![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/06/2.jpg\")
\nOn July 7, 2025, Ayla King was scheduled to become the first of the Stop Cop City defendants charged with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to go to trial. This text has been updated to reflect the fact that at the court date, the judge declared a mistrial and sent Ayla back into the appeals process.
\n\nAyla King and the other defendants in this case were chosen practically at random so that the state could attempt to intimidate the entire movement against the proposed police militarization facility in Atlanta, Georgia known as Cop City:
\n\n\n\n\nAmong the accused are 41 people previously charged with “domestic terrorism” for allegedly participating in the movement to Stop Cop City on the basis of attending a protest or entering a forest; three more people charged with felonies for allegedly distributing flyers; and another three people charged in May 2023 with “money laundering” and “charity fraud” for organizing legal support for activists. Others were previously charged with trespassing misdemeanors, and some were never charged with anything before being indicted under RICO. None of these previous charges has resulted in a single conviction. In fact, none of them have even been indicted.
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The prosecution is terrorizing these defendants in order to enable police departments to preserve their stranglehold on public funds. This is a classic example of judicial persecution.
\n\nThe RICO cases will be tried in groups of five, which means that twelve more trials are scheduled in addition to the trial of Ayla King. The outcome of these cases will contribute to shaping the prospects for protest of all kinds in the second Trump era.
\n\nWherever you are, you can act in solidarity with Ayla King and the other 60 RICO defendants. Drop a banner; put up posters; host a fundraiser. Circulate information about the RICO case.
\n\nYou can donate to Ayla’s trial fund here and to the Stop Cop City RICO defendants as a whole here.
\n\nFor more background on the Stop Cop City RICO cases, start here. For updates, follow Fire Ant Movement Defense.
\n\nYou could also call the office of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr at (404) 458-3600 and let them know what you think about their behavior.
\n\n\nAdapted from Fire Ant Movement Defense and other reports.
\n\nJudge Kevin Farmer declared a mistrial in Ayla King’s RICO case today, as some 80 supporters gathered in the courtroom and rallied outside. The mistrial comes in the wake of two years of delays to Ayla’s case being heard. When charged with RICO in 2023 after being arrested at a Stop Cop City music festival, Ayla was quick to demand a speedy trial and in 2023 a jury was selected under the judge previously presiding over the case, Judge Adams. The jury never even heard opening arguments, as the case was sent to appeals. The court of appeals refused to dismiss King’s charges, but determined that the court proceedings must be public to media (as Judge Adams had refused to allow news media and livestreaming of the court while King’s initial jury was selected).
\n\nDue to these procedural issues, Judge Farmer ruled the case a mistrial. In ostensibly protecting one “right,” the right to public court proceedings, Fulton County continues to completely disregard King’s right to a speedy trial. Those familiar with Fulton County, where criminal charges typically take several years to resolve, will find no surprise here. Following the continued, persistent violation of Ayla’s rights, Ayla’s lawyer is appealing the mistrial. This leaves Ayla’s case in limbo. Currently, it is expected that, paradoxically, King’s “speedy trial” will be delayed to September or October, while the trials for other defendants in the RICO case may begin this summer.
\n\nAyla’s case exemplifies the miscarriage of justice in this politically-motivated prosecution. Cases like these are “process as punishment,” in which the stress and resource drain of facing trial for trumped-up charges are intended to diminish activists’ ability to organize. The RICO case itself seeks to frame basic political activity, such as distributing food or attending a protest, as racketeering and political conspiracy.
\n\nDespite these intimidation tactics, a vibrant display of support was visible outside the courthouse. Supporters held a punk show, with dancing, free burritos, and coffee, banners and outreach to passersby. Music and continuous cheers drew people to join the rally and learn about the case. Despite the criminalization of political activity, activists in the Stop Cop City movement have continued to organize undeterred to support all the defendants facing charges.
\n\nIn 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia, during the movement to stop Cop City, police randomly arrested a teenager named Ayla King for attending a music festival in Weelaunee Forest alongside several hundred other people. The police were lashing out in response to an act of sabotage that had taken place nearly a mile away at the same time as the festival. Like the other 22 people they randomly arrested at the music festival, the police charged Ayla with domestic terrorism.
\n\nAccording to eyewitness reports, the police detained more people, but they focused on arresting the ones who did not provide home addresses in Atlanta. They presumably did so in order to cherry-pick evidence bearing out the narrative about “outside agitators” that racist police and politicians in the South have employed at least since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described this strategy in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
\n\nAs reported at the time,
\n\n\n\n\nThe 23 people arrested during the music festival are all being charged with Domestic Terrorism under Georgia’s HB 452. None of them are accused of throwing stones at riot police. None of them are accused of shooting fireworks at armored vehicles. None of them are accused of using Molotov cocktails to protect protesters, nor of setting Earth-destroying equipment on fire. Instead, they are accused of wearing black clothing, of having traces of mud on their shoes, of wearing camouflage, of running from officers, of being out of breath, of having wet clothing, of possessing a mask. The warrants for all 23 are identical, listing the same general actions for all of them, without reference to specific evidence or witnesses.
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A few months later, along with 60 others, Ayla was additionally charged with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
\n\nAt 19 years of age, Ayla bravely filed for speedy trial. Yet it has taken more than two years for the case to come to trial, presumably because the prosecutors have so little to work with.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/06/3.jpg\")
\nIn the indictment of the Stop Cop City RICO defendants, the prosecution arbitrarily dates the fabricated conspiracy to the day in 2020 that a group of police officers in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd:
\n\n\n\n\nThe said accused, individually and as persons concerned in the commission of a crime, and together with unindicted co-conspirators, in the State of Georgia and the County of Fulton, on or between May 25, 2020 and August 25, 2023, while associated with an enterprise, did unlawfully conspire and endeavor to conduct and participate in, directly and indirectly, such enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity.
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It is telling that they claim that the conspiracy began before the construction of Cop City was even being discussed.
\n\nFor the state, this trial is not about the guilt or innocence of Ayla King; it is about crushing the memory and the spirit of the George Floyd Rebellion. It doesn’t matter to Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general who hopes to be elected governor in 2026, that Ayla King was a 16-year-old in Massachusetts when the third precinct burned in Minneapolis. In accusing Ayla and 60 people Ayla had never met of beginning a criminal conspiracy together on the day that police murdered George Floyd, Carr and his cronies show that the premise for this trial is chiefly constructed from their paranoid fantasies.
\n\nCarr wants to be able to suspend freedom of assembly and freedom of association at will. He is trying to establish a precedent that any person who attends a protest can be held legally responsible not just for any crimes committed that day, but for any crimes committed under similar banners or slogans years before or after. If he succeeds, there will no longer be even a pretense of due process for those accused of participating in social movements: the criminal justice system will be at the disposal of any authoritarian who wishes to crush dissent, no matter how flimsy the pretext.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/06/6.jpg\")
A punk show that took place the morning of Ayla King’s first day of trial.
\nThis is not a new strategy. For years, prosecutors have been trying—and mostly failing—to do more or less the same thing.
\n\nIn 2017, prosecutors charged hundreds of people mass-arrested at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration with eight identical felonies—two of which were not even on the books as legitimate charges—for being in the vicinity of a demonstration. After the defendants in the first two trial blocs were declared innocent on all counts, a judge threw out the remaining charges on account of prosecutorial misconduct. Although the prosecutors failed to obtain a single guilty verdict, they succeeded in tying up the defendants in years of bureaucracy and stress.
\n\nThe vast majority of the 900+ protesters arrested in Atlanta during the summer of 2020 were simply grabbed at random and charged as if they were personally responsible for the actions of entire crowds. These exaggerated charges enabled the state to extract plea deals from some defendants and to inflict a certain amount of pre-trial punishment, but most of them failed to stick. Now, nearly five long years into the period of reaction following the 2020 uprising, the state is at it again, this time with a twist.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/2.jpg\")
Like the J20 case from 2017, the Stop Cop City RICO case represents an attempt to set a new precedent for guilt by association.
\nIn order to succeed where they’ve failed in the past, state prosecutors are hoping that the shock value of the words “domestic terrorism” and “outside agitator” will combine with the confusing technicalities of Georgia RICO law to dazzle judge and jury alike. Yet it is inconvenient for Chris Carr, and for his deputy AG John Fowler and his assistant Hallie Dixon who are tasked with arguing the case in court, that Ayla King chose to demand a speedy trial.
\n\nIt is not going to be easy to convince a jury that Ayla King deserves to spend 20 years in prison simply for attending a music festival in a DeKalb County park to express opposition to the construction of Cop City and listen to famous artists like Zack Fox, Raury, and Faye Webster, who stayed on the mic and kept the show going to calm the crowd after police attacked the festival.
\n\nTo put it bluntly, Fowler doesn’t have shit on Ayla. And it’s not just Ayla—the problem for the prosecution is that Ayla’s case is not exceptional, but emblematic. The entire RICO case is a house of cards, full of defendants who were grabbed randomly at a public protest, people who were already in handcuffs in the back of a cop car when the crime they are accused of occurred, people who had the misfortune of being in a public park when the police decided to carry out one of their multi-agency militarized raids.
\n\nWhen you don’t have shit, you bullshit. So despite the fact that Ayla was only ever in Atlanta for one weekend in March 2023, Fowler has provided a witness list 21 pages long, mostly comprised of cops and corporate backers of Cop City. His plan, presumably, is to put the entire movement against Cop City on trial, painstakingly describing every instance of lawbreaking, property destruction, and self-defense against police officers over a multi-year period involving thousands of people. Burned bulldozers, smashed windows, masked forest defenders fending off armed police with rocks and fireworks, the spectacular police helicopter footage of two hundred people storming the Cop City construction site—Fowler will show these things to the jury, and then he will try to lay them all at the feet of Ayla King, a teenager in Massachusetts.
\n\nThe stakes are high. Every person in the bureaucratic institutions that are trying to put Ayla in prison must know that they won’t be able to do it without publicity or consequence.
\n\nThe office of the Georgia Attorney General does not process nearly as large a caseload as the county courts. They are not especially well-equipped to prosecute a big, complex case like this. As a public office, they are required to answer the phone and to open and read all incoming mail. Despite being a public official, Fowler hates publicity. He has repeatedly complained to the court about an instance when a journalist took photos of him while he was accompanying defendants and their lawyers on a tour of the Cop City site, falsely describing the incident as “doxxing” even though he was engaged in his official duties as a representative of the state. When Fowler’s incompetence is exposed, he tends to throw his subordinates under the bus—for example, making assistant Attorney General Hallie Dixon face the judge to apologize for violating attorney-client privilege through illegal searches.
\n\nOf course, it’s not just Chris Carr and his lackey Fowler behind this political prosecution. They’re doing the dirty work for the Atlanta Police Foundation and the whole corrupt apparatus of city and county politicians who have a shared interest in quelling all dissent and civil unrest. All those who care about freedom should concern themselves with the outcome of Ayla’s trial. You can do this from afar by publicizing the proceedings, ordering pizza or otherwise supporting the rallies outside court, or doing research into the ones who are pressing these absurd charges and what their vulnerabilities might be.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/06/1.jpg\")
\n“Cop City Is Everywhere: Learning from the Movement to Defend the Forest” follows the final phase of the movement to date, concluding in 2025.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/4.jpg\")
\n The movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest was one of the most important social struggles of the Biden era. Its trajectory tells us a lot about the challenges we confront today under Donald Trump. In the final chapter of our chronology, we trace the movement’s concluding phase, beginning in 2023 and ending with Trump’s arrival in power, and explore what we can learn from it.
\n\nYou can consult a timeline of events in the appendix.
\n\nIn the wake of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, politicians and profiteers in Atlanta set out to create a compound in which to train police to use militarized force to suppress protest activity. In response, a movement emerged to defend Weelaunee Forest, the forest slated for destruction to make way for the training facility known as Cop City. This movement picked up where the George Floyd rebellion left off, seeking to channel widespread anger against police violence into a campaign mobilizing a wide range of people and tactics against a concrete target.
\n\nOver the following three and a half years, this movement gave rise to one of the fiercest struggles of the Biden era. Opponents of Cop City repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project. In response, the authorities killed one forest defender and distributed outlandish terrorism and racketeering charges charges at random. While the movement became so broadly popular that the government of Atlanta was forced to use a variety of strategies to prevent voters from participating in a referendum on Cop City, politicians across the political spectrum unified in favor of pouring a virtually unlimited quantity of public funds into the coffers of the police and their allies.
\n\nThe arrival of the second Trump era has vindicated the decision to focus on resisting police militarization. Every repressive policy that Trump decrees will be imposed by police and other state mercenaries. The opposition that emerged in Atlanta sets the template for the social struggles that will play out under the second Trump administration. On one side, a political class unified in favor of repression unhampered by precedent or law; on the other side, a popular movement involving many different elements of the population using a wide array of tactics and strategies.
\n\nThis makes the lessons of the fight to stop Cop City essential reading for all.
\n\nThe movement to Stop Cop City was exemplary in several ways.
\n\nFirst, the movement began from the premise that victory might be within reach. Although they were taking on powerful adversaries, the participants in the movement did not take it for granted that they would lose. Rather than simply setting out to make a gesture, they began from the premise that it was possible to achieve a concrete change in society—or at least, that they had a responsibility to discover whether it was possible through ambitious action. They set concrete goals and experimented with a variety of strategies to achieve them.
\n\nSecond, the participants did not water down their politics or tactics out of a misguided desire to appeal to a broad range of people. The George Floyd uprising, which began with the burning of a police precinct, demonstrated that boldness and a radical analysis can be at least as galvanizing as a timid approach calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
\n\nFinally, the participants set out to create a movement that was both popular and combative. Rather than accepting a role on the margins, they asserted direct action and the aim of abolishing the police as core to the movement. They made a point of articulating their intentions clearly and accessibly, making them known far and wide, with the goal of welcoming as many people as possible into a movement aiming to enact profound change.
\n\nIf every movement began from these points of departure, it seems likely that many of them would succeed.
\n\nIn the United States today, the wealthiest members of the ruling class control hundreds of billions of dollars apiece, while tens of millions of people struggle to put food on the table. The impossible task of imposing this state of affairs on an increasingly restless population is left to the police. Without police, politicians and executives would not be safe for an instant, as recent events have demonstrated.
\n\nIn this context, it is not surprising that the authorities threw every resource at their disposal into imposing Cop City on Atlanta, freely shedding blood and violating their own laws in the process. In the Biden era, this sufficed to overcome resistance to the project, because a large part of the population remained aloof from the movement, retaining faith in democracy and the rule of law. As we enter the second Trump era, however—which is already characterized by the abandonment of all compromise and the erosion of whatever perceived legitimacy state institutions still possessed—no one will be able to stand aside from social struggles for long.
\n\nIn view of this, the most important question is not whether the movement achieved its express goals, but how its legacy will equip people for the next round of struggles. At the minimum, it has helped to clarify the complicity of the entire political class in the violence of the police while setting important precedents for movement solidarity and diversity of tactics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/13.jpg\")
“From the border to Weelaunee and Palestine, we defend life.”
\nAlready, the confrontations between those who seek to militarize the police and those who aspire to create a world without domination have spread from Atlanta all around the country.
\n\nIn 2022, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced that the National Guard training center at Camp Grayling sought to take over an additional 162,000 acres of publicly-owned land, more than doubling the area under its control. Inspired by the example of the movement to Stop Cop City, protesters mobilized against this expansion. In the end, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was compelled to reject the original request, instead offering 52,000 acres to the military via short-term use permits.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, anarchists launched a movement to oppose a “Cop Campus” in San Pablo, California. In Charlotte, North Carolina, locals initiated a campaign targeting the construction of a local Cop City project. Even where resistance does not immediately emerge, building these facilities could prove difficult in a climate of widespread opposition: in East Somerville, South Carolina, developers scrapped their contract to build a new police training center in favor of building condos on the valuable real estate slated for development.
\n\nAs the US government increasingly emulates carceral states like El Salvador, stopping these facilities may be among the principle responsibilities of revolutionary movements. But whether it is a question of opposing police militarization, standing up for housing and the environment, or preserving public health, the same dynamics that emerged in the fight over Cop City will come to characterize more and more social conflicts.
\n\nCop City is everywhere. Our resistance must be, as well.
\n\nThis is the concluding chapter of our chronology of the movement. You can read the earlier installments here:
\n\n“Don’t Stop: Continuing the Fight against Cop City” chronicles the movement’s fortunes through the second half of 2023, including the Block Cop City mobilization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/10.jpg\")
\n In the previous chapter, we discussed the Block Cop City mobilization and some of its immediate consequences, including the burning of sixteen Ernst Concrete trucks that same night, which led to the company’s departure from the project.
\n\nIn November 2023, mobilizing in response to the RICO charges against 61 people in late summer was a bold move. Only 500 people showed up, partly due to warnings from nonprofit staffers and activist groups—liberals and anarchists alike—about how “dangerous” the action would be. Despite this, no participants were arrested, a significant achievement for a movement that has often seen riot police tackle elderly picketers.
\n\nAfter Block Cop City, autonomous groups organized around two new efforts. One idea, a nationwide convergence outside Georgia, emerged during the sixth week of action, alongside the Block Cop City proposal. The other followed the anniversary of Tortuguita’s death.
\n\nOn January 2, 2024, anonymous authors published a statement titled “The Day of the Forest Defender,” which circulated widely online and in print. The statement briefly described the January 18, 2023 killing of Tortuguita by Georgia State Patrol and proposed a permanent commemoration of that day through resistance. The authors drew parallels to global commemorations, including Black August (honoring George and Jonathan Jackson), The Day of the Young Combatant (March 29, remembering Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo’s deaths fighting the Pinochet regime in Chile), November 17th (commemorating the 1973 Polytechnic University revolt in Greece), and December 6th (marking the 2008 police killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos and the subsequent insurrection in Greece).
\n\nThe statement called for January 18 to be recognized as a day for actions, workshops, vigils, and other events honoring Tortuguita and all those who have died defending the Earth. It emphasized that movements in the United States must confront the repression targeting the Stop Cop City movement and respond with ongoing acts of resistance beyond just supporting those facing charges.
\n\nAs the anniversary approached, it became clear the government sought to assassinate Tortuguita’s character, as Tortuguita had become a martyr for the movement. Attorney General John Fowler filed a cynical motion to include excerpts from Tort’s journal in the RICO discovery, claiming it contained evidence relevant to the case against other activists. Filing this motion made the private journal a public record, and right-wing commentators spread what they considered to be shocking quotations across the internet and television.
\n\nIn the end, the court denied that motion, but the journal’s contents had already been digitized and published. The public saw notes from Food Not Bombs meetings, fragmentary thoughts, jokes, scattered remarks, abbreviated lists, dates, and drawings. Among these were instances of hyperbole, anti-police humor, and iconography, the kind of thoughts shared by millions of young people across the country. None of the leaked material scandalized the movement. We may never know how the television-viewing public perceived the coverage at that time, as many simply adopt the most recent perspective they hear. In any case, the news outlets and their audiences did not have the final word on the killing of a 26-year-old anarchist.
\n\nOn January 16, two days before the Day of the Forest Defender, a feller-buncher was set on fire in Weelaunee Forest. This machinery was burned at the forest’s edge near Interstate 20, on a parcel of land owned by Shadowbox Studios. The online communiqué reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to this section of the forest and highlighted the continued vulnerability of the developers to sabotage, despite the $41,500-per-day security budget allocated by the Atlanta city government to protect the construction site. In acting early, the saboteurs presumably hoped to set the tone for the days to follow.
\n\nAfter the action, the government announced it had spent $20 million on security for the project, bringing the total cost to $110 million. This figure excluded the damages incurred by private contractors but included increases in insurance premiums.
\n\nOn January 18, Day of the Forest Defender events drew a total of over 1000 participants across approximately fifty locations. Vigils, rallies, movie screenings, and marches took place in cities including Seattle, Portland, Corvallis, Boise, Arcata, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Pablo, Stanford, Sacramento, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Tucson, Lincoln, Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Columbus, Akron, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Carbondale, Minneapolis, Lansing, Pontiac, Richmond, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah, Tallahassee, Miami, Asheville, Chapel Hill, DC, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Binghamton, Bridgeport, New York, London, Berlin, and Atlanta. There was an event in Rojava, as well.
\n\nThat night, anonymous groups carried out acts of vandalism and sabotage. In Atlanta, anarchists broke windows at two Nationwide Insurance subsidiaries. In San Francisco, activists smashed eighteen windows at the Police Credit Union. In Novi, Michigan, caltrops were placed at the driveway of MTU Solutions. Elsewhere, windows were etched with corrosive chemicals.
\n\nAnarchists overseas also conducted invite-only actions, reflecting global sympathy for the movement and its sacrifices. In Hanover, Germany, anarchists burned an Autobahn GmbH. In Amsterdam, saboteurs slashed the tires of UPS trucks, a Police Foundation funder. In northern England, activists raided a chicken farm and liberated the animals. The communiques for all of these actions referenced Tortuguita.
\n\nAs tragedies pile up, movements for liberation must focus on rigorous, ongoing education. Without it, they will remain trapped in cycles of short-lived outrage, unable to build lasting movements, organizations, or projects. The Day of the Forest Defender could serve as an opportunity for education, clarifying important lessons for years to come. If it succeeds, future activists will be able to learn from our struggles and mistakes, just as the movement against Cop City draws inspiration from past struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/8.jpg\")
Day of the Forest Defender demonstration in Berkeley, California on January 18, 2024.
\nThe Day of the Forest Defender reinvigorated networks in Atlanta and beyond. On January 25, activists burned four machines owned by Brent Scarborough Company at a construction site on Boulevard Drive, near Custer Avenue.
\n\nFour days later, on January 29, activists rushed onto a Brasfield & Gorrie jobsite in Midtown (at 12th and Juniper) and locked themselves to construction equipment. Dozens of supporters gathered at ground level, halting construction for several hours. Two people were arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Could this method become a new approach for forest defenders fighting Cop City? It seemed to spark enthusiasm among a new layer of activists who were committed to resisting Cop City even after the clearing of the forest.
\n\nBefore this approach could be tested further, events took a drastic turn with severe consequences for the movement—and perhaps for all movements in the near future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/9.jpg\")
Machines belonging to Brent Scarborough burned on Boulevard Drive. The company was repeatedly targeted for their contract with Brasfield & Gorrie to build Cop City.
\nAt 6 am on February 8, hundreds of police officers, federal agents, and state patrolmen raided three houses simultaneously. This was not the first time they had worked together to raid a home. But it was the first time they had targeted multiple houses at once within context of the movement.
\n\nTwo homes in Lakewood Heights were near recent acts of arson and sabotage targeting Brent Scarborough Company. The third, in Starlight Heights, was a few hundred feet from the Cop City construction site. The raids followed a joint investigation by the Atlanta Police, FBI, and ATF. The APEX Unit led the raid at one Lakewood home, the ATF at another, and the FBI at the Starlight Heights residence, with support from the Georgia State Patrol and Bureau of Investigations.
\n\nAt the house raided by the APEX Unit, a helicopter hovered overhead as officers arrived in armored vehicles. Wearing balaclavas, brandishing long guns, and obscuring their name tags, they pounded on the door. One resident, hands raised, opened the door before it was broken, possibly avoiding gunfire. Another resident, topless, was dragged outside despite asking for a shirt. Masked plainclothes officers photographed detainees on their phones. Neighbors filmed and shouted at the officers. Inside, police overturned furniture, punched holes in walls, and ransacked the house. They seized t-shirts, laptops, a camera, and phones. One resident was detained for eight hours at police headquarters; agents photographed his tattoos but did not interrogate him before releasing him without charges.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/12.jpg\")
APEX Unit of the Atlanta Police blocking a residential street in Lakewood Heights after conducting a raid on a single-family home.
\nAt the house that the FBI raided, dozens of agents arrived and loudly announced themselves. Those inside were permitted to sit while agents searched through the shelves, cabinets, books, and cushions. The intruders seized some phones, but made no arrests. The agents combed through belongings with meticulous care, avoiding errors or oversights.
\n\nAt the ATF raid, agents surrounded the house, shining flashlights and barking orders. They detained the residents of a backyard unit and broke down the front door of the main house, throwing flash-bang grenades inside. The agents abused residents and destroyed belongings, dragging one person down the porch stairs by their hair and staging intimate photographs in order to humiliate the residents. They arrested one person on charges of First-Degree Arson, later accusing them of involvement in the June 2023 attack on a police training facility in which eight police motorcycles were burned using time-delayed devices.
\n\nUnlike the 2023 raid on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, the targets of this massive operation were not public figures. They were not known to the media, did not face RICO charges, and could not easily express what connected their situation to the broader movement. Setting aside concerns about why the police decided to target these individuals, the movement’s ability to rally support was uncertain. When the police raided the Solidarity Fund, activists, journalists, and even politicians spoke out in their defense. Who would come to the aid of accused terrorists and arsonists?
\n\nBefore the end of February 8, the movement responded boldly. The Stop Cop City Vote Coalition (the group organizing the referendum campaign), Emory Stop Cop City, and others called an emergency press conference at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters. As a result, the Police Foundation—which had been vandalized during the first Week of Action in 2021 and again after Tortuguita’s killing in 2023—sent all staff home early.
\n\nDuring the press conference, public figures associated with the movement spoke out, condemning the repression and asserting that it was not just an attack on the fight to stop Cop City, but an assault on everyone’s right to organize and resist social injustices. This would have sufficed to counter the media narrative that the police chief had attempted to craft with his self-assured, misguided statements earlier that day. But the organizers went further. When a journalist asked if the pro-referendum coalition condemned the burning of police motorcycles—the act the police cited as justification for the raids—a prominent local activist associated with the Movement for Black Lives answered:
\n\n\n\n\n“Hell no. No. Not at all. And if I’m being completely honest with you, Atlanta deserves even more than that. Real talk. They are lucky. This city is lucky. This country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all. But some of us cannot take that risk. But those who can? Bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows I’ll sit with my lighter and be like ‘damn.’ But the best thing I can do is use my voice, use my feet, use my heart, talk to my people, and organize. And I’ll put my body on the line and show up and do as much as I can. Because we need every, every means necessary to deal with the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care. No! And I would imagine my comrades would feel the same. No! We are not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every ‘proper democratic process.’ As one of the students says: ‘If we can’t get this in the courts, if we can’t get this in the council, then we are going to take it to the streets!’ Because our people, our children, my babies, are worth the risk.”
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In the days following the raids, others worked to demonstrate that both the principle of solidarity and the spirit of resistance remained intact despite the intensifying repression.
\n\nPress conference, downtown Atlanta, February 8, 2024.
\nIn the early morning of February 10, anarchists in St. Paul set fire to two Home Depot trucks and the trailers carrying expensive lumber. A claim of responsibility posted online expressed support for the individual arrested in the raids and quoted the “March 5th Movement” communiqué accompanying the action that the arrestee was accused of participating in: “The time has come to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”
\n\nThat same night, in Lakewood Heights—the location of two of the raids—a police cruiser was set on fire. The car was parked outside a cop’s home. An anonymous statement published online with the action read:
\n\n\n\n\n“We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down…We all have something to lose; it is simply a matter of living out our beliefs or submitting to the police state. Inaction is a choice just as much as action, and we all have to live with the choices we make.”
\n
This act targeting a police officer at home, shortly after a major operation, sent authorities into a spiral they wouldn’t recover from for nearly six months.
\n\nBy mid-morning on February 10, Lakewood Heights was effectively under occupation. Local, state, and federal agencies laid siege to the area. Police cruisers lined highway off-ramps, intersections, and major streets. An armored vehicle was stationed on Jonesboro Road, a key street in the neighborhood. A helicopter circled overhead for days. Unmarked cruisers sped through the area, parking outside the homes of suspected “militant anarchists” (in the words of Chief Shierbaum), tailing individuals, photographing them, pulling over motorists, and asking pointless questions. The GBI, FBI, and ATF canvassed door-to-door, dug through trash cans, and paraded K-9 units through the community.
\n\nAround 4 pm, dozens of police vehicles gathered at Kipp Vision Elementary on McWilliams Street, marking the southern border of the Lakewood neighborhood. They drove north several blocks, shut down roads, and established a perimeter around a single-family home. After kicking in the front and back doors and finding no one inside, they ransacked the place—flipping over chairs and tables, pulling posters off walls, and breaking furniture. Finding nothing of interest, they left as quickly as they had come.
\n\nOutside, Chief Shierbaum addressed the media. With nothing to show for the raid, he focused on the burned police cruiser, absurdly claiming that “someone could have died.” Though he admitted no one was home at the time, he claimed that police had targeted the house based on a “preliminary investigation” suggesting the arsonists might have returned there after setting the cruiser on fire. He ended his press conference ominously: “The person we were looking for knows who he is,” and that the police would like to speak with him.
\n\nIn a courageous countermove, the resident of this home held his own press conference the next day. He asserted that he was targeted not for any crimes, but because of his support for the movement. He refused to yield to leading questions from journalists, who tried to imply he had prior knowledge of attacks on Cop City. Instead of denouncing the attacks, he maintained that it was the police who had created the dangerous conditions, not anarchists. At the end of the conference, he invited journalists into his home to show them the damage from the raid.
\n\nHad more community members responded this way, publicly asserting their unity and refusal to accept raids and harassment of activists, the following months might have played out differently.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/11.jpg\")
Faith leaders denounce the repression of Cop City protesters.
\nIf there had been no militant response to the raids, the government might well have carried out more raids and arrests, something they had explicitly stated was in the works. Politicians and police often fail to make good on their promises. Possibly, the authorities thought they would find evidence in the course of their raids that they did not find. Perhaps they expended too much political favor kicking in so many doors for so few arrests. Both could be true. The courage of the responses from the movement probably impacted the situation as well.
\n\nMovements that fail to respond swiftly to attacks often lose morale. It is a significant weakness only to be able to advance with the consent of one’s adversary. At the same time, movements should resist the temptation to get caught in high-risk grudge matches, boxing themselves in ever-shrinking fields of action that involve fewer and fewer participants. This applies to everyone, not just those who burn police cruisers.
\n\nIn the weeks following the raids, the movement stalled. There was no systematic canvassing of the besieged area, nor were large demonstrations organized to denounce the raids. Local engagement was missing precisely when it was crucial. While many recognized the need to mobilize in such a way, many key figures in the movement were in retreat—intimidated by police drones, unmarked vans, or still out on bond from their felony RICO charges. To have been able to seize this missed opportunity, the movement would have required broader participation, more people prepared to take initiative, and greater support from the wider community. Perhaps this was a “chicken and egg” dilemma.
\n\nOne advantage the movement had long held over the Atlanta Police Foundation was the ability to stage interventions outside of the forest, outside the city, outside the state of Georgia. Convergences allow movements to remain focused and precise, drawing together many of the movement’s most dedicated participants and supporters. Decentralized action makes the movement more agile, resilient, and capable of replenishing its ranks, since organizers can introduce new participants to the movement far from the epicenter of repression.
\n\nWhat if these two strengths could be combined, converging far from the center of surveillance and intimidation?
\n\nBy the second week of February, police cruisers began parking outside the homes of more than a dozen Atlanta residents, day and night. According to local media reports and The Guardian, officers parked their cars, shined floodlights, and generally created an air of menace in Lakewood Heights and southeast Atlanta. Between mid-February and early September 2024, officers parked outside these homes up to ten times a day. This amounted to well over a thousand instances of overt surveillance against alleged participants in the movement and their neighbors.
\n\nEven before the February raids and subsequent harassment, opponents of Cop City began organizing a nationwide convergence in Tucson, Arizona. This marked the first large-scale attempt to mobilize forest defenders and anti-Cop City activists outside of Atlanta in the three years of resistance to the project. After the inconclusive events the previous November, this was a creative innovation worth pursuing. If the movement could catalyze participation on a larger scale by cultivating centers of participation further from the epicenter of repression, it might give itself a new lease on life and continue deploying both confrontational and participatory means.
\n\nOn February 23, just weeks after the raids in Atlanta, hundreds of people converged in Tucson. They gathered at Mansfield Park, exchanging food, pamphlets, schedules, and embraces. For those who had participated in previous weeks of action in the Weelaunee Forest, this scene was familiar—though this time, without helicopters overhead.
\n\nIn the late afternoon, 150 forest defenders marched from the park to a nearby lot that had been abandoned by developers and authorities; they transformed it into a temporary autonomous zone. Participants redecorated the lot with graffiti, tents, and folding tables. Workshops, presentations, and skill-shares drew several hundred more people over the next few days. For those who had traveled from afar, the warm Arizona night was likely a pleasant surprise.
\n\nThat evening, away from the reclaimed plaza, an anonymous group smashed windows at three Nationwide Insurance locations. The weekend had officially begun. Around one hundred people slept beneath the Tucson sky.
\n\nOn Saturday, February 24, local residents and seasoned anarchists intermingled all day long in strategy sessions, workshops, and assemblies about the movement and the challenges it faced.
\n\nThat afternoon, Ben Morea, of the legendary New York City anarchist groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), addressed 75 people in a corner of Mansfield Park, sharing the lessons he had learned as a lifelong rebel against all authority, domination, and closed-mindedness. Young participants asked him questions and received heartfelt responses.
\n\nThe movement against Cop City and to defend Weelaunee Forest has benefitted from its continuous cross-pollination with autonomous and unruly youth subcultures. It has also benefitted from the participation of elders, movement veterans, and seniors who offer their own perspective and insights on the world, with the wisdom of many decades of hard-earned lessons and experiences.
\n\nThat night, a few hundred people gathered at a nearby community arts space for a hardcore punk show organized within the context of the convergence. Anarchists distributed pamphlets and posters about the movement, while punk bands played fast and angry music into the late hours of the night.
\n\nIn Santa Cruz, California, a Nationwide subsidiary was vandalized with spray paint, its locks glued shut.
\n\nOn Sunday, February 25, 80 people gathered in downtown Tucson, dressed in black clothing and masks. The crowd had apparently assembled on an invitation-only basis. They marched toward the Presidio Plaza, down Stone Street; some began smashing windows. The sound of hammers and stones colliding with glass rang through the night. Masked protesters smashed the plate glass windows at a Wells Fargo. Paint fumes drifted into the air, rising above the glimmering wreckage. PNC Bank shared the same fate.
\n\nA few police cruisers confronted the crowd. Hooded protesters responded, lobbing stones and fireworks, sending the officers into retreat. The crowd circled back to Presidio Plaza before dispersing. Pairs of protesters sprinted in different directions. Sirens wailed in the distance. Within minutes, the crowd vanished, just as police flooded the area. Three pedestrians were arrested and charged with felonies. Later, the charges were dropped.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/2.jpg\")
PNC Bank on Stone Avenue redecorated by protesters.
\nThis demonstration echoed the march on the APF headquarters in Atlanta during the first Week of Action, when the movement still lacked mass sympathy but possessed the element of surprise. It also recalled a specific type of protest undertaken by US anarchists between 2007 and 2011—small affinity group actions that exploited the element of surprise and mimicked the energy of a riot, albeit on a smaller scale. The most infamous example was the May 1, 2010 vandalism of a gentrifying shopping area in Asheville, North Carolina, followed by the arrests of eleven people, facing felony charges and bond amounts of $65,000 each.
\n\nSuch demonstrations are risky. The crowds involved are often too small to effectively repel police incursions, leaving stragglers and passersby vulnerable to snatch squads. Moreover, these actions are often ignored or misrepresented by the media, and because they’re not destructive enough to warrant widespread attention, their broader political or social impact is negligible—at least, in terms of public perception. However, the February 25 demonstration was accompanied by a press release, which ensured extensive media coverage. Though the worst consequences were avoided, it appeared that this demonstration neither galvanized nor demoralized the movement. In that regard, its impact on the movement was more similar to Block Cop City than to the January 21, 2023 black bloc or the March 5, 2023 raid on Cop City.
\n\nOne might wonder if the risk was worth it, given the lack of tangible results. If nothing else, considering the context, it was remarkable that so many people were willing to take part in such actions just weeks after the recent raids in Atlanta. Arguably, the virtues and courage that movement participants are able to embody for one another are more important than what they communicate to their adversaries. Perhaps the networks that enable these actions are more durable than those that rely solely on other tactics. In that case, it is the relationships and organization of those networks that gives them strength, not risk tolerance or bravado alone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/1.jpg\")
Windows broken at the Stone Avenue Wells Fargo during the “Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City” in Tucson, Arizona.
\nThe next day, as media outlets published dramatic images of broken glass from the night before, dozens of protesters gathered at the Nationwide Insurance headquarters in Scottsdale, two hours from Tucson. Armed with poster-board signs and whistles, they faced off against hundreds of police officers. The office was closed, the entire area under heavy police surveillance. Law enforcement clearly expected a militant confrontation at the office building, but the office itself was tucked away in an office park far from the city center, easily policed. The few protesters who gathered there, undeterred, courageously faced down the absurd overreaction of the police.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Forest Hills, Arizona, six activists locked themselves into concrete-filled barrels blocking the entrance to a gated community housing a regional executive of Nationwide Insurance. With only a few journalists and medics for support, they successfully shut down access to the wealthy community for hours. During that time, they explained their actions to the neighbors of the Nationwide executive.
\n\nAt the same time, in New York City, over two hundred people marched to AXA XL and Nationwide offices. AXA XL insures Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor behind Cop City, while Nationwide insures the Atlanta Police Foundation. The crowd surged into the building, pushing past police and security. They flooded the atrium and stairwells, dropping banners from the second-floor balconies as their chants echoed through the halls. It was the largest demonstration against Cop City to take place outside Atlanta. The next day, several Nationwide offices in New York City were vandalized. The day after that, someone slashed the tires of ten NYPD cruisers in an expression of solidarity with the movement.
\n\nThese actions in Arizona and New York illustrated the relationship between participatory and clandestine tactics, as the Weeks of Action in Atlanta often led to greater sabotage against those destroying the forest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/3.jpg\")
Scottsdale, Arizona, February 26, 2024.
\nBy March 2024, a new round of actions against Cop City were in full swing. The weekly picket at the construction site, established over the winter, continued to grow as temperatures rose. On March 5, the anniversary of the historic raid on the Cop City site, around 20 Black women gathered at Mayor Andre Dickens’ private residence at 6 a.m. They held banners, chanted slogans, and delivered speeches condemning the repression of the movement and demanding the city unblock the referendum process in order to permit residents to vote on the land-lease ordinance.
\n\nTwo days later, on March 7, another activist locked down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie worksite in Midtown. A crowd gathered outside with megaphones and banners, just as they had during the January lockdown at a nearby construction site. After several hours, the forest defender was removed by police and cited for misdemeanor “trespassing.”
\n\nAt the same time, authorities continued extensive surveillance and harassment in Lakewood and southeast Atlanta.
\n\nOn March 11, a crowd of Austin residents confronted Mayor Dickens while he was participating in a panel at the South by Southwest music event. As Dickens began his speech, protesters unfurled banners, hurled insults at him, and chanted “Viva, Viva, Tortuguita” while throwing fliers into the air. The event was ruined. In a desperate attempt to shield himself, Dickens called out, “Look at who is doing this,” cynically using identity politics to deflect from his responsibility for the harm occurring in Atlanta. The disruption continued, and Dickens was heckled all the way out of the building.
\n\nThree days later, on March 14, eight machines owned by Brent Scarborough were set ablaze in a suburb south of Atlanta. Anonymous saboteurs issued a statement online, highlighting the lack of coverage surrounding the attack. They argued that while actions in the city often prompted police statements and media coverage, news of attacks in the suburbs was generally suppressed. This may have been the most destructive act against Brent Scarborough yet.
\n\nAs the movement regained its footing after the February raids, new activists flocked to meetings, fundraisers, and direct action trainings. This led to more daring actions. Two activists climbed a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie construction site in Midtown Atlanta. Unlike previous lockdowns, which involved small groups stalling work for a few hours, this action was riskier and posed a serious challenge to security. After several hours, police scaled the crane and used an angle grinder to capture the activists, who had locked their arms inside a steel pipe.
\n\nThe courts reacted harshly, charging the two with “False Imprisonment,” a felony kidnapping charge. The police claimed the crane operator, on the ground, was “unable to leave” due to the activists suspended nearly 20 stories above him.
\n\nThis absurd charge gave pause to many. If camping in a forest, passing out fliers, civil disobedience, breaking windows, and rioting were all punished with the same severity, what actions remained for those unwilling to risk imprisonment? What would it take to stop the construction?
\n\nAt the same time, across the Atlantic, the Israeli invasion of Gaza continued. Graphic images and reports arrived daily showing the brutal toll on Palestinian civilians. Horrific footage recorded and broadcast by Palestinians depicted scenes of unimaginable violence. Soldiers decapitated children. Fighter jets vaporized hospital wards. Aid workers shoveled human remains into trash bags to turn them over to loved ones.
\n\nFor six months, protesters in the United States blocked highways, disrupted speaking events, shut down ports. While often small, these actions were passionate and contributed to growing momentum. On April 15, coordinated highway blockades took place around the country. Two days later, a group at Columbia University in New York established a protest camp. When the administration brought the NYPD in to attack students and faculty, outrage spread across the country. By the third week of April, protesters had established or attempted to establish “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” at over a hundred campuses.
\n\nAtlanta was no different. On April 22, an anonymous group wheatpasted slogans around Emory University, linking the institution with Cop City and the Israeli occupation.
\n\nOn April 25, dozens of protesters rushed onto Emory’s Quad at 7:30 am, erecting tents and banners that read “No Cop City,” “No Genocide,” and “Defend the Forest.” Protesters were able to assemble tents, but not much else. At 10:15, protesters attempted to march but were blocked by officers who fired pepper balls. Riot police used rubber bullets and batons. In the chaos, medics were tackled, journalists maced, and professors arrested.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/5.jpg\")
“Divest from death—no Cop City, no genocide.” A banner raised at the Emory University Gaza Solidarity Encampment in April 2024.
\nWhile the police reasserted control of the Quad, students rushed from classrooms, eager to witness—and join—the unfolding conflict.
\n\nBy 11:30 am, nearly 500 people had gathered around Emory’s Quad. A group surrounded the Atlanta Police cruisers holding detainees from the earlier chaos. The crowd chanted, “Every city is Cop City.” Tensions flared as the cruisers tried to leave and protesters rushed into the road to block their exit. Police fired pepper balls into the crowd and tackled another student. People poured out of nearby classrooms, pushing closer to the police lines while chanting, “Shame on you.” In the standoff, snatch squads arrested several more protesters. The crowd then swarmed to de-arrest them, hitting and shoving officers, successfully freeing at least one person. Some began throwing bottles. The cruisers left and the crowd marched toward Convocation Hall.
\n\nStudents, community members, faculty, clergy, and activists then reconvened in the Quad. Supporters brought food to the protesters, who gathered in small groups to discuss their next steps. At least 28 people had been arrested and many others were injured. Though the police were absent, those assembled were uncertain how to proceed.
\n\nWord spread that students at the Candler Theology School had occupied the atrium and were calling for supporters to join them. Around 300 people headed to the school. By the time they arrived, police had blocked the doors to prevent an occupation. Masked protesters with reinforced banners pressed into the police lines, throwing bottles and signs in an attempt to break through. For the third time, police fired pepper balls at the crowd, sending many running or retreating from the building.
\n\nDespite the efforts of a few dozen who tried to push through, the larger crowd lacked the will to confront the police directly. Had they been more unified and prepared, they likely could have seized the building. Instead, exhausted and underprepared, the crowd—still several hundred strong—retreated to the Quad.
\n\nAround 9:15 pm, most protesters dispersed, anticipating the 11 pm campus curfew.
\n\nBetween us and peace, a line of police officers. Clashes outside Emory Candler School of Theology.
\nThe next day, 500 people reconvened in Emory’s Quad following an autonomous call to action circulated anonymously online. The flier outlined two demands: divest from Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation, and drop all charges against those arrested in the previous day’s protests. As the crowd gathered, students and activists delivered impassioned speeches on a megaphone, connecting the fight against Cop City to broader issues like US imperialism in Palestine and systemic racism.
\n\nAfter an hour of speeches, the crowd marched toward Cox Hall. A few protesters forced open the doors and hundreds poured inside, chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Stop Cop City.” The atmosphere was upbeat but cautious—there was no immediate threat of arrest, but most participants quickly retreated to the Quad after the brief transgression.
\n\nRepresentatives from the “Open Expression” committee—the Orwellian name of the group that the university established to monitor protests under the guise of “protecting rights”—warned the crowd that if protesters set up camp or took over a building, the police would be called. They claimed that, because someone had painted “Escalate 4 Gaza” on a bathroom mirror, the entire event was at risk of forced dispersal. These mediators exerted significant influence over the movement; on April 26, they effectively neutralized momentum, discouraging further action.
\n\nAs the hours passed, hundreds lingered in the Quad, blasting music and socializing, before dispersing by the 11 pm curfew.
\n\nAmid nationwide protests, on April 27, the Atlanta Police Department hosted a recruitment event in New York City. In August 2023, forest defenders had disrupted a similar event, blocking the doors and throwing buckets of shrimp into the convention center atrium. Protesters sought to disrupt this event as well. The evening before, someone poured fast-drying cement into the Marriott Hotel’s toilets, repeatedly flushing them to mix it with the water. This presumably caused extensive damage to the plumbing. Activists also covered the courtyard with posters of Tortuguita and graffiti denouncing Cop City. The next day, anonymous activists released 300 crickets into the building and pulled the fire alarm. The event was ruined once again.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Atlanta, Emory President Greg Fenves sent an email warning students and faculty about dangerous “outsiders” supposedly spreading violence and vandalism at protests. His rhetoric aimed to divide campus affiliates from the broader Atlanta community to better control dissent. When someone spray-painted the word “genocide” on a campus building, Fenves condemned it as “hateful.”
\n\nWhile the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published opinion pieces claiming that Palestine solidarity protests were at risk of being “co-opted” by activists seeking to stop Cop City, activists from Arcata, Los Angeles, New York City, Tucson, Richmond, and New Orleans drew explicit connections between the two struggles, emphasizing the link between US military operations and domestic policing.
\n\nDespite the attempts to undermine the protests, including the outrageous ruling from the internal conduct board that found protesters had “violated” the rights of Open Expressions the previous fall, public sentiment remained firmly opposed to the repression. Nearly all of the 28 arrestees from April 25 were Emory students, faculty, or alumni, undermining allegations about outside agitators.
\n\nOn April 28, hundreds gathered again in the Quad. Faculty and students announced their intention to hold a “No Confidence” vote against President Fenves for summoning the Atlanta Police Department to arrest and abuse protesters. The vote resulted in a 75% supermajority against Fenves and the administration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/7.jpg\")
A Defend the Forest / Stop Cop City banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Emory. These are the alleged “outside agitators” described by President Greg Fenves.
\nProtests across the country escalated, with dramatic confrontations between protesters and police. Scenes of police beating and gassing students, alongside moments of protesters linking arms and overpowering police encirclement tactics, inspired many. On May Day, around 300 people gathered once again at Emory, carrying reinforced banners.
\n\nFor the third time that week, protesters flooded into a building, this time filling the atrium of the Undergraduate Admission Bookstore. To hold the building, participants would have had to broadcast their intentions to stay; some people would have needed to barricade doors with tables, chairs, and other obstacles. However, the crowd lacked unity and tactical direction. Representatives from Open Expressions again informed protesters that they would call the police if the action continued. With no clear plan to withstand a police response, the crowd dispersed, leaving the building unoccupied.
\n\nThe Gaza Solidarity protests at Emory University had ended for the time being.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/6.jpg\")
A demonstration at Emory Undergraduate Admissions, spring 2024.
\nSince April 2021, activists have focused on the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program at Georgia State University. The program facilitates exchanges between metro Atlanta officers and Israeli police, sharing tactics for controlling marginalized communities. Some argue that GILEE’s training of US police in Israeli military tactics may have inspired the concept of Cop City.
\n\nOn May 4, around one hundred people gathered at Hurt Park near Georgia State University and marched to the GILEE office at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Upon arrival, protesters faced off with police at the front doors. Using reinforced banners as shields, they charged the police lines, hoping to enter the building. Police responded with batons and mace, but the protesters held their ground. After several minutes, recognizing that they couldn’t enter, and anticipating police reinforcements, they left together without arrests, showing the power of direct confrontation in the Gaza solidarity movement.
\n\nThe next day, sixty protesters returned to Hurt Park. Surrounded by riot police, they held a meeting to discuss next steps before leaving without marching. Law enforcement, hoping for a confrontation, was left frustrated.
\n\nOn May 6, Emory University moved its commencement ceremony off campus to Gwinnett County in hopes of avoiding disruption from Cop City/Gaza solidarity protests.
\n\nYet as the semester ended, campus-based protests subsided nationwide. In Atlanta, eight months later, protests had not returned.
\n\nProtesters and police clash outside of GILEE headquarters in downtown Atlanta.
\nWhen movements lose the ability to innovate and set their own timelines, participants often convince themselves the pause is not politically risky. “Once the semester starts…,” they tell themselves. “After May Day…” or perhaps “After the election…” This mindset can signal a movement’s collapse. Patience and strategy are vital, but waiting on things to develop “organically” or on others’ timelines is generally a sign of stagnation. Bold action, audacity, and collective organization are essential to the pursuit of change.
\n\nAs attention shifted from the forest to the city, the opportunities to take action expanded, in theory, even as the ability to take advantage of them contracted. The will to act had spread, but the vulnerabilities of the Cop City project were shrinking. Construction continued day and night, funded by contractors with deep personal and professional stakes in the Police Foundation. It began to appear that only a serious revolt could halt the project—if even that could. Across the country, mayors and local governments announced their own Cop City projects—in New York, Oakland, Nashville, Charlotte, and beyond.
\n\nIn early June, autonomous groups within the Cop City and Gaza solidarity movements called for a joint action to disrupt the first Biden-Trump debate, which was scheduled to take place in Atlanta. The call encouraged people of all tendencies to act. If unrest could unfold outside electoral events, as it had in Costa Mesa, Albuquerque, and elsewhere in 2016, the fight against Cop City might expand its purchase upon the public imagination. Failing to do would mean consigning millions to passivity and spectatorship as the US power structure sought to monopolize their attention, narrowing the spectrum of political possibility to two elderly candidates who both sought to increase police funding and continue sending billions to Israel to fund the genocide in Gaza.
\n\nBut catalyzing confrontations at a national security event was a tall order.
\n\nThe weeks leading up to the Presidential debate were eventful. Police harassment in Lakewood reached new heights. On May 29, The Guardian reported officers shining lights into residents’ homes, running sirens at random. In one instance, someone placed a lit traffic flare in a bush outside an activists’ home, sparking a fire.
\n\nAround this time, cameras appeared on the streetlights outside the houses that APEX and the ATF had raided. The camera outside the former was concealed in a metal box with black duct tape, peering through a tinted window at the home’s entrance. The box containing the other camera wasn’t covered in black duct tape, but simply labeled “High Voltage.” It resembled the devices placed outside the homes of several Memphis Black Lives Matter activists in 2018.
\n\nAt the end of May, several water mains burst in Atlanta, cutting water access to large parts of the city, especially Black neighborhoods south of I-20 and west of the I-75/85 connector. The morning that the system failed, Mayor Dickens flew to Nashville for a fundraiser with wealthy elites and lobbyists. For nearly a week, tens of thousands of residents had only brown or murky water, and some in the southeastern parts of the city had no water whatsoever. On social media, many linked the water crisis to funding for Cop City.
\n\nAs the geopolitical influence of the United States wanes and climate disasters worsen, such breakdowns will likely become more common. Unless we reclaim our resources from warmongers and police, social chaos will merge with catastrophe. It’s easy to anticipate the consequences, as desperate people are already experiencing the equivalent in many parts of the world.
\n\nNew fronts of repression were opening further afield. In Charleston, South Carolina, federal agents surrounded a sedan on the interstate and forced it to pull over. The driver, a 20-year-old anarchist, was served with a subpoena for a federal grand jury investigation into the December 31, 2023, arrest of a person accused of painting anti-Cop City slogans on multiple Thomas Concrete trucks and setting them on fire.
\n\nOn June 25, the legal team representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in the RICO case targeting the movement filed a motion in court. It revealed that local and federal law enforcement had mishandled confidential client-attorney communications, primarily emails. These were supposed to be processed by a third-party “filter team” to protect the rights of the accused, a process the defense had warned the prosecution about three times. As the trial approaches—dates still pending—more such violations are expected, as the charges against the movement are largely political rather than legal.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/14.jpg\")
A camera on a light pole outside of a home raided by Georgia police. The metal box is covered in duct tape to obscure its similarity to a similar device installed on the same day at another house a few blocks away. The camera inside the plastic window is difficult to see with the naked eye, but can be seen clearly in this photograph.
\nOn June 27, several activists locked themselves to the entrance of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, an Atlanta suburb within the I-285 perimeter highway. Hudson Technologies works with the Israeli Defense Forces; the activists were drawing attention to its role in the violence in Gaza. They also emphasized the right of Atlanta residents to participate in the popular referendum against Cop City. This was the third time that anti-war protesters had targeted Hudson. Earlier, on February 14, activists had glued the locks and spray-painted the building. On June 3, all the windows were broken in retaliation for the US-backed Israeli invasion of Rafah, a Gaza Strip area designated a “safe zone” for refugees.
\n\nLater that afternoon, protesters gathered in west Midtown, between Spring Street, the 17th Street bridge, Northside Drive, and south toward Home Park and Georgia Tech University. Advocates for affirmative action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs stood on the 17th Street bridge. Nearly a hundred protesters, most of them Black, were surrounded by police separating them from a pro-Trump rally just fifty feet away. At the Israeli consulate on Spring Street, around a hundred socialists and anti-war activists gathered at 5 pm, chanting slogans and listening to speeches. Another demonstration was assembling in a small park in Home Park.
\n\nThis group stood apart from the others. On Hemphill, 10th Street, and surrounding streets, helmeted police squads stood watch with bicycles in hand, their heads swiveling. Undercover vehicles crept down side streets, likely carrying federal agents. Atlanta Police vehicles and motorcycles blocked roads and shone their lights on sidewalks and intersections. Meanwhile, ninety people in black hoodies, face masks, keffiyehs, and helmets assembled near 10th and State in a green space. The sound system nearly drowned out the noise of helicopters overhead. As the sun began to set, many waited for others to arrive to begin the march. In the end, no one else came.
\n\nA few speakers delivered fiery speeches, grounding the crowd in the gravity of the moment and the need for militant action. Forty cops stood watch on the adjacent street, many just out of sight.
\n\nWhat could be done? With over a hundred people facing charges—61 of them under RICO—it’s easy to see why the crowd was small. Without the prospect of confronting a Cop City contractor, it was hard to grasp the stakes of the event, especially for those still focused on direct action rather than mass disorder. One could blame other groups for scheduling “competing” events at the same time, but would two hundred people have done what the boldest one hundred could not? Would one hundred people taking confrontational action elsewhere provide a real boost to resistance against the electoral farce or against Cop City? Probably not—unless they had breached the fortified construction site. The movement, like society at large, was being squeezed by immense forces it had yet to take the measure of.
\n\nAfter some deliberation, many of the brave individuals present determined that the demonstration they had hoped for was not feasible. They made the decision to march out of the park together and disperse. Following a brief standoff with police, the crowd managed to leave the controlled zone and exit the area without any arrests.
\n\nPerhaps unknowingly, the participants had arrived at the end of a movement trajectory.
\n\nAt that very moment, as the debate reached living rooms around the country, everyone could see that by permitting the bureaucracy behind Joe Biden to maintain its ossified grip on power and siding with the forces of repression at every step, the Democrats had ceded the 2024 election to Trump and the future of America to a new breed of autocracy:
\n\n\n\n\nSuddenly, in the midst of Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27, it became inescapably obvious that their pragmatism was about to lose them the 2024 election, their only alibi for all the atrocities they had endorsed up to that point.
\n
A new cycle was opening, even darker than the Biden era. The fight against Cop City had represented the best hope to continue the social movements of the first Trump era and the best chance to address the challenges they had confronted. The struggle reached an impasse at the same moment that the contours of the second Trump era came into focus:
\n\n\n\n\n“Every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms.”
\n
As of March 2025, it appears that the movement to defend Weelaunee Forest and stop Cop City has been effectively neutralized. The pace of actions has stalled, and the kind of qualitative interventions that might spark new forms of resistance or mobilize additional communities have come to a halt. The petition for a referendum against the land lease remains mired in legal battles. Much of the forest has already been destroyed. Key support structures, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, are entangled in high-stakes litigation. Long-term participants have faced harassment, intimidation, and collective punishment. Direct action to isolate Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractors from the Atlanta Police Foundation no longer appears feasible.
\n\nUnless something unexpected were to happen to the heavily fortified facility itself, which is now nearing completion, the only remaining hope for the movement would be a mass uprising capable of shifting the balance of power from the police to the population at large. But there is currently no sign of such an uprising on the horizon.
\n\nIn analyzing the repression of the movement, we must be careful not to attribute more insight, strategy, or strength to our adversaries than they actually possess. At the same time, we owe it to ourselves and to those who will come after us to honestly assess the limits and challenges the movement faced so that future movements can anticipate similar obstacles and overcome them.
\n\nThis process can feel like studying a volcanic eruption: those with the clearest view risk perishing in the flames.
\n\nFrom its inception in April 2021 until the murder of Tortuguita in January 2023, the movement remained remarkably small. While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the movement’s size, we can say that during this early period, all public marches, rallies, and demonstrations drew fewer than 175 participants. Concerts, raves, and other social events occasionally drew up to five hundred people to the forest, including a generator party along the banks of Intrenchment Creek during the first week of action in late summer 2021. At any given time, only a few dozen people maintained the encampments in the forest.
\n\nWhy is this? The United States had just emerged from the most powerful social movement in living memory, involving millions of people protesting against police violence.
\n\nNon-participants are notoriously difficult to understand. Analyzing the Stop Cop City movement, it is hard to attribute its shortcomings to a lack of outreach, media coverage, or information sharing. For years, anarchists, abolitionists, and radicals implemented a comprehensive media strategy—conducting interviews, drafting press releases, and writing articles for a range of outlets from anonymous anarchist blogs to international media platforms. Organizers also directly contacted hundreds of thousands of people through face-to-face canvassing.
\n\nThe anarchists at the core of the movement were aware of the risks involved in conducting a militant but isolated campaign. Significant strategizing went into addressing this challenge from the earliest weeks. Within the direct action wing of the movement, countless hours were devoted to developing frameworks that were both confrontational and accessible to those new to radical politics. The theory of escalation that the organizers shared held that only a mass uprising could pose a serious challenge to the police; the direct action campaign was intended to ignite this.
\n\nWhy, in the wake of the 2020 revolt, did so many fail to rally to the struggle against a new police facility? How could so few engage in the fight to save a vital urban greenspace during an era of cataclysmic environmental collapse? This is difficult to grasp. But perhaps those aren’t the right questions. Maybe it’s not just a matter of awareness or political consistency.
\n\nAs of 2023, Atlanta’s population stands at just 520,000. Adding in the populations of its largest suburbs—DeKalb, Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett—the total rises to about 3.3 million, spread across 1300 square miles. That’s roughly 2500 people per square mile. The broader “Metropolitan Atlanta Area,” with its six million residents across 39 counties, spans a vast, mostly semi-rural expanse in a deeply conservative state. Most of these people live an hour or more from the city’s core. During rush hour (roughly 3 to 8 pm), some areas are nearly three hours away from the city limits. Consequently, we can’t realistically count all these millions as potential participants in a movement centered in Atlanta.
\n\nTo grasp the functional population distribution of Atlanta’s “inner metro” area, it’s useful to compare it to cities like Tampa (2300 people per square mile), Indianapolis (2400), and Charlotte (3000). These cities are more similar in terms of urban density. When considering outreach programs, local participation in protest movements, and attendance at rallies, marches, or encampments, the most important factor is the will and enthusiasm of the public. That will is shaped by several factors including the difficulty of getting around, the city’s notorious traffic, its underdeveloped public transit, and the sprawling neighborhoods that keep people isolated within their specific quadrant of the city or the surrounding suburbs.
\n\nConsider the 2020 George Floyd protests. At their peak in late May and early June, only two or three protests drew more than five thousand people. Most barely exceeded one thousand. When residents clashed with police and burned down the Wendy’s on University Avenue after Rayshard Brooks was murdered that summer, the crowd likely did not exceed six or seven hundred. This is important when we consider the prospects for a mass protest movement in Atlanta and whether it could be driven by local residents. The same is true for many other cities across the United States, as most are not significantly denser than Atlanta.
\n\nThese conditions are neither neutral nor accidental. Atlanta was once a far denser city. In the early 20th century, streetcars carried workers and visitors through neighborhoods filled with brick townhomes, corner stores, and thriving industry. The first challenges to this dense, “walkable” urban core emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, when General Motors began dismantling streetcar lines and promoting cheap automobiles. However, after the summer of 1967, a year marked by open confrontations between Black youth and police across the US, the federal government took a special interest in this process. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by the FBI, examined the causes and protagonists behind over three hundred rebellions against police across the country, especially in Newark and Detroit. At the end of their report, they recommended a drastic restructuring of cities, emphasizing “spatial deconcentration”—the deliberate dispersal of urban populations, particularly the Black working class.
\n\nIn the 1970s and ’80s, this concept became a government mandate. The federal government poured billions of dollars into infrastructure, promoting the construction of interstate highways that cut through the heart of Black communities in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration’s deregulatory policies gave a massive boost to the automobile and construction industries, enabling them to widen roads and expand freeways, while also outsourcing production overseas to regions with lower wages. These highways were not built in vacant lots—they ran straight through low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods, shattering communities and displacing families.
\n\nBlack communities were gutted. Industry and jobs moved to the suburbs (or overseas), and white flight followed, leaving Black workers behind. As factories relocated and middle-class white families moved to the outskirts, the policy of “last hired, first fired” ensured that Black workers, already facing systemic discrimination, were the first to lose their jobs.
\n\nThis was not simply poor urban planning. It was a deliberate reorganization of cities intended to decimate the urban core and reshape the economic landscape. The scars of that era continue to mark cities across America today.
\n\nThe decision to build a movement that could draw in activists from outside Atlanta—indeed, from outside Georgia—was surely made with these considerations in mind, and for good reason. Still, the participation of out-of-towners was neither consistent nor decisive enough to halt the project. Local participants lacked the tactical leverage they needed; without the resources of national support, they were at a disadvantage. The authorities could concentrate local, state, and federal forces against the movement; only outside support could even the odds.
\n\nThe government understood this. That’s why Allison Clark of the Community Stakeholders Advisory Committee, Michael Julian Bond of the Atlanta City Council, Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, Mayor Andre Dickens, and countless other proponents of Cop City sought to normalize a simple, devastating, repressive formula, encapsulated in one of their oft-repeated mantras:
\n\n“Traveling out of state to protest is a form of domestic terrorism.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/16.jpg\")
I-85, I-75, and I-20 all pass through the heart of downtown Atlanta, segregating the city into four quadrants.
\nAs repression intensified, the movement lost its flexibility and capacity for innovation. After the City Council approved the project in fall 2021, one faction of the movement adopted a simple framework: defend the forest, pressure contractors to withdraw, and evade or repel police operations. But as police violence escalated and prosecutors leveled increasingly outrageous charges, the once vibrant and audacious movement faltered. It struggled to match the force of the state, especially after the killing of Tortuguita.
\n\nThis was also evident in the difficulty of planning the next steps. There was no unifying strategy capable of addressing both the intensifying attacks of the state and the passive spectatorship of the wider public. The principle of “decentralization” did not suffice to resolve this problem.
\n\nThousands considered themselves to be on the movement’s “front lines.” Between the first and fifth weeks of action, this perception was an asset, regardless of whether it was accurate. During those early months, generating widespread sympathy and engagement was a key priority. Organizing cultural events, mushroom walks, bike rides, and similar activities in the forest or across town played an important role in maintaining visibility and involvement.
\n\nAfter the police lost control of the forest following the July 2022 burning of Boyette Brothers equipment and the music festival during the Fourth Week of Action, the balance of forces shifted definitively in favor of the movement. For a brief period, it seemed theoretically possible that the movement could pursue more conventional tactics, such as mobilizing hundreds for a direct assault on the site—which at that time was still little more than a police staging area—or launching a mass encampment at the Prison Farm. However, what was theoretically viable was not always politically realistic. Who would have carried out such a raid at that time? How would they have been organized? Here, we see how tactical questions are always political questions.
\n\nSome well-intentioned commentators—many of them participants in the movement—have suggested that the movement contracted after Tortuguita was killed on January 18, 2023. On closer examination, this is simply not true. The movement grew significantly after Tortuguita’s death. The number of participants increased; the frequency, scale, and intensity of actions increased. These grew even more after the March 5, 2023 raid on the Cop City construction site. It is true that they did not increase enough to counterbalance the extent to which the state was concentrating force against the movement. It is also true that the tactics that had made the movement feel powerful for a small dedicated core became impossible after Tortuguita was killed. But the movement should not be reducible to the tactics of any specific group or tendency. Therefore, it cannot be argued categorically that the potential of or participation in the movement receded after the killing. The movement arguably reached its peak of participation in the summer of 2023, during the City Hall mobilizations. The period of lowest participation was actually in fall of 2022.
\n\nWith this context in mind, we can see that the domestic terrorism arrests and the killing of Tortuguita were, in part, a consequence of low participation, not a cause of it. Tragically, fall 2022 was the moment when the movement had gained the greatest leverage against Cop City, as it had created a stalemate between forest defenders and police. To break that stalemate, city officials and law enforcement began spreading lies about protesters, labeling them “terrorists” and falsely claiming they had fired guns at contractors. In this way, they gradually built the political will to employ deadly force against the movement, as well as persuading state and federal authorities to get involved.
\n\nSome participants recognized this danger at the time. To maximize the leverage that the movement had gained against Cop City, many people concluded that they needed to expand the struggle as rapidly as possible. Their goal was to involve a large number of people in viable tactics that had the potential to halt the project. For some, this meant organizing community meals and concerts in the forest. Others focused on building infrastructure, such as cabins and warming stations, to encourage mass participation. These “place-makers,” if you will, organized around the idea of making the forest a place where people would want to spend time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/15.jpg\")
One of the structures built by the movement in Weelaunee People’s Park, also known as Intrenchment Creek Park.
\nThe grassroots left had largely abandoned the movement, leaving it to anarchists to organize against Cop City. Punks, ravers, and artists contributed what they could, but their involvement was mostly peripheral. Some activists worked tirelessly to draw these communities deeper into the struggle, seeing them as potential key players who could fill in where the traditional left had fallen short.
\n\nOrganizers of the weeks of action sought to mitigate the participation problem by drawing in large numbers of people for short periods of time.
\n\nBy fall 2022, the actions that were needed were far beyond what the available forces could mobilize. While city officials and law enforcement sought to prepare the ground for lethal violence, the only ways for the movement to break the stalemate in its own favor would have been to mobilize massive numbers of people or deal a series of blows so devastating that they eroded the political will of those behind the project.
\n\nYet only a handful of people were still circulating through the forest, mostly in the context of parties, plays, or concerts. Even fewer were focused on leveraging force against Cop City outside of the forest through demonstrations, blockades, or occupations. Those committed to direct action were not able to compensate for the absence of large numbers of people, as their tactics remained largely confined to hit-and-run acts of destruction, presumably necessitated by their own small numbers.
\n\nThose who lived in the forest faced difficult challenges. At times, some individuals behaved in ways that made it more difficult to solve problems, reconcile differences, and pursue shared goals. This also contributed to the isolation of the encampments.
\n\nThe efforts of those involved in direct action outside the forest, those working on “place-making” efforts within the woods, and those curating cultural experiences that connected the forest with surrounding communities all plateaued.
\n\nInstead, as the pressure increased, the movement’s capacity for creative, sustained resistance dwindled. Early on, abolitionists argued that some environmentalists were less concerned with the police than with protecting “nature.” This tension was compounded by the fact that some of those temporarily living in the forest framed their interests as opposed to others, claiming parts of the forest as their “homes” and suggesting that weeks of actions, fundraisers, or protests were violating their personal space. In turn, some anarchists criticized others for lacking a sufficiently militant vision, accusing them of pushing for mere policy changes. Meanwhile, many working groups within the movement failed to prioritize the forest’s physical integrity, not realizing that once the trees were gone, it would be considerably more difficult to resist the construction of Cop City.
\n\nIn the end, not enough participants pushed beyond their comfort zones. When their preferred tactics became too difficult, many stopped participating entirely, regardless of their stated objectives.
\n\nHow could this story have turned out differently?1
\n\nLet’s return to summer 2022, when the movement showed that it was too powerful for the local authorities to control. What if, at that moment, people around the country had organized a massive outreach campaign calling people to converge on Atlanta for a range of broadly confrontational and participatory actions?
\n\nAll of this did in fact occur a full year later, in fall 2023, when several speaking tours crisscrossed the United States promoting the Block Cop City mobilization2 and hundreds of people gathered in Atlanta for a weekend of action. Perhaps if something similar had taken place in 2022—when the movement was up and coming rather than embattled, when the state had not yet used spurious charges of terrorism and racketeering to intimidate potential participants, when supporters were not yet busy trying to respond to the genocide in Gaza—it might have drawn much larger numbers, which might in turn have made it more difficult for the government to regain the initiative.
\n\nFor that to have taken place at the end of summer 2022, however, a critical mass of people outside of Atlanta would have had to realize how pivotal the movement was and immediately invest energy in organizing to support it. They would have needed to recognize—long before the police murdered anyone or charged anyone with terrorism—that the movement’s apparent success introduced new perils. Had they succeeded in bringing new forces to bear against Cop City, this would likely have contributed to tensions with established local organizers in Atlanta and with those who were already occupying the forest. They would have needed to accept those tensions as necessary growing pains.
\n\nThe outcome of the struggle over Cop City has had profound implications for movements around the United States and, consequently, for people all around the world. If nothing else, we can learn the importance of recognizing the stakes of a fight while there is still time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/18.jpg\")
\nEvery movement that undergoes severe repression experiences internal conflict, and the movement to stop Cop City was no exception. As has been said before, the function of repression is not simply to strike the immediate targets, but to send shockwaves through a movement in a way that opens up fault lines.
\n\nThe movement endured three years of intense struggle, in part, by adhering to one fundamental principle: members refrained from publicly denouncing each other. Disagreements or critiques were handled internally whenever possible. Groups that could not reconcile their differences simply avoided each other. Saboteurs, tree-sitters, rioters, and others took action against Cop City, secure in the knowledge that they would not be labeled “crazy” on prime-time news—at least, not by other activists. Canvassers, community organizers, fundraisers, and event coordinators could rest assured that, for the most part, social media would not be flooded with rage-fueled rants denouncing their strategies as hopeless or naïve.
\n\nAnonymous internet users violated this principle repeatedly. Each time, it threw the radical segments of the movement into temporary disarray. Coinciding with moments of intense repression, spiteful statements and semi-coherent allegations flooded the internet, contributing to an atmosphere of fear and tension. This underscores the need for well-delivered, constructive criticism—whether in public venues or private face-to-face exchanges.
\n\nFrom the earliest days of the movement, some grassroots organizers sought to smear it. Through whisper campaigns, gossip, and private conversations, they tried to prevent it from gaining momentum. They labeled it “all white,” or claimed that organizers hadn’t “consulted the community” before launching actions, echoing the “outside agitators” narrative pushed by the police chief and Mayor Dickens. On a podcast, one person shamelessly declared the movement “more disappointing than Cop City itself”—a pro-repression stance thinly disguised as progressive politics.
\n\nUntil the struggle became too large to ignore, some local activists derided it. On Signal groups, they sowed doubt, division, and paranoia—particularly targeting out-of-towners and newcomers—while technically adhering to the movement’s commitment to discretion. As large non-profit organizations began to support the movement, some activists discouraged them from allocating resources to the participants who were taking significant risks.
\n\nIronically, many of those who attempted to undermine the movement also sought to benefit from its momentum. NGO staffers and careerists continue to cash in, earning accolades and grants on behalf of a movement for which they risked very little. Meanwhile, many of those facing felony charges and living under surveillance continue to struggle below the federal poverty line.
\n\nCritique is essential. Aspiring revolutionaries should actively seek critical input, as the cost of error can be extremely high. Criticism helps refine strategies and fosters humility in the face of immense obstacles and uncertainty. Anyone serious about dismantling the carceral state, overthrowing capitalism, and transforming the world must first admit that they don’t know everything and that it will be necessary to refine their theories and strategies on an ongoing basis.
\n\nUnfortunately, petty and self-serving forms of criticism remain all too common. Real critique uplifts, educates, and transforms the participants. When people engage in denunciatory attacks and gossip, this can obscure the true cost of political errors, burying self-reflection under an avalanche of invective and rumor. This fosters defensiveness, stubbornness, ego trips, and factionalism, ultimately leading to the propagation of dogmas that remain untested. This isn’t just a problem for collectives, crews, and organizing groups—it can stunt entire movements. It’s a challenge that all humanity has a stake in overcoming.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/19.jpg\")
\nThose who have fought to oppose the construction of Cop City in Weelaunee Forest were correct to identify the project as marking the dawn of a new era of police militarization in the United States. Local authorities plan to build at least eighty additional police training facilities across the United States; every state except for Wyoming is planning at least one.
\n\nDespite courageous efforts, they did not manage to save the forest from destruction or prevent the completion of the project. Only two options remain for closing down Cop City: pressuring policymakers to defund it after it opens or directly destroying the site. Only a mass revolt or carefully planned acts of sabotage unlike any that have occurred thus far could achieve either of those outcomes. During the movement, thousands repeatedly chanted, “If you build it, we will burn it.” It remains to be seen whether they were serious or bluffing.
\n\nThe police are a central pillar of the state. Appearances aside, the government is not primarily composed of bureaucracies, libraries, clinics, or universities. At its core, it is made up of armies, borders, prisons, and police.3 Societies embroiled in destabilizing conflicts often see social services, welfare, and even parliamentary systems collapse, but the repressive functions of the state never collapse on their own—they can only be dismantled by powerful revolutionary movements.
\n\nThe power of the police will not simply fade away. Those who rule depend upon it; it is essential to preserving the inequalities that are the foundation of their authority. All evidence indicates that the power of the police will continue to expand until the social order that requires it is destroyed. If that occurs, it will not simply be the consequence of a change in public opinion; it will involve real people taking real actions against real infrastructure. Because the concentration of armed force is inevitable in all unequal societies, doing away with the police will require abolishing artificial scarcity and war between classes, castes, and nations.
\n\n\n\n\nWe did not fight to stop Cop City because we believed that all it would take to reform capitalism and the state would be a few concerts and a little vandalism. We fought because we hoped that this particular fight could clarify the stakes of the struggle that is taking place at this critical juncture in history, drawing more people into action and deepening our joint effort to change the world.
\n\nAnd that is something we still believe in.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/17.jpg\")
\nDecember 27: A Chase Bank in NYC is vandalized with “Stop Cop City” and “Free Gaza” painted on its veneer and its doors locked. A demonstration takes place outside the home of Jonna Hamilton, the senior legal counsel of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the Atlanta Police Foundation.
\nDecember 31: Charleston Police and FBI arrest a 21-year-old in Charleston, South Carolina. Police allege the accused is responsible for burning two trucks belonging to Thomas Concrete, and for painting “You build it, we burn it” on the trucks, as well as slogans about Weelaunee Forest.
\nJanuary 1: A car is burned outside of Portland City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s house. The action is dedicated to fallen revolutionaries, including Tortuguita, as well as two unhoused people in Portland who died as a consequence of police enforcement tactics advocated by Gonzalez.
\nJanuary 2: A proposal appears online inviting people to conduct solidarity actions and events on January 18, the day of Tortuguita was killed. Manuel’s Tavern is vandalized in advance of an appearance by Mayor Dickens; its doors are glued shut, its walls painted. The scheduled visit is canceled.
\nJanuary 16: A feller buncher belonging to Shadowbox Studios is burned in the forest.
\nJanuary 17: The news comes out that the cost of the Cop City project has increased from $90 million to $109 million. The authorities blame security costs, damage from protests, and increased insurance costs.
\nJanuary 18: On the “Day of the Forest Defender,” around the country, hundreds of people participate in events commemorating the death of Tortuguita. Nearly fifty events take place for the occasion, including vigils, teach-ins, rallies, film screenings, and fundraisers. In addition, 18 windows are broken at the San Francisco Credit Union; in Hanover, Germany, a car belonging to Autobahn GmbH is burned; windows are broken at two different Nationwide subsidiaries in Atlanta; MTU Solutions is vandalized in Novi, Michigan; UPS tires are slashed in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
\nJanuary 19: Someone liberates ten chickens in the Northern UK in memory of Tortuguita.
\nJanuary 25: Four machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned on Boulevard Drive near the Federal Penitentiary in southeast Atlanta. No communiqué appears online, but local police stage a press conference nonetheless.
\nJanuary 27: A bank in Chicago is redecorated with posters in memory of Tortuguita.
\nJanuary 29: Protesters lock down at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown.
\nJanuary 30: A cybersecurity incident cripples the municipal government in Atlanta.
\nFebruary 1: Someone sabotages 11 ATMS belonging to Truist Bank with glue and glues the doors shut.
\nFebruary 8: Atlanta Police, the ATF, and the FBI raid three homes in southeast Atlanta in a joint operation, each targeting one house. They arrest one person, charging him with first-degree arson, and detain another for several hours. Police attempt to violently humiliate the residents of the house they raid, forcing one resident outside without her clothes on to be photographed by masked thugs; at another house, officers drag a resident down the stairs by his hair.
\nFebruary 10: In Lakewood, Atlanta, just blocks from two of the houses raided on the 8th, a police car catches fire in front of the home of an APD officer. The accompanying statement reads, in part: “We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down, or that arresting alleged arsonists will deter future arsons.” In St Paul, Minnesota, two trucks and trailers loaded with timber are burned at a Home Depot in solidarity with Jack and those affected by the raids. “It is time to destroy those who destroy the earth,” the statement reads.
\nFebruary 11: Police raid another home in Lakewood, in broad daylight, following the burning of the police cruiser the day before. Nobody is arrested or detained, and nobody is home. FBI, GBI, ATF, the bomb squad, helicopters, armored vehicles, and undercover police vehicles establish a presence in the area for days. In San Francisco, Waymo self-driving cars are vandalized “with hammers and knives” in solidarity with those in Atlanta facing police harassment.
\nFebruary 12: The owner of the home raided on February 11 holds a press conference denouncing the police action at his home.\nElsewhere, the Davinci Development website is vandalized by hackers.
\nFebruary 23: The Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City in Tucson, Arizona brings together a few hundred activists from the Southwest. Three Nationwide subisidiaries lose their windows in Tucson, Arizona.
\nFebruary 24: A Nationwide subsidiary in Santa Cruz has its locks filled with glue and its walls covered in spray paint.
\nFebruary 25: During the Nationwide Summit, 80 people gather in a black bloc in Tucson. They march several blocks and smash all of the windows of Wells Fargo and PNC Bank in Presidio Plaza. Some decorate the walls with Tortuguita’s name.
\nFebruary 26: Dozens protest at the Nationwide Headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ. Hundreds of police are deployed. At the same time, six activists lock themselves down to concrete barrels in entrance to a gated community in Fountain Hills, Arizona, where a regional executive of Nationwide lives. In New York City, over 200 protesters march into the offices of Nationwide and AXA XL—insurers of the Atlanta Police Foundation and Brasfield & Gorrie, respectively. This is the largest protest connected to the movement to take place outside of Georgia.
\nFebruary 27: A video release shows multiple Nationwide locations vandalized in New York City.
\nFebruary 28: Ten New York Police Department vehicles are splashed with paint and have their tires slashed.
\nMarch 5: About twenty Black women protest outside the home of Mayor Dickens in the early hours, demanding the city government drop the court appeal blocking the referendum to stop Cop City. In the United Kingdom, a dairy farm in Leistershire is extensively vandalized in solidarity with Jack and others facing repression in Atlanta.
\nMarch 7: One person locks down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie site in Midtown as a crowd gathers below. After several hours, he is removed and charged with misdemeanor trespassing.
\nMarch 11: Protesters disrupt a Mayoral panel featuring Andre Dickens in Austin, Texas. The event is canceled and Dickens is chased off-site. In Oregon, a butcher shop in Portland is vandalized in solidarity with Jack.
\nMarch 14: Eight machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned in Henry County, GA.
\nMarch 27: Two activists climb up a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown Atlanta to disrupt work. This time, the activists are charged with felonies. Elsewhere, an I-5 highway sign is redecorated.
\nMarch 28: Anarchists in the northern United Kingdom liberate 41 ducks from a farm in memory of Tortuguita and in solidarity with Jack. Also, at some point in March, someone tampered with the tables of the Atlanta Police Department, temporarily freeing the horses.
\nApril 16: Several pieces of machinery belonging to Brasfield & Gorrie are burned in Fayetteville, Georgia. No communiqué accompanies the action, but police publicly speculate that it is related to Cop City.
\nApril 22: People wheat-paste posters and paint slogans all over Emory University campus denouncing the institution for ties to Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation. Six surveillance cameras are disabled by various methods.
\nApril 25: Students and others set up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza at Emory University in the context of a national mobilization against US support for the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Protesters connect Israel to Cop City. Emory Police and Georgia State Patrol attack the crowd, firing pepper balls at protesters, tasing medics, and slamming professors to the ground. As the day passes, crowds descend from classes onto the quad to confront police and block prisoner transport vehicles. Police shoot rubber bullets at students. In the early evening, faculty and students occupy Candler School of Theology atrium. As police arrive, protesters use reinforced banners to clash with police and to protect each other from rubber bullets and pepper balls.
\nApril 26: More than 500 people reconverge on the Emory quad after a day of clashes with police on campus. Protesters flood Cox Hall, temporarily occupying the building. During an emergency faculty meeting on campus, staff move to hold a “no-confidence” vote on President Fenves. Fenves sends an email to thousands of students, alleging that “outsiders” were converging on campus in buses. Despite his allegations, corporate news platforms report that over 90% of the previous day’s arrestees were students or faculty. In New York City, during an Atlanta Police recruitment event, someone pulls the fire alarm of the Marriott hotel and 300 crickets are released inside the building. Graffiti decorates the courtyard.
\nApril 27: To further disrupt the Atlanta Police recruitment event, cement is poured into the plumbing system of the hotel.
\nApril 28: Faculty and staff walk out on Emory campus, denouncing President Greg Fenves for calling the police on student protesters.
\nApril 29: Three OMNY machines and three MTA machines on the New York subway are smashed in memory of Tortuguita. At Cal Poly Humboldt, a Gaza solidarity protester builds a tree-sit beside occupied Siemens Hall in memory of Tortuguita.
\nApril 30: During the eviction of Hamilton Hall and the West Lawn at Columbia University, the crowd begins chanting “Stop Cop City.”
\nMay 1: Hundreds march on Emory Campus with reinforced banners, temporarily seizing control of the Oxford/Undergraduate Admissions building. Police drag George State University students wearing keffiyehs at the graduation ceremony off stage.
\nMay 3: Some 75% of Emory faculty vote “no confidence” in President Fenves. Protesters march to the headquarters of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program on Georgia State University campus, long the target of the stop Cop City movement and now of the Gaza solidarity protests as well. Protesters clash with police while trying to enter the building, using shields, reinforced banners, and umbrellas to protect each other. The crowd disperses with no arrests.
\nMay 4: About 60 protesters gather near the GILEE headquarters again; several dozen riot police stage nearby. The crowd decides not to march and assembles in deliberation instead.
\nMay 6: Morehouse students issue a public letter to the Board of Trustees, reiterating their call to sever ties with Cop City and the Atlanta Committee for Progress and to cut ties with Israel.
\nMay 7: The Atlanta Journal Constitution attempts to split Stop Cop City and Gaza solidarity protests by urging anti-war activists not to be “co-opted” by activists fighting police militarization in “southeast Atlanta,” just a few miles from Emory campus. Spelman students issue an open letter to the Board of Trustees urging them to cut ties with Israel and Cop City.
\nMay 10: Columbia University Hamilton Hall arrestees issue a statement directly connecting the genocide in Gaza to the GILEE program and the construction of Cop City and similar projects around the United States.
\nMay 11: Thirteen Emory arrestees issue a public statement demanding that Emory cut ties with Israel and Cop City and drop all charges against protesters on campus.
\nMay 20: The Atlanta Police Foundation pays twelve temp workers hired by “Our America” to attend a City Council session in order to read statements in support of Cop City.
\nMay 21: An NYPD bus is burned in Brooklyn in memory of Tortuguita and in retaliation for police brutality at a Palestine solidarity protest in Bay Ridge, NYC.
\nMay 29: The Guardian publishes an article exposing constant surveillance and harassment of southeast Atlanta residents. The harassment includes hundreds of visits by police at homes day and night; during these visits, officers sometimes park outside of the houses for a few minutes without approaching. Other times, they shine lights into windows and blare their sirens outside the homes of activists with suspected ties to the Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement. In one instance, a lit road flare is placed in the bushes directly outside a window.
\nMay 31: Multiple water mains explode across Atlanta, leaving a majority of residents without clean running water for a week. Many people connect the collapse of city infrastructure to the channeling of tremendous amounts of funding to police.
\nJune 3: Groups involved in the movement join Palestine solidarity activists in calling for disruptions at the first US Presidential debate on June 27.
\nJune 5: A 20-year-old anarchist named Cyprus is subpoenaed in Charleston, South Carolina and summoned to a Federal Grand Jury investigating alleged acts of arson against Cop City subcontractors.
\nJune 20: In NYC, people disrupt a budget session at City Hall. NYC Mayor Eric Adams wants to cut the public library budget in order to build a Cop City-inspired facility in Queens. Local New Yorkers begin organizing against the project.
\nJune 25: A lawyer representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund files a motion to dismiss the case against them after it is learned that the Attorney General’s office failed to hire a “filter team” to redact client-attorney emails subpoenaed by the State. Those emails were read by law enforcement and included in evidence.
\nJune 27: Using reinforced pipes, activists lock down in the driveway of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, Georgia. Hudson produces arms for the Israeli army. Activists denounce the war on Gaza and demand a right to vote via referendum on Cop City. That night, two demonstrations take place in the vicinity of the Presidential debate. Several hundred police officers swarm the area, both in uniforms and undercover. Around one hundred protesters gather for a black bloc but decide not to initiate a combative demonstration. They march a few blocks before dispersing without arrests.
\nJuly 4: Cyprus publicly declares their intention to resist the Federal Grand Jury targeting the Stop Cop City movement. They call for others to resist the hearings without compromise. Six Flock cameras are destroyed in Savannah, Georgia.
\nJuly 10: In Okemos, Michigan, protesters visit the home of Paul Kearney, Chief Claims Officer for Accident Fund Insurance.
\nJuly 31: A grand jury subpoena targeting Cyprus is withdrawn, likely as a consequence of their commitment to resist the hearing.
\nAugust 13: A machine belonging to the Brent Scarborough Company is burned on Memorial Drive. Unknown saboteurs use “improvised incendiary devices” to destroy the machines of the Cop City contractor.
\nAugust 22: A industrial railroad bridge burns near Milwaukie, Oregon. The saboteurs connect the shipping company to the Israeli war in Palestine and to Cop City.
\nJanuary 18, 2025: Day of the Forest Defender events coinciding with “Festivals of Resistance” against the incoming Trump-Vance-Musk administration take place in over twenty locations. Five hundred people gather in Richmond. In Olympia, a thousand people march. The mother of Tortuguita joins local musicians at an event in Atlanta. Somewhere in Northern California, anonymous saboteurs disable a dozen trucks belonging to Green Diamond Resource Company in memory of Tortuguita.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/20.jpg\")
\nRe-litigating the past can be tempting for those who have experienced traumatic failures and setbacks, as it allows us to take responsibility for the past by criticizing ourselves and others. It is important to approach such questions with humility and to resist the temptation to shift the goalposts in response to setbacks. From the outset, participants in the movement boldly maintained that they intended to win. Some of them criticized discourses that trivialized the concept of victory or made apologies for failure. “The real stopping Cop City is the friends we made along the way”—it might be easy to say something like this today, but it would not represent the spirit of the movement. ↩
\nSpeaking tours promoting the movement to defend the forest did take place in 2022, but on a smaller scale than the speaking tours in the lead-up to the Block Cop City mobilization. ↩
\nIn contexts where the power of the police is subcontracted out to third parties or paramilitaries, we could say that the state itself has already transformed into a corporate or factional enterprise. ↩
\nSince April 2021, protesters in Atlanta, Georgia have been fighting to defend Weelaunee Forest, where politicians and profiteers are attempting to build a police training compound known as Cop City. This movement has spread around the country, identifying and attacking the roots of state and corporate support for the project; later this month, opponents of Cop City will gather in Tucson, Arizona.
\n\nYet the proposed police militarization center in Atlanta is only one of many. All across the United States, governments are allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to build new police militarization facilities, seeking to expand the repressive capabilities of the police and pouring more money into the pockets of their allies.
\n\nThe movement to Stop Cop City has given rise to one of the fiercest struggles of the past three years. Does it represent a reproducible strategy by which abolitionists can take a structural approach to stopping the expansion of the police-industrial complex?
\n\nIn 2022, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced that the National Guard training center at Camp Grayling sought to take over an additional 162,000 acres of publicly-owned land, more than doubling the area under its control. Protesters mobilized against this expansion, many of them inspired by the example of the movement to Stop Cop City. In the end, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was compelled to reject the original request, instead offering 52,000 acres to the military via short-term use permits.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, politicians intend to build a regional police training facility and gun range in San Pablo. A movement against this facility has already gotten off the ground, informed by the movement against cop city, delaying the construction of the facility.
\n\nRather than giving up on building Cop City, the government of Atlanta has doubled down on repression. Aside from Camp Grayling, it has yet to be seen whether the model demonstrated in Atlanta can succeed elsewhere. Yet even if the movement in Atlanta ultimately fails to prevent the completion of Cop City, it may dissuade politicians elsewhere from embroiling themselves in similar fiascos.
\n\nBelow, we offer a report from a protest on February 5 that interrupted the groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of a police militarization facility in Lacey, Washington, and share an incomplete list of other such proposed facilities around the country.
\n\nYou can find a map showing the locations of all the new cop cities that are in some stage of development here.
\n\nAs war, ecological and economic crises, and displacement wrack the world, police and their cronies are snatching up as much land and public funds they can. They seek to present themselves as the only possible solution to these crises even as they exacerbate them. It’s a vicious cycle: the more resources they hoard, the more violence they are able to use to impose the disparities and disempowerment that lie at the root of the crises—and they take advantage of the instability this creates to justify grabbing up even more resources. It’s up to us to prevent them from turning the entire world into a lattice of interlocking police states.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/02/07/3.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Lacey holds a sign on February 5, 2024.
\nFor a while, I’ve been hearing that there are more “cop cities” popping up around the country. This is not surprising, since the facility planned for Atlanta, Georgia is intended to set the standard for policing nationally. That is one of the reasons so many out-of-state police are expected to train there: to set that standard.
\n\nUntil just yesterday, I hadn’t heard of any similar facilities nearby, and it seems like I wasn’t the only one in the dark. But it turns out that a contract was awarded on December 21, 2023 for the construction of a new police station and training facility in Lacey, Washington. The groundbreaking ceremony was meant to be February 5, 2024.
\n\nDespite the immensity of the contract, which originally started at $43.6 million, then ballooned to $61.5 million, there has been surprisingly little reporting on it. The project is slated to go up next to City Hall and the library, where approximately twelve acres of forest will be destroyed in order to build it. According to one of the community members I spoke with, very few people had heard about this project before the groundbreaking ceremony was announced—they had never heard about any opportunity for public comments, and it appears that there was never a public vote.
\n\nOnce news about the ceremony spread, activists and organizers responded quickly, rallying a couple dozen people to crash the groundbreaking ceremony starting at 1 pm. People showed up with signs reading “Stop Cop City” and “No to Police Training Facilities, Yes to Housing, Healthcare, and Education.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/02/07/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Lacey hold signs on February 5, 2024.
\nThe small group shouted down the cops and officials present for the ceremony with chants such as, “LPD [Lacey Police Department], KKK, IDF—You’re all the same,” and “No justice, no peace, no racist police.” By approximately 2 pm, officials started packing up the chairs, microphone, and tent that had been set up for speeches. The chants continued as officials carried the gear out.
\n\nAt one point, a vehicle that had been loaded attempted to exit via the street that had been blocked off for the ceremony. Protesters clustered together blocking the street. An officer approached the protesters, laying hands on at least one, though it didn’t appear any further escalation occurred. For a moment, it appeared that there might be a confrontation—but when it became clear that the protesters wouldn’t move, the cop walked away, directing the vehicle to exit on the opposite end of the City Hall/library parking lot.
\n\nThe protesters lingered a little longer, with a handful climbing onto the excavator that had been brought on site for the groundbreaking and fixing a sign reading “Stop Cop City” to the window facing the street. Another protester threw a rock through the excavator’s windshield, ensuring that the equipment wouldn’t be used after protesters dispersed.
\n\nFive to ten minutes later, protesters retreated down the street to the intersection. Cops followed closely behind them. When the protesters stopped at the street corner, the police paused and held back, but stayed close to the group until they crossed the street. The demonstrators temporarily blocked traffic, which drew just as much support as ire. But rather than remaining in the street, they withdrew to the opposite corner, where they remained for a short time before dispersing in groups.
\n\nIn some ways, this project slated for Lacey will be different from the pilot Cop City project in Atlanta. For example, it is not supposed to include a replica of an urban setting in which police can practice “crowd control,” which is to say, the repression of political dissent. However, like Cop City Atlanta, Cop City Lacey represents a doubling down on increasingly militarized policing in response to the George Floyd uprising and to demands that police budgets be reallocated to community projects that actually tend to reduce crime, such as affordable and accessible housing, healthcare, childcare and teen centers, education, and elder care. The government here heard people demanding the defunding of the police who kill so many innocent people in the street annually, who shelter violent abusers and employ training programs known as “Killology,” and in response, they have only awarded more and more money to the police. Since 2020, civilian deaths at the hands of police have continued to climb while local and state governments continue to shift money away from social services into policing.
\n\nIf the project in Lacey sees the kind of resistance that Cop City Atlanta has provoked, the cost of building the center will continue to grow and the delays will stretch out longer and longer. Activists, organizers, and forest defenders in Atlanta have used a diversity of tactics including occupations in the forest slated for destruction, marches, signature gathering, and attempts to get Cop City on the ballot for a referendum—an effort that has been squashed at every turn in what has been a perfect case study of the banality of evil. Some forest defenders have destroyed equipment and engaged in other forms of vandalism aimed at making construction work impossible, rendering the project almost prohibitively expensive. Recently, protesters have chained themselves to equipment with their arms encased in reinforced pipes, halting construction until police were able to cut through the pipes and chains to arrest them.
\n\nIt has yet to be seen whether people in Lacey and the surrounding areas will go as hard as folks in Atlanta have. But here’s hoping that this fight is only just beginning.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/02/07/1.jpg\")
A sign reading “Stop Cop City” placed on an excavator by demonstrators in Lacey on February 5, 2024.
\nHere are just a few of the proposed police facilities that gained momentum in the wake of the upheavals of 2020. In this video, the presenter describes having found new police militarization facilities proposed in all but two states in the United States.
\n\n\n\n\n“The project is set to cost about $43.6 million, a sizable investment for the small city in Contra Costa County with a population of just over 30,000 whose total budget expenditures were about $66 million last year.”
\n
\n\n\n“The village, coined ‘Hershville’ after Field Training Officer Kevin Hershberger who came up with the idea, will be made up of small structures designed to represent businesses, homes, streets, and other real-world environments.”
\n
\n\n\n“In 2021, state lawmakers approved $70 million for the renovations—although inflation has pushed costs some 22% above original estimates, requiring state fiscal leaders to approve additional funds. “
\n
\n\n\n“A master plan for modernization of the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center in Hutchinson calls for $200 million to $250 million in renovation and construction… ‘Right now is exactly the time we need to invest in law enforcement,’ said Darin Beck, executive director of the Hutchinson training center. ‘With the controversies in law enforcement in the state and with the national debate that is currently raging, it’s been an interesting time in law enforcement.’”
\n
\n\n\n“The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Foundation has launched a $35 million fundraising campaign to build the Reality Based Training Center… The first phase of the Center is a $35 million state-of-the-art Reality Based Training facility [which] will include an indoor, climate and environmentally controlled tactical training village including casino simulations and other incidents to enable our First Responders to train realistically for a variety of events ranging from personal and citizen defense to high profile [sic] scenarios.”
\n
\n\n\n“‘We’re just feet from where I went to the police academy in that very building (nearby). It’s a great location.’ Of the new, nearly 15,000-square-foot complex, Filicetti said the training facility will feature two floors of class space with moveable walls; a reality-based training center with a use-of-force simulator; men’s and women’s locker rooms; and office space.”
\n
\n\n\n“The 2024 budget includes $2 million for the planning and design of a new public safety training facility… the county’s five-year spending plan attributes $35 million to the project… However, not everyone is on board with the training facility. A few citizens protested the plans Monday night before the commissioner meeting and called it a ‘cop city.’”
\n
\n\n\n“Currently, the Dallas Police Department says it has secured $20 million in funding for the new facility from the state, and that it has requested [an additional] $50 million.”
\n
\n\n\n“Tarrant County Commissioners voted Tuesday to cut tens of millions of dollars from affordable housing, childcare and public health funding. They reallocated much of that money to build a new law enforcement training center… $11 million to build a new training center for the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office and $22.5 million for the county’s continuing contract with a private prison in Garza County.”
\n
\n\n\n“The Lacey City Council voted unanimously on Thursday, December 21 to award a $43.7 million construction contract to Forma Construction of Olympia for a new two-story police station.”
\n
\n\n\n“When we went to the governor with this idea, it was the fastest ‘yes’ I’ve ever had; he was 100% behind it and was so supportive every step of the way,” said Monica Alexander, executive director of the Criminal Justice Training Commission… Now, the old elementary school has new purpose… The long-term plan is to buy a large parcel that can accommodate a permanent training center.”
\n
\n\n\n“Surprised by a price tag nearly $15 million over budget, the Fitchburg City Council has delayed voting on a proposed stand-alone police services facility… The city’s 10-year Capital Improvement Plan anticipated the facility would cost about $35 million. But the plan presented to the city last month by FGM Architects came in at $49.2 million.”
\n
In the following account, a participant describes how people involved in an anarchist social center set up a haunted house last October as a fundraiser to support defendants facing RICO charges as a consequence of repression targeting the movement to Stop Cop City. This is an excellent example of how creative efforts can add a joyous element to political outreach and legal support.
\n\n\n\n\n“I don’t know what to say about it other than it was one of the coolest events ever. I literally felt like you could get lost in our space. I didn’t recognize where I was.”
\n\n-Participant testimony
\n
This video offers a walkthrough of the haunted house. Watch at your own risk!
\nMany Halloweens ago, in a galaxy far far away, our local anarchist puppet troupe (not to be confused with the other local radical puppet troupe, which also involved anarchists) hosted a haunted house fundraiser for the local books-to-prisoners project.
\n\nIt was a wild success. With a sliding scale admission of just $5-10, we raised over $10,000. Dozens of anarchists artistically collaborated, improvised, and laughed together throughout two nights of performance. The haunted house attracted hundreds of townspeople who otherwise would never have set foot inside our books-to-prisoners space, or been to exposed to the abolitionist and anti-authoritarian ideas undergirding the jokes and jumps throughout the haunt.
\n\nSo, years later—to be precise, at our Weelaunee Defense Society meeting last September—when someone made a passing comment to the effect that we shouldn’t limit our imaginations to only the traditional rote tasks of solidarity committees, I leaped at the chance. “Halloween Haunted Weelaunee Forest! But, uh, I can’t work on it. I’m too busy…”
\n\nIn the end, I was still nailing wooden trees together minutes before opening. Not because no one else was willing, but rather because the collective’s creative energy was too electrifying to resist.
\n\nPersonnel:
\n\nMaterials:
\n\nTools:
\n\nLights and Electricity:
\n\nDon’t let this list intimidate you—we made our haunted house a success with the initiative of a half dozen people. That’s all it really takes to get started.
\n\nAs for brainstorming props and mechanics, go to a library and check out books about how to make your own haunted house. There’s a wealth of information on the subject.
\n\nOur anarchist social center is, for lack of a better term, federated. The building has its own name, but inside it, there are half a dozen spaces, each managed by a freestanding organization or project: a community print space, a radical lending library, a queer Jewish zine archive, a co-working space for a handful of anarchist publishers and podcasts, a semi-squatted garden, a harm reduction warehouse, and a free kitchen that serves two meals a week. To pull off the haunted house, we had to get permission from each of these projects and acquaint ourselves with their preferences.
\n\nThe garden and library were already reserved, as another collective had already booked those areas to throw a Halloween rager on the same night that we wanted to do the haunted house. That left us with the harm reduction warehouse, the office, the kitchen, the print shop, and the hallway between those areas.
\n\nTo coordinate with the party crew, we met face to face with as many collective members as we could gather. It was hard to find time for a critical mass of us to meet, but I think it was worth it to sit down in person. There are some things that just can’t be expressed well over text, like the fact that we sincerely weren’t trying to compete with the party, we wanted to collaborate with them.
\n\nWe took a different approach with the project spaces. We chose point people for each room who would be responsible both for coordinating with the regular users of their space and for bringing together the materials and design for that room in the haunted house. By decentralizing responsibility, we maximized each point person’s investment in their room and their ability to respond to the needs of those who would normally use it. The project would have been too much for one person to take on alone. It also meant that each room had its own creative vision for the scares and wonders. The results included jump scares, compressed air guns, falling spider babies, chainsaw chaser guys, and a grotesque, impaled dummy representing a cop.
\n\nInternally, we met in person for a couple of hours once a week, and established a signal thread for discussion between meetings. Both the thread and the meetings were completely open to whoever wanted to contribute. All in all, the project took about a month and a half from start to finish. It was surprisingly little work for what we accomplished. Only afterward did it become clear how much more we could have achieved with just a little more time and teamwork.
\n\nWe only had one “casting call” for actors. As it turned out, this was less a matter of selecting the best actors and more a question of begging the few people who showed up to commit to the roles, days, and windows of time that we needed them to fill.
\n\nOur dress rehearsal took place immediately before we opened. It took about five runs through to start to feel confident in our rhythm.
\n\nEarly on, we decided that all of the money raised would go to support those facing charges stemming from forest defense. We explicitly agreed not to reimburse anyone for costs or materials from building the haunted house. This was a good decision. It forced us to be more creative with our designs than we would have been if we could have essentially just bought the haunted house piece by piece from Amazon or Walmart. Some of us did spend a little money on this or that, but the vast majority of the materials were acquired through anarchist economics—they were gifted, stolen, dumpstered, returned after use, or borrowed. We even attracted two professional makeup artists from the fancy ($60 admission!) studio haunted house in town. They originally asked to be paid but quickly decided that we were cool enough for them to happily donate their time and makeup!
\n\nWe developed the story through big group brainstorming, then we tasked one of our participants—a person who had professional haunted house experience—with synthesizing the ideas into a script. One of the bigger debates in our group was whether an absurdist work of horror was an appropriate way to represent a struggle that has already cost some people their life or liberty. It wasn’t exactly a formal decision, but those who participated most in the preparation and were actually in touch with defendants all seemed determined to make the haunt a direct reference to the ongoing struggle to defend the forest, with our sights set on building towards the Block Cop City week of action just a couple of weeks after Halloween.
\n\nWe had three long build days ahead of opening. Miraculously, no one lost any of their tools in the furious clanging and banging. Often, a small team would embark on a stated task only to be pulled in by a sudden, spontaneous, fun idea that would then take hours to accomplish, morphing again and again in the course of its genesis. Almost every room saw new details added right up to the very last minute. This is a benefit of haunted houses for anarchist expression: they are spaces of maximalist chaos. The more detail, the more it confuses, the more it creates chaos, the better.
\n\nIn addition to the actors in the haunt, we had a Stop Cop City protester to work the crowd as they waited in line and a stage manager to check in on the actors and make sure we took a ten-minute break every hour. Those roles were indispensable. We had a line the entire night and only got all the way through it at the very end: we somehow managed to plan perfectly for the audience that showed up for us. Actors kept showing up until the end, and we managed to improvise to fill in gaps as other actors left early.
\n\nOne of the highlights of the night came when a mostly Spanish-speaking group arrived to tour the haunted house. The “project manager” character started them off in Spanish, figuring that the people in the other rooms would end up using English but that it would be all right, since those rooms weren’t as dependent on narrative. Instead, from one room to the next, the people running each room heard Spanish being used in the previous room and adapted their script accordingly, resulting in a complete tour in Spanish for the group. It was beautiful to discover that we could improvise and collaborate on the basis of our affinities without making formal decisions or even being in the same room together, not to mention the analogous benefits of exercising that kind of collaborative social muscle within an anarchist community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/19/1.jpg\")
\nAs in many anarchist efforts, our chief error was that we didn’t plan for success. Early on in the planning process, we decided to forego a second night on Saturday because the social center was booked for a show. As it turned out, that show lasted two hours, took place early in the evening, and did not use any of the haunted house rooms. Cast and audience alike had a blast on the night we ran the haunted house. We could easily have hosted it a second night—we would have made more money and had more fun. Part of the reason that we rushed to commit to only hosting it for one night was that we were asking a lot of the projects who lent us their space, but we should have had more faith that we would succeed in pulling off something great. Whether you’re planning a risky direct action or just a fun piece of theater with your friends, the most important question in any anarchist activity is “What if everything goes so well that we want to take it further? What will we do then?”
\n\nWe reached our fundraising goal, but we easily could have made double it by raising the price of admission. Admission was basically set at $5 by making a two-for-one ticket price: $10 admission to the party, $10 for the Haunted House, or $15 for both. In reality, the Haunted House was just another activity for the party-goers, and I think they would have paid $10 or more to check it out. Everybody in our collective seemed most comfortable making the admission price as adjustable and low as possible so that no one would be turned away for lack of funds, but—in my non-expert opinion—most of the crowd could and would have gladly donated more to forest defender legal defense if prompted. With dozens of comrades facing RICO and domestic terrorism charges, we shouldn’t take any opportunity to raise funds for granted.
\n\nWe had planned to publish video from the haunted house to hype up the Block Cop City week of action that was scheduled to take place just a couple weeks later. In the end, unfortunately, we just didn’t have the capacity, partly because we had done so little planning around media. Likewise, early on, we had jokingly discussed adding a hell-house-style recruitment effort at the end of the haunt. Obviously, we weren’t actually going to sit people down in the final room and ask them if they would accept militant sabotage as their one and only salvation, but we did miss an opportunity to promote the week of action or channel the interest that we generated and the bonds forged that night into some kind of action treating our local Cop City profiteers to trickery.
\n\nWe also failed to make a plan for cleaning up, which ended up demanding just as much effort as preparing for the haunt had. Fortunately, the success of the haunted house won us plenty of willing volunteers the next day… but still, we should have planned better. You need people to take out the trash, but you also need places to put the trash. Many thanks to the local queer Shakespeare collective for taking the psychedelic trees off our hands. We should have reserved time to communicate with the people responsible for the spaces on the backside of the haunt. Some of them were upset with how we left those spaces, while others expressed gratitude, having enjoyed the haunted house and saying that their spaces were cleaner after the event than they had been before it. The differential between the happy people and the unhappy people was one drawback to the decentralized, point-person model of organization, in that different point people had different standards regarding what it meant to clean up.
\n\nYou should host an anarchist haunted house in your social center! Apart from May Day, is there a more anarchist holiday than Halloween? Dark, mischievous, occult, fun!
\n\nOur haunted house brought in plenty of people who don’t usually participate in other projects at our social center, and the crowd that attended was full of people I hadn’t seen at previous event. And a whole lot of them screamed.
\n\nYou can consult an interview about the haunted house and Halloween party here courtesy of our local radical journal, Living and Fighting.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/01/18/the-2024-zapatista-encuentro-report-back-and-footage", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/01/18/the-2024-zapatista-encuentro-report-back-and-footage", "title": "The 2024 Zapatista Encuentro : A Report-back with Footage of a Play about the Movement to Stop Cop City", "summary": "A report-back on the Zapatista encuentro celebrating 30 years since the 1994 uprising, including footage of a play about the movement to stop Cop City.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/header.jpg", "date_published": "2024-01-18T10:50:20Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:58Z", "tags": [ "Mexico", "stop cop city", "Atlanta", "ezln", "zapatistas" ], "content_html": "On January 2, 2024, members of the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective—an ad hoc group of US-based forest defenders and revolutionaries—presented a play about the history of the movement to Stop Cop City at the encuentro celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising. The play recounts the recent history of Weelaunee Forest and the struggle to defend the vision of life it embodies against the militarized world of police and prisons represented by Cop City. The play was creative, playful, and amateur: all endearing qualities that characterize the cultural productions that Zapatistas presented throughout the gathering, at which collective participation in narrating history was valued as an end in itself.
\n\nIn the following account, participants in the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective describe their experiences at the gathering and their reflections about what the ongoing Zapatista project can teach aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere around the world. We also share footage of the play they performed at the encuentro in memory of Tortuguita, who was murdered one year ago today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/8.jpg\")
\nIn 1994, the Zapatistas refuted the claim that humanity had reached “the end of history” by carrying out an uprising in response to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The proponents of neoliberal market economies had prematurely declared victory over the last remnants of the worker’s movement, hoping to consign the dream of a dignified life in common (which Zapatistas refer to as Lekil Kuxlejal) to the dustbin of history. The Zapatista uprising and the decades of autonomy it secured are living proof that history itself is not over—that the present, like the past and the future, remains a site of contestation and struggle.
\n\nIn 2023, in defiance of a society bent on destroying life itself—a society that is responding to the crises produced by capitalism by redoubling investment in police, borders, plantations, prisons, extraction, and militarized control—a group of militants traveled to Chiapas from the so-called United States of America to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1994 uprising.
\n\nNearly a year after Georgia State Patrol murdered our friend and comrade Tortuguita, we arrived in the Lancandon jungle with Tort in our thoughts. While Tort was murdered far from the cloud forests of southern Mexico, they inhabited a landscape of revolutionary possibility that the Zapatistas had helped to create. Tort often spoke of the Zapatistas. We placed a portrait of Tort on the memorial altar lining the front of the stage at the encuentro, alongside photographs of murdered Zapatistas and other freedom fighters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/2.jpg\")
“We placed a portrait of Tort on the memorial altar lining the front of the stage.”
\nWhile not all of us knew Tort, we have all been involved in the struggle to defend the forest over the past several years. We did not travel to Chiapas as passive observers, but as active revolutionaries who find ourselves on the same side of the global civil war as the Zapatistas, striving to defend a dignified collective life. We know that for a revolution to be possible, we will have to weave together our struggles across the Americas, recognizing each other as combatting different heads of the same capitalist hydra.
\n\nIn the movement to stop Cop City, we have come to a point at which we are facing serious repression: the murder of Tortuguita, comrades facing charges that could mean decades in prison, the loss of the forest as a space of life, assembly, and experimentation. All of these have contributed to a state of stagnation and disorientation, posing challenges to those who aspire to see the movement develop a mass character. In attending the encuentro, our intention was to share the stories of our struggle and to learn whatever lessons the Zapatistas could share with us on the basis of decades and centuries of resistance. We arrived curious about recent Zapatista communiqués describing the difficulties caused by narcoviolence and announcing a new reformulation of their structure of autonomous government. In the face of total devastation—”the great storm,” as they call it—we must not succumb to resignation.
\n\nOver the past few years, Zapatista communities have begun to contend with narcotrafficking, a new regime of violence in Chiapas’s already contested terrain. This has led to necessary reconsiderations regarding how the Zapatistas can maintain their way of life against the incursions of the state and wealthy landowners, which are now deeply entangled with the area’s competing cartels.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/7.jpg\")
\nMany of us living in the United States have been impacted by crises caused by some of the same forces. There is a crisis along the US border, justified by a police state that has no intention of doing anything to diminish the violence resulting from a criminalized drug trade that it has contributed to creating. At the same time, a crisis has emerged out of the criminalization of drug use in the United States, involving a wave of overdoses intensified by unsafe supply, alongside cyclical and racialized incarceration. Some reduce this to an oversimplified formula: narco violence in the Global South is fueled by the consumption habits of the Global North.
\n\nSpeaking to those facing the threat of narcoviolence in their territory, we found it important to present an alternative framework emphasizing the interconnected nature of these crises and the repressive forces that purport to engage in “crisis management.” If we are to forge paths toward an internationalism that is capable of connecting struggles across ever more militarized border regimes, it is especially important to unearth the links between our unique contexts.
\n\nAfter a long, crowded ride from San Cristobal in a combi, during which we passed military bases and the silent streets of towns struggling with the incursions of the cartels, we were greeted by banners welcoming us to the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo. An autonomous enclave in the heart of Zapatista territories, Dolores Hidalgo is in a large valley surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful mountains and cloud forests. This valley had been a hacienda until the Zapatisatas redistributed it after the 1994 uprising. Dotted throughout the valley are many Zapatista communities, each with parcels of land being worked communally.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/13.jpg\")
“Welcome to the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo.”
\nThe Zapatistas built an entire village to host the encuentro, welcoming thousands of strangers and neighbors. In the center was a massive field where plays and performances took place daily. As we arrived and looked for a spot to rig up our massive tarp, we passed Zapatistas from the caracol of Oventik who were reenacting the centuries of servitude on the hacienda, the indignities of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Such plays function as a form of storytelling and political participation for the Zapatistas, enabling their communities to engage in historiography and to pass on shared memory. Coming from a land where the memories of struggles barely last a single generation, we bore witness to these acts of collective retelling, inspired by the struggle to wrestle the memory of the past and the rebellious lessons it contains from those who would prefer to consign them to oblivion.
\n\nPerformances of many kinds filled the days, both on the field and elsewhere around the site. Music rang out continuously throughout the encuentro, with brief silences between 4 and 6 am. Even in that silence, one could still hear the low hum of daily life: conversation, the cries of a baby, laughter, animals stirring.
\n\nSurrounding the central field were thousands of bicycles carefully maintained, covered, and guarded by EZLN militants. One could not get within a few feet of the bikes without being asked to back up. Why there were so many bikes and what they are going to do with them remains a mystery to us. Even the EZLN guards seemed at a loss regarding the purpose of the bicycles. Were they a demonstration of their increasing focus on hyper-localism? A feminist praxis? An environmentalist gesture? There is an entire communiqué dedicated to a video of their new bicycle fleet so you can wonder for yourself.
\n\nBeyond the bikes, on the edges of the site, were spaces to eat, receive medical treatment, sleep, wash your clothes, shower, and more.
\n\nThere were many little worlds within the world of the encuentro. The world of the Zapatista-run restaurant for visitors, where people from all over stood in line for over an hour to order from a large menu that was almost always limited to a single item; the world of the cocina para visitantes, a free kitchen, if you could find it, where there were no lines; the world we created under our large tarp, where twenty of us slept on the hard and slanted earth, sliding into each other, staying up late into the night talking about revolution and discussing our situation in the United States while EZLN militants silently marched past us in lines, carrying bowls of beans and cups of coffee up to their camps on the hill above; the world of play, involving us and children and even the dogs; the world of the encounter we shared with a group of Germans who asked us to be in a photo with a banner reading “Freedom to those underground and on the run,” in solidarity with a group of anti-fascists who have recently gone underground to evade the charges brought against them after a fascist gathering in Budapest. Our discussions with them illuminated parallels between the RICO charges in Atlanta and paragraph 129, a similar law increasingly used in Germany to prosecute political organizing as criminal conspiracy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/5.jpg\")
\nAll of these worlds were worlding together in a robust ecosystem, on the basis of shared life and land in common—a defining element of Zapatismo. Indeed, if there was one word that was repeated over and over again, it was commons. The Zapatistas understand the commons as sites of insurgency. The foundation of revolution must be the commons—to share life in common is to revolt together, and to share work in common is to refuse alienation and the isolating effect empire has on life. The commons are an interruption of capitalism. As sites of insurgency, they are antagonistic to capital’s rapid flows. Insofar as time itself has become a function of capital flow today, the commons slow down time. Where time is slower, one can attend to intention—in laughter and joy, discovery and death, play and performance.
\n\nTo us visitors, this intentional, communal action was apparent everywhere: the infrastructure and arrangement of the site, the way ordinary tasks were carried out, the breaking of a piñata. A swarm of children formed a large circle around the piñata, which was decorated as a Yankee monster with an American flag hat, terrifying eyes, and a monopoly spirit. The master of ceremonies let the children take turns swinging as the piñata bounced up and down. Eventually, it cracked open—but to our surprise, no candy fell out. We Americans were accustomed to a downpour of treats and the ravenous race to get what you can—”you better be quick, or it will all run out.” What we saw, instead, was the opposite of competition rooted in a false sense of scarcity and an accelerated temporality. After the piñata broke, the kids were all handed candy in an egalitarian manner; there was enough for everyone, and the kids understood this.
\n\nThis moment illustrated how every ritual conceals the possibility of changing worlds. At the encuentro, it felt as if every action was directed at the development of a historical consciousness as the resilient unfolding of life. This awareness and intentionality is necessitated by the commons and the commons necessitate it. The people and the earth have become reified as opponents alien to each other. The commons represents the reunion of the two in reciprocal liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/4.jpg\")
\nIn the worlds sustained by the bad government, children are relegated to school, away from the serious adults who are focused on the details of their own exploitation. The elderly are imprisoned in senior centers or else often left homeless, deteriorating in the abyss of isolation, taking with them memory and potential wisdom. This makes it difficult to intentionally shape a collective consciousness according to aspirations that are informed by a time frame that extends deep into the past and future. Likewise, when children are not able to participate in memory-making, it is easy to forget about fantasy and possibility. The processes of making history and making memory are intertwined.
\n\nIn Zapatista territory, the youthful and the old are not excluded from social life. A healthy forest includes both old growth trees and saplings, which often grow out of decaying logs alongside their mycelial relations. In this regard, Dolores Hidalgo felt like a healthy forest, creative and alive.
\n\nAs visitors, we borrowed some of the imaginative practices that the Zapatista children shared with us and put on a play of our own. The Zapatistas have always incorporated an internationalist framework. They performed the stories of their struggle for us because they want us to know them, but they also invited all visitors to share in our own ways so that we could learn from each other. We decided to share our struggle via the same mode of communication they were using to share their struggles with us. This meant stepping outside our comfort zones. It challenged us to construct a performance involving a large group of people.
\n\nIn writing the play, we rediscovered how easy and spontaneous collaboration and art making can be. One does not need to be a professional playwright, director, or actor to put on a play. Anyone can do it by maintaining a childlike playfulness and focusing on the most crucial elements of the story. At first, when we were brainstorming, we wanted to include every detail of the struggle: the spiraling of offensive time with weeks of action, the strategy of targeting contractors, and all the different ways people exerted pressure, including home demos, office demos, call-in campaigns, and sabotage.
\n\nWe eventually simplified our narrative to a few key points: we fought the police and protested for Black lives, then we lived communally in the forest to protect it from destruction, then the police raided, ripping a forest defender from their tree house and murdering Tortuguita. At this point in our performance, we lifted up Tortuguita’s body, representing the carrying on of their spirit, and then they walked with us on the path forward. Our bodies, cloaked in black t-shirt balaclavas and carrying branches, became the trees, the animals, the forest defenders, our fallen comrade, and eventually, the fire that burned down the beginnings of Cop City on March 5, 2023. We became the living memory of history, oral history against specialization. Our play ended with everyone, arms linked, in a tight circle facing outward to represent our solidarity in the face of repression. As we slowly moved outward and apart, we beckoned the audience to join us, as our narrator concluded, “This is not an end to our story. The movement continues.”
\n\nFootage of the play that the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective performed at the Zapatista encuentro.
\nTwo nights before we performed our play, we celebrated New Year’s and the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising with the thousands of Zapatistas and others who had gathered in Dolores Hidalgo. Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, over a thousand EZLN fighters in full army fatigues marched in formation, tapping along to the beat of Como Te Voy a Olvidar by Los Ángeles Azules. This time, they were marching with sticks, not guns. Thousands of spectators watched. Most had traveled many hours to be there; many of them were recording on their smartphones.
\n\nThe demonstration was serious yet playful, something the Zapatistas have become known for over the years. The women of the EZLN marched in first, and the men followed, facing towards them. Then the women militants broke out of formation into a skipping dance, waving their arms in invitation, spiraling all around the open field. The performance ended with the men moving simultaneously outward, linking arms to create a perimeter surrounding the entire crowd.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/10.jpg\")
“The women with rebel dignity—EZLN.”
\nThe procession did not display military power, per se. Rather, it attested to the Zapatistas’ continuing ability to organize.
\n\nAs the Zapatistas advanced in their not-so-military formation, we reflected on their saying: lento pero avanzo. Paso a paso, step by step, slowly but advancing, so we can continue our struggle for another ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/1.jpg\")
Lento pero avanzo. Slowly, but we advance.
\nSome of us left the Lancandon jungle with more questions than answers. However, we left with the faith that we had helped to foster deeper connections with the Zapatistas and others around the world. For the friends who had the time to stay, more intimate conversations will be possible in the days following the encuentro.
\n\nThe Zapatistas are able to offer access to land, food, healthcare, education, and a justice system as immediate existential benefits for participating in life in common. This is the recruitment pitch. Sustenance, education, continuity in collective memory, a dignified and communal life.
\n\nThis challenged us to reflect: What are we able to offer? Friendship, cultural events, adventure, collective purpose? If the most that a struggle can do is to temporarily counter our loneliness and alienation, this may not be sufficient to sustain it. If that is all we have to offer, we are only competing with other subcultures to play the same role. On the other hand, we are living in a time when obtaining housing, food, and health care is once again becoming a real struggle for many of those who live in America. Perhaps making some of these necessities available was an important element of what the Weelaunee forest occupation offered. While there are strategic disadvantages to holding space that is vulnerable to attack from all sides, and at worst, occupations may hinder the broadening of a movement beyond a specific location, the loss of the forest as a commons leaves us with the task of creating a commons elsewhere. The question is how.
\n\nThe “how” will necessarily be messy, complicated, and contradictory. That’s the nature of struggle, of operating within a field of forces pushing and pulling in different directions. Zapatista territories are territories in struggle; they are not free of market influence. Zapatistas drive cars, drink Coca Cola, operate roadside stores, use smartphones and social media; we suspect that there is a corner of Facebook where one can find long threads of comments in Tsetal beneath videos of young EZLN men dancing with internationalists. Autonomy is not a question of purity; it is an ongoing practice. It means making breaks from capital and becoming the collective authors of our shared destiny, starting now.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/6.jpg\")
\nThe Zapatistas began this process forty years ago in clandestinity, drawing on decades of consciousness raising and cultural practices that predate capitalist systems altogether. Sometimes these breaks may not look clean. The Zapatista network is not entirely severed from capitalist networks and supply chains; it is a constellation of liberated territories, collective projects, support bases, and flows of information, people, and materials. All the elements of the constellation have varying degrees of relation to capitalism, yet they nevertheless form part of the constellation of struggle. The liberated communal lands, the health clinics, the Zapatista stores in San Cris selling Zapatista-made goods, the pizza restaurants, cinemas, and bars operated by support bases, all of these form part of the constellation that is a community in struggle. This is the reality of the struggle today, in a world in which capitalist relations have colonized every part of the planet.
\n\nBecause struggle is dynamic, and the terrain on which we struggle shifts according to the strategies of our enemies and our own accomplishments and failures, any enduring struggle must be capable of transforming itself. It must be fluid, mutable, flexible, modular, and non-dogmatic. This has been one of the most inspiring elements of the Zapatista fight for life: their continuous ability to reinvent their struggle. This does not mean refusing to set attainable concrete goals, nor does it mean declaring an effort a success when it fails to achieve its goals. Strategies should be falsifiable. It does, however, mean being flexible, always thinking about how to turn each situation to the advantage of the movement, even when it may represent a failure by the original metrics.
\n\nDuring the encuentro, we struck up a conversation with an older Zapatista man, likely in his seventies. He told us he had been involved with the organization since the days of clandestine activity. We asked him how he got involved. “At that time, they were just going door to door, one by one,” he said. Someone came to his door asking if he wanted to join the organization and he agreed. He shared that he has a wife and six children, none of whom wanted to become Zapatistas. The rest of his family are partidistas—they vote for and support the political parties in Mexico’s electoral system. His decision to join the struggle remains a point of contention in his family. He told us that this kind of division is common in Zapatista families. We asked him if, after everything he has been through, he is happy with the state of things for the Zapatistas today. “I’m very sad,” he answered. He explained that for him, the days of being clandestine never ended—that he still cannot go into the city because he is a known Zapatista organizer, that he still sees himself as clandestine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/12.jpg\")
\nThis was just one conversation, but it illustrates something that many internationals don’t realize: for many, the aspirations of the 1994 uprising were much greater than what Zapatismo has become today. Subcomandante Moises echoed this in his speech on New Year’s: “We are as alone now as we were thirty years ago.” When the Zapatistas rose up in 1994, they asked others to get organized and rise up with them, but no one did. While they received a great deal of support and solidarity in the following years, both nationally and internationally, no one took up arms alongside them to overthrow capitalism. Consequently, they did the best they could with the situation they found themselves in.
\n\nIn many ways, this very situation led to the new and creative forms of autonomous organizing that continue to inspire many internationals today. It provides us with an example of what it means to think strategically and dynamically, adapting to changing conditions without losing sight of our goals or setting aside our convictions. It also makes us wonder how things might have turned out if other people had risen up with them, and what hopes and aspirations were never realized by those who fought and died for their revolution. (For further reading on Zapatista organizing and aspirations before the uprising, we recommend John Womack’s Rebellion in Chiapas.)
\n\nThrough the trials and tribulations, across the shifting terrain of struggle, the Zapatistas continue to attract new participants by relatively simple means. They offer a real alternative to the existing capitalist and state systems. They offer people land and health, the fundamentals for a dignified life. Questions of land have always been at the heart of the Zapatista struggle. They recovered large amounts of land after the 1994 uprising, which provided fertile soil for growing crops.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/9.jpg\")
\nIn addition, the Zapatistas offer a communal form of organization to manage the land and formal processes for dealing with land disputes. They also operate autonomous health clinics in each of their caracoles. These clinics are often the closest place to get healthcare in rural areas, for Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike. This care is free, apart from the cost of any medication prescribed, which is sold at cost. This means that, especially for rural people, Zapatista autonomous health clinics are often the most affordable option accessible.
\n\nThe way they attract new people to their ranks, then, is by offering alternatives to the life that capitalism can provide. This challenges us to ask ourselves: what do we have to offer people? How can we provide viable alternatives to the ways of living offered by the capitalist system?
\n\nWe recommend reading the entirety of the newest series of Zapatista communiqués, all of which can be found here. You can read a foundational primer on the Zapatista rebellion here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/3.jpg\")
\nStarting in April 2021, people in Atlanta, Georgia set out to defend Weelaunee Forest, where politicians and profiteers are attempting to build a police training compound known as Cop City. Over the past two and a half years, this movement has given rise to one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Opponents of Cop City have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project, while the authorities have killed one forest defender and pressed outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective.
\n\nIn the previous chapter of our chronicle of the struggle against Cop City, we described the difficulties that the movement faced after the murder of Tortuguita on January 18, 2023 and the police raids on the South River Music Festival and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. In the following account, we trace the trajectory of the movement from the June 5 City Council vote in favor of Cop City through the November Block Cop City mobilization and its aftermath.
\n\nComparing the movement that began in 2021 to the struggle as it exists at the close of 2023 feels nearly impossible. Many of the horizons that were open to the movement when it began have been definitively blocked. It has become impossible to defend the forest by occupying it; construction of the facility is underway, though it has been repeatedly delayed. Yet the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest has continued to evolve despite the attacks of the Attorney General, federal agencies, and local police. In this chapter, we will explore how the movement has managed to maintain a participatory and confrontational character, even under tremendous pressure.
\n\n\n\n\n“Thought it would be over by now, but it won’t stop”
\n\n-Destiny’s Child, “Survivor”
\n
For background on the first two and a half years of the movement:
\n\nThree and a half years ago, twenty million people rose up to fight police and the structural white supremacy that they exist to impose. For a short time, it appeared that police abolition could become a realistic possibility in the United States; but politicians, universally dependent upon the police, ultimately blocked any attempts to so much as defund or reform police departments. Afterwards, people in Atlanta, Georgia set out to use direct action to block the flow of public resources to police by preventing the construction of Cop City.
\n\nA great deal has changed in those three and a half years.
\n\nOn September 27, a Philadelphia judge dismissed all charges against the police officers who murdered Eddie Irizarry. In response, people organizing via social media began vandalizing businesses, looting stores, and setting fires in various part of the city. This mobilization built on social tensions that have been percolating since the protests in response to the murder of Walter Wallace by local police in 2020. Yet this time, the activist left largely stayed home. Those who are already on the receiving end of most of the violence of the police were left to go it alone, as they were in the days before the George Floyd rebellion.
\n\nThe following month, protesters returned to the streets in response to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, blockading transportation infrastructure and stopping work at arms manufacturers like Raytheon. As early as October 19, a poll showed that most US voters (including 55% from the Republican party and 80% of Democrats) supported a ceasefire.
\n\nUndeterred, the United States government is sending tens of billions of dollars of military aid to the Israeli military. This is essentially a gift card, in that most of the aid must be spent on weapons supplied by US-based firms. This war stimulus to the US economy enables Washington to channel a secret budget into the pockets of arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin that is not included in the annual Congressional allocation. War is making a small number of people extremely wealthy.
\n\nSome large firms, including Wells Fargo, worry that the war is creating an atmosphere of “deglobalization” that could hurt their profits in the long run. But this has not shifted US foreign policy any more than the mass murder of thousands of Palestinian children has. It appears that some elements of the ruling class anticipate a future in which it will be more profitable to bank on war than on peace.
\n\nThis has serious implications for us all. If we don’t organize accordingly now, our future may be bleak indeed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/10.jpg\")
\nFall of 2023 was the first time since the beginning of the movement to stop Cop City that large numbers of protesters mobilized around any issue in the United States. The movement in Atlanta emerged after the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, during the period of social peace and political disorganization that typically follows large protest movements. If the echoes of the 2020 uprising were never entirely suppressed, we owe that to the initiative of the movement in Atlanta and those who acted in solidarity with it elsewhere, as well as the persistence of young Black and Brown people who continue to resist state terror in places like Philadelphia.
\n\nTo overcome the obstacles confronting the movement in Atlanta will require long-term, large-scale mobilization. The actions of individuals and small dedicated groups have created a context in which a mass outbreak of revolt could have the most radical content currently imaginable, possibly paving the way for a more serious movement against carceral infrastructure all over the country. But such an outcome is by no means guaranteed. The movement has already experienced several flashpoints, including the murder of Tortuguita; these have given it greater visibility without mobilizing massive numbers of new participants.
\n\nNonetheless, the story is not over, and the stakes are high. Now is not the time for backing down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/3.jpg\")
The authorities in Atlanta appear to be prepared to prioritize channeling millions of dollars to the police above all else, including their own democratic protocols—even if it leaves them standing atop a pile of ash. A photograph of the aftermath of the demonstration of March 5, 2023.
\nOn June 6, 2023, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve an additional $67 million for Cop City after more than thirteen hours of public comment against the project—the largest participation in a City Hall meeting in Atlanta history. After the vote, the names and addresses of the councilmembers who voted “yes” appeared online. Various local outlets subsequently published articles platforming the councilmembers. Councilmembers Bakhtiari and Westmoreland, the former who voted “no” and the latter who voted “yes,” met at a local restaurant and posed for pictures together, reasserting their alliance as gay councilmembers, denouncing radical politics, and calling for “calm” in the face of angry responses to the charade that the City Council had choreographed on June 5 and 6. The next day, June 7, Mayor Andre Dickens was doxxed.
\n\nThese doxxings appear to have been conducted by the same group that had published the names and addresses of the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Buckhead Coalition. The documents were signed by a group calling itself the “Free & Rowdy Party,” a reference to one of the early political organizations in Atlanta history, colloquially known as the “party of militant disorder.” The Rowdies frequently clashed with the other major party, known as the Moral Party.
\n\nThe following Monday, on July 8, a group of protesters associated with the Stop Cop City Coalition announced the formation of a new organizing group called Cop City Vote. The idea was to collect signatures for a petition demanding a referendum. If successful, this would compel the City to place the land-lease contract between the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation on a popular ballot, enabling Atlanta voters to decide the future of the project.
\n\nThe new group got to work with great haste, establishing online platforms, writing statements, and building an organizational model that would enable a large number of people to volunteer to canvass the public. The referendum process only allows for registered City of Atlanta voters to participate—excluding most of those who live closest to the forest, which is just outside city limits. The participants had to cover a large area in short time: according to Georgia law, from the day a petition is filed, the petitioner has only 60 days to turn in signatures in order to initiate a referendum. In this case, the petitioners would have to submit 70,330 signatures (15% of the city population), collected in less than two months. By comparison, only 97,000 voters altogether participated in the 2021 mayoral election. Collecting so many signatures was a bold ambition, and it faced illegal obstruction from the beginning.
\n\nOn June 7, Cop City Vote delivered a referendum petition to City of Atlanta Clerk Vannessa Waldron. This legal document initiates the process of signature collection upon approval, thus starting the 60-day countdown. In order to place Cop City on the November ballot, organizers would have to submit the signatures they collected by no later than August 15. If the signatures were turned in after that date, the referendum would go on the March ballot. Clerk Waldron denied the petition, citing obscure legal technicalities. A week later, on July 14, Waldron denied the second petition, again on obscure clerical premises. This second denial prompted popular outcry.
\n\nBy denying the petition on July 14, the city government hoped to make it impossible for the organizers to deliver the signatures by the August 15 deadline. This was a pre-emptive attack on the referendum—the first stage of a long campaign targeting the initiative. It’s worth noting that while in times of social peace, the authorities would presumably have welcomed the opportunity to channel a combative movement into electoral reformism, in this case, they were not prepared to make any compromises, not even permitting citizens to utilize their legal rights.
\n\nIn response, organizers filed a lawsuit against the Clerk. Public figures such as Senator Raphael Warnock called on the city government to permit the process to move forward. On July 21, Waldron approved the petition. Signature collection could finally begin.
\n\nOn July 27, a US District Court ruled in favor of the canvassers. This was one of the first legal rulings in favor of the movement since it began in April 2021. The court ruled that the illegal restrictions placed on the petition-collection process, specifically the clause that disqualifies non-residents from so much as knocking on doors to collect signatures, violates the First Amendment. Consequently, the judge gave organizers an additional 60 days to collect signatures.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/2.jpg\")
Organizers petitioning for a referendum on Cop City established a presence across Atlanta, building offices and information points in community centers and places of worship.
\nOrganizing efforts around the City Hall protests and the referendum enabled the movement to overcome a few barriers. Nearly 800 people volunteered to collect signatures for the referendum process. Dozens of abolitionists and radical organizers composed a curriculum to train those volunteers and strategized about how to best distribute their energies across the city. From mid-June to mid-September, these volunteers could be seen everywhere. Posters, stickers, signs, and memorabilia filled coffee shops, bars, local grocery stores, tattoo parlors, bookshops, farmers markets, and art galleries. On busy avenues, volunteers walked up and down the sidewalks, speaking with all passersby. In just a few months, hundreds of thousands of residents spoke with canvassers; this gave them a chance to ask them questions, learn about Cop City, and discuss the resistance to it, generating a new level of mass sympathy with the movement.
\n\nIn the canvasser trainings, aspiring canvassers were explicitly instructed not to denounce sabotage, vandalism, or clashes with law enforcement. If they did not feel comfortable explaining those phenomena, they could simply change the subject, or they could humbly listen, then find a way to reassert the purpose of the petition. The referendum organizers themselves asserted continuously that the strength of the movement derived in no small part from sabotage, vandalism, and other combative tactics. They published written statements affirming the validity of “all tactics.” Contrary to the anxieties of some internet commentators, the referendum campaign was not intended to suppress or compete with direct action. Most participants in the effort simply wanted to establish a path for the movement that could involve a large number of metro Atlanta residents.
\n\nThe movement has had many strengths, but mass participation has never been among them. Despite continuous attempts to foster a creative and contagious movement, despite robust media coverage locally, nationally, and globally, no more than 2000 people have ever participated in any one event opposing Cop City. Despite the accessible action framework demonstrated by the groups targeting contractors and funders, only ideologically driven and risk-tolerant groups have participated in those actions, usually using a clandestine approach. The largest event by far was the South River Music Festival, which drew in a couple thousand people over two days in March 2023. Most protests, rallies, and marches have drawn between ten and two hundred people. When Tortuguita was killed, only 300 people showed up downtown in response, two thirds of them hooded militants in black masks. This has consequences for what those who do participate can actually do, because some kinds of action are only possible in large crowds.
\n\nThe movement has made considerable headway nonetheless. It has found ways to turn its small size to its advantage. Centering a small, dedicated core has enabled the participants to advance revolutionary discourse throughout the movement and to conduct militant actions with greater tactical agility.
\n\nYet countless historical examples suggest that this pattern cannot be maintained forever. If frontline fighters cannot keep supply lines open, take breaks, receive new assistance, and rely on the resources and security provided by sympathizers and newly radicalized people, they will eventually lose. This concern is not derived from abstract political concepts or folded-and-stapled booklets; it has been proven time and again across centuries and continents. For example, the legendary focoista campaigns of the 20th century drew together some of the most dedicated, audacious, and extreme sectors of the Latin American revolutionary left in clashes with the armies and paramilitaries of various CIA-backed dictatorships. Aside from exceptions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, and El Salvador, these campaigns resulted in the near-complete decimation of an entire generation of revolutionaries. An isolated vanguard—however dedicated or secretive—is doomed to defeat.
\n\nCounterinsurgency strategy explicitly seeks to create a gulf between dedicated militants and the rest of society in order to target the former and immobilize the latter. Acknowledging this does not oblige committed militants to pursue populist strategies to appeal to an imagined mass of people, but it does open the question of what the alternatives might be.
\n\nSome participants in the movement insist that all strategies oriented towards “society” in general are naïve and “liberal.” A few go further, asserting without any measurable criteria that only clandestine sabotage “works.”1 But without widespread participation, even the fiercest vanguard cannot move beyond hit-and-run actions. They will never be able to advance to open confrontations (which the historic proponents of guerrilla warfare understood as a necessary step in their strategies). Without more participants, actions such as the march in downtown Atlanta on January 21 or the march to the construction site on March 5 will remain the high points of combativity from the movement. Those actions did not succeed in bringing about the cancellation of Cop City. In order to move from clandestine attacks to winnable confrontations, the movement needs a more robust way of understanding the relationship between the actions of anonymous saboteurs and more accessible, participatory forms of widespread self-organized activity.
\n\nIf a few thousand more people dedicated themselves to the fight, that would increase the capacity of the fighters by an order of magnitude. There are worthwhile and necessary tasks to conduct in clandestinity, in public organizing, and in fundraising. The relatively small size and ferocity of the movement so far has contributed to a kind of mythologizing of the protagonists, so that the most dedicated participants are seen as heroes (or demons, depending on who you ask) while most of the supporters and public remain passive spectators. When a movement is structured as a small, sharp, edge passively observed by spectators, the latter, as a consequence of their inactivity, will tend to oscillate wildly between sympathy and skepticism. To succeed, movements must inspire the self-organized activity, theoretical development, and participation of as many people as possible. Real militancy is not showing people bold actions; it is enabling them to act for themselves.
\n\nThose who are skeptical of the value of mobilizing people to speak at City Hall or organizing people to petition for a referendum must accept that they will remain a marginal force in the movement unless they themselves take on the burden of organizing alternative strategies to engage large numbers of people. So far, the proponents of no other strategy have succeeded in doing so, and few have even tried.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/7.jpg\")
Police intimidation of ordinary protest activity has become the norm in Atlanta.
\nNot everyone pursued the referendum strategy, although everyone was affected by the shifting landscape of repression. On June 23, Dekalb County District Attorney Sherri Boston announced that her office would no longer participate in the terrorism cases against the movement. In a televised press conference, she referred to the “fundamentally different” philosophies of prosecution that distinguished her office from the office of Chris Carr, Attorney General of Georgia. She also cited pressure applied against her by the public in the form of incessant phone calls and letters as a factor in her decision. This shifted all legal responsibilities and initiative into the hands of the most reactionary forces in the state, signaling that the Dekalb County Government hoped to wash its hands of the ongoing public relations disaster that they have helped to create by participating in the lethal raid on January 18 and closing Intrenchment Creek Park (a part of the Weelaunee Forest).
\n\nThe following day, June 24, the sixth Week of Action began. It shared almost no common features with the previous four, though it was somewhat reminiscent of the first such week, held in October 2021. Rather than Weelaunee Forest, workshops and talks took place in Brownwood Park, located in East Atlanta Village. Rather than centering the capacities of the movement to leverage nationwide support with concentrated militancy, the sixth Week of Action involved very few protests, no mass encampment, and few cultural events. It was so different from previous Weeks that it was as if an altogether different constellation of groups had organized it.
\n\nOn the first day, over 100 people gathered in Brownwood Park. By late afternoon, they were surrounded by police vehicles and surveilled by drones and helicopters. At 8:30 pm, Belkis Teran, the mother of Tortuguita, gathered people in the park to host a vigil and ceremony for her deceased child. At that point, dozens of officers entered the area, barking orders and pointing at people, instructing those assembled that if they were not gone when the park closed (three hours later), they would be subject to arrest. The crowd did not hesitate to confront the officers, yelling at them and telling them to leave the premises. When a few people with tactical experience began encircling police and calling for others to do the same, the officers quickly withdrew. This brief confrontation was cathartic for participants, but nonetheless had the intended chilling effect. After the vigil, everyone left the park. Later in the evening, deep in the Weelaunee Forest, hundreds of people gathered for an illegal dance party. Music blared late into the night as forest defenders and ravers shared the comforting embrace of the trees. However, this was not the section of the forest slated for demolition. No encampment was established there, nor in the park, nor anywhere else.
\n\nThe following day, June 25, over 100 people re-assembled in the park. The atmosphere was jubilant and friendly. Participants shared food and assembled beneath a gazebo for a presentation on the limits of referendum strategies, conducted in a comradely and good-faith tone. Elsewhere in town, activists passed out fliers for forthcoming events. For the most part, the day was uneventful—with one exception.
\n\nThat night, anonymous activists ventured onto the headquarters of the Brent Scarborough Company. Brent Scarborough, located almost an hour south of Atlanta in the suburb of Newnan, is the subcontractor that Brasfield & Gorrie hired to cut down trees and grade the land at the Prison Farm. Their facility is surrounded by trees and barbed wire fencing. They hired on-site security to park overnight at the office. This did not stop a few dedicated people from sabotaging their machines. According to an online communiqué, the activists hiked through the woods and scaled the fences using a cut-out square of carpet, as seen in the Hollywood film Fight Club. Sneaking past the security guards, they poured muriatic acid into the engines of multiple trucks and machines before escaping into the night.
\n\nAside from a few movie screenings and workshops, no events were planned for the following days. Several were planned for June 28.
\n\nAt midday, a small crowd gathered outside of Cadence Bank in downtown Atlanta. The bank was slated to offer a multimillion-dollar loan to the Atlanta Police Foundation; activists wanted to give them cause to reconsider. After a few minutes, police chased and dispersed the crowd. In the skirmish, a few people were pulled free of the police, but two were arrested. One person was ultimately charged with Felony Obstruction. Between harassing the vigil for Tortuguita and this, police sought to establish a new balance of force in which they could control the streets, so that activists would be reduced to knocking on doors.
\n\nA few hours later, around 4 pm, two hundred people gathered in Gresham Park. Belkis Teran joined them. The crowd held reinforced banners. Scouts observed several dozen police vehicles in the parking lot of Intrenchment Creek Park and dozens of officers in riot gear. The crowd marched down the same bicycle path that another crowd had during the fifth Week of Action in order to re-occupy the park on March 4, 2023. Morale was high.
\n\nApproaching the wooden bridge passing over Snow Creek just east of Intrenchment Creek Park, the crowd encountered multiple police cruisers stationed next to the path, near Cottonwood Drive. Helicopters circled overhead. At the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, which marks the true entrance to Intrenchment Creek Park, police had erected cement barriers and formed a skirmish line. The crowd stopped before encountering any of this directly. Belkis took a megaphone and delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd. Others spoke as well, including demonstrators wearing balaclavas and gloves. Had the crowd been a few hundred more, this demonstration might have confronted the police and retaken the forest.
\n\nThe crowd turned back, without losing morale, soberly assessing the situation. There were nearly as many police as protesters, and it was better to only fight when success was plausible. Any further advance would likely have provoked a dramatic clash in which police would have had the upper hand. If the movement had been in a phase in which it was necessary to assert its militancy, this might have been worthwhile. On the contrary, however, the movement had already demonstrated its militancy; what was necessary at this point was to show that it could win confrontations while minimizing losses.
\n\nAt that point, the preparedness of the police could still be ascribed to the proximity to the forest. The authorities were clearly committed to preventing new encampments from being established there. But the protests the following day showed that this was not simply a question of the securing the forest, but of seeking to crush the whole movement.
\n\nOn June 29, a small number of people assembled on Ponce de Leon, intending to picket Home Depot, a sponsor of the APF. They met a massive police mobilization. Police cruisers filled the parking lot, perhaps 100 yards long. The construction and hardware retailer closed for the day pre-emptively. A few dozen people stood on the sidewalk chanting slogans and holding signs for passing traffic. This did not appear to be a militant group; they were ostensibly not prepared to engage in confrontations with the authorities or their corporate sponsors. That did not protect them, however. Abruptly, Atlanta Police grabbed an elderly protester and handcuffed her. The demonstration was aggressively dispersed by officers barking orders and grabbing signs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/1.jpg\")
Protesters march down the bike path between Gresham Park and Intrenchment Creek Park during the sixth Week of Action on June 28, 2023.
\nThe following day, June 30, over 100 people gathered again in Brownwood Park. Once again, the Weelaunee Coalition hosted a youth-led rally in defense of the forest and against Cop City. This may have been the only event of the week that was not harassed by law enforcement, including the movie screenings and talks. Thankfully, these children were not subjected to the direct intimidation that the rest of the movement experienced.
\n\nIn the three days following the sixth Week of Action, clandestine groups claimed responsibility for several attacks against Cop City.
\n\nThe first took place in California. Activists released a statement claiming credit for smashing the windows of four banks and the screens of three ATMs in San Francisco, Oakland, and Concord. Over the preceding two and a half years, several dozen offices and institutions had suffered broken windows due to their support for the Atlanta Police Foundation, but this was the largest number of locations targeted simultaneously—implying that the saboteurs were scaling up their numbers and coordination.
\n\nAnonymous saboteurs struck multiple targets in Atlanta on July 1 as well. A clandestine group calling itself the March 5th Movement—a reference to the March 5, 2023 attack on the Cop City construction site—vandalized police infrastructure in two locations. Tagging “M5M” on the hood of a police cruiser, they smashed the windows out of three cop cars on Memorial Drive and unsuccessfully attempted to set them on fire. Simultaneously, improvised incendiary devices appeared in the parking garage beneath the current Atlanta Police training facility located in an industrial area at the southern boundary of Atlanta. This second action resulted in the burning of eight police motorcycles. According to government press conferences, an additional improvised device failed to detonate. Police claim that if it had, it would have assured the burning of 40 additional vehicles. The Chief of Police and the Atlanta Journal Constitution published photographs of the device. Officials claim that the entire facility could have been destroyed if an off-duty officer had not been randomly driving by at the time. Apparently, no one was inside the building at the time of the action.
\n\nOn July 2, protesters visited the residence of Cop City architect Anthony Kenny, vandalizing it with paint and slashing the tires of his car. Ambrish Baisiwala, who sits on the Atlanta Police Foundation Board of Trustees, received the same treatment that night.
\n\nThe same day, July 2, protesters gathered outside the suburban home of a regional manager for Atlas Technical Consultants in Minnesota, chanting slogans and banging on drums in his yard. The regional manager stormed out his front door screaming and cursing at the demonstrators. He told those assembled that Atlas had already dropped the contract. When someone in the crowd asked him why, he answered “Because you guys are a fucking nightmare” and “You broke all of our fucking windows.”
\n\nAfter this news spread online, some people in Williston, Vermont visited the offices of Atlas on July 9, painting slogans on the work trucks and front doors of the facility. The next day, Atlas Technical confirmed with an independent journalist that they had backed out of the project. The following week, asked about Atlas’ decision at a press conference about Cop City, Atlanta Police chief Darin Shierbaum said “Well, if people were coming to your home, what would you do?”
\n\nLater, documents released on November 30 indicated that Atlas had apparently withdrawn from the project the preceding March. The company expressed the desire to withdraw from the project on March 4. By the 7, they were already off the contract. The document reveals much about the internal status of the project and its investigations into the movement, including the potentially illegal collusion of various agencies with Magnus Miller Gorrie over encrypted Signal chats. It also catalogues a number of actions for which no public claim of responsibility was ever made, such as February 21, 2023 burning of an Atlas Technical office and vehicle in Brecksville, Ohio.
\n\nThe departure of Atlas represented a significant victory for the movement. In the winter of 2021, as detailed in The City in the Forest, 50 forest defenders had marched to the prison farm to resist the soil-boring and sampling conducted by Long Engineering, a subsidiary of Atlas Technical Consultants. Finally, after over two years of home visits, call-ins, letter writing, marches, rallies, vandalism, and clashes, a major Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractor had backed out of the project. Despite this success, the news did not catalyze a significant uptick in the pressure campaign against other subcontractors of Brasfield & Gorrie, other clients of the Atlanta Police Foundation, or the project itself. It did not give people the sense that greater resistance to Cop City was possible.
\n\nIn view of this, it is worth reevaluating that campaign. More on that below.
\n\nIn audio engineering, “equalization” (EQ) means adjusting the frequencies to produce the ideal sound and tone. Broadly speaking, these frequencies are divided into bass, mid-range, and treble. Insofar as taste is completely subjective, there is no “correct” way to EQ a song. In general, however, it is agreed that any EQ that completely obscures a frequency is undesirable, because that means that a given instrument or sound will be covered up by other sounds. For instance, there are many high-end frequencies in the snare drum and cymbals; without proper equalization, high-end frequencies in vocals, guitar, or keyboard can be completely covered up by the drum sounds, or all of them can bleed together in an unintelligible cacophony.
\n\nIn music parlance, to “scoop the mids” is to turn down the mid-range frequencies below the bass or treble frequencies. In heavy metal, people often “scoop the mids” to produce an aggressive guitar tone, imitating the recordings of Metallica or Pantera. Unfortunately, if the mid-range of the guitars is “scooped” too much, a live audience will not be able to hear them over the drums and bass. Experienced bands know that to deliver a crisp, hard-hitting, intelligible sound, you need to include a certain amount of mid-range frequencies in the guitar EQ.
\n\nImagine that civic efforts such as canvassing for the referendum and speaking at City Hall represent the “treble” of resistance, while nocturnal sabotage, vandalism, fire-setting, and clandestine attacks represent the “bass.” In this metaphor, the “mid-range” is comprised of public demonstrations, marches, forest encampments, walk-outs, and riotous protests—actions that are both combative and participatory. The police strategy since December 13, 2022 has been to “scoop” the mid-range of the movement, pushing down the middle frequency as much as possible.
\n\nThis has created a situation that intensifies the contrast between underground and civic actions. Those who imagine that some forms of resistance are more intrinsically worthy than others welcome this situation, because it makes it easier to center their preferred approaches while deriding the others. The forcible suppression of space for participatory action protects participants from testing the viability of their concepts in open dialogue with alternative viewpoints. Prosecutors and police like this situation for the same reason: it makes the line very clear between those engaging in legal protest activity and those engaging in clandestine direct action.
\n\nBut it is precisely the middle frequencies of a movement that give it its punch—making its rhythms infectious, enabling it to move people and draw them into a process of transformation. Without these frequencies, the results will be muddy and indistinct.
\n\nIf activists cannot re-assert their right to gather publicly for “mid-range” activities, nocturnal sabotage and civic actions will drift further and further apart, becoming mutually unintelligible and incapable of reaching those outside the movement. Regardless of individual preferences, everyone must recognize the importance of participatory, confrontational activity.
\n\nOn July 2, Governor Kemp released a statement describing the March 5th Movement attacks as “the tactics of organized criminals,” while avoiding using the name of the group. On July 3, activists visited the private residence of Keith Johnson, the pre-construction regional director for Brasfield & Gorrie. Protesters had visited his house repeatedly over the preceding two and a half years. As a result, his multi-house estate had hired full-time security to park in his driveway. This did not stop activists from climbing over the fence into his yard.
\n\nAccording to an online statement, saboteurs entered the Johnson estate and dumped paint on the main house, spray-painted slogans on his cars, and painted messages on his driveway next to the vehicle of the security guard. They also dumped motor oil into his swimming pool. Finally, they unloaded buckets of rotten fish into the pool and backyard. This may be among the most serious actions targeting an executive in recent US history.
\n\nThe next day, on the Fourth of July, anonymous forest defenders torched two machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company in broad daylight. This action took place at the same site where other machines belonging to the Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractor had been sabotaged after the fifth Week of Action in spring 2023. Since the action in the spring, the site had been guarded nearly around the clock by private security. Activists targeted the location on the holiday, correctly predicting a lapse in security coverage.
\n\nThese actions sent the Atlanta and Georgia administrations into a panic.
\n\nA month later, on August 2, Atlanta Police, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, Department of Homeland Security, the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) department, and the Fire Marshal held a joint press conference in which they publicized technical details of the previous months’ actions, including how and why they took place. The Police Chief announced an increase in the cash reward for the parties behind these actions; this suggests that the authorities did not have adequate information to go on. That did not stop them from baselessly claiming that the saboteurs did not represent the broader movement opposed to Cop City or committed to the defense of Weelaunee, alleging that they were a “very small” group. More likely, the anonymous saboteurs were not a “group” at all.
\n\nAs the actions in Atlanta slowed and canvassers continued fanning out to talk with residents and acquire signatures, bold actions continued elsewhere, including the burning of multiple Asheville police cruisers just after Atlanta police announced they would host recruitment events in that city. A week and a half later, a raucous crowd disrupted another Atlanta police recruitment event in New York City, blocking the doors of the event despite the efforts of the NYPD. At the end of the month, on August 30, the March 5th Movement claimed credit for placing an incendiary device on the truck of Vertiv Corporation in Milwaukie, Oregon. Vertiv is a logistics and technology company providing technical aid to the Atlanta Police Department.
\n\nWith the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the “tactics of organized criminals” language Governor Kemp used on July 2 was not just boilerplate copy drafted by an intern, nor was the August 2 press conference simply propaganda to assure backers that the state could still protect their investments. These phrases and statements were shaping operations, carefully crafted interventions designed to position the government for their next operation: the blanket criminalization of the entire movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/5.jpg\")
Governor Brian Kemp sets the stage for the RICO charges, seeking to isolate the defendants targeted by the state from their supporters in August 2023.
\nOn August 29, the Attorney General of Georgia, Christopher M. Carr, filed an indictment with the Fulton County Superior Court, bringing charges against 61 people under Georgia’s version of the Rackeeter-Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act O.C.G.A. § 16-14-4. The indictment became public on September 5. The document, which is over 100 pages long and very poorly written, claims that the “conspiracy” (which it names “Defend the Atlanta Forest”) was “founded” on May 25, 2020—the day that Minneapolis Police officers murdered George Floyd, precipitating a nationwide uprising.
\n\nThis was a serious escalation. It did not catch everyone by surprise: the Atlanta Solidarity Fund has been braced for such charges since February. The authorities and their extreme-right proxies had been demanding a full-scale crackdown on the movement for over a year, spreading a conspiracy theory that the movement was a mafia controlled by a shadowy and well-connected group (a narrative some activists also reproduced, apparently with no sense of irony). According to one version of this conspiracy theory, circulated by far-right trolls, the Network for Stronger Communities (a Georgia-based nonprofit organization) operates a number of financial enterprises, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, that coordinate acts of terrorism in order to accumulate wealth and influence. Of the 61 accused, three were members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The 42 people already facing Domestic Terrorism charges were also indicted, as well as a number of other people whose connection to the movement was unclear. The indictment alleged that some people had committed acts in “overt furtherance of the conspiracy” such as buying glue sticks for sign-making.
\n\nThe RICO indictment was not a legal procedure but a political act. It was not a judicial intervention to suppress criminal activity but a government measure to crush what the text describes as “anarchism,” “collectivism,” “social solidarity,” “mutual aid.”
\n\nIt is not simply 61 people who are on trial. By dating the case to the murder of George Floyd, the prosecution showed that their real target was the entire population of millions that participated in the consequent revolt. This is not an unusual court case, but a new chapter in the fight between those who seek to preserve the hierarchies of a structurally white supremacist society and those fighting to destroy it root and branch. The indictment does not present a list of crimes. It describes the contours and values of a rival society emerging within the movement to stop Cop City, aspiring to reinvent the world according to a different logic.
\n\nThe Fulton County Judge assigned to the RICO case immediately recused himself. Until then, judges had not recused themselves from cases related to the movement even when they possessed obvious ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation.
\n\nRICO cases are becoming a generic strategy of prosecution in Georgia. The local statutes are conveniently vague, allowing the government to bring conspiracy charges against people who do not even know one another, as in the case against the movement. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis uses RICO charges for a wide range of purposes, including sending teachers to prison for doctoring test answers in a low-income area.
\n\nIn May 2022, Atlanta-based rapper Young Thug was indicted alongside 27 others under the Georgia RICO statute. In August 2023, former US President Donald Trump was indicted alongside 18 others on the same charges. Although the RICO cases currently in progress represent rival factions of the political class, the same grand jury that indicted Donald Trump is responsible for indicting those accused of “racketeering” for protesting Cop City.
\n\nThe court system is the central infrastructure for directing state violence. Though naïve Democrats may imagine it to be a check on the aspirations of autocrats, it naturally lends itself to all forms of repression targeting the oppressed, and that is the chief role that it will always play.
\n\nThe movement swiftly responded to the charges. The language of the indictment was specifically phrased to imply that any protest or action in the forest by nature of being in the forest constitutes an act of terrorism in “overt furtherance of the conspiracy,” i.e., racketeering. To challenge this framing, on September 8, clergy associated with the “Faith Coalition” rushed the construction site at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm and chained themselves to heavy machinery, stopping work for the day. Officers eventually arrived to arrest them, but only charged them with simple misdemeanors. Journalists captured this courageous action on video. In only three days, the movement had broken the state of shock that the charges had created. Nothing was finished.
\n\nIn the following days, over 100 people marched to the Georgia State Capitol building, denouncing the charges. Sunrise Movement Ann Arbor marched in Michigan, demanding that Accident Fund drop its insurance coverage for the Police Foundation. In Kingston, New York, people held a vigil for those killed by state terrorism or charged with RICO. A crowd rallied outside the local “Safety Center” in Carbondale, Illinois. Graffiti denouncing the charges appeared throughout Minneapolis. In Phoenix, activists the blocked entrances to the offices of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the APF. Two activists in Elliston, Virginia locked down to construction equipment for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in solidarity with the lock-downs in Atlanta. On September 10, protesters in Chicago blocked streets and broke windows at a Chase Bank. The next day, anarchists in Olympia, Washington broke windows at an Arby’s, citing the connection that their parent company, Inspire Brands, had to the APF.
\n\nThe RICO charges offered new clarity to the stakes of the struggle. The summer of 2023 had seen a lull for the combative part of the movement after the sixth Week of Action; the repression immediately catalyzed a response.
\n\nOn September 11, the referendum organizers turned in 116,000 signatures demanding a popular vote on the future of Cop City—more than twice the number of votes Andre Dickens had received in the run-off election that made him Mayor.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/6.jpg\")
Clergy chain themselves to machines belonging to Brent Scarborough company just days after the Attorney General indicts 61 people on RICO.
\nThe referendum initiative terrified the local administration and the Cop City funders. The specter of a popular vote unsettled the confidence of the pro-Cop City coalition because it called all the reassurances of the Police Foundation into question. If the contract was not a sure thing, what kind of institution would lend or donate millions of dollars to it? This question surely haunted the offices of the Police Foundation and Mayor’s office. They must have felt they needed to do something definitive to silence internal skepticism.
\n\nOn September 29, 2023, Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon published the full legal names, phone numbers, and home addresses of the 116,000 Atlanta residents who had signed the petition for a referendum, posting them on the website of the Atlanta government. Taking her cue, fascist groups began sharing this list online. Many on the list feared that stalkers and abusers would hunt them down.
\n\nIn response, within 24 hours, the Free & Rowdy Party doxxed the members of the Atlanta Committee for Progress, using Vanessa Waldon’s act of repression as an opportunity to catalyze further actions against Cop City. The Atlanta Committee for Progress is a coalition of powerful industrial and bourgeois delegates who collude to maintain the clientelist system known as the Atlanta Way, described in The City in the Forest. These delegates include the CEOs of many international corporations, universities, and institutions. No previous doxxes had targeted figures of such stature and influence.
\n\nA few days later, on October 1, an excavator belonging to Brent Scarborough Company caught fire. This was the third attack against the company at the location of Sawtell and McDonough, near the Federal Penitentiary. While this action did not address the 116,000 people who had been doxxed by the government, perhaps missing a chance to communicate with a huge number of people, it did demonstrate that the fighting spirit of the movement had not been extinguished by the RICO charges, nor the repression of the referendum petitioning process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/4.jpg\")
The delivery of 116,000 signatures demanding a referendum. Later, City Clerk Vannessa Waldron would publish them unredacted on the city government website in a retaliatory gesture.
\nOn October 3, a Georgia Open Records Act (GORA) request revealed that the office of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens had been speaking with the White House since at least June 2023. City officials had been communicating with White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs representative Julie Rodriguez. Rodriguez believes, according to these notes, that Cop City is “exemplary” of what President Biden “would like to see other municipalities emulate.” Finally, the White House offered to send “an official of your choice” to visit the site.
\n\nAnother document made available through the GORA request revealed that the Department of Homeland Security published an overview analysis of the movement on January 3, 2023, two weeks before the killing of Tortuguita. Their report included a map of specifically destructive actions across the country, arguing that the movement would continue to inspire acts of “domestic violent extremism” if it was able to persist.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/8.jpg\")
A map of Stop Cop City actions across the country, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security.
\nThe picture is becoming clearer. Local authorities, unable to mitigate the effects of the movement against their project, have been drawing in greater and greater forces to assist them. This began with the coordination of interdepartmental raids (“security sweeps,” in the official doublespeak) on the forest in May 2022. This interdepartmental coordination slowly pulled in more agencies from across the metropolitan area, eventually culminating in a statewide raid on the forest in December followed by the infamous lethal raid led by Georgia State Patrol in January 2023. In March, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security in interrogating music festival attendees detained in or near Intrenchment Creek Park. Statements from the Governor’s office have become increasingly common, while Congresspeople like Marjorie Taylor Green have denounced the movement and demanded a clampdown.
\n\nIt is now clear that some attention is being given to the fight to stop Cop City from the highest echelons of official government. In order to defeat the awkward coalition being built against it, the movement will have to combine at least as many forces and strategies.
\n\nIn the six months that have passed since the previous chapter of this story appeared, some of the forces described therein have disappeared. For instance, the “South River Forest Public Safety Training Center Task Force,” established by the Mayor’s office to rubberstamp Cop City blueprints and reforms, has either moved to illegal encrypted channels or vanished completely. The movement has paid no attention to Michael Thurmond, the CEO of Dekalb County, despite his decision to shut down Intrenchment Creek Park. Ryan Millsap, one of the movement’s chief antagonists in 2022, has also receded from view.
\n\nAfter the RICO charges became public, many participants stepped back from the movement, as well. As of October 2023, 108 people accused of participating in the struggle to stop Cop City faced charges of some kind. Presumably, the stress of awaiting trial and dealing with bond conditions has negatively impacted both the defendants and their various supporters. Hundreds of people were living with the stress of looming court cases and possible incarceration, not to mention those who did not know anyone facing charges but were emotionally impacted nonetheless. The challenges of constantly fighting, organizing, attending meetings, conducting research, deliberating, and thinking about the movement must have worn on the resolve of all participants.
\n\nOne way to avoid burnout is to find a specific, concrete role to play, then change that role over time, taking breaks or periodically moving into less intensive roles before fatigue can take too much of a toll.
\n\nNot everyone who withdrew from the movement did so because of burnout. Some stepped back for other reasons. Some simply vanished, abandoning others in their time of need–neither engaging in public organizing, nor conducting clandestine activity, nor securing materials, resources, or funds for the movement or those facing charges.
\n\nAt the same time, a small number of people strained the solidarity of the movement by launching public denunciations and political attacks on other participants, violating the movement’s longstanding principles of discretion and private debate. It’s interesting to note that the timeline of these denunciations roughly matches the timeline of police escalation. Public denunciations appeared online in January, in March, and then again shortly after the announcement of the RICO case.
\n\nThis is not all that unusual. Internal conflict often emerges as a consequence of repression. Those who study counterinsurgency understand that the chief effect of repression is usually not the direct impact of the blow, but the fault lines it opens up.
\n\nSome of those who have published denunciations may have sought to give themselves political cover for withdrawing from the movement, falling back on a narrative of “betrayal,” the only persuasive justification for leaving the movement in what otherwise might itself be understood as a betrayal. In the end, it was neither liberals nor pacifists—neither ecologists nor lawyers, students, canvassers, academics, socialists, abolitionists, Black nationalists, Marxists, or musicians—who drafted public condemnations of other participants in the movement to stop Cop City. It was anarchists targeting other anarchists.
\n\nSome of the other critics were apparently never involved in the movement to defend the forest at all, or only peripherally connected to it. Some do not even live in the United States. Conflict among participants in the movement is one thing, but it is sheer opportunism for those who only experience the movement as a distant projection screen for their own fixations to seek to capitalize on friction within it.
\n\nWhen analyzing the end of the forest encampments and the heartbreaking death of Tortuguita, we could well blame the billions of people who were not living in the forest in the winter of 2022—including most of the people making public denunciations in the first place. We would also have cause to criticize those in the forest who drove others out with their polarizing attitudes, behavior, and words. But apportioning blame and name-calling are for those who have given up on changing the world. The rest of us have to find ways to resolve our differences if we are to continue fighting our chief adversaries.
\n\nDespite the tensions among a few anarchists and their friends, many people have continued to push ahead courageously. What comes next will be determined by those who persevere.
\n\nOn October 6, District Attorney George R. Christian of the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit ruled that it was “objectively reasonable” for police to kill Tortuguita. While disturbing, this news did not shock many people. Perhaps because of the widespread cynicism around the investigation, which many considered a mockery from the outset, nobody mobilized in response to the ruling. At the same time, students and organizers on Emory University Campus were hosting meetings about Cop City and the attacks on the Gaza strip that the Israeli military was preparing.
\n\nAfter threats and intimidation on Morehouse, Spelman, Carter, Georgia State, and Georgia Tech campuses, it seemed that the prospect of campus resistance to Cop City had receded. On October 26, around 150 students and faculty rallied on campus. The group listened to speeches and chanted slogans. After an hour, the crowd began marching toward the Quad, where Atlanta police had forcibly dispersed an encampment in April 2023. Outside the administration building, the group stopped and organizers read out a list of demands. Those demands included the renunciation of Cop City by the Emory administration, the cessation of membership in the Atlanta Police Foundation and Atlanta Committee for Progress, and a number of specific demands relevant to the student body and their ability to organize on campus.
\n\nAfter reading the demands aloud, the larger part of the assembled crowd marched into the administration building to deliver them to the campus authorities directly. As they filled the atrium and stairwell, administration staff locked the doors to the office and hid from view. Eventually, a representative of the university came out to meet the students. Having accomplished their goals, the crowd dispersed onto the Quad and established a temporary information point there, distributing t-shirts and literature about the movement as well as free food and conversation.
\n\nIn the days following this action, Zionists doxxed campus organizers. Across the country, academics, journalists, and workers in many industries have faced reprisals for objecting to the bombing and ethnic cleansing targeting the Gaza strip. Emory University has been no different. The administration released a statement denouncing student action, likening it to “anti-Semitism.” Jewish activists have not been spared this slander or the accompanying harassment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/9.jpg\")
Emory students demand that the university administration break ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation.
\nIn this context, a group of Black activists and organizers announced a Week of Action. Ostensibly, this was the first time an all-Black group had organized a series of events like this during the movement. Black activists felt that this was an important moment to mobilize Black residents and bring more into the struggle. Toward this end, they promoted a calendar of events.
\n\nThroughout this Week of Action, activists conducted workshops and presentations on a range of topics. Classes on herbalism and somatic care drew local participants. Students attended talks on Palestine solidarity and the colonial capitalism. Some of these events were ethnically mixed; many were intended to be majority-Black.
\n\nCanvassing took place every day of the week across the city. Outside of grocery stores and libraries, at shopping malls and low-income housing developments canvassers met up and passed out fliers, started conversations, and collected phone numbers. After months of canvassing for the referendum petition, some may have felt that it was urgent to continue reaching out to people, or that some communities had not been adequately canvassed. The results of this approach are seldom visible in the short term and require more durable and far-looking organizational structures to make use of the feedback and contacts arising from door-knocking and walking around with a clipboard. Some of the groups spearheading the Black Week of Action are organized into structures that are well-equipped to do this kind of outreach.
\n\nOn November 9, a crowd assembled on Georgia State campus. After speeches denouncing the Israeli military and its US sponsors for the ongoing assault on civilians in the Gaza strip, the crowd marched to the location of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. The banners and signs of the procession connected the struggle against Cop City with the fight to end Israeli apartheid. The GILEE program, which is funded by GSU tuition, enables Georgia police to cross-train with military personnel in Tel Aviv, and to host them for counterinsurgency trainings in the United States as well. A delegation of Atlanta police was supposed to go to Tel Aviv on the week of October 10 to receive training from the apartheid regime, but the training was cancelled as a result of the unfolding crisis. This did not stop officers from conducting a “mock” raid on an abandoned hotel in downtown Atlanta, role-playing the invasion of a “Hamas stronghold,” according to police radio communications.
\n\nThe next day, November 10, dozens of people gathered on Metropolitan Parkway, just southwest of downtown, for a “Black Family March.” The group included Black residents and activists as well as some whose family members had been killed by police. Protesters chanted slogans and listened to speeches. Police officers on motorcycles gathered on the road with their lights on, hoping to intimidate the assembly. It appeared that the authorities were still strongly invested in preserving the balance of forces that they had worked so hard to establish over the summer, denying crowds the ability to take the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/11.jpg\")
During the Black week of action, activists marched to the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) office on Georgia State campus. If Cop City is completed, Israeli soldiers will use it to train police from the United States. Activists left shoes at the doorstep of GILEE, representing the thousands of Palestinian children that soldiers in Gaza have murdered.
\nThe Black Week of Action ended just before another mobilization: Block Cop City.
\n\nOver the preceding summer, some participants in the movement had concluded that in order to prevent the forces of repression from reducing the movement to the segments focused on the referendum or clandestine sabotage, it was necessary to try a new approach. In hopes of reassuring those who were not prepared for the level of confrontation that the movement had engaged in on March 5 and building bridges with organizations that had remained aloof from the movement, they decided to employ a model of “nonviolent tactics,” a framework that had the movement had never previously utilized for mass actions.
\n\nA website was ready by early September. Across the following two months, organizers across the country conducted nearly 80 public speaking events promoting the mobilization and seeking feedback on the proposal. A total of thousands of people attended these talks.
\n\nThe basic idea—coming out of the RICO case, the stagnation of the referendum process, and the sharp downturn in clandestine actions following the fifth Week of Action—was to bring together a large enough group to march onto the construction site to stop work. The larger goal was to carve out space for public demonstrations and challenge the state’s strategy of openly criminalizing out-of-state protesters.
\n\nSome opposed this proposal. The most vocal antagonists were in the City Government and police department. They claimed loudly and frequently that the event would not really be nonviolent, suggesting that a secretive group aimed to use the public mobilization to create chaos and violence.
\n\nSome activists agreed with them. We can divide these into two broad categories. On one side, there were people who did not believe in combative protests in the first place; some of them did not trust the anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizers behind Block Cop City. On the other side, there were people who did not believe in mass protests and did not trust the radical credentials of the Block Cop City organizers. The two forms of grassroots consensus with the government worked in tandem to obscure the details of the proposal. At some presentations, people passed out fliers attempting to dissuade others from attending the event, arguing that it was dangerous, ineffective, and disingenuous—the same arguments that the city government was making. They also challenged the right of groups to forms agreements about what kinds of actions they wanted to do, claiming that doing so would inhibit the freedom of individuals and was thus a form of “policing.”
\n\nBlock Cop City organizers felt that with scores of people facing RICO charges, publicly coordinating a large event necessitated publicly arriving at a shared vision of the action. While critics claimed that it was “authoritarian” to propose action agreements, the organizers countered that it was specifically their anti-authoritarian politics that motivated them to take this approach. Below, we’ll return to the question of whether the framework of “nonviolence” served to achieve their objectives.
\n\nHundreds of people arrived in Atlanta on November 10, gathering at parks and a local Quaker community center. They were received with food, literature, and sign-up sheets. On the first night, more than 500 people attended a kick-off party at a warehouse in East Point. Some people set up tables to distribute schedules and pamphlets about the coming days. Others distributed zines and posters on the history of the movement, instructional guides on direct action, and reflections drawn from various struggles around the world. Hardcore punk bands and rappers shared the stage while attendees crashed into one another and danced late into the night.
\n\nSuch events play a role in cultivating the most fundamental factor in all movements and struggles: the will to fight. As long as movement protagonists feel that fighting Cop City is worthwhile, they stand a chance of winning. The more they can engender despair in their antagonists, the better off they will be.
\n\nThe kick-off events prepared activists for the meetings scheduled for the next two days. Aside from direct action trainings, medic workshops, and legal aid assemblies, more than 400 people intended to gather two days in a row for a spokescouncil meeting involving representatives of affinity groups from around the country. The goal was to reconcile the concerns, aspirations, and capacities of the different participants in order that they could cooperate harmoniously during the march. Thanks to the venue hosts, the cooks, the dishwashers, the welcome tables, the facilitators, the drivers, those who cleaned up after, and everyone who provided emotional support for all of the aforementioned, the meetings were fairly focused and efficient.
\n\nAt the beginning of the spokescouncil, facilitators reminded attendees that the movement began with a series of public meetings and the burning of machinery in the forest. The assembly cheered; many chanted “If you build it, we will burn it.” It was important to the organizers to emphasize that the nonviolence proposal for the Block Cop City action was intended to complement the other forms of action associated with the movement, including sabotage and combative protest tactics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/13.jpg\")
Puppets in the Orange cluster during the Block Cop City march.
\nIn the course of two days of deliberation, the spokescouncil agreed to form three “clusters” in the march. The clusters arranged themselves by color. Those colors were not intended to denote risk level, but to indicate relative position within the march; this was clearer than referring to “front, middle, and back,” since it was possible that the crowd would be compelled to change direction without being able to rearrange the locations of groups within the mass. The colors also represented different responsibilities.
\n\nThe Blue cluster was to lead the march at the beginning. It would be responsible for setting the pace and direction. After much deliberation, the spokescouncil also agreed that the Blue cluster was responsible for maneuvering around or through the police and any other barriers to the site, concluding that the notion of nonviolence developed by the spokescouncil did not prevent the Blue cluster from attempting to push through lines of riot police using banners or inanimate objects. They also agreed that the nonviolence agreement did not prohibit the Blue cluster from cutting the perimeter fencing to the construction site, should the crowd get that far, provided that they did not throw objects or set things on fire. Item by item, the blue cluster reached consensus that they would not flee in response to non-lethal munitions including tear gas, flashbang grenades, pepper balls, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, water cannons, long-range acoustic devices, mace, police dogs, and baton charges. They would only stop moving forward if it became physically impossible.
\n\nThe Purple cluster would start in the middle of the march. This was the largest cluster. The Purple cluster was responsible for filling whatever space the Blue cluster opened up. Some of them would carry saplings with the intention of planting them; others would bear puppets or musical instruments. A marching band chose to participate in this cluster. Many people joined this group because they were hesitant to be in the front or back, believing that the middle would be safest.
\n\nThe Orange cluster was to begin at the back of the march. If retreat was called for, it would lead the march away. Towards this end, the Orange cluster was responsible for maintaining a strong rear section and making sure that the crowd was not caught unawares from behind. If the crowd was attacked or forced to turn around, the Orange cluster would bear responsibility for leading the march out of harm’s way. Many medics were in this cluster, prepared to treat injuries.
\n\nIn all of the clusters, there were people prepared to push sound systems. Communications teams would also move between the clusters.
\n\nParticipants in the mobilization distributed loose-fitting white coveralls dotted with paint. The idea was to enable protesters to blend in with one another, protecting vulnerable people and risk-takers from police harassment while fostering a sense of togetherness between the different sections. The front and back of the crowd were to be protected with banners framed with PVC pipe.
\n\nFor the benefit of future demonstrators, it’s important to know that PVC pipe can break under the blows of police batons if it is not reinforced with spray insulation. Green bamboo can be both lighter and more resilient. Reinforced banners should have handles on the back, so that protesters don’t have to hold the edge of the frame, as this can result in broken hands and fingers if the police decide to hit them. To our knowledge, nobody suffered injuries of this nature during the Block Cop City march.
\n\nAt 8 am on Monday, November 13, nearly 500 people gathered at Gresham Park. Helicopters and police drones were already circling overhead. Many of the assembled were journalists or support personnel who did not themselves intend to participate in the march. Cooks delivered hundreds of burritos. Organizers from different groups in the movement gave impassioned speeches and led chants. Speakers emphasized the intentions of the march and reiterated the action framework agreements. Nearly everyone present had attended the spokescouncil meetings at some point.
\n\nNeither the massive numbers nor the formal organizations that some had hoped would participate in the march had turned out. Few Atlanta residents were in attendance, and many participants in the previous two years of local activity did not attend. Much of the crowd was comprised of anarchists and radicals from around the country. Despite the dismayingly low numbers, the beautiful puppetry and marching band gave the gathering a festive appearance.
\n\nLivestream of the Block Cop City march courtesy of NDN Collective.
\nAt 10 am, the crowd began marching down the bike path in the direction of Intrenchment Creek Park. This was the same route taken by a slightly larger crowd on March 4, at the beginning of the fifth Week of Action, and by a smaller crowd on June 28, during the sixth Week of Action.
\n\nPeople in the Blue cluster carried reinforced banners and a large number of umbrellas. Many of them wore balaclavas, gloves, helmets, respirators, goggles, or masks.
\n\nAbout fifteen minutes into the march, scouts reported a considerable number of riot police positioned at the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, in the entrance to Intrenchment Creek Park. Lines of cops were assembled behind concrete barriers erected inside of the tunnel. They had taken the bait.
\n\nReaching Cherry Valley Road, about halfway down the bicycle path, the crowd unexpectedly turned left, taking a route intended to outmaneuver the police checkpoints on the busy roads surrounding the forest. Every 500 meters or so, communications teams in the different clusters arranged for the procession to stop for two or three minutes in order to keep the march together. At the top of Cherry Valley Road, the crowd turned left onto Bouldercrest and then right onto Constitution Road. Finally, police vehicles appeared behind the march, blasting their sirens and attempting to intimidate the participants.
\n\nThe crowd was now approaching the construction site. In the months leading up to the mobilization, some locals with experience in the forest and previous clashes with police had correctly predicted that a line of riot police would position themselves at the intersection of West Park Place and Constitution, just outside of the Fire station.
\n\nAs the crowd approached West Park Place, police cruisers rushed ahead around the march. An armored vehicle was parked next to the fire station. Further ahead, multiple armored vehicles and a water cannon were parked inside the barbed-wire fencing of the construction site itself. When the Blue cluster was about 60 yards from the fire station, officers parked their vehicles in the middle of the road. They formed a solid line, wearing helmets and carrying shields.
\n\nThe Blue cluster had already resolved to keep moving in the face of obstacles. If police blocked the path, they would advance through or around them. If they were physically incapable of moving forward, they would shift direction. As they drew within 20 yards of the police line, participants in the Blue cluster reminded themselves that they had already decided together what to do—they didn’t have to worry about improvising an individual response to the line of armored cops ahead.
\n\nWhen the Blue cluster drew within ten yards of the first row of police, they picked up their pace. Without pausing, the front of the march charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and moving their umbrellas forward to block the view of the police as well as their pepper spray and other munitions. The first line of cops fell back and was reinforced by a second line. This line was also pushed back. Cops began striking protesters with their shields, and then with batons. They began shooting pepper balls and pepper spray at the front of the crowd.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/16.jpg\")
Demonstrators clash with police on November 13, 2023.
\nAs a third line of police formed, officers threw tear gas over the heads of the Blue cluster towards the Purple group, who were lagging a little behand. Most of the front of the Purple group withdrew down West Park Place and into the tree line. A bicyclist wearing heat-resistant gloves nonchalantly picked up a tear gas canister and lobbed it out of the crowd.
\n\nWhile the Purple and Orange groups drew back, the Blue cluster continued to rush ahead, now facing officers shooting tear gas, pepper balls, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets directly at them. The police were apparently employing a graduated response, rapidly escalating their tactics as the Blue cluster pressed forward. However, the officers in the front were not wearing gas masks or goggles, so they were not prepared for the officers behind them to deploy tear gas. Consequently, the tear gas impacted them as badly as it affected the activists who were charging them. Abruptly, the two groups backed apart as protesters and police alike fell back coughing, vomiting, and calling for help.
\n\nVideo footage shows the majority of police retreating with their backs to the crowd. This illustrates the extent to which order broke down on their side during the clash.
\n\nThe demonstrators fell back a several yards down Constitution Road. Police fired a few flashbang grenades at them to preserve the gap between the two forces. Someone threw another tear gas canister back toward the riot police whence it had come. Technically, this was outside the agreed parameters of the action framework, but no one objected, then or afterwards.
\n\nAnother angle on the clash of November 13, 2023.
\nThe people from the front of the Purple cluster who had withdrawn down West Park Place and towards the tree line rejoined the rest of the march. Medics in the Orange cluster provided medical treatment to militants from Blue while other steadfast Orange participants held their ground.
\n\nThe unity of the Blue cluster had provided the cool-headed courage they needed to defend and de-arrest each other throughout the clash. As a result, no one had been grievously harmed or arrested.
\n\nFor a more detailed account of the events of the morning, we recommend “Don’t Panic, Stay Tight: Frontline Reflections on Block Cop City.” One account offers a lucid enough appraisal of the prospects of the march, given its numbers:
\n\n\n\n\nI knew that we stood no chance of making it into the construction site when I saw the crowd at the meet-up point. I was worried that all of these people would have come to Atlanta for nothing. The lines of police showed me my concerns were unfounded. While many people prefer to evade the clash, to move around the danger, to stick to the shadows, I have always preferred the front lines, the exploding canisters, the sour smell of the tear gas, the wild crush of the crowd. Real knowledge lives in the body, not the mind. The experience of the mob howling in unison, linking arms, rushing headlong into lines of police, is worth years of speculation and theorizing. If we were more numerous, we would have doubtlessly split into multiple corridors to spread the police response thin. […] To my left and right, my friends were shoving umbrellas upward, pushing ahead in the dense throng. For a few moments, it was dark and almost silent. The veil of the umbrellas, the silent heaving, and incredible pressure of the comrades packed together behind the banners is an experience you can’t describe easily for those who have never felt it. Eventually, I couldn’t breathe anymore and I grabbed someone as I retreated. Thankfully we didn’t make it past the fourth line of officers. We would have all been arrested.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/14.jpg\")
A protester from the Blue cluster protects those behind them by kicking a tear gas canister back to the police who deployed it.
\nAfter a few minutes, Indigenous activists within the Purple cluster convened a drum circle in the middle of the road. This had a calming effect. Protesters took time to check in with their affinity groups and anyone else in distress. The crowd chanted “All of us or none of us,” expressing the determination to defend each another from police snatch squads and the targeting of vulnerable or risk-tolerant protesters. In the final spokescouncil meeting the day before, the assembly had agreed that risk-takers from Blue cluster or other clusters would be welcomed into the other sections of the crowd and that nobody would feel “used” by this kind of tactical retreat. Over a loudspeaker, police began issuing dispersal orders. Slowly, the crowd made their way back down Constitution, the way they had come.
\n\nAfter a long, slow procession, the group returned to the bicycle path near Gresham Park, far from the construction site and the lines of police. Helicopters and police drones continued to circle overhead. Still several hundred strong, the demonstrators broke into smaller breakout groups to process and deliberate. Medics set up a check-in station for anyone in need of assistance.
\n\nEventually, people returned to the park and dispersed. That night, a vigil took place at Dekalb County Jail during which inmates broke windows and lowered plastic bags to ground level, which protesters filled with cigarettes, lighters, and pizza.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/15.jpg\")
A Dekalb County Police officer retreats from the clash during the Block Cop City mobilization, turning her back to the crowd, after other officers deployed tear gas so carelessly as to impact the front line of police as well as demonstrators.
\nAt the very moment that the blue cluster was driving back the police line, one individual wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and reflective orange ski goggles physically assaulted the person who was pushing the sound system immediately behind the front of the march. As the individual in the orange ski goggles did so, they yelled epithets referencing an online post criticizing the mobilization. Then they ran away towards the back of the crowd, fleeing from the confrontation with police.
\n\nThis individual may not have been working on police payroll, but by timing their attack to coincide with the clash, they were engaging in joint action with law enforcement. They could have performed this stunt at any time, but they timed it to maximize the effectiveness of the police attack.
\n\nIt is very difficult to imagine that this was an earnest participant who suddenly panicked and, recalling an obscure online post, spontaneously threw a tantrum. Likewise, it seems unlikely that they were simply a police agent seeking to stoke internal tensions—for such a stunt would discredit critics of the mobilization, not the mobilization itself. Either they were carrying out the wishes of the authors of the screed, and their action turned out to be so contemptible that even the authors disclaimed it, or they hoped to impress the authors but failed. The fact that no one has claimed credit for the assault online—when the critics of the Block Cop City movement have been nothing if not extremely online—shows that the responsible party or parties understand how shamefully they behaved.
\n\nWhatever the case, both the authors of the aforementioned screed and those who have circulated it bear some responsibility for this farcical episode. It is the material consequence of their efforts; it expresses the spirit of their project. In the final analysis, they have not sought to contribute to the fight against the police so much as to hinder at least some of those in open struggle against Cop City.
\n\nThe march did not reach the construction site. It was not a “mass mobilization,” either, in that it didn’t bring together a larger number of people than had gathered for earlier mobilizations to defend the forest. Nor did it succeed in connecting the more radical sections of the movement with less risk-tolerant groups, formal organizations, or large numbers of locals.
\n\nIt did shut down construction for the day, and for several days afterwards. It also brought together hundreds of people for a bold action in a context of unprecedented repression, including many who had never participated in protests and many more who had never faced tear gas or riot police. It took months of considerable effort to accomplish this, however.
\n\nBut that effort may not have been wasted. In a debrief meeting afterwards, activists who had come from around the country to participate in the mobilization unanimously agreed that they would leave feeling more prepared to act boldly in their home communities. That, if nothing else, counts as a victory. In that regard, we can credit the Block Cop City organizers with giving the movement another lease on life.
\n\nIf two thousand people had showed up to the departure point on November 13, multiple marches could have departed for the construction site, stretching police thinner and opening space for a wider array of tactics. Then, there might have been an open horizon of possibility. Rather than looking for minor technical improvements in what the participants could have done differently, it makes more sense to consider why more people did not come.
\n\nDid the nonviolence framework fulfill its express purpose of enabling more people to participate in the action? Again, let’s consult the authors of “Don’t Panic, Stay Tight”:
\n\n\n\n\nIn general, we disagree with the setting of nonviolent parameters. Frankly, we disagree with tactical parameters in general and with the minutely “organized” coordination of events, although we recognize that this type of attention to detail makes some people feel more confident and brave. We believe that the march would have been more successful at breaking through police lines and potentially breaching the site had it been able to use projectiles. We also recognize that it is impossible to know if this crowd could have even materialized without the parameters. We do not believe that it is possible to know if the “nonviolence” language in the promotion helped or hindered attendance without conducting a thorough interview with attendees before the action occurred. It is our unprovable suspicion that it did not increase participation much, and that it only shifted it from one segment of the population to another.
\n
It seems plausible that, remembering how “nonviolent” actions used to draw more participants than confrontational actions many years ago, the organizers hoped that defining the mobilization as “nonviolent” would serve as a shortcut to draw mass participation. Indeed, “nonviolent direct action” does seem to occupy an intermediate zone between canvassing and open confrontation. But a lot has changed since the turn of the century. Following the George Floyd rebellion, millions of people have participated in confrontational street activity that did not involve action agreements; likewise, millions have experienced firsthand that police tactics are not necessarily determined by how “violent” a demonstration is.2
\n\nHundreds of people undoubtedly showed up for the Block Cop City mobilization who would not have showed up without the months of touring and promotion that preceded it. But it may not have been the action agreements that drew them so much as the care that was put into outreach and hospitality, spelling out to activists around the country that there were concrete roles they could fill even if they lacked experience in autonomous organizing models. In retrospect, it was a missed opportunity not to do this kind of outreach more systematically in 2022, when the movement had a foothold in the forest.
\n\nLikewise, imagining that a nonviolence agreement would enable formal organizations to participate, finally drawing out massive numbers, may get the causality backwards. More often, an initiative draws massive numbers and then formal organizations show up to take advantage of them. If the action agreement had succeeded in creating a situation in which dozens of student organizations, religious groups, and environmentalist groups had participated in the mobilization without trying to curtail its ambitions, that would have been a good thing, but from this vantage point, it is clear that that would have taken considerably more than an action agreement to make that possible.
\n\nIt is possible that more people might have turned out for Block Cop City if demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians had not been taking place all around the country at the same time. On the other hand, these demonstrations may have galvanized some people who would otherwise have stayed home. The absent are the most difficult demographic to understand.
\n\nArguably, if drawing massive numbers of people to the Block Cop City action had been the top priority, the most effective way to do so would have been to broadcast the time and place of the demonstration far and wide—rather than publicizing the spokescouncil meetings, as occurred, and only announcing the location and time of the action that weekend. The march was scheduled early in the morning on a work day in a location that was not otherwise thickly populated. This made sense if the mobilization was understood as a direct action determined above all by the necessities of interrupting work at the construction site, but not if the goal was to involve as many people as possible. The largest number of people have participated in the social and cultural events that the movement has hosted, such as the South River Music Festival.
\n\nDid the action agreement keep some people from attending the action? It definitely generated distracting controversy. But it’s not clear how many of those who criticized the nonviolence protocol stayed home only on account of it. The number of people in that category is probably dozens, not hundreds.
\n\nAt best, action agreements can be understood as a way for people to get on the same page about what to expect from each other. Ideally, such agreements should be co-created on a horizontal basis, but there are always uneven dynamics around power, leverage, and initiative in group decision-making. The same goes for spontaneous crowd decision-making, in which there is less opportunity for group deliberation. Of course, different formats lend themselves to certain outcomes: a mobilization coordinated by a visible organizing group or planned in open public meetings is more likely to adopt conservative mutual expectations, whereas planning on an invitational basis or acting spontaneously can lend itself to a wider tactical repertoire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/17.jpg\")
Demonstrators clash with police on November 13, 2023.
\nAs the authors of “Don’t Panic, Stay Tight” put it, “the organization of the weekend was gratuitously, painfully, democratic.” One way to interpret this quality of the mobilization is as a response to the events of March 5, 2023, when—without any formal decision-making whatsoever—hundreds of people marched to the construction site and engaged in confrontational action that had significant repercussions. By contrast, the Block Cop City mobilization centered two days of hours-long facilitated decision-making processes and a march that was almost performatively inclusive. Each of these approaches involves advantages and disadvantages.
\n\nWe all have a responsibility to push back against agreements that we consider unacceptable, even if doing so could precipitate conflict. It is also our responsibility to deliver our critiques in a way that could change others’ minds, rather than simply establishing cliques. The action agreements for Block Cop City in themselves provide no justification for stepping away from the fight against Cop City, nor for sitting out the events of November 13. Hopefully, those who were critical of the mobilization simply focused their efforts elsewhere.
\n\nSurely all the repression in Atlanta played a central role in limiting attendance. Many participants were afraid to be close to the front of the march, and many potential participants surely stayed home on account of similar fears. But the old adage proved true once again: it’s safer in the front. The sole arrest on November 13 was of a person who opted for a support role; they were arrested in a vehicle the vicinity of Gresham Park. When the police deployed tear gas canisters, they threw them over the front line, targeting the people in the middle of the march. Those in the front line could count on the comrades at their sides to act boldly to defend them, whereas those behind them scattered when the clashes ensued. Counterintuitive as it seems, it can be safer in the front.
\n\nThe same goes for the Block Cop City mobilization itself. Although organizing any kind of confrontational protest was a risky proposition with scores of people already facing RICO charges, it was actually safer than doing nothing would have been. Permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere. It would also have left over a hundred defendants facing charges in a movement without a public face. One way to ensure that there is energy for defendant and prisoner support is to keep a movement vibrant, drawing in new people and new energy.
\n\nAs it turned out, the authorities had their own reasons not to escalate on November 13. If they had arrested more people, they would have had to decide whether to dole out even more RICO charges, stretching prosecutor resources even thinner, or to put prosecutors in the position of having to explain why some accused Stop Cop City protesters deserved RICO charges while others did not. Video footage shows officers brandishing zip ties with which to carry out arrests, but either they had their hands full dealing with the charge of the Blue cluster, or the preferred not to try to in the first place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/21.jpg\")
A drone’s-eye view of the clash on November 13 as the police and protesters drew apart.
\nVictory and defeat always arrive together, mixed up in the same vessel. It is not possible to taste one without the other, even if on a given day it is the bitterness that overpowers the sweetness or vice versa.
\n\nThis does not mean that there is no difference between the two. If you have clearly defined goals, it is possible to determine whether or not you have achieved them.
\n\nSome of the Block Cop City organizers feel that they achieved their goals of organizing a convergence to shut down construction in a context of unprecedented repression, and that it was a victory that they were able to do so without any arrests. They are correct about that. The Atlanta Police Foundation and its supporters presumably consider it a victory that they were able to stop the crowd from reaching the construction site and from damaging property. They, too, are correct in this regard. Some commentators who watched from the sidelines are pleased to declare that the march was a failure because it did not reach the job site. In a sense, they are also correct.
\n\nIf all of these groups believe that their expectations have been confirmed and their decisions vindicated, what does that tell us? Probably, that they are all selectively recalling what their ambitions were before the mobilization, selectively interpreting the events of the day, and misunderstanding crucial elements of each other’s strategies. Participants in the movement should set concrete goals, in order to be able to evaluate their efforts critically. They should also think critically about what their adversaries unstated goals might be and how to thwart them.
\n\nNo single set of tactics can be judged in isolation. The movement involves a diverse array of participants; debate about the alleged effectiveness of one strategy versus another is often just a coded form of sectarian competition for approval. The most important question is not which participants in the movement are right and which are wrong, but how the different participants can ensure that their combined efforts will inspire others to participate and expand the number of fronts on which the struggle takes place. Certainly, the proponents of Cop City already perceive every effort to stop them—be it legal or autonomous, violent or nonviolent, symbolic or direct, defensive or offensive, local or international—as part of a combined assault.
\n\nMutual suspicion, destructive competition, scarcity thinking, paranoia, conformity, nostalgia—these are all pitfalls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/20.jpg\")
A picture is worth a thousand words. Repression during the Block Cop City march on November 13, 2023.
\nSoon after the Block Cop City march, an anonymous group burned sixteen large work trucks belonging to Ernst Concrete. This took place in Lawrenceville, Georgia, roughly half an hour northeast of Atlanta. In an online statement, the participants claimed to have placed incendiary devices and kindling beneath the hoods of the vehicles.
\n\nErnst Concrete was seen in the Old Atlanta Prison Farm on November 3. They were contracted to pour concrete and to build sidewalks and roads inside of the perimeter fence. In the first week of November, activists from across the country launched a call-in campaign to their offices, urging them to boycott the Atlanta Police Foundation. After the stoppage of work for the Block Cop City action and the subsequent torching of their machinery, they dropped from the project. This was confirmed by dozens of people who called the company the days after the action, and was confirmed by the company itself in a statement sent to local news. Eventually, Ernst took down their website. The statement they released to the news was framed in the most confusing way imaginable, claiming that Ernst “is not involved in Cop City” in the headline, while clarifying that they had in fact been contracted for it, and were no longer going to continue working on it.
\n\nThis was the quickest victory against a contractor the movement had sustained yet. Ernst Concrete is a large company that does far more than simple sidewalk paving. They also appeared to have very few previous contracts with Brasfield & Gorrie in Georgia, suggesting that Brasfield & Gorrie might be having difficulty securing the contractors they prefer to work with.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/19.jpg\")
A participant in the Block Cop City march planting a tree along the march route on November 13, 2023.
\nAn array of injunction hearings and court cases continue to play out in the background. The South River Watershed Alliance and others are in court against the Dekalb County Government for the illegal closure of Intrenchment Creek Park, and the contamination of the South River, which is occurring in quantities that violate the Clean Water Act. Lawyers assisting the Cop City Vote initiative to launch a referendum continue to file motions and lawsuits against the undemocratic denial of the process by the city government and the clerk’s office. Appearances and hearings will continue to drag the 100+ defendants of the movement into courtrooms for months or years to come.
\n\nBut despite the proliferation of court cases, lawyers are not the only protagonists in this struggle. Here, we will spell out some of the paths that remain open to the movement.
\n\nA new campaign called Uncover Cop City aims to draw attention to the insurance providers of the Atlanta Police Foundation: Accident Fund and Nationwide. This represents a refinement of a familiar strategy. Instead of targeting contractors and subcontractors, as previous campaigns have done, this effort takes aim at institutions with hundreds of offices across the country—institutions that represent a legal bottleneck for the project. Without coverage of their assets, the Atlanta Police Foundation is legally forbidden from maintaining contracts or holding assets in the state of Georgia.
\n\nBecause of the effectiveness of campaigns like Stop Reeves Young, the Cop City project has been reduced to a hardcore group of contractors, nearly all of whom sit on the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation. This makes it more difficult to exert pressure on them, because they have an existential stake in the project. Some subcontractors, such as Ernst, remain vulnerable to direct pressure. But pressuring insurance providers could provide the movement with a set of achievable goals even as the stakes of the conflict escalate.
\n\nUncover Cop City has already announced a “nationwide summit” in Arizona from February 23-26. This will be the first time that such an event has taken place outside of Georgia. Considering how much force has been brought to bear inside Atlanta itself, expanding the zone of conflict and experimenting with the strategy of convergence elsewhere in the country seems promising.
\n\nThe struggle against repression will also continue to provide opportunities to put action in a context in which it can be powerful. A number of acts of sabotage, including the coordinated vandalism of police cars and motorcycles over the summer, were ostensibly carried out in response to police attacks on protesters. The doxxing of the Atlanta City Council and the Atlanta Committee for Progress both occurred in retaliation for repression targeting the movement. With over a hundred people facing charges, there will be many chances to take action against the local authorities, to conduct fundraisers, to host rallies.
\n\nIf anti-repression efforts continue to precipitate action rather than panic and paranoia, the movement could redirect the momentum of the prosecution to generate its own momentum.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/12.jpg\")
The Block Cop City march, November 13, 2023.
\nThe Block Cop City event showed that some activists are learning to respond to police aggression. Moving forward, protesters will need to innovate technical and creative methods of dealing with police snatch squads, munitions, and intimidation. Reinforced banners and shields, masks, goggles, helmets, umbrellas, linking arms, carrying laser pointers, deploying bicycle scouts, car caravans, flash mobs, communications teams, and other yet-to-be developed innovations could enable crowds to assemble once again. With renewed confidence, these crowds could march in the streets, gather outside press conferences and fundraisers, and mobilize against insurance providers, construction companies, corporate executives, and their supporters.
\n\nSo far, the movement has not been able to reestablish an advantageous balance of force with law enforcement since the murder of Tortuguita and the destruction of the forest encampments. It has lost the element of surprise, while state and federal institutions have increasingly focused resources on attacking it.
\n\nAt the same time, these institutions are gambling with their own legitimacy. As they pull out the stops to go after the movement, their thin veneer of democratic credibility is peeling away. In the long run, this could have consequences for them, provided that those who lose faith in them encounter practical options for how to enter into resistance against them.
\n\nIn general, the offensive capacity of a movement tends to plateau or diminish over time, while defense becomes the principle method of fighting. At first, it might appear that the movement to defend Weelaunee and stop Cop City has ended up in a bind in which it has to invert this trend if it hopes to win. This is probably the wrong way to think about the situation. In fact, it is impressive that the movement has persisted this long already. Rather than pursuing “decisive” battles with authorities, which could result in incapacitating defeats, it may be wiser to seek sustainable levels of conflict on the existing fronts while attempting to open up new theaters of conflict where the authorities are not yet prepared.
\n\nIf the movement can keep going, it will encounter new opportunities. Morale is essential to struggle; grassroots movements must maintain momentum while demoralizing their adversaries and eroding their will to fight. There are a few ways to do this.
\n\n1) Preserving a positive image of the movement. Any event, poster, sticker, film, article, coverage, or intervention that uplifts and celebrates the movement will hurt the morale of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the contractors, the Mayor’s office, and police officers. Sometimes this can take the form of justifying bold actions by putting them in their proper context. Even well-designed graphics can play a part; the movement has been very skilled in this regard already, but it can do more. Posters, graffiti, and stickers celebrating the movement should be everywhere, especially in areas highly trafficked by the proponents of Cop City.
\n\n2) Sowing doubt, confusion, anxiety. By continuously frustrating the progress of construction, disrupting public events, monopolizing the phone lines to offices, highlighting and exacerbating tensions between agencies, undermining state narratives, doxxing hostile forces, and inducing paranoia and uncertainty in the firms and agencies responsible for the project, activists undermine their will to fight. Civil disobedience, clandestine action, noise demonstrations, fliering campaigns, pranks, and creatively-timed actions can exhaust the resources of the institutions that support Cop City.
\n\n3) Diverting hostility. Wherever the authorities seek to direct their hostility—whether against a perceived group, a place, an institution, or an individual—they are compelled to build up morale and internal consensus in order to do so. If the movement can continuously redirect this frustration away from the stated targets of repression or control, this will compel the Atlanta Police Foundation to change discourses and strategies over and over again, disrupting their focus and unity. This strategy necessitates remaining flexible and creative while pulling in as many forces and discourses as possible. Everyone who is not mobilized by the movement will be tokenized by the state. The government should not know who they are fighting, why, where, when, or by what means. In compelling officials to drum up paranoia about “outside agitators,” the movement has already achieved a victory, in that this opens up space for locals to act with comparative legitimacy.
\n\nOver the coming months, the situation will continue changing. In the wake of the Black Week of Action and Block Cop City, it remains an open question how to continue to create participatory spaces for the struggle. Organization derives from action, not vice versa. Keep pushing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/12/18.jpg\")
Block Cop City, November 13, 2023.
\nAssembled from publicly available reports.
\n\nJune 7: Mayor Andre Dickens is doxxed. At the same time, people file a petition to initiate a popular referendum on the land-lease contract between City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, effectively placing Cop City on the ballot.
\n\nJune 8: The Executive Board of Atlas Technical Consultants, a subcontractor for Brasfield & Gorrie, is doxxed. A group of activists announce a public campaign to collect signatures for a popular referendum.
\n\nJune 9: A March 5 arrestee presses charges against Charlotte NC Police Major Brad Koch for defamation of character in response to public statements alleging that the accused would “one million percent” commit another crime if given bail. Dekalb County Judge Anna Davis, spouse of an APF accountant, had denied the defendant bail after those statements.
\n\nJune 10: An anonymous statement appears calling for more digital actions against Cop City.
\n\nJune 14: City of Atlanta Clerk Vanessa Waldron refuses to approve the petition to referendum on legal technicality.
\n\nJune 19: Graffiti appears in Minneapolis in solidarity with the movement.
\n\nJune 20: City Clerk Waldron once again refuses to approve the petition for a referendum, prompting outrage.
\n\nJune 21: Organizers sue City Clerk Waldron, forcing her to approve the petition.
\n\nJune 22: The signature collection begins demanding a referendum.
\n\nJune 23: Dekalb County District Attorney Sherri Boston announces that she is withdrawing her office and all of their resources from the 42 terrorism cases against the movement that are being pressed in Dekalb County (out of a total of 43 such cases associated with the movement). Boston cites “fundamentally different prosecution philosophies” with Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr in her statement. She also hints that pressure from the movement has influenced her decision.
\n\nJune 24: The sixth Week of Action begins.
\n\nJune 25: Protesters and community groups assemble at Brownwood Park. Police drones and helicopters circle overhead. Law enforcement drive around the area continuously. Belkis Terán, mother of Tortuguita, hosts a vigil for their slain child in the park around 8:30 pm. Dozens of Atlanta Police officers enter the park and threaten to arrest everyone if they aren’t gone by 11. Protesters yell at the cops and surround them. Elsewhere, hundreds of people gather deep in Weelaunee for an underground party. Meanwhile, an APD lieutenant who has been active in repressing the movement of forest encampments is doxxed. At the same time, the initiative Cop City Vote declares solidarity with the Week of Action, explicitly recognizing the value of “all tactics on this road to collective liberation.”
\n\nJune 26: Over 100 people gather in Brownwood park to host presentations, talks, and community outreach events. Elsewhere, multiple machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company are sabotaged with muriatic acid, apparently despite security protection.
\n\nJune 27: Film screenings and cultural events continue daily in Brownwood Park, usually under police surveillance. At Intrenchment Creek Park and the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, dozens of police vehicles are stationed at every known entrance and exit.
\n\nJune 28: Around 200 people gather in Gresham Park with a mobile altar. Many don masks. They march most of the way to Intrenchment Creek Park. Scouts report a massive police mobilization further ahead in the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, possibly as many officers as demonstrators. The crowd holds a short ceremony for Tortuguita led by Belkis Terán, before returning to Gresham Park and dispersing without incident. Downtown, outside of Cadence Bank (which funds the Atlanta Police Foundation), a crowd gathers in an unannounced demonstration. After 20 minutes, protesters throw bacon at the facility and disperse. Cops attack people in the vicinity and arrest two people, charging one with Felony Obstruction.
\n\nJune 29: Protesters assemble near a Home Depot on Ponce de Leon in Midtown; Home Depot has donated to the APF. The establishment closes early for the day as a consequence. A nearby Starbucks also closes because of the small protest. Several dozen Atlanta Police officers assemble in the strip mall parking lot. An elderly woman—a member of the National Lawyers Guild previously involved in the Gay liberation organization Act Up!—is arrested for holding a sign on the sidewalk. At the same time, in Columbus, Ohio, protesters storm the headquarters of Nationwide Insurance, demanding that they cut their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation. That same day, protesters confront Mayor Andre Dickens as he attempts to hold a press conference at Fire Station 10 in Grant Park. City Councilman Matt Westmoreland refuses to tell Belkis Terán that he condemns the killing of her child, Tortuguita.
\n\nProtesters confront Mayor Andre Dickens as he attempts to hold a press conference at Fire Station 10 in Grant Park.
\nJune 30: The Weelaunee Coalition hosts a Youth Rally in Brownwood Park, bringing over 100 people together to participate in events and to chant for the forest and against Cop City. Four Bank of America offices have windows broken in the Bay Area, and four ATMs are vandalized. Three ATMs in Concord, California are broken. A single statement claims responsibility for these actions.
\n\nJuly 1: The windows of three Atlanta police cruisers on Memorial Drive are smashed and a time-delayed incendiary device burns eight APD motorcycles in the parking garage beneath the current police training center. A group calling itself the March 5th Movement takes responsibility for the actions and claims that they are in retaliation for violent suppression of peaceful protests at Cadence Bank and elsewhere.
\n\nJuly 2: Atlanta police officer Andrew Strutt is doxxed in retaliation for his actions at a protest outside of Cadence Bank during the sixth Week of Action. The private homes of Cop City architect Anthony Kenney and APF Board of Trustees member Ambrish Baisiwala are vandalized with paint and their car tires are slashed. Elsewhere, protesters gather outside the Minnesota home of the Atlas Technical Project Manager. He yells at the protesters to leave his property, claiming that Atlas has dropped the project. Asked why, he answers “you guys are fucking nightmares” and “you broke all of our fucking windows.” Apparently, two years of actions against that contract have had an effect.
\n\nJuly 3: A golf course in New Orleans is vandalized in solidarity with the movement against Cop City. The home of Keith Johnson, Brasfield & Gorrie Director of Preconstruction, is also vandalized. His driveway and house are painted, fake blood is dumped around his back door, and motor oil and fish heads are poured into his pool. On-site security apparently does not notice the saboteurs.
\n\nJuly 4: Two machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned in broad daylight at a location where machines have already been sabotaged before. A Chase Bank in southeast Michigan is vandalized.
\n\nJuly 9: Three Bank of America ATMs are smashed in Berkeley, California. At the same time, another group throws a brick through the front window of a UPS office. In Williston, Vermont, work trucks and an office of Atlas Technical Consultants are vandalized. Although the Project Manager had told activists that they had dropped the contract, no official statement had yet appeared. After this action, Atlas confirmed to an independent journalist that they were no longer involved in the project.
\n\nJuly 27: The July 14th injunction succeeds, giving the referendum organizers an additional 60 days to collect signatures on the premise that Clerk Waldron had illegally violated their first amendment rights.
\n\nJuly 28: Mongo Holdings LLC is exposed as an APF event sponsor for 2023. The Chief Investment Officer is doxxed.
\n\nJuly 29: A complete list of Atlanta Police Department officers as of July 21, 2023 is posted online, including their full names, social media accounts, wages, and positions.
\n\nAugust 3: The GBI, APD, ATF, and Mayor Dickens hold a joint press conference about the July 4th attacks. They post images of the alleged incendiary devices online and in televised statements.
\n\nAugust 9: Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., denounces Cop City.
\n\nAugust 15: Days after the Asheville Police Department advertises a recruiting event on behalf of the Atlanta Police Department, two Asheville PD cruisers are burned outside of a precinct.
\n\nAugust 26: In New York City, several dozen people march to the Hilton Hotel in midtown, where the Atlanta Police Department is hosting a police recruitment event. Protesters chant slogans and hold banners, blockading the event. New York Police push and shove protesters but fail to evict the crowd. Someone smuggles rotten shrimp into the building, filling the atrium with a putrid stench.
\n\nAugust 30: A time-delayed incendiary device burns a machine belonging to Vertiv Corporation in Milwaukie, Oregon. Vertiv is a technical supplier for the Atlanta Police Department. The “March 5th Movement” claims the action.
\n\nSeptember 5: 61 people are indicted under the Racketeering-influenced Criminal Organization (RICO) Act of Georgia. The indictment includes dozens of pages on the history and theory of anarchism, mutual aid, and solidarity. It paints a broad and speculative picture of the ideology of the movement, referencing Kurdish and Zapatista liberation movements. According to the indictment, the “conspiracy” began on May 25, 2020—the day that Minneapolis Police murdered George Floyd. Meanwhile, the City of Atlanta hires a company called the Great Lakes Project Solution to begin counting signatures for the referendum.
\n\nSeptember 6: In Savannah, Georgia, dozens of protesters visit the office of the Cop City architecture firm LS3P, dumping rotten food into their elevator.
\n\nSeptember 8: This has been announced as a Day of Solidarity against the RICO charges. Local religious leaders and others invade the Cop City construction site and lock themselves to equipment, halting work and compelling the police to arrest them. They are not charged with terrorism. Other actions take place at the Georgia State Capitol and the University of Michigan, as well as in Kingston, New York; Carbondale, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Phoenix, Arizona; and Elliston, Virginia. An anonymous group claims responsibility for sabotaging multiple signal boxes belonging to Norfolk Southern during the sixth Week of Action.
\n\nSeptember 10: In Chicago, streets are blocked and windows are broken at a Chase Bank. Elsewhere, a group rallies outside a Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina to denounce the RICO charges and demand that Bank of America drop their contract with APF.
\n\nSeptember 11: The Inspire Brands subsidiary Arby’s is vandalized in Olympia, Washington. The Inspire Brands CEO sits on the board of the APF. Meanwhile, the referendum organizers present 116,000 signatures to the Clerk’s office.
\n\nSeptember 12: A new organization named Block Cop City announces a mass demonstration in November targeting the Cop City construction site. Organizers visit over 70 cities and towns in a nationwide speaking tour to promote the event.
\n\nSeptember 25: The Weelaunee Defense Society of New York City disrupts an event by the Korea Society honoring Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. The Korea Society was founded by former United States General James Van Fleet, who helped to coordinate US ground troops in the Korean War. He worked alongside the fascist “Republic of Korea” dictator Syngman Rhee before forming the Korean Society in the US to assist in ongoing support for the Rhee administration globally.
\n\nSeptember 29: The Atlanta City Clerk uploads 116,000 signed petitions demanding a referendum to the Atlanta Government Website. Despite a legal order from the City Council to redact the names of the signatories, the City legal department argues they do not have to, and the government doxxes 116,000 civilians. Fascists immediately begin sharing the information online. In response, the board of the Atlanta Committee for Progress is doxxed.
\n\nOctober 1: For the third time, machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company are burned at a construction site located at the corner of Sawtell and McDonough near the Federal Penitentiary.
\n\nOctober 2: Over 200 people gather at Atlanta City Hall to demand that the government release body camera footage showing the extrajudicial killing of Johnny Hollman during a traffic stop in late August. The government asserts its supposed “right” to not release the footage by citing its decision to withhold aerial footage of the January 18 killing of Tortuguita as precedent.
\n\nOctober 3: An Open Records Request reveals that Mayor Dickens has been communicating with the White House about Cop City.
\n\nOctober 6: District Attorney George R. Christian of the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit rules that it was “objectively reasonable” for the Georgia State Patrol to kill Tortuguita on January 18. No charges will be brought against officers for the killing. The names of the killers have still not been released by the government, although the movement has already published them: Bryland Myers, Jerry Parrish, Jonathan Salcedo, Mark Jonathan Lamb, Ronaldo Kegel, and Royce Zah. A new Open Records Request reveals extensive commentary about the movement from the Department of Homeland Security in the two weeks leading up to the murder of Tortuguita.
\n\nOctober 10: The Malaya Movement of Georgia denounces the repression of activists, likening it to state terrorism in the Phillipines. An army recruitment center in Daly City, California loses nine windows in an act of solidarity with Palestinian resistance, anti-colonial resistance in Haiti, and Weelaunee forest defenders.
\n\nOctober 26: Approximately 150 Emory University students gather on campus to denounce administration support for Cop City, membership in the Atlanta Police Foundation, and the Atlanta Committee for Progress. The students chant slogans connecting Cop City to the ongoing airstrikes and war crimes that the Israeli military is committing against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The crowd marches into the administration building chanting to deliver a demand letter.
\n\nOctober 27: A dozen protesters gather for a “People’s Stop Work Order” on Constitution Road outside of the Prison Farm.
\n\nOctober 31: Vandalism at LS3P, Cadence Bank, and Nationwide Insurance in Savannah, Georgia.
\n\nNovember 3: Another group gathers outside of the Prison Farm to picket construction.
\n\nNovember 4: A group called the “Bay Rage Brigade” breaks windows at HSBC bank, Starbucks, and a US military recruiting office and dumps paint on vehicles belonging to a subsidiary of General Motors. The action calls attention to each institution’s connection to the Israeli apartheid system. The saboteurs dedicate their action to the memory of Tortuguita. Elsewhere, 25 pounds of rotten fish viscera is dumped into the rootop HVAC access panel of the Buckhead Theater the night before the venue planned to host the annual Atlanta Police Foundation fundraiser. The home of Wendy Stewart, a member of the Buckhead Coalition, is vandalized with messages opposing Cop City.
\n\nNovember 6: A Week of Action begins, organized by Black Atlanta residents for the purpose of connecting with other Black Atlantans. Many of the events draw crowds of a variety of ethnicities, but the organizers are unambiguous about their aim of coordinating with and mobilizing Black people.
\n\nNovember 6: 57 of the 61 RICO defendants turn themselves in for arraignment while nearly 200 supporters gather outside the courthouse. Most of the defendants are quickly released from jail after booking.
\n\nNovember 9: As a part of the Week of Action, students march to the office of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program on Georgia State University campus. They demand an end to the bombing of Gaza and the suspension of the GILEE program, which could be expanded with the construction of Cop City.
\n\nNovember 10: The Black Family March brings together activists with the families of Black people who have been killed by police. Shamefully, at least a dozen Atlanta police officers riding motorcycles intimidate the march. At the same time, several hundred people are gathering across Atlanta for the Block Cop City weekend, meeting at Brownwood Park and at a warehouse in East Point where hardcore punk bands and rappers share the stage for a kick-off party.
\n\nNovember 11: An open letter entitled “Anarchism Must Not be Criminalized” appears online. It is said to come from an anonymous group of 12 of the 61 RICO defendants.
\n\nNovember 12: An herbalist clinic and workshop occurs in the context of the Week of Action.
\n\nNovember 13: Under the banner of “Block Cop City,” 400 people march from Gresham Park toward the Cop City construction site on Constitution Road. Carrying puppets, marching band instruments, reinforced banners, and umbrellas, the demonstrators push through three lines of riot police before police standing in the back tear gas their own officers as well as the demonstrators. In the confrontation, Dekalb Police employ tear gas, pepper spray, flashbang grenades, pepper balls, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, and body-length shields against self-described nonviolent protesters. No one is arrested during the action. Construction is halted, but the group does not make it onto the site. Afterwards, 150 people gather outside the Dekalb County Jail to support those inside, including one person who was arrested earlier in the day during a traffic stop, accused of being connected to the protest. Inmates break five windows of the jail and throw debris at the police below; they also drop a line and a bag to the ground level, which protesters on the ground fill with cigarettes, slices of pizza, and bottles of water. Twice, bags of goods are pulled into the jail this way from the street below. Meanwhile, in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, activists drop banners on campuses in solidarity with the protesters. Sixteen trucks belonging to Ernst Concrete are burned in Lawrenceville, Georgia, allegedly with the use of “incendiary devices and kindling.” Activists claim to have burned six, but authorities report that the fire spread to ten more vehicles.
\n\nNovember 17: Ernst Concrete confirms that they have dropped out of the project.
\n\nNovember 18: During a demonstration in New York City in solidarity with Palestine, someone adds graffiti reading “Chase funds Cop City” to a Chase bank and locks its doors shut.
\n\nNovember 19: Windows are smashed and trucks vandalized at Thomas Concrete work site in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thomas Concrete is a frequent subcontractor of Brasfield & Gorrie.
\n\nNovember 22: Seven windows are broken at a Nationwide Insurance subsidiary, PCF Insurance Services office in Walnut Creek, California. Back in Georgia, local news claims that 23 machines belonging to an unnamed Cop City contractor were vandalized somehow “just before Thanksgiving.” Some speculate that this was Brent Scarborough Company. The method of sabotage, the specific date, and the exact target of the action are all left out of the report.
\n\nNovember 27: Georgia deputy attorney general John Fowler files a motion to include Tortuguita’s 150-page personal diary as evidence in the RICO case. The motion is rejected, but not before right-wing outlets publish false and exaggerated narratives about the contents.
\n\nNovember 30: Communications between the Chief of Atlanta police, Brasfield & Gorrie executives, Department of Homeland Security, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, and police forces across the country are made public thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request on the movement. The document proves that authorities are colluding on legal matters with corporate backers in encrypted chats.
\n\nDecember 7: Another Nationwide subsidiary is vandalized. At the San Francisco office, “every window” is smashed. This communiqué references the November 22 Walnut Creek action as inspiration. Both statements drive attention to uncovercopcity.blackblogs.org, where Nationwide and Accident Fund locations are listed.
\n\nTo accomplish what, when, where, for how long, and so on are all left vague, given the essentially metaphysical nature of the claim. ↩
\nThe new lengths of repression that the authorities are prepared to go to in Atlanta are also a consequence of the George Floyd rebellion—witness the date listed in the RICO indictment as the beginning of the alleged conspiracy. The context in which “nonviolent civil disobedience” functioned in 1963 or even 2003 no longer exists. We have to understand the conditions that made nonviolent action effective for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in historical context. Rather than falling back on old solutions to the question of how to bring large numbers of people together in struggle, we will probably have to discover new ones. ↩
\n