saturday, there was a large demonstration. People took walks through the forest, actually went to the place where Tortuguita was killed. And then on Sunday, there was a music concert that had been planned where many different artists came out to perform.

There were some who decided to engage in a direct action that didn’t start at the music festival. That direct action went straight to the campsite that’s been blocked off by the police. And in that action, which was meant to destroy the property that’s going to be used to build Cop City, there were police agents already there. There was a back and forth between the police and the organizers and activists. The police called for more backup. At the scene, to our knowledge, there weren’t many, if any, arrests.

But what the police did was that they decided to go break up the music festival and begin to make additional arrests there. And so there were 35 arrests in total. Twenty-three of those were charged with domestic terrorism. That’s in addition to the other 19 who were previously charged with domestic terrorism.

We must make sure that we’re clear: The overwhelming majority of people who’ve been arrested with the charge of domestic terrorism have been people who’ve been either sitting in trees and tree huts or people who’ve been sitting in tents.

And even [for] those people who are actively engaged [in] acts of civil disobedience, so direct action, it’s one thing to charge people with assault, or vandalism, or trespassing, or even arson. It’s another thing to label folks and to then charge them with domestic terrorist accusations. That is meant to criminalize the movement, that is meant to harm the movement in general, and basically to squash dissent.

So that is part of what we are really, really rallying around—that we understand at the state agencies, this is not about them charging people with certain crimes. This is about them overcharging and trying to present the movement as violent so that people will look the other way and allow them to build this militarized center.

Kolhatkar: So, in other words, they’re using the resistance to Cop City as justification for Cop City. What about Atlanta’s mayor Andre Dickens and Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp? How have leaders in Georgia and Atlanta responded to what seems to be widespread resistance to this training center?

Franklin: I think basically what’s happened is that these leaders, these so-called leaders, have doubled down on their aggressive tactics. And so, what we have here in Atlanta is that you have a moderate-to-liberal Black Democratic mayor who has teamed up with a right-wing white supremacist Republican governor to stomp out activism and organizing around Cop City. Because the one thing that both of these leaders agree with—and they’ve even gotten support, of course, from the moderate Democratic presidential administration through the FBI and the Justice Department, and Homeland Security—so all of these different political elites support the police. All of these different political elites support or get support from the corporations that support the police. And so, they have been continually aligned in their opposition to the movement to Stop Cop City.

In addition to that, here in Atlanta, in the northern part of Atlanta, we have a place called Buckhead, which has threatened to secede from Atlanta and to form its own city on a false narrative of there being a crime wave. If Buckhead was its own city, it would be the 12th-safest city in the country. But what this city is doing—and this is a majority-white part of the city—is putting pressure on Republicans to support its secession bid.

Basically, the governor of Georgia told the mayor of Atlanta—and again, these are through emails—that he likes the job that he’s doing on policing, i.e., he likes the job that he’s doing by responding to Buckhead, and he likes the job he’s doing by pushing forward Cop City.

And so recently, in the State Assembly, the Republicans basically put down the vote to have Buckhead secede. So basically, the governor is promising the mayor that as long as you continue to do the job that I think is good in terms of over-policing, you have my support in keeping Buckhead, which is basically the economic engine of Atlanta, connected to Atlanta.

And so, these folks again are working hand in hand to build this militarized operation because it fits their political interests and their political needs, and they don’t care that the city itself, the majority of the city—remember, when this vote was taken to bring forth police, 70% of the people who called in said they were opposed to Cop City—but yet the city council and the mayor went ahead anyway and voted this in and have tried to move this forward.

Kolhatkar: One of the signs that I’m seeing in images coming out of the resistance to Cop City is a slogan, “No Hollywood dystopia.” What does that mean?

Franklin: Well, in addition to the building of Cop City, there was another attempt to build a movie studio in Weelaunee Forest. At the time, it was called Blackhall Studios. And so, in addition to the 300 acres which were rented to the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private foundation, to do the training for a public entity, another, over 200 to 300 acres, was designated to be used to build Blackhall Studios.

And so, the “Hollywood dystopia” conversation is that at the same time they’re ripping apart a forest to build this militarized training center, they’re also ripping apart a part of the forest to build a Hollywood studio. And so, apparently, the forest is no good to anybody, in terms of these elite circles, unless it’s torn down.

Kolhatkar: Maybe there’s an interesting symbolism there, because Hollywood has been, for decades, the perpetrator of “copaganda,” and you just pointed out the liberal mayor, Dickens, who is, like President Biden, very much pro-police. So, liberal forces and Hollywood have lined up behind police in spite of whatever lip service they paid to Black Lives Matter in summer 2020. So finally, let’s wrap up this conversation with looking at why you think this ought to be a national story and how people outside of Atlanta can express solidarity, especially those who got activated in the summer of 2020 in the largest mass movement in American history.

Franklin: Yeah, well, we think this is a national and international story because of some of the points made earlier. The idea of Cop City is basically the idea of training police all around the country with connections to police departments all around the world in tactical and strategic ways, we think, to shut down movements.

This idea was birthed after the 2020 uprisings when the Atlanta policing establishment, and the political establishment, and the corporate establishment felt that Atlanta did not control protest here. And this is the outcome: to militarize the police further and give them a place to train for that militarized outlook that they can bring back on the community.

And again, this will continue the over-policing of Black and Brown communities. And so, nothing was solved in 2020. This issue is still alive. Instead of talking about defunding, or talking about abolition of the police, or alternatives to public safety, the city of Atlanta has doubled down on its policing tactics and has invited other policing agencies to come here and train with them.

So, this is very much a national issue. We want people to get involved wherever they are. They can get involved—you know, we’re doing this week of action—by coming here to Atlanta. They can get involved where they’re located, on the website of CommunityMovementBuilders.org. We have a “Stop Cop City” page, which lists some of the actions that people can take: everything from calling and chastising these corporations, to calling and chastising these developers who are actually working on the building of Cop City, calling the mayor, calling the city council.

We have petitions. We’re going to start a fight soon to stop the DNC from coming to Atlanta, to stop FIFA, the World Cup, from coming to Atlanta. We must make Atlanta pay a political price for their actions, and we can only do that through a national effort.

And so, we welcome those who were part of the 2020 struggle who have to understand that that struggle was not completed. In fact, it was diverted into mass elections, into political elections. And we have to get back out in the streets. We have to continue organizing. And that is the way that we fight back against police violence and police terror.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

Prosecutors in Atlanta have charged 23 forest defenders with “domestic terrorism” after their arrests late Sunday at a festival near the site of Cop City, a massive police training facility being built in the Weelaunee Forest. The arrests followed clashes between police and protesters on Sunday afternoon and came less than two months after Atlanta police shot and killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, a 26-year-old environmental defender. For an update on the growing movement to fight Cop City in Atlanta, we’re joined by Micah Herskind, a local community organizer, and Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Environmental activists hold a rally and a march through the Atlanta forest that is scheduled to be developed as a police training center, on March 4, 2023, in Atlanta, Ga.

Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

Photograph Source: Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States – CC BY 2.0

On the edge of a forest just south of Atlanta, I sat in the shade of a gazebo on a hot day in May of 2022, speaking to two activists. Parkgoers sweated in their short sleeves as they strolled past a concrete wall, on which graffiti said DEFEND THE FOREST over a fist sprouting up from roots like a squat tree trunk.

The two activists, along with many others, had taken the graffiti’s message to heart and were trying to stop large tracts of the South River Forest from being developed into a privately owned soundstage and a sprawling training center for police, dubbed Cop City. Since that day, the gazebo has been ripped apart by heavy equipment, eighteen activists have been charged with “domestic terrorism,” and one forest defender has been shot and killed by police.

Much has been said on the American left about the movement to defend the South Atlanta Forest, for good reason. For one thing, it is a coalition of individuals and organizations brought together by disparate concerns, especially about the environment (and environmental racism) and policing. For another, it has employed a diversity of tactics (from children’s marches to Molotov cocktails) without members of the movement scrambling to distance themselves from one another over these differences. It is also notable that one tactic, Earth First!-style tree-sits to prevent clearing, is being used in an unusually urban context. Activists have also mounted pressure campaigns against subcontractors hired by the main contractor, Brasfield & Gorrie, slowing down the project by creating financial disincentives to work on it.

One of the movement’s most remarkable features, however, is its insistence on treating public land as truly public—held in common by the people. Activists have not only camped out in the forest to prevent clearing but have continually held community events, inviting people from Atlanta and elsewhere to enjoy themselves in a green space, to see the land’s potential. These events have included barbecues and weekly dinners, concerts and raves, puppet shows, art shows, and skill shares where participants learn about plant identification, yoga, herbal medicine, and more. When a friend of mine went to Atlanta for work last August, I suggested he stop by the forest. He did and stumbled on a concert being given by one of his favorite singers, Raury, amid the trees. The forest has even hosted ritual events from different traditions, such as a witches’ bonfire and Sukkot and Shabbat ceremonies.

The fight to defend the forest has thus been grounded in a positive vision of people in active relationship with the land, in a shared enjoyment of public space—in democracy that grows from the ground up—even as elected officials, the wealthy, and the police have insisted on an alternative vision: one of unilateral decisions, prosecutorial intimidation, and brute force.

The details are complicated (see this timeline) but involve a public-private land swap, environmental concerns, and residents shut out of the decision-making process. The Atlanta Police Foundation, a nonprofit supporter of the Atlanta Police Department with big corporate donors, wants to build a new $90-million police training facility on land owned by the city of Atlanta but lying outside city limits, in unincorporated Dekalb County. This means the largely Black residents who would be most affected did not elect those with the power to approve the military-grade facility, which was initially planned to include shooting ranges, an area for explosive tests, burn buildings for firefighters, and a mock city for practicing police raids (giving rise to the Cop City nickname). A related land swap transferred nearby Intrenchment Creek Park (site of the gazebo) to a private company, Blackhall Studios, to build a soundstage on—even though the parcel was given to Dekalb County in 2003 on condition it remain a park forever.

The environmental impacts of the proposed development helped galvanize initial opposition. The city-owned property that would hold the facility had been earmarked by Atlanta itself in a 2017 document as integral to plans to create “a massive urban park.” Environmentalists argued that destroying woodland would worsen flooding and raise temperatures—a shortsighted move in a changing climate. But local politicians said the facility was needed to boost local police morale and retention after the George Floyd uprising of 2020 (fueled in Atlanta by the killing of Rayshard Brooks as he ran away from police).

When a virtual city council meeting was held in September 2021 to hear from residents about Cop City, most who called in seemed unimpressed by the morale argument. Between environmental concerns and locals’ worries about noise and other disruptions, 17 hours of public comment was recorded—opposed to the project by a two-to-one ratio. Calls supporting Cop City came mostly from police officers and residents of wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. Despite overwhelming opposition from the affected locals, the city council voted to approve the project.

Opponents of Cop City had used all the city-approved means at their disposal—public comments, courts, peaceful protests—to make their voices heard. Whether or not they were heard, they certainly weren’t heeded. Instead, city councilors went ahead with a project developed by the unaccountable Atlanta Police Foundation and funded by $30 million of taxpayer money, with the remaining $60 million coming from corporate sponsors such as Delta Airlines, Wells Fargo, UPS, the Home Depot—even my beloved Waffle House. The failure of the “democratic process” to change a top-down decree to build Cop City on public land with public money is seldom mentioned by local officials expressing shock that opposition started to take less legal, and more militant, forms.

Ryan Millsap, who talked the city into a land swap to build a huge soundstage on Intrenchment Creek Park, then sold his film company but retained ownership of the property. He has so far declined to explain any new plans for its development, but in July he blocked public access to the park and in December he demolished the gazebo, though the terms of the swap required public access be maintained until equivalent facilities were built elsewhere. Police did nothing to stop this apparent flouting of the agreement, but activists took matters into their own hands, blocking and torching heavy equipment—and Millsap’s pickup.

The veneer of a democratic civic process has gotten vanishingly thin as one member after another of the citizen’s advisory committee for the project has defected from the Cop City consensus. One member, an environmental engineer, was taken off the board after voicing criticism of the project. Another has filed an appeal of the land-disturbance permit for construction. Still another resigned after the tragic climax of the government’s efforts to impose their will on the land: the killing of a protester by police.

Before that day, police had raided the activists’ camp repeatedly, slashing tents and wrecking other equipment. (This kind of property damage never seems to merit outcry from officials, no more than when it’s inflicted on homeless encampments elsewhere.) Raids had been met with thrown stones and fireworks; one activist told me last year that they had succeeded in making “police afraid of the forest,” an unpredictable space full of shadowy opponents.

Nonetheless, protesters were arrested during these raids, some later charged with “domestic terrorism” under a vague state law passed after Dylann Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers. The law is not being used against white supremacist murderers but apparently to intimidate activists, since no more concrete charges have been brought against the so-called terrorists than trespassing. (This parallels the aggressive prosecution of environmentalist Jessica Reznicek, whose sabotage of pipeline equipment resulted in an eight-year sentence with a domestic terrorism enhancement.)

Then, on January 18, a multi-agency police force raided the woods and again began slashing tents and rounding up activists. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, a forest defender named Manuel Teran (called Tortuguita by their comrades) disobeyed orders and shot at Georgia State Patrol officers, who returned fire. An autopsy later showed Tortuguita was shot at least a dozen times. One officer went to the hospital with a bullet wound and recovered.

Authorities said no body cameras recorded the killing, but eventually released videos that caught the sound of gunfire from farther away. On camera, a heavily armored police officer notes the shots sounded like suppressed fire. This would be consistent with the guns carried by the Georgia State Patrol but not the recovered firearm said to belong to Tortuguita. The wearer of the body cam even says, “Man, you fucked your own officer up.”

Exactly what happened may never be known to those not on the scene, but activists have loudly doubted that Tortuguita—on record as an advocate of nonviolence—would have fired on officers. Law enforcement in the area does not have a sterling reputation for honesty; in a notorious 2006 case, Atlanta police executed a no-knock raid of a 92-year-old woman’s home, who in her surprise fired above the home invaders’ heads. They shot her to death and planted drugs in the house, claiming she had hit them when they had, in fact, shot each other.

 How to interpret Tortuguita’s killing is the most emotionally charged of many disputes over meaning in Atlanta. The core questions are: who does the land belong to, and who belongs to the land? Activists emphasize that the area’s Black residents were shut out of the decision-making process, and that the land’s history has long been tied to oppression. For much of the 20^th century, the city-owned property was a prison farm run on unfree, racialized labor. It is very possible the site holds unmarked graves from this period. Long before, the area belonged to the Muscogee Creek people, until they were pushed off the land by white settlers. Activists have connected the present fight to this original injustice, and in November 2021 Muscogee people from Oklahoma returned to perform a stomp ceremony on their ancestral land for the first time in centuries. Forest defenders refer to the woods by its Muscogee name, the Weelaunee Forest.

Meanwhile, current Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens has disputed that the area at issue even is a forest, saying, “This is Atlanta, and we know forests. This facility would not be built over a forest.” This desperate definitional gambit seems to rest on the idea that the woods on the prison farm site are relatively new, and composed less of hardwood trees than of softwoods and “invasive species”—as if no nonnative species could form part of a healthy ecosystem.

In a curious way, this emphasis on invasive species mirrors another piece of the official narrative about Weelaunee Forest: that the forest defenders are mostly “outside agitators,” stirring up trouble that Georgians want no part of. This is a very old trope, as liberal Northerners who came down during the civil rights struggle were often called the same thing. Cop City opponents have pointed out the hypocrisy of this messaging, since the Atlanta Police Department itself estimates that 43% of trainees at the new facility will come from out of state. I would add that the business-friendly government of Atlanta has never been at pains to stop the free flow of capital from beyond Georgia, or of visitors spending tourist dollars. It is only outsiders concerned with the environment who are suspect—apparently the wrong shade of green.

Do new woods growing over old injustices constitute a forest? To whom does that forest belong—the public, elected officials, the officials’ corporate sponsors? Or perhaps to itself, its trees, water, animals? What property is sacrosanct—trees and paths on public land, a gazebo shading parkgoers, or construction equipment and the windows of the Atlanta Police Foundation (smashed during a march after Tortuguita’s killing)? And who is a terrorist? A smiling 26-year-old who tried to protect the land, or the paramilitary force that invaded a camp with guns drawn?

It remains to be seen how these questions will be answered in Atlanta, but the answers concern us all. The problem of militarized police killing with impunity is an American problem. So is the struggle for democratic ownership of the commons against developers’ and corporations’ priorities (profits, and the police to protect them). So is the need for green space in a warming world, space that can cool our cities and stave off flooding, space that will renew us and remind us where we come from.

For now, city officials seem to be on the defensive. On January 31, they announced new “compromises” around the project’s environmental protections, even though, effectively, nothing had changed. On February 7th, Mayor Andre Dickens lost his cool repeatedly at a meeting with Georgia HBCU students who asked hard questions and sometimes booed him—though he never went so far as to accuse them of being outside agitators. The powers-that-be may have overplayed their hand—trying to quash a movement, they instead created a martyr.

After Tortuguita’s killing, Atlanta’s public radio station WABE held a conversation about Cop City between one liberal and one conservative pundit, who agreed on the bottom line: Cop City would be built as the conclusion to a “democratic process.” As the Republican strategist said, “It’s not like this is some right-wing administration in Atlanta that’s foisting this on this Democratic city. This is a Democratic-led city making this decision.”

What is increasingly obvious to people everywhere is that the party making decisions is often immaterial, as neither works for the people. Cop City is spilling the open secret of who counts in this system of governance: police over other citizens, and corporations most of all.

Driving out of Atlanta the day after Tortuguita was killed, I passed the entrance to Doll’s Head Trail, a quirky recent addition to the larger South Atlanta Forest. The trail is dotted with dolls that have been arranged with other discarded objects to make a creepy-cute public art project, started by one underemployed carpenter and grown with the help of other volunteers. Though its makers might not characterize it this way, the trail is anarchism in action: individuals taking it upon themselves to act without asking permission; idiosyncratic visions joining to make the commons better for all. It’s an organic process that mirrors nature’s opportunistic growth and mutualism, one that can’t be understood by a top-down government or the extractive logic of capital, and it’s sending down new roots in the Atlanta forest.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Walter Smelt III.

Family members of climate activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán are demanding answers regarding the January 18 police killing of their 26-year-old relative, commonly known as "Tortuguita."

At a press conference held Monday morning outside the DeKalb County courthouse in suburban Atlanta, family members and lawyers discussed the results of a private autopsy and demanded access to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's (GBI) full record of events amid its ongoing probe.

According to the private autopsy, multiple officers from a joint task force shot Tortuguita at least 13 times during a raid on an encampment in the Weelaunee Forest. Tortuguita was part of a collective that occupied the forest in an attempt to prevent the construction of a $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training facility popularly known as Cop City.

The GBI alleges that Tortuguita fired a weapon before officers killed him. The GBI claims that it has traced the bullet that wounded a state trooper to a handgun found at the scene and has reportedly provided documents showing Terán purchased the firearm in 2020. However, law enforcement officials continue to evade basic questions about the fatal shooting.

"Manny was a kind person who helped anyone who needed it," Tortuguita's mother, Belkis Terán, said in a statement shared ahead of the press conference. "He was a pacifist. They say he shot a police officer. I do not believe it."

"I do not understand why they will not even privately explain to us what happened to our child," she added.

Civil rights attorney Jeff Filipovits lamented that "the GBI has selectively released information about Manny's death."

"They claim Manny failed to follow orders," said Filipovits. "What orders? The GBI has not talked about the fact that Manny faced a firing squad, when those shots were fired, or who fired them."

"Any evidence, even if it is only an audio recording, will help the family piece together what happened on the morning of January 18. This information is critical, and it is being withheld."

The GBI has stated publicly that body camera footage of the shooting does not exist. However, the bureau has not yet stated whether there is any audio or video from other sources, such as drones or helicopters that were being used at the time.

Tortuguita's family has requested that the GBI release whatever audio or video recordings of the shooting exist or any other information that could help illuminate what occurred.

"Any evidence, even if it is only an audio recording, will help the family piece together what happened on the morning of January 18," said Brian Spears, a civil rights attorney with nearly five decades of experience litigating police shootings. "This information is critical, and it is being withheld."

While the family searches for answers, Tortuguita's killing "escalates concerns related to the construction of a police training center and the government's willingness to deem activists as terrorists," Fossil Free Media noted. "The power used against these activists will soon be used against other protesters."

Several Weelaunee Forest defenders were arrested and charged—under a 2017 Georgia law that expanded the definition of "domestic terrorism" to include certain property crimes—during mid-December raids on their encampment.

More forest defenders were detained on the same charges on January 18, the day police fatally shot Tortuguita—the first or possibly second time that police have killed an environmental activist in modern U.S. history, according to experts. Additional activists are also facing prosecution as a result of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp's crackdown on demonstrations held since Tortuguita's killing.

According toGrist:

Over the course of December and January, 19 opponents of the police training center have been charged with felonies under Georgia's rarely used 2017 domestic terrorism law. But Grist's review of 20 arrest warrants shows that none of those arrested and slapped with terrorism charges are accused of seriously injuring anyone. Nine are alleged to have committed no specific illegal actions beyond misdemeanor trespassing. Instead, their mere association with a group committed to defending the forest appears to be the foundation for declaring them terrorists. Officials have underlined that an investigation is ongoing, and charges could yet be added or removed.

Atlanta Police Department Assistant Chief Carven Tyus was recently quoted as saying, "Protests by non-locals are inherently terrorism," according to Fossil Free Media. Moreover, Tyus has admitted in private meetings with his advisory council: "Can we prove they did it? No. Do we know they did it? Yes."

Fossil Free Media noted that "the city of Atlanta has also admitted to using Georgia's hands-free driving law as a pretext to arrest at least one person for filming officers at Cop City."

Gerry Weber of the Southern Center for Human Rights said that "police who behave legally have no reason to fear being filmed and should welcome it."

"Law enforcement has a vested interest in this training center that demands scrupulous transparency and impartiality," said Weber. "Unfortunately, we are getting the exact opposite."

"Cop City is something that no one in the community asked for, and survey after survey shows that the majority of Atlanta residents are opposed. The mayor continues to run roughshod over the desires of the community."

While Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond announced what they called a "compromise" for Cop City last week, opposition to the project remains strong among locals.

"Cop City is something that no one in the community asked for, and survey after survey shows that the majority of Atlanta residents are opposed," Kamau Franklin from Community Movement Builders, one of the organizations fighting against Cop City. "The mayor continues to run roughshod over the desires of the community."

The Atlanta City Council gave the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private organization, permission to build Cop City in 2021, four years after the Atlanta City Planning Department recommended that the Weelaunee Forest—deemed one of four "city lungs"—be turned into a massive urban park.

A coalition of more than 1,300 progressive advocacy groups published a letter last week calling for an independent investigation into the killing of Tortuguita. The groups also demanded the resignation of Dickens, a Democrat who they said parroted "the rhetoric of extreme right-wing Gov. Brian Kemp" when he condemned protesters rather than police officers after the shooting.

The coalition pointed out that Dickens and the Atlanta City Council have the authority to terminate the land lease for Cop City and implored local policymakers to do so immediately.

Ikiya Collective, a signatory of the letter, noted that the training set to take place at Cop City "will impact organizing across the country" as police are taught how to repress popular uprisings.

"This is a national issue," said the collective. "Climate justice and police brutality are interconnected, which is why we are joining the Stop Cop City calls to action with the frontline communities in Atlanta."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

On the morning of January 18, agents from nine agencies, including the FBI and its local counterpart, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, descended on a section of Atlanta’s South River Forest occupied by activists. For the past two years, hundreds had lived in the section of the Weelaunee forest, in tents and treehouses, in order to block its planned conversion into a police training facility—a “cop city” complete with a mock village, firing ranges, and a Black Hawk landing pad. That morning, the agents were under orders to “eliminate the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center of criminal activity.”

It is still unclear why the task force opened fire. But after twelve shots rang out, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita (or “Little Turtle”), a young, trans forest defender of Afro-Venezuelan and Indigenous ancestry, had been hit and killed.

Terán’s death marks the fifth protest fatality at the hands of US law enforcement since the start of the George Floyd rebellion in May 2020: David “Ya Ya” McAtee, was killed by a National Guardsman’s bullet in Louisville, Kentucky, on June 1, 2020; Sean Monterrosa, was gunned down by undercover police in Vallejo, California, the very next day. Michael Reinoehl and Winston “Boogie” Smith, Jr., both antifascists, were hunted down and “neutralized” by US Marshals within months of each other. And it’s not just protesters: In the past month, the police have killed Tortuguita, Tyre Nichols and Keenan Anderson.

This latest wave of police killings comes on the heels of the most lethal year on record for police-civilian encounters. Yet the response of the political class has been to capitulate to rightwing scare tactics and inflated claims of a crime wave, effectively writing yet another blank check for police violence.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between centrist and conservative talking points; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution can read like the lurid headlines of the New York Post with their condemnation of “police abolitionists, environmental extremists, and anarchists.” Talking heads at Fox News, in between segments like “Antifa Is Ravaging America,” have been using leading Democrats to make their point that the tree-sit protests amount to acts of terror. All of this has made strange bedfellows of centrist Democrats and MAGA Republicans who, in a rare show of unity, have been loudly calling for a clampdown on “out of control crime” and beating the drum for “law and order.”

Right-wing talking points notwithstanding, the current landscape for protest policing is one that’s been shaped by the legacy of American apartheid, Southern lynch law, and centuries of slavery. As such, it is structurally skewed in favor of the police – and, according to multiplestudies, systematically biased against Black Lives Matter and the political left. The bias is so extreme that officers are fully three times more likely to use force on “leftwing” protesters than rightwing ones.

And when it comes to deadly force, the doctrine of qualified immunity, recently reaffirmed by the courts, means an officer can effectively shoot to kill without consequences. In a context of renewed protest and possible civil unrest, current US law enforcement strategy, as we saw in Terán’s fatal shooting, makes escalation almost inevitable, de-escalation unthinkable, and lethal outcomes ever more likely for those at the receiving end of state violence.

But several mechanisms work together to create these conditions. The first is a military-style chain of command which sees itself at war with enemies domestic and foreign. This hierarchy leaves little room for ambiguity as to who was responsible for the killing of Terán: the commanding officers who gave the orders, the agencies that employed them, and the elected officials who deployed them against the forest defenders. Governor Brian Kemp has been leading the charge, vowing to "bring the full force of state and local law enforcement down on those trying to bring about a radical agenda" and calling for "swift and exact justice" aimed at "ending their activities."

Georgia’s governor has since gone one step further, declaring a state of emergency and calling up to 1,000 members of the National Guard, who, according to the declaration, “shall have the same powers of arrest and apprehension as do law enforcement officers.” A similar state of exception was in effect when David McAtee and Sean Monterrosa were executed by a National Guardsman and an undercover policeman, respectively, in June 2020.

Another link in the chain is the pipeline between the military and the police, whereby the tools, tactics, technologies, and advanced weaponry from America’s counterinsurgency wars overseas are imported, requisitioned, and reinvented for use on civilian populations here at home. The Pentagon’s 1033 program, which has experienced something of a revival under the Trump and Biden administrations, is partly responsible for this military supply chain, equipping local law enforcement with a seemingly limitless supply of “less-lethal” munitions, high-powered rifles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and full-spectrum battle equipment. Cop City itself represents a prime example of this failed approach to public safety.

Other military tools and tactics are brought to the police by way of programs like the private-sector Law Enforcement Charitable Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative, or the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, headquartered in Glynco, Georgia. And yet studies now show that while militarization increases the risk of loss of life, it has little to no observable effect on measures of crime or safety.

And it’s not just a matter of surplus supply. It is also a question of political demand: Who has an interest in building “Cop City,” in the process displacing DeKalb County’s Black communities, and empowering the police to use deadly force to evict the forest defenders and end the protests? It’s not the people of Atlanta: During a public comment period after the mayor announced the plan to build the training facility, nearly 70 percent of the 1,166 responders expressed opposition to it.

All signs point to the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF): a private-public partnership that’s been a driving force behind “Cop City” and a major player in local politics. Its executive board is a veritable who’s who of corporate power and inherited wealth. Last year, the foundation expended large sums of its donors’ money lobbying for police expansion.

Another leading partner in the land grab is Shadowbox Studios, an entertainment firm whose real-estate tycoon CEO, Ryan Millsap, is “ideologically” aligned with the project due to a “deep respect for private property.” Millsap plans to turn another 40 acres of the forest into what demonstrators have called a “Hollywood dystopia.” Millsap has likened the protests to “organized crime,” while APF (formerly Coca-Cola) spokesman Rob Baskin has called them a "fringe group" that has "routinely resorted to violence and intimidation" against "police officers [and] executives from construction companies." Between Shadowbox Studios and the Fortune 500 firms that make up the board of the APF, the donor class has been unabashed in its incessant demand for a heavier hand.

Meanwhile, homeland security in Georgia appears to be engaged in a similar strategy, conflating tree-sits with terrorist acts, local activists with “outside agitators,” and environmentalism with “homegrown extremism.” It doesn’t appear to matter whether the persons of interest are armed or unarmed, sitting in a treehouse or sowing chaos in the streets: As the domestic terrorism charges against the Atlanta 19 reveal, the treatment is effectively one and the same. Atlanta’s assistant police chief, Carven Tyus, has admitted in private meetings with his advisory council “Can we prove they did it? No. Do we know they did it? Yes.”

We do not know exactly how or under what pretext the task force opened fire. One of the tactical officers involved was injured during the raid, but in the absence of body cam footage—or of any independent inquiry whatsoever—we may never learn the full story of what went down that day. But we are obliged to name the shooting of Terán for what it was: an extrajudicial execution, carried out by hired men armed with military assault weapons, paramilitary training, and qualified immunity from prosecution—in other words, a death squad in all but the name.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Michael Gould-Wartofsky.

Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis, chief of police in Memphis, won praise for her immediate response to the Tyre Nichols beating death. Amid criticism, she and the city shuttered the SCORPION unit, created as one of her first acts as Memphis’s new police chief in 2021, whose officers conducted the traffic stop and beating of Nichols.

Davis, of all people, should have understood how high-intensity, politically driven specialized policing units could go wrong. Davis ran Atlanta’s checkered REDDOG unit for about 18 months in 2006 and 2007, according to the resume she gave Durham, North Carolina, in 2016 before being named police chief there.

When asked, a Memphis Police Department spokesperson said that its SCORPION unit was modeled on Boston Police Department’s Operation Ceasefire, which — at least in design — is meant to be a very different system than what was on display in the Nichols video. But people in Atlanta who experienced REDDOG’s tactics recognized the similarity to the jarring video released last Friday of Nichols’s beating death.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

As Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond announced Tuesday that construction of the $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training center known as "Cop City" will proceed under what Dickens called a "compromise," critics of the project had a resounding message: "Defend the Atlanta Forest. Stop Cop City."

Speaking during a Tuesday press conference at Atlanta City Hall, Dickens, a Democrat, outlined changes to the project. Acknowledging "concerns about the environmental impact" of the project, the mayor said a 100-foot tree buffer would be added, and that 100 new hardwood trees would be planted for each one destroyed during construction. Dickens also said the complex's firing range would be moved further away from a nearby residential area.

Dickens also defended the type of police training that would take place at the facility, saying it "includes vital areas like de-escalation training techniques, mental health, community-oriented policing, crisis intervention training, as well as civil rights history and education."

However, activists—many of whom protested inside and outside City Hall chanting slogans including "APD, shut it down," referencing the Atlanta Police Department, and "Cop City will never be built"—were not swayed in their opposition to the project.

"Our firm line is no Cop City anywhere," Jasmine Burnett, organizing director at Community Movement Builders, toldUnicorn Riot outside City Hall. "No destruction of the forest at all. I know, they're trying to harp on the fact that it's only 85 acres. And allegedly, the rest will be left for public use. But that's 85 acres too much."

"We are also calling for the charges to be dropped against all of the protesters who've been charged with any crimes, but especially the domestic terrorism charges," Burnett added, referring to the 19 nonviolent protesters facing prosecution under a 2017 Georgia law that expanded the definition of "domestic terrorism" to include certain property crimes.

Over the objections of environmental, racial justice, Indigenous, and other groups, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF)—a private organization whose backers include major corporations like Amazon, Home Depot, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS—was given permission in 2021 to build what's officially called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in the Weelaunee Forest in DeKalb County just outside Atlanta city limits. Cop City would be built on land stolen from the Muscogee people, many of whom were forced westward during the genocidal Trail of Tears period.

Last month, militarized police shot and killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a 26-year-old protester also known as "Tortuguita" who allegedly opened fire on them, during a raid to violently clear forest defenders from the site. While a few federal lawmakers have called for an independent probe, Georgia Democrats including U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams have said little to nothing about the killing, or about Cop City in general.

Also protesting outside City Hall on Tuesday, community organizer Micah Herskind said: "How dare they stand in front of people and say, 'Oh, this plan, where we're tearing down trees, is actually good for people, and it's good for the economy, and it's—you know, it's actually going to protect people?' It's obviously false, and I hope that it's reported as such, because it's such classic, blatant spin, that they're taking us for fools if they think anyone would believe that tearing down trees and putting cement over it is protecting the environment. That's outrageous."

In a statement, the Atlanta Community Press Collective said that "like all other points of 'compromise,' this has proved empty rhetoric to cover over the undemocratic railroading of this project on to unrepresented, disenfranchised residents of Atlanta and DeKalb County. This is more backroom talk between powerful elites and their dark money contributors."

"Now, the city, DeKalb County, the APF, the funders and builders of Cop City collectively have blood on their hands, and it seems they are willing to get bloodier: These are the people in power goose-stepping us to climate apocalypse," the collective continued. "Police continue to kill at higher and higher rates. In 2022, more people in the U.S. were killed than in any other year on record. The police and their corporate and political backers have used lies, misinformation, and distorted half-truths at every step of this process. Why should we believe a word they say?"

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," the authors asserted. "Ours is: 'Cop city must never be built—not here, not anywhere. Not one blade of grass! Not one tree! Free the prisoners, drop the charges!'"

"The fight continues. The movement to stop Cop City is only growing," they added. "On February 19-26 we are calling for a Week of Solidarity to Stop Cop City, with protests throughout the U.S .and around the world."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

A coalition of more than 1,300 climate and racial justice groups from across the United States on Monday joined a call for an independent investigation into the police killing of forest defender Manuel Paez Terán earlier this month, and demanded the resignation of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

Nearly two weeks after the fatal shooting of the 26-year-old activist and medic—known as Tortuguita—Dickens "has still failed to condemn the killing," said the groups, and has instead opted "to condemn protestors and parrot the rhetoric of extreme right-wing governor Brian Kemp."

Tortuguita was shot and killed on January 18 when a joint task force including Atlanta police officers raided an encampment at Weelaunee forest. The forest is the site of a proposed $90 million police training facility known as Cop City.

"His championing of Cop City occurs against the backdrop of a continued investment in the gentrification of Atlanta and a continued disinvestment of affordable housing for a city identified as having the country's highest level of wealth inequality."

Over the weekend Dickens, a Democrat, condemned people who have protested Tortuguita's killing in Atlanta, accusing protesters of traveling to the city to "wreak havoc" at demonstrations that were overwhelmingly peaceful.

"Within a few hours of the shooting, Dickens tweeted support for [an] injured state trooper and completely ignored the death at the hands of a task force which included Atlanta police officers on his watch," wrote the groups, which include People vs. Fossil Fuels, Jewish Voice for Peace, Climate Justice Alliance, and Oil Change International. "As a growing number of Atlanta residents, national and global news outlets, and human rights and environmental organizations worldwide call for an investigation of the police narrative of Tortuguita's death, Dickens has dismissed their concerns. He has refused to bring any scrutiny to the one-sided and unsubstantiated recounting of events. Dickens has yet to offer condolences to the slain protestor's family."

The groups noted that Dickens and the Atlanta City Council have the authority to terminate the land lease for Cop City in the forest and called for the mayor to do so immediately, denouncing his strong support for the Atlanta Police Foundation's proposal.

"His championing of Cop City occurs against the backdrop of a continued investment in the gentrification of Atlanta and a continued disinvestment of affordable housing for a city identified as having the country's highest level of wealth inequality," said the groups. "Mayor Dickens can somehow find $90 million dollars for Cop City, one third of which will come from taxpayer money. Still, he can't find money to keep our already overwhelmed hospitals open or to finance much-needed affordable housing."

Ikiya Collective, a signatory of the letter, noted that the training slated to take place at Cop City "will impact organizing across the country" as police are trained to respond to popular uprisings.

"This is a national issue," said the collective. "Climate justice and police brutality are interconnected, which is why we are joining the Stop Cop City calls to action with the frontline communities in Atlanta."

"It is imperative that we demand an independent investigation into the police murder of Manuel 'Tortuguita' Paez Terán," said Ikiya Collective. "We join calls for the termination of the lease and for Mayor Dickens' resignation."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, AKA Tortuguita, is the victim of an expanding and increasingly militarized machine of state violence, suppression, racist policing, and environmental destruction. Activists in the Stop Cop City movement have put their bodies on the line to protect the Weelaunee Forest from the development of a monster urban policing training center. If constructed, it will equip thousands of police units from across the country to replicate and escalate the deadly and racist tactics employed by modern American law enforcement institutions. It is sadly unsurprising, too, that Cop City will facilitate Atlanta Police’s continued exchange of militarized police tactics with the Israeli Police Force, itself an arm of racialized state violence and repression.

The construction of “Cop City” would raze the Weelaunee Forest, home for millennia to the original forest defenders, the Muscogee people, who were illegally and lethally forced out of their territory by the United States. The current residents of the area surrounding Weelaunee Forest, largely Black Americans, are overwhelmingly opposed to the Cop City project, which would destroy the most crucial carbon store in the area and would only serve to supercharge the deadly policing apparatus.

The state of Georgia has already charged more than a dozen Forest Defenders with “domestic terrorism” for occupying the forest, showing the extent to which our government is prepared to escalate against activists with wartime rhetoric and suppression tactics. There is a tragic, inescapable irony to this charge.

When a living forest is under threat of total destruction; when lives are stolen in the name of  “justice;” when those killed are disproportionately Black and Brown men; when armed forces are deployed to expedite deadly resource extraction and accelerate the climate crisis; we ask:

Who are the real domestic terrorists?

Forests are the lungs of the Earth. Every tree felled for major development robs our planet of its natural ability to release oxygen into the atmosphere and store carbon in the soil. This knowledge is what drives the forest defenders to put their bodies on the line, just as environmental activists the world over resist and disrupt systematic deforestation which is linked to Indigenous displacement and fascist governments. It has become tragically commonplace to hear of land defenders and environmental activists in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico the Philippines, and Honduras being killed for their bold defiance of environmental destruction. Tortuguita’s killing must shock us into action and guide our demands to ensure that no more activists are killed, whether here in North America or across the Global South, for their acts of conscience. Particularly, this killing must serve as a wakeup call to those in the climate movement who have yet to draw the connections between natural resource extraction and the rampant US militarism which threatens people and their environments here and abroad.

CODEPINK stands with the Weelaunee Forest Defenders, who are risking their freedom and lives to prevent an appalling misappropriation of $90 million. We recognize that the cost of Cop City is not only the unacceptable destruction of the forest and the militarization of police. Cop City is part and parcel of this country’s perennial failure to prioritize healthcare over police, green jobs over nukes, working families over Wall Street, Indigenous communities over oil profits – in short, life over death. Tortuguita’s killing is a testament to a broader sickness in American policy, and as we call for an end to deadly US intervention abroad, we join in calls to bring it to a halt here, at home.

RIP Tortuguita. Stop Cop City.

In Solidarity, CODEPINK

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Codepink.

Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency through at least February 9 that will enable him to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops "as necessary."

The order follows protests in Atlanta after 26-year-old forest defender Manuel "Tortuguita" Teran was shot dead last week during a multi-agency raid on an encampment to oppose construction of Cop City, a nearby law enforcement training center. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), which is investigating the case, has said Teran was killed after he shot and wounded a state trooper.

While the order begins by stating that "protests turned violent in downtown Atlanta" last Saturday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported that Kemp's aides signaled that the move was not about the Cop City demonstrations but rather in anticipation of any potential response to video footage from Memphis, Tennessee showing the arrest of Black motorist Tyre Nichols.

As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, five fired Memphis cops were charged with second-degree murder and other crimes related to Nichols' death. Footage of the 29-year-old's arrest is expected to be released sometime after 6:00 pm local time on Friday.

"We understand the executive order is purely precautionary based on possible unrest following the release of the videos from Memphis," an official in Georgia with direct knowledge of the situation told the AJC. "There are no immediate intentions to deploy the guard."

The Atlanta Police Department also mentioned the Memphis case in a statement Thursday:

We are closely monitoring the events in Memphis and are prepared to support peaceful protests in our city. We understand and share in the outrage surrounding the death of Tyre Nichols. Police officers are expected to conduct themselves in a compassionate, competent, and constitutional manner and these officers failed Tyre, their communities, and their profession. We ask that demonstrations be safe and peaceful.

In a series of tweets Thursday, the Atlanta Community Press Collective named several people killed by law enforcement in recent years and suggested that Kemp's order is about "trying to instill fear in anyone who stands up against police brutality."

Meanwhile, national groups and progressive lawmakers have echoed local demands for an independent probe in Teran's case.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has highlighted that it is separate from the Georgia State Patrol and said that GBI "is conducting an independent investigation," after which it will "turn the investigative file over to the prosecutor." The agency noted Wednesday that DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston has recused herself from the case so a special prosecutor will be assigned.

Some have pushed back against the "police narrative" that the "corporate media has ran away with" for Teran's case, as forest defender Kamau Franklin toldDemocracy Now! last week, adding that "we find it less than likely that the police version of events is what really happened."

"And that's why we're calling for an independent investigation, not one that's done by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, not one that's done by any federal authority, but a complete independent investigation," Franklin said, "because that's the only way we're going to know what really happened."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

"There is no honor in appointing a fossil fuel executive who profits immensely off of fueling the climate crisis to oversee the global response to climate change," the network wrote in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Simon Stiell, and all parties to the UNFCCC.

"That such a move could ever be seen to be legitimate amidst an intensifying climate crisis where millions of lives and ecosystems are on the line exemplifies just how insidious Big Polluters' stranglehold over climate policy is," continued the letter, which was spearheaded by four UNFCCC constituencies representing millions of people. "No COP overseen by a fossil fuel executive can be seen as legitimate. COP presidencies must be free and independent of fossil fuel influence. It's time for the UNFCCC to deliver the long overdue equitable phaseout of fossil fuels."

The letter comes days after Politicoreported that the U.N. is "querying the presidency of this year's COP28 climate talks over its ties" to ADNOC, the 12th-largest oil company in the world by production.

"The main COP28 team is using two stories of an 11-floor office building in Abu Dhabi also used by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology located next to ADNOC's headquarters," Politico noted. "That prompted the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to send a series of questions to the presidency of the climate talks enquiring about whether the presidency will be independent of the oil company."

According to the outlet, which cited an unnamed source with knowledge of the matter, the questions raised by the U.N. "include whether there is a firewall between the two institutions; whether ADNOC has access to COP28 meetings and strategic documents; if the staff working on the climate conference are relying on the oil giant's IT systems; if part of the work will be devoted to protecting ADNOC's interests; and whether the climate team is being paid by the oil company."

"Polluters have a role to play: Stop polluting. They cannot be placed on a leadership pedestal."

Rejecting pressure to rescind his appointment, the UAE has said Al Jaber will stay on as head of ADNOC as he presides over COP28, a striking conflict of interest given the oil giant's financial interest in limiting the scope of climate action.

John Kerry, the United States' special presidential envoy for climate, praised the selection of Al Jaber to oversee COP28, calling the oil company executive a "terrific environmentalist."

The UAE, one of the world's biggest oil producers, has ratified the Paris climate accord, but experts say its policies are way out of alignment with the agreement's critical 1.5°C warming limit.

Cansın Leylim Ilgaz, associate director of global campaigns at 350.org, said Thursday that "letting petrostates host the U.N. climate talks is bad enough, but appointing a petrol company executive as president of COP28 is an effrontery several orders of magnitude beyond anything that happened before in the history of the U.N. climate process."

"Attempts to sugarcoat this scandalous decision only serve to undermine the huge efforts of everyone working to limit global heating," Ilgaz added. "This brazen attempt of the dying fossil fuel industry to predetermine the outcome of COP28 will not stand."

But the Kick Big Polluters Out network stressed in its letter that the problem of fossil fuel influence on U.N. climate talks runs much deeper than Al Jaber.

"Fossil fuel interests overrun the UNFCCC and threaten its credibility," the network wrote. "At COP27 last November, more than 630 fossil fuel lobbyists registered to attend the climate negotiations. The UAE, now hosting COP28, had more fossil fuel lobbyists on its delegation than any other country. The grim reality is that this appointment represents a tipping point in which the UNFCCC is rapidly losing any legitimacy and credibility."

To succeed at delivering "the needed climate equity and action to end the era of fossil fuels, and to rapidly and justly transition to a new global system," the network said the UNFCCC must agree to four demands:

1. Big Polluters cannot write the rules. Big Polluters must not be allowed to unduly influence climate policymaking. This allows them to continue to weaken and undermine the global response to climate change, and it’s why we are on the brink of extinction. The UNFCCC must urgently establish an Accountability Framework, including a regime-wide conflict-of-interest policy, that systematically ends this corporate capture.
2. No more Big Polluters bankrolling climate action. No Big Polluter partnership or sponsorships of climate talks or climate action. Not now. Not ever. Major polluters must not be allowed to greenwash themselves and literally buy their way out of culpability for a crisis they have caused. The UNFCCC will always fail to deliver so long as this is deemed acceptable.
3. Polluters out and People in. While civil society has always participated in the COP process, governments have made it more difficult each time for non-governmental organizations and climate justice movements to have their voices heard. We need
equitable, meaningful inclusion of civil society. Climate action must center the leadership and lived experience of the people, especially those on the frontlines of the climate crisis. With frontline communities in the lead, we must end the funding and validation of dangerous distractions and false solutions that promote Big Polluters' profits, enable their abuses, and guarantee decades more of fossil fuel use.
4. Reset the system to protect people and the planet, not Big Polluters. Big Polluters are destroying life as we know it. It's time to build a new way of living and collaborating that works for people, not polluters, and that restores, rather than destroys, nature. We
need real, just, accountable, gender-responsive, community-led, nature-restoring, and proven and transformative solutions to be implemented rapidly and justly. We need a total and equitable transition off of fossil fuels. We need real solutions that center the rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities, women, workers, and the protection of those speaking up for justice. We need an end to the impunity of corporate abuses

"Polluters have a role to play: Stop polluting," said Gadir Lavadenz of the global campaign to Demand Climate Justice. "They cannot be placed on a leadership pedestal and certainly not in a position to undermine and weaken policy. That is basically nonsense. The UNFCCC is not only reluctant to accept a straightforward conflict of interest policy, but it is undermining its already weak international trust year after year."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We get an update on calls for an independent investigation into the Atlanta police killing of an activist during a violent raid Wednesday on a proposed $90 million training facility in a public forest, known by opponents to the facility as “Cop City.” Law enforcement officers — including a SWAT team — were violently evicting protesters who had occupied a wooded area outside the center when they shot and killed longtime activist Manuel Teran, who went by the name “Tortuguita.” Police claim they were fired on, though protesters dispute this account. We hear a statement from an Atlanta forest defender about what happened, and speak with Kamau Franklin, an anti-“Cop City” activist and the founder of the Atlanta organization Community Movement Builders.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We get an update on calls for an independent investigation into the Atlanta police killing of an activist during a violent raid Wednesday on a proposed $90 million training facility in a public forest, known by opponents to the facility as “Cop City.” Law enforcement officers — including a SWAT team — were violently evicting protesters who had occupied a wooded area outside the center when they shot and killed longtime activist Manuel Teran, who went by the name “Tortuguita.” Police claim they were fired on, though protesters dispute this account. We hear a statement from an Atlanta forest defender about what happened, and speak with Kamau Franklin, an anti-“Cop City” activist and the founder of the Atlanta organization Community Movement Builders.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Police accountability advocates on Thursday called for an independent investigation after an activist was shot and killed during a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement raid on a forest encampment blocking the construction of a massive police training center just outside Atlanta popularly known as Cop City.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Details surrounding the deadly encounter near the planned site of Atlanta's public safety center continued to trickle out Thursday, as a wounded state trooper recovered and left-wing activists both mourned a fallen comrade and questioned the official account of events.

At least seven other people, meanwhile, were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism in connection with Wednesday's law enforcement operation in the southern DeKalb County woods.

Activists tied to the "Defend the Forest" movement identified the person killed by law enforcement—after allegedly firing at troopers first—as Manuel Teran, aka "Tortuguita." Online posts described Teran as a "beloved member of the community" who split time between Atlanta and Florida.

"We are devastated by the loss of our friend who was killed by the police. Tortuguita was a kind, passionate, and loving person, cherished by their community," said a statement published on the Atlanta Community Press Collective website.

\u201cThis is the Manuel "Tortuguita" Teran, the young, queer, Afro-Venezuelan forest defender killed by police yesterday in their raid to clear the forest so they could build Cop-City. Don't let the media criminalize them.\u201d

— Kamau Franklin (@Kamau Franklin) 1674147903

"We don't know what happened yesterday," the statement acknowledged, adding that Teran was killed while "defending the forest."

According to Unicorn Riot, "throughout the day and into the night, efforts to extract forest defenders from the trees continued, with arborists cutting down trees and tree houses in an effort to remove protesters."

Jeff Ordower, North America director at the climate action group 350.org, said in a statement Thursday, "With heavy hearts, we stand with the Atlanta Forest Defenders and all of those who defend the land, the water, and the planet."

"Tortuguita's 'crime' was defending a forest in the heart of Atlanta—yet police moved in full force to evict the encampment, using their usual litany of brutal tactics," he added. "As we've seen all too often with police brutality, we can expect the usual false claims of 'self-defense,' coupled with an attempt to smear the victim and movement. Our movement will continue to stand up for intersectional justice—for the people and the planet."

\u201c\ud83c\udf9e\ufe0fAtlanta Community Reacts to Police Killing of Forest Defender Manuel Teran\n\nMore Updates Here \u27a1\ufe0f https://t.co/qre2y0SMp7\u201d

— UNICORN RIOT \ud83e\udd84 mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot \ud83d\udc48 (@UNICORN RIOT \ud83e\udd84 mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot \ud83d\udc48) 1674165940

In an Instagram post, the activist group Stop Cop City said that "in Manuel's name, we continue to fight to protect the forest and stop Cop City with love, rage, and a commitment to each other's safety and well-being."

The Atlanta Police Foundation, a private organization, was given permission in 2021 to build Cop City, a $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training facility in the Weelaunee Forest in DeKalb County on land stolen from the Muscogee people, many of whom were forced westward during the genocidal Trail of Tears period.

In 2017, the area was designated one of four "city lungs" by the Atlanta City Planning Department, which recommended the forest become a massive urban park. Instead, Cop City was approved.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

"These statistics highlight the need for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act."

The number of workers who held a job covered by a union contract—including those who report no union affiliation—rose by 200,000 to 16 million last year, but the percentage of employees represented dropped from 11.6% to 11.3%, according to the BLS.

The bureau found that though 7.1 million public sector employees belonged to unions in 2022, similar to the 7.2 million private sector workers, the union membership rate was 33.1% for the public sector compared with just 6% for the private sector.

As The Washington Postreported:

The lackluster figures reflect how far unions have to go to see an upsurge in membership, especially in a year of booming job growth. More than 5 million jobs were created in 2022 across the economy, especially in industries where union membership is lower, such as leisure and hospitality, meaning union jobs did not outpace the growth of nonunion jobs. The economy also launched millions of new businesses, where jobs rarely start off unionized. And many of the high-profile victories at Starbucks, Apple, and REI, for example, added a relatively small number of union members. A 2022 Bloomberg analysis of labor data found that the average unionized Starbucks store added 27 workers to union rolls.

Despite the continued low union numbers, labor historians say there's been a major shift underway, propelled by pandemic conditions, in how Americans view unions. More Americans said they approved of unions in 2022 than at any point since 1965—some 71% of those polled, according to Gallup.

Responding to the BLS release, the AFL-CIO, a federation of unions representing 12.5 million workers, asserted, "These statistics highlight the need for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which will hold union-busting companies and organizations accountable and give workers the negotiating power they deserve."

Specifically pointing to the record-low unionization rate last year, Nina Turner, a former Democratic congressional candidate and senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, said that "this is a move in the wrong direction."

Noting the same statistic, Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce tweeted: "Unfortunately, this is not a surprise even though unions are extremely popular among workers. This is a direct result of employers using illegal union-busting tactics and Republicans turning their backs on working people."

The panel's Democrats also called on Congress to pass the PRO Act—a historic proposal to reform U.S. labor laws to better serve workers, spearheaded by the committee's ranking member, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

"Every worker deserves a union," Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who was elected in November, said in a statement Thursday. "Unions built the middle class and they built America. It's time to pass the PRO Act and drastically expand union membership across this country."

A trio of Economic Policy Institute experts who analyzed recent data from both the BLS and the National Labor Relations Board pointed out Thursday that between October 2021 and last September, the NLRB saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, and "evidence suggests that in 2022 more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union, but couldn't."

"The fact that tens of millions of workers want to join a union and can't is a glaring testament to how broken U.S. labor law is," they wrote. "It is urgent that Congress pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. State legislatures must also take available measures to boost unionization and collective bargaining."

Despite union-busting efforts from powerful corporations, last year saw a wave of high-profile worker victories. Employees at Apple, Amazon, Chipotle, Google, Starbucks, Minor League Baseball, T-Mobile, Trader Joe's, and beyond successfully organized.

"In 2022, we saw working people rising up despite often illegal opposition from companies that would rather pay union-busting firms millions than give workers a seat at the table," AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said Thursday. "The momentum of the moment we are in is clear."

"Organizing victories are happening in every industry, public and private, and every sector of our economy all across the country," she added. "The wave of organizing will continue to gather steam in 2023 and beyond despite broken labor laws that rig the system against workers."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Six people in Atlanta have been charged with domestic terrorism for taking part in protests against a massive new police training facility known as Cop City. The protesters were taking part in a months-long encampment in a forested area of Atlanta where the city wants to build a $90 million, 85-acre training center on the site of a former prison farm. Conservationists have long wanted to protect the area, the South River Forest, from future development. Protesters are also urging the city to invest in alternatives to more policing. “This is basically a boondoggle that’s been given to the police to make them feel better,” says Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, which is a part of a coalition trying to stop the construction of Cop City in Atlanta.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reported for The Appeal, the ACLU study found that 45 percent of the inmates at Fulton County Jail had not been formally charged. Georgia law states: “Any person who is arrested for a crime and who is refused bail shall, within 90 days after the date of confinement, be entitled to have the charge against him or her heard by a grand jury having jurisdiction over the accused person.” Most of the inmates being held were arrested for misdemeanor cases, according to the ACLU, which also found that 90 percent of those held at the Fulton County jail were Black.

The Atlanta City Council came to an agreement with Sheriff Patrick Labat as well as Fulton County to transfer several hundred inmates to the Atlanta City Detention Center, which would alleviate the overpopulation crisis. However, these transfers have been delayed pending a new study by the Justice Policy Board, a joint effort by local governmental agencies and nonprofits to develop alternatives to incarceration for Fulton County and the city of Atlanta. Sheriff Labat said he believed this was a “stall tactic” and that moving the inmates would help solve the overpopulation problem. Justice reform groups and local groups have questioned the proposed transfer as a genuine solution. In line with the ACLU study, they call for the release of hundreds of those detained.

As of October 2022, no major national news outlet has covered the issue of Fulton County’s overpopulated jail. The issue has been the topic of local news reports, including coverage by Atlanta-based news outlets.

Source: Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, “Nearly Half the People at Crowded Atlanta Jail Haven’t Been Formally Charged With a Crime, ACLU Says,” The Appeal, October 12, 2022.

Student Researcher: Jaden Humble (Salisbury University)

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Cox (Salisbury University)

The post Overcrowded Atlanta Jail Raises Justice Concerns appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Sirrena Buie sat at her kitchen table, scrolling through her texts. She was looking for a message from a man who might have information related to her son’s death. Twenty-six-year-old Kedric Buie had died five years earlier at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta — found “unresponsive,” in the clinical parlance of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Officials said that he’d died of a heart attack. But his mother was convinced that he had been killed.

After pursuing legal avenues that went nowhere, Sirrena turned to social media, where she posted videos telling her story. She urged anyone who might know something to come forward. This man was one of several people who had recently offered to help. He said he had known her son — and “that he knows some people that know some people that’s supposed to get in contact with me about this,” Sirrena said. In her quest for the truth, even vague tips were a lifeline. She found the man’s message and pulled it up for me to see. “Atlanta is a bad place that did a lot of bad things to good people,” he wrote. “They did your son bad and I know this.”

I met Sirrena Buie on August 1 at her home just south of Birmingham, Alabama. Employed at the deli counter at a Publix supermarket, she also does freelance catering, posting photos of her colorful fruit platters on TikTok. Her account is otherwise full of family photos, pictures of Kedric set to music, and video updates describing her fight for justice. “They expected for me to give up,” she said in a video posted in May. “But I haven’t.”

Sirrena Buie holds a framed photo of her son Kedric Buie outside her home in Birmingham, Ala., on Aug. 1, 2022.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Sirrena Buie looks through records related to the death of her son Kedric Buie at USP Atlanta in 2017.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

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“I heard an inmate complain that he was having trouble breathing and the CO told him, ‘Good motherfucker, take short breaths.’”

Kedric Buie during a visit with a loved one while incarcerated in federal prison.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Kedric feared his time at USP Atlanta could become a death sentence.

“I’m done with lawyers. Giving me money is not going to tell me what happened to my son.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

Notes:

“Coyote” is a member of Defend the Atlanta Forest. The organization aims to protect a 500-acre parcel of the city’s historic South River Forest from development plans that would turn part of the woods into a police training center, and another part into a movie studio. Coyote explains how the conflict over the forest involves multiple inter-related issues.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

The post Special Guest “Coyote” From “Defend the Atlanta Forest” and Under-Reported Climate Crisis Stories appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Mass Shooting in Atlanta leaves 9 dead, most of Asian descent.
• Campaign pushes California Governor to appoint an AAPI lawmaker to Attorney General.
• Senate holds hearing on Equality Act, to extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ people.
• Senate moves forward with house voting rights bill and mulls filibuster to ensure it’s passage.
• Congress advances Equal Rights Act and Violence Against Women Act.
• San Francisco assemblyman proposes use of radar to detect speeders on the road.

Photo is a screenshot of House Democrats’ Equal Rights Amendment press conference.

The post Mass Shooting in Atlanta leaves 6 Asian women dead; Campaign pushes California Governor to appoint an AAPI lawmaker to Attorney General; Congress advances Equal Rights Act and Violence Against Women act – March 17, 2021 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.