Earlier this week, nearly five dozen people appeared in a courtroom near Atlanta to answer criminal racketeering and domestic terrorism charges brought against them by the state. The charges are related to what’s commonly known as “Cop City,” a $90-million paramilitary police and firefighter training facility planned for 85 acres of forest near Atlanta.
The Atlanta Police Association saw a need for such a facility at the start of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and started to fund raise. Many corporations have contributed to the plans for a world-class police training facility.
Georgia prosecutors are calling the demonstrators “militant anarchists.” But many of those charged say they were simply attending a rally or a concert in support of the Stop Cop City movement.
The protesters, their lawyers and their supporters, who rallied outside the court this week, say the government is using heavy-handed tactics to silence the movement. The RICO charges brought against the demonstrators essentially accuse them of being part of organized crime and carry a potential sentence of five to 20 years in prison.
Legal experts worry about the type of precedent this might set for our right to protest. It’s a case a lot of people are following nationally and internationally, for that reason.
In this week’s Don’t Call Me Resilient episode, we speak with one of the leaders of the Stop Cop City movement. Kamau Franklin is a long-time community organizer and the founder of Community Movement Builders. He is also a lawyer — and was an attorney for 10 years in New York with his own practice in criminal, civil rights and transactional law. He now lives in Atlanta.
Also joining us is Zohra Ahmed, assistant professor of law at the University of Georgia. A former public defender in New York, she, too, has been watching this case closely.
“In 2020 when people were talking about…defunding the police …the state…instead of doing any of that, decided to double down here in Atlanta and bring forth the idea…of a Cop City, a large scale militarized police base meant to learn tactics and strategies on urban warfare, crowd control, civil disbursement which was meant to move against community organizers and activists. The idea of Cop City is that it’s not only going to train the police in Atlanta, but it’s going to train police across the state and across the country and have international connections…so that different policing agencies are learning similar tactics and strategies and exchanging ideas on how to suppress. - Kamau Franklin
Read more in The Conversation
Read more: Students demand removal of 'mild racist' from Georgia landscape
Read more: 'Fortress USA': How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut
Resources
Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada, edited by Shiri Pasternak, Kevin Walby and Abby Stadnyk
Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, by Andrea J. Ritchie
"The Fight Against Cop City” (Dissent Magazine)
“How Georgia Indicted a Movement” (The Nation by Zohra Ahmed and Elizabeth Taxel)
The Companies and Foundations behind Cop City (American Friends Service Committee)
“Georgia State police return home after two-week Israeli training” (The Jerusalem Post)
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