In an aggressive and indiscriminate arrest sweep on Sunday, police stormed a music festival held in the Atlanta forest by activists protesting Cop City, a vast police training facility under construction atop forestland. Twenty-three of the activists arrested in the raid now face domestic terrorism charges for their participation in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.
The protesters are alleged to have participated in acts of vandalism and arson at a Cop City construction site over a mile away from the music festival location and over an hour before the arrest raid took place. They have all been charged under Georgia’s domestic terror statute, though none of the arrest warrants tie any of the defendants directly to any illegal acts.
The probable cause stated in the warrants against the activists is extremely weak. Police cited arrestees having mud on their shoes — in a forest. The warrants alleged they had written a legal support phone number on their arms, as is common during mass protests. And, in a few cases, police alleged protesters were holding shields — hardly proof of illegal activity — which a number of defendants even deny.
This is
just the latest incident of law enforcement and prosecutorial overreach against the abolitionist, environmentalist movement in Atlanta, an absurd attempt to establish guilt by association, as the flimsy arrest warrants make clear.
At a hearing for arrestees on Tuesday, 22 activists were denied bond outright. One defendant, a Georgia-based attorney who was arrested while acting as a designated legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild during Sunday’s events, was released on $5,000 bond.
“We haven’t seen a charge for arson or interference with government property,” said Eli Bennett, the attorney for several defendants, describing the arrest warrants during Tuesday’s bond hearing. “The state has no evidence,” he said, adding that Georgia’s domestic terrorism statute is “laughably unconstitutional.”
A total of 42 participants in the Stop Cop City struggle now face state domestic terror charges, as 19 individuals were previously hit with the same charges in the last two months on equally weak grounds. At the end of January, during a multi-agency police raid on the forest encampment, cops shot dead 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, marking a grim escalation in repression against a movement that has shown impressive resilience in its two years of mobilizing against Cop City.
Now, on the most tenuous claims of vicarious liability, multiple forest defenders face up to 35 years in prison if found guilty of domestic terrorism.
“It’s collective punishment. The police are trying to establish a de-facto norm that anyone who associates with a political movement will be attacked and charged for the actions of any other supporter of that movement,” said Marlon Kautz, an Atlanta-based organizer with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provides bail funds and legal support to protesters targeted for involvement in social movements, including against Cop City.
“As a law enforcement strategy, it’s utterly incompetent and ignorant of how the law works. But as a strategy for repressing a political movement it makes a lot of sense,” Kautz told me. “Convincing activists and prospective activists that they will be held criminally responsible for the actions of other supporters of their movement can have the effect of pitting activists against each other.”
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