It Could Happen Here Weekly 83

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Come Monday morning, basically no one was in the forest.
The police raid the night prior pushed out most of
the people gathered for the music festival and week of action,
and it was still unclear how the rest of the
week would now proceed. This Monday happened to be the
Jewish holiday Porum. Initially there were plans to have a

(00:48):
perum celebration in the forest that evening, but it was
unknown if people would feel comfortable returning to the woods.
Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
This is episode three of my miniseries covering the March
twenty twenty three Week of Action to defend the Atlanta Forest. Monday,
March sixth also happens to be the day of an

(01:10):
Atlanta City Council meeting, and the Stop cop City Clergy
coalition held a well attended press conference at noon outside
City Hall. Reverend Keana Jones opened up at the press
conference by making the clergy's position clear.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
We are the faith coalition against cop City, and we
are here to again raise our voices so that Mayor
Andre Dickens and the members of the City Council of
Atlanta know that we will not stand for the atrocities
that have been occurring. We will not stand for cop
City to go forward. The community came out and made

(01:50):
public comment for over seventeen hours when given an opportunity,
and said emphatically, no, we don't want your cop City.
We don't want more repression of black people. We don't
want more polluted air, we don't want less green space
in our community. We don't want more policing and terrorizing

(02:14):
of black, brown, indigenous bodies in our community.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Reverend Jones gave her own perspective as a local Atlanta
with deep ties to the city.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
So we are here as faith leaders today and we
are here to say, Mayor Dickens, if you didn't hear
us the first time, we are here once again to
let you know that we don't want cop City. This
is our community, this is our land. I am a
daughter of East Atlanta. I still live in East Atlanta.

(02:47):
I don't want cop City. My granny owns a home
that she's been in for almost fifty years in the
heart of East Atlanta village. She does not want cop City.
My neighbor across the street does not want cop City.
The teachers at my daughter's school do not want cop City.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
She also addressed the outside agitators narrative that police and
media have continued to craft against force defenders, including by
only arresting and charging people thought to be from out
of town at the music festival that previous night.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
So we're here today to make sure that we ring
the alarm and dispel the false narrative that it's outside
agitators who don't want this. We know that this is
the rhetoric that's been going on ever since abolition began,
that it's outside agitators. They said slaves didn't want to
be free, but it was white people from the North
who wanted it. That's a lie. They said that black

(03:43):
people in the South didn't want civil rights, but it
was white people from the north. That's a lie. Today
they are claiming that the black people love Cop City,
it's outside agitators from elsewhere, and that again is a lie.
Simply because the police we have chosen to systematically arrest
people from out of state doesn't mean that what they're

(04:05):
saying is the truth.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Reverend Leoshe addressed to other faith leaders and ask them
to join in their calls to stop the Cop City project.

Speaker 4 (04:15):
We local Atlanta clergy and religious leaders representing diverse communities
call on clergy, religious leaders and people of faith in
moral conscience across this nation and in solidarity with local
Atlanta leaders to stop Cop City, stop the swap, and
defend the Atlanta forests. Wilani People's part Today, we're gathered

(04:39):
for this press conference and we will be delivering a
letter to Atlanta City Council. But we invite you to
continue in this faithful work that we are doing and
contribute wherever you find your space in this growing movement.
We call on clergy religious leaders, who are a moral
authority in our society, to use your power in support

(05:01):
of the forest protectors. We are deeply concerned for the
greater Atlanta community and the implications for the future of
public safety in the United States if Kopsudy moves forward.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
At the press conference, the coalition presented a letter to
the city council, signed by over two hundred clergy members.
Reverend Leoshe also read it aloud.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Despite a record breaking amount of public comment opposing the facility,
Atlanta City councils still pass legislation to build cop City.
We are troubled by leadership that stops acting on the
will of the people and aligns itself instead with corporate
money and the dominant power structure. Urged on by the

(05:44):
message of peace and compassion in all our faiths, we
deplore escalating militarization by city and state government, most recently
since the police killing of Rayshard Brooks here in twenty
twenty by the Atlanta Police Department and Tortugita January eighteenth
of this year by Georgia Patrol. We applaud the rising

(06:07):
consciousness and the need to protect humans and the more
than human by resisting police violence everywhere.

Speaker 5 (06:15):
Yes, and may I.

Speaker 4 (06:16):
Add that in the face of the violent raid that
took place last night, as city residents gathered in solidarity
to defend this forest that is an example of the
militarization that we are calling out through violence and greed.
These lands have been subjected to centuries of abuse, from
the forced removal of indigenous communities, to serving as a

(06:40):
plantation for enslaved African labor, to the site of the
old Atlanta Prison Honor Farm in the twentieth century that
produced immense profits for the prison system. Today, the sounds
of berg song from the forest canopy live alongside the
sound of gunfire and the adjacent APD firing range.

Speaker 5 (07:01):
We are troubled.

Speaker 4 (07:03):
By the commodification of community, land, water, and air on
which all.

Speaker 5 (07:08):
Of us depend.

Speaker 4 (07:10):
We are profoundly troubled by the use of military tactics
and escalated legal charges on members of our community, suppressing
legitimate resistance while at the same time clearcutting the forest
trees despite not having the appropriate permits. The lands and
the people of Atlanta have suffered violence for too long.

Speaker 5 (07:34):
We say no more, No more.

Speaker 4 (07:37):
We declare with faith, commitment and hope that this land
will be a part of healing and repair. We Atlanta clergy,
religious leaders, and all of those across the nation and
world who are in agreement, join our voices with calling
for the following, a complete stop of the cop City
project and cancelation of the Atlanta Police Foundation's lease dropping

(08:01):
all charges against forest defenders and protesters. We demand an
independent investigation into the uses of domestic terrorism charges. We
demand an independent investigation into the killing of Manuel Tehran Tortugita.

Speaker 5 (08:18):
We speak their name for which.

Speaker 4 (08:20):
Recently released video footage of the event suggests there was
lying and deceit surrounding the incident on part of law
enforcement in their initial reporting of the incident.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
The Muscogee elder Miko Chabbon, Colonel spoke at the press
conference and called for land back and for the Muscogee
people to return and remtreat the Wilani Forest in community
with the black and brown residents of the area.

Speaker 6 (08:47):
Our ancestors lived here for over thirteen thousand years, and
if you're to do the math correctly, this country that
we now call the United States is somewhere in the
neighborhood of two hundred and forty just over nearly two
years ago. I came here to the Lawni Forest. I
came here with my own family, my own children, with
some of my elders, to just share a little bit

(09:09):
about how this territory in this land feels to us
as Muskogee people, because let it be known today, it
was not our choice to leave here. We did go
to war to protect these areas, We did go through
much burden to protect these areas, only to be forced
to leave here under military occupation, but also to be
forced to leave here after treachery, after illegally lands were

(09:32):
taken from us.

Speaker 5 (09:34):
This is our homeland.

Speaker 6 (09:35):
My ancestors for generation upon generation, for millennia are buried
on the very ground that you walk on every day.
And I think we have a say in how we
should live as a society in this day and time.
And so in this moment, our hope is to be
able to come back to rematriate, to take our lives
back and to the intimacy that we once had with

(09:57):
everything that grows here in what you now i'll call
the State of Georgia. Because no matter who we are
and where we come from, we have to have air,
we have to have water, we have to have the
elements of this earth to take care of us. Regardless
of what we think. We're dependent on this earth Mother,
and she has been faithful in taking care of us.

(10:17):
It's us that has not been faithful and respecting her.

Speaker 5 (10:21):
Our hope is that.

Speaker 6 (10:22):
This earth is not destroyed before we even have a
chance to come back, that lives aren't destroyed before we
have a chance to come back. So today, in whatever way,
I come here to join the choruses of voices that
you hear all around you saying, what is going on
now is a violence against all of creation. What is

(10:44):
going on now bringing death and harm and hurt is
a violence against all of creation. And we stand in
solidarity as Muskogee people. I stand in solidarity with the
voices that we hear of those tenets, those persons who
live in the land and now. But my hope is now,
at this moment in time, that somehow we can change

(11:07):
the trajectory of our species and go into a direction
where we can value each other, and we can stop
the criminalizing of descent. We should be able to say no,
the increasing of the militarized forces out there does not
ever create peace. It only creates harm, and it only

(11:30):
harms those that are most vulnerable.

Speaker 5 (11:33):
That's the prayer that I carry today.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Reverend Darcy Jarrett joined in the call for a stewardship
of the Wallani Forest to be returned to the Muskogee people.

Speaker 7 (11:42):
City Schools of Decatur has a statement of solidarity an
acknowledgment of harms to cab County and the City of Atlanta.
We call on you to make good on these words,
to give the land back to our indigenous siblings, so
that they, as they have stated and will do and

(12:03):
always have done, work in collaboration with the black and
brown community. Right there near where the site is, outside
of the Wee Lawni Forest, The City of Atlanta is
ready to lease this land at just ten dollars an acre. Instead,
give this land to the native inhabitants. Repatriate this land

(12:25):
to the people to whom is their sacred call, to
defend and work in community with the black and brown
communities that are there. We call on you, Atlanta City Council,
to be the moral compass and to not just halt
the building of this structure, but to repatriate the land

(12:48):
to the sovereign Muscogee Nation, the sacred keepers of this land.
May it be so amen.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Finally, Matthew Johnson spoke about the worrying amount of police
repression and violence the movement has already seen.

Speaker 8 (13:05):
We're projecting by the end of the day, there will
be forty people that have domestic terrorism charges, many of
which just for being in a parking lot. I don't
know how anybody can accept this when you have a
projected forty people that are committed of domestic terrorism, not
one dead body. Meanwhile, we can't even show the bruise

(13:29):
on the police officer that was allegedly shut at but
our friend's ashes. We have the ashes of a friend
that we will spread. We can no longer accept this
as a people, as at lanterns. If we can't figure
out a way to fix public safety without lacking tons

(13:49):
of black kids up in the blackest city in America,
every person in that building needs to step down. If
we can't do it here, we can't do it anywhere.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Self and Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective were
at the press conference, and we met up after to
discuss the events of the day. During the press conference,
some of the media's line of questioning was very much
like aligned with the types of narratives being put out
by police in relation to the events that previous night,
the Sunday Direct Action and Music Festival. I think it's

(14:22):
also worth noting that the people at the Clergy event
did not openly like demonize the actions that people chose
to take on Sunday, And it was very much like
the media definitely gives them opportunities to try to throw
people under the bus, and that did not happen.

Speaker 9 (14:38):
Yeah, and we've seen that all throughout the week. Every
every chance that the media is trying to throw somebody
to like cause dissension or divide amongst the movement has
been really handily deflected by anyone who's come across it.
And the Clergy did not just a good job of

(15:00):
like not falling into that trap, but of actually pointing
out how that line of thinking was like missing the
point and where the true violence was coming from.

Speaker 10 (15:10):
Jams.

Speaker 8 (15:11):
This is how we in the lab And so why
are there.

Speaker 11 (15:14):
A targets people engaging in violence coming from other states.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
The reality of it is that the ones who are
engaging in violence are the police, and they're from right
here in Atlanta, Georgia. You got APD, you got Georgia
State Police, you got GBI, you got Georgia State Troopers,
you got everybody except the Marta police who are engaging
in violence and terrorism against the people who are standing

(15:40):
against this illegal land swap. So I would suggest that
the next time you decide that you are going to
bring up your police rhetoric that you get from whichever
police source, you go ahead and discuss that with them,
because we don't know what they're doing. But what we
do know is what we're doing and what we see
from them that we know. I know when I get

(16:01):
hit by an officer. I know when I see a
mother with a child begging to be let up off
the ground because her children are with her. I know
when I see officers pointing a rifle inside a bouncy house.

Speaker 8 (16:12):
If I could just say, I'd like to just bring
up a story. Initially, the colonizers that came onto this
land attempted to use the indigenous folks as their slaves. However,
the indigenous folks knew the land so they could get away. Now,

(16:33):
when you ask me about why is it that you
keep catching people that aren't from here that might not
reflect the people that are actually involved in the resistance,
God bless.

Speaker 5 (16:45):
You, thank you.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
After the press conference, people from the Clergy Coalition marched
to the front door and entered City Hall before making
it upstairs to sign up for public comment during the
City Council meeting.

Speaker 12 (17:01):
We shall not be moved.

Speaker 13 (17:05):
Fighting for readA, we shall not be mole just like
a street colandic by walls.

Speaker 12 (17:17):
We shall not.

Speaker 14 (17:21):
Move.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
The large group of the clergy and the people gathered
for the Interface Coalition are now moving through City Hall.
There's a whole bunch of cops here that looks relatively
nervous about the easily sized group of people. The scary
Christians are now invading City Hall.

Speaker 5 (17:40):
Lookout.

Speaker 9 (17:41):
So usually in city Hall there there are several APD
officers who you know, just kind of hang out. But
while the clergy are walking up to City Hall, you
can look out and you there is APD on every corner.
And then you enter into City Hall and there are
clusters of APD there. There are I think four floors
to city There are clusters of APD on three sides

(18:03):
of every floor of City Hall.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
After an unexpectedly long Awards and proclamations ceremony, the public
comment section of the City Council meeting finally began.

Speaker 4 (18:14):
I'm standing here today with the Faith Coalition. We are
clergy and faith leaders, we are citizens, and we are
protectors of the land that doesn't belong to us, but
belongs to God. We are deeply concerned for our community members,
for ourselves, and the implications for the future of public

(18:37):
safety in the United States if this cop city development
goes forward. We are asking for all people of faith,
those of you who sit on council, regardless of your
tradition or background, and those who stand with moral conscience,
to stop the cop city project. My faith convicts me

(19:00):
and tells all of us that there is a better way.
We have a prophetic, moral imagination and opportunity here to
do something different in Atlanta, to do something different for
the South. Finally, we're asking for a community process. A
community process. Let us come together with moral imagination to

(19:20):
envision how the Wilani River forests can be the heart
and lungs of community wellness and healing, not more militarization
of police. We want a process that centers the voice
and needs of Muskogee leaders and community members, our indigenous siblings,
incarcerated folks and surrounding prisons, families and neighbors who live

(19:41):
in cross proximity to the firing range and under police surveillance.

Speaker 5 (19:45):
We want holistic community.

Speaker 4 (19:47):
Safety, clean water, tree canopies, a future for every single
one of our children. May it be so.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Someone from the Muskogee Creek Reservation in Oklahoma spoke about
the design to return to their homeland.

Speaker 15 (20:02):
The Miko of our Hellbi Ceremonial Grounds back home in
Oklahoma has come here where our original fire was started,
and then it was taken all the way to Oklahoma,
and now we want to bring it back to our
land and we want to start those fires again. Well,
when we come back, we need a land to come
back to. This is my first time coming back to

(20:24):
visit my homelands. I wanted to visit here where my
ancestors are, as a spiritual and personal journey. I didn't
want to come here to try to fight the violence
that I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is from the residence
is they need investment in housing and public spaces, and
not investment in further militarized policing. They want investment in

(20:48):
the well being of incarcerated and not further violent incarceration,
but the well being of the community members.

Speaker 13 (20:56):
Thank you, moto Chi Chadi's.

Speaker 11 (20:59):
I turned last week and I've lived in Atlanta my
whole life. I'm not an outsider and I am here
to say to you that I find cop City to
be an abomination. My husband is a pastor of a
church a couple of miles from here, and he could
not be here today. He's out of town, but he

(21:20):
stands with me with these comments. The people who have
spoken before me have said the things I would say,
but I would like to say that I pretty much
agree with every single thing they have said about this
insanity that you all are calling a police safety training facility.
So I think you need to just cancel it, start

(21:43):
having some real conversations with the people of this city
to solve the real problems in a way that will
actually be effective. And this facility is not going to
be it. And the mayor's proposed task force is just
one more way to try to propagandize us to believe
that this is good for us, when we're not stupid
and we know it's just lipstick on a pig.

Speaker 5 (22:05):
And if you hard in your heart, be.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
Reminded of the story of another pharaoh who had a
very hard heart, who would not free the people of God,
who would not lead them to their land. You know
what happened in that story. Don't think that you will
not suffer the same fate. Don't think that the infrastructure
of this so called black Mecca will not come toppling over,

(22:28):
because it will.

Speaker 9 (22:29):
There are a couple like things to note about how
City council public comment works. City Council doesn't tend to
pay attention to them. Essensibly the only one who pays
attention is City Council President Doug Shipman, because it is
his job to call time and to call up the
next person. But you know, city councilors will like step
in and out of the room, get something to eat

(22:51):
during the seventeen hours of public comment for cop city,
like one of them held a press conference.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
There are two council members notoriously bad at paying attention
to public comment. Dustin Hillis who is the committee chair
for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee. Basically he's in
charge of police. And the other is Mary Norwood, who
represents Buckhead and has what I would describe as ontologically
evil vibes. Buckheed is the northern, primarily white neighborhood in

(23:19):
Atlanta that is wanted to secede from the city, which
in Atlanta has very uncomfortable segregation and redlining parallels. But
despite not paying attention during public comment. These two, in particular,
both paid extra attention after public comment when Police Chief
Darren Sheerbaum gave testimony on what happened the night previous.

Speaker 16 (23:42):
Were there any firefighter or police city employee entries yesterday's event.

Speaker 17 (23:48):
At Kelsmer hillis there was not. We're very fortunate that
that was the outcome. We're fortunate that there was no injuries.

Speaker 16 (23:54):
If this continues, do we have the ability to deploy
even greater force to quill this? You know, the millions
of damage, millions of dollars of damage to public and
private properties.

Speaker 17 (24:11):
We will make adjustments as those that used various tactics.

Speaker 14 (24:15):
Yesterday was an escalation.

Speaker 17 (24:17):
We had not seen this large number of individuals engaged
in this activity, and the aggressive manner in which.

Speaker 14 (24:23):
The officers were attacked.

Speaker 17 (24:25):
Was a significant change from what we had seen before,
when it generally had been setting property on fire. We'd
seen police cars set on fire, win those buses, but
this was started as an attack against individuals, men and
women who are employees of this city, So that was
an escalation. Council Member hillis that we have already made
adjustments for both within our capability as well as with
our partners.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Throughout to Sheerbaum's testimony, it was interesting the degree to
which the Chief framed Sunday's direct action as primarily being
targeted against officers and not the destruction of equipment and
machinery at the North Gate. From the video that APD
themselves released of the incident, it's clear that engagement with

(25:05):
the police was limited to keeping officers at bay as
construction equipment was targeted, and despite the continued referring of
fireworks as quote unquote mortars or explosives, as the Chief
himself admitted, no officers were harmed during the direct action.
In a later episode, we'll hear more of Chief Sheerbaum's

(25:27):
explanation of Sunday Night's events, as it gives insight into
the police's own surveillance capabilities and their ability to respond
quickly to direct actions. But until then, back to the
events of Monday, March sixth, After the city council meeting,
I dressed up in the gayest little outfit that I
had with me and went back to the woods for

(25:49):
the first time since Sunday Night for Perham. Initially, people
were very cautious when entering the woods again, but As
the night went on, more and more people started to
pour into the forest, with some choosing to return to
their camp. Later that night, I enjoyed an experimental noise
show in the living room, probably to the detriment of

(26:09):
people trying to sleep in the area. I went to
the Perham in the Woods. I got to share my
memory of the Veggietail's ester story starring the tickle Monsters.
I got to bond with a few exangelicals about that,
so that was fine. Then there was an experimental noise
show in the forest, and really, I think it actually

(26:29):
is worth talking about because this was the first time.

Speaker 5 (26:31):
People return to the forest.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, this was the first time that people like returned
to the forest in mass since Sunday, and you started
to kind of feel people's energy get reinvigorated. The woods
became a place again that people were able to be
in and feel like they were able to be in
community in the woods again.

Speaker 9 (26:49):
And that is in keeping with sort of how this
movement has always responded to what we I guess could
call a loss, right.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Like, twenty three people getting arrested in charge is a
is a great loss.

Speaker 9 (27:01):
Yeah, and the bounce back period is pretty quick like
the resiliency is is continual and always strengthening. Every time
that you know, the repression grows, like it does seem
like the resiliency grows with it.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
People were not scared away from the woods. People still
still were like, no, this is something I care about.
I am still going to be in the woods. I'm
still going to defend these woods. And you kind of
have like there's always this essence of like fear kind
of kind of underlying whenever you're like in the Wollani Forest,
because you know, people have been arrested and charged for

(27:34):
laying in a hammock like that.

Speaker 5 (27:36):
With another defender, with another defendant.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
And like so you know that it is it is
fundamentally a risky place to be, but people think the
potential cost is worth it, Like they will they continue
to be here because they know this is a winnable
fight and they know it that it is worth it
to defend these woods. Early Tuesday morning, a few stop
Coop City banner drops happen throughout the city. Two people

(28:02):
were detained by police during one of these banner drops,
but were later released with a traffic citation after being
interrogated separately and extensively photographed by law enforcement officials only
identified as quote Georgia Police and Homeland Security unquote. Tuesday
was the start of a series of non violent direct
actions that were being launched around downtown and midtown. Tuesday morning,

(28:26):
I followed a small group that went to the headquarters
of Norfolk Southern, one of the Atlanta Police Foundation's financial
contributors and noted enemy of Ohio.

Speaker 9 (28:36):
They entered the lobby and it's a very small group,
but like I think half of it was.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
It was like five people and another five like press people.

Speaker 9 (28:45):
Yeah, So they enter and they read allowed a letter
to Alan Shaw, the CEO of Norfolk Southern, calling forward
investment of Norfolk Southern from Copcity. And immediately they are
met with a security guard screaming like go you get.

Speaker 5 (29:01):
Out of the lobby.

Speaker 9 (29:02):
Leave, You're you're being criminally trust or you're being trespassed.

Speaker 5 (29:05):
You have to leave.

Speaker 9 (29:06):
One of the other security guards runs around with a
cell phone camera and like shoves it in everybody's faces,
reaching rather rudely over you to get my face, and.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
They got very close to me and during the Norfolk
Southern building, please.

Speaker 12 (29:25):
Please let.

Speaker 13 (29:35):
It's playing a horrible row in the city, where.

Speaker 12 (29:44):
Can you.

Speaker 9 (29:49):
And so the whole thing lasts like less than five minutes,
maybe ride about five minutes when they finished reading the letter,
Like all they asked was that the letter go to
the CEOP.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
While people were ins the headquarters, security called ns Police,
which is the Norfolk Southern Police who are legally allowed
to arrest people.

Speaker 13 (30:13):
Anyone you can see.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
For your building.

Speaker 9 (30:18):
But nobody was arrested at that non violent direct action.
The whole thing was over pretty quickly, and you know,
as we were walking out, we saw like the the
a force of Norfolk Southern Police like swarm kind of
the exterior of the campus and like keep an.

Speaker 14 (30:33):
Eye out on things.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
And then we moved over to Woodriff Park, which was
the meeting place for these non violent direct actions that
happened about every every day at noon starting on starting
on Tuesday. It's Tuesday, March seventh, around noon, there's about
fifty or so people gathered in Woodriff Park who are
heading out and marching to go stop by two of

(30:54):
the Atlanta Police Foundation corporate funders.

Speaker 9 (30:58):
We roll up and I think at that point they
were like twenty is protesters.

Speaker 18 (31:02):
It was.

Speaker 9 (31:02):
It started off very small there was no police, like
no real visible police presence. They were like maybe a
cruiser or two like kind of around and actually start
to gather and kind of talk about like what their
plan is for the day, which was just to march
around to three different sites. They wanted the EIGHTE and
T Building, the Georgia Pacific Building, and GSU Georgia State University.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
They are now leaving Woodriff Park. They got to Georgia Pacific,
one of the COP City financial backers, without much incident
and without much in terms of visible police presence. People
called on Mayor Dickens, who is the chair of the
board of directors for Georgia Pacific, to cancel the Atlanta
Police Foundation lease of the land that cop City is

(31:50):
slated to be built on.

Speaker 19 (31:52):
Mayor Dickens, we want you to cancel this lace. We
know that you had the authority.

Speaker 5 (31:57):
To do so.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
They finished up that george Pacific, they set up a
little vigil for Torti Guita.

Speaker 9 (32:02):
And from Georgia Pacific they began their trek to the
AT and T Building.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
They left a little vigil for Torti Ghita in front
of the Georgia Pacific Center and the group of like
more than fifty people are continuing to march north.

Speaker 5 (32:21):
Police eight to ten.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Police officers are directly behind them, and their whole bunch
of police cars are blocking Peachtree along the path to
at and D was the APF's headquarters just across the street,
And as the crowd approached this intersection, the amount of
police ballooned massively. In the block around the Atlantic Police
Foundation headquarters. There's got to be about thirty to forty

(32:44):
officers stationed walking off the entrance to the APF, and
also just like following the crowd around as they're as
they're marching through the through the sidewalks, there's definitely over god,
there's I think around seventy five office deployed in this
area right now.

Speaker 5 (33:01):
The number keeps growing.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
As we start walking down different sidewalks and different streets,
you just see more officers that are already stationed.

Speaker 9 (33:09):
There are fifty activists and what certainly over one hundreds
some were probably between one hundred one hundred and twenty
police officers started marching not like behind, not in front,
but directly beside the march, sort of pinning the march
to the wall, and like essentially kettling the march.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
There was police station in front, there was police station behind,
and police stationed on the side. It was surrounding the
surrounding like these fifty people who were simply walking on
the sidewalk stumbling upon a new group of officers.

Speaker 5 (33:40):
Got to be about one hundred officers in this area
right now.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
At one point a police vehicle was just parked on
the sidewalk, completely blocking it. During this entire time, police
were blocking all of the traffic in these intersections and roads.

Speaker 9 (33:54):
Driving wrong way up one way, like just you know,
doing police things.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, a Geordia State University canine unit this blocking off
the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle.
They're trying to make it impossible for people to actually
move on the sidewalk. But for the most part, people
have been able to move around the police and keep
their movement going instead of just stalling in one spot

(34:20):
or like trying to tychically confront what is now like
hundreds one hundreds of law enforcement officers from Fulton County
Sheriffs and Atlanta Police Department and even like Georga State
University police. So the group is split up in between
two streets right now because people are trying to follow
the crossing signals because otherwise police are going to tackle

(34:40):
and violently assault people. No one was arrested, People marched
to their perspective locations.

Speaker 9 (34:46):
People very pointedly kept to laws. There was a couple
of times when like the crosswalk changed and the group
kind of had to split. They would stay and wait
until the crosswalk went back to walk, and then crossover
and join.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
It's so funny that the cops are so insistent if
you stepped on the streets, you're going to get arrested,
and makeing sure people stay on the side of walks.
But the result of that is that all the cops
are standing in the street and they're blocking off like
miles of traffic downtown right now. People just arrived at
the fifty one Peach Street Center Avenue AT and T
Building in downtown Atlanta. Police were already stationed in front

(35:20):
of the AT and T building, so there wasn't much
to do. After a brief speech talking about AT and
T's contributions to the Police Foundation and Cop City, the
crowd moved on. Now people are turning west in the
opposite direction from the AT and t headquarters, heading back
into the Woodruff Park area where this march began. Police

(35:43):
with long guns here. Finally, the crowd stopped at Georgia
State University and talked about GSU's connections to the Atlanta
Police Foundation. What is of note for this action, and
really all of the actions that happened the next few days,
is not what the protesters did. It's the police is
disproportionate response to just fifty people walking on the sidewalk,

(36:03):
chanting and giving short speeches outside of businesses tied to APF.

Speaker 9 (36:09):
With a small line of officers in front of GSU,
they gave their their last round of speeches and sort
of dispersed for.

Speaker 19 (36:16):
The day before we wrap today and gave these clouds
something else that got do.

Speaker 13 (36:21):
We will be out here.

Speaker 19 (36:23):
We will be out here for the rest of the week,
for the rest of the month, for the year.

Speaker 12 (36:32):
We won't fight. Got here.

Speaker 4 (36:33):
We wait.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Some of the police are now grouping up and opening
up the sidewalk so people can actually leave. It seems
officers were in fact instructed to make arrests during this action,
but for some reason did not follow through on those orders.
According to scanner audio from Atlanta Police department's swat team.

Speaker 20 (37:00):
About fifty of them. The problem is they've been telling
them to make a risk, but also is not making
a risk. I guess they weren't supposed to. I don't know,
but I'm lit with that. We'll just hold what we
got at spawn as leaders.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Extensive police activity continued. Later that night, at around five
thirty to six pm, police started staging around the forest
in a way that usually indicates that a raid is forthcoming.
Word spread around the recovering encampment that police could be
preparing for a raid.

Speaker 9 (37:35):
So the initial reports were like that there were fifty
police officers staged at Key Road and ready to go,
and then the Caab County Swat starts to roll up
at the fire station, and I would say a fair
amount of like panic starts to set it at camp.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Multiple multiple police copters are getting are getting flown overhead,
multiple different spat teams being brought in. At least like
three or four different agencies are stationing officers around the woods.
I believe it's estimated that at least one hundred and
twenty police officers were being staged in the area directly
surrounding the forest and in the area by the power

(38:16):
line cut on Key Road.

Speaker 9 (38:17):
And it should be said that you know, up until
this point, the police have never brought in that many
resources to any protest action that I'm aware of, and
not come in and engaged. So I was with a
group offsite who like immediately began to fear, like you know,
for they wouldn't be able to get back to their
camp size, they wouldn't be able to get their gear,

(38:38):
they wouldn't be able to get their medication, and that,
from what I understand, was the general vibe around.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
But nothing happened, Nothing seemed to happen. And then at
around seven police started to almost like express confusion on
what was going on, and then everyone else expressed confusion
for why the police were confused. And we think we've
kind of put together what may have happened.

Speaker 5 (39:02):
So Clark, what.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Is suspected of going down here?

Speaker 9 (39:09):
So the one thing that police don't understand and probably
will never understand, is humor. Now they become the butt
of the joke often, but they don't understand comedy. So
at seven o'clock that evening was scheduled comedy in the forest,
and from what we've gathered, the police thought that the
Comedy in the Forest event was going to be a

(39:30):
cover for another Sunday night like action.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
So this event was scheduled on the public Defend the
Atlanta Forest calendar that anyone can look at online is
this Comedy in the Woods event for people to tell
jokes around a campfire. And I guess they thought it
was like it was like this event that was like
a red herring so that people could then go do

(39:55):
violent militancy in around the woods. So when seven o'clock
came in, went like police were expecting people to like
arrive at the woods or something, and that just didn't
happen because it turns out a few minutes before seven o'clock,
this comedy event was canceled for like unrelated reasons. The
organizer had had things come up, so this event just
didn't happen. But there still was comedy in the Woods.

(40:19):
It just was that the police wasted probably over one
hundred thousand dollars mobilizing over one hundred officers. I mean, obviously,
I think some people in the woods were you know,
had some frustration that that that you know, they experienced
this fear of this possibly incoming rate that then resulted
in there being nothing. I think it's always important to

(40:42):
when people are relaying information, they relay information that is
known without like unadue speculation. So like it is a
fact to say that there's over a hundred cops stationing
by the woods and they've never had that many cops
there before without doing some sort of raid or some
sort of some sort of like activity forest.

Speaker 9 (41:00):
And part of what I've heard go on since then was,
you know, some very generative conversations about how they're going
to take into account like this new paradigm that developed
that night. And I think that again speaks to sort
of just how the movement continues to develop and grow
and like you know, handle new new challenges and shifts.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
So, with the Forest camp still intact, the week of
action continued on as planned, with another downtown nonviolent direct
action that next morning.

Speaker 9 (41:30):
So Wednesday noon is a lot smaller of direct action
than the day before.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
It starts with like a dozen people. It slowly grows
like a few dozen, but yeah, it started extremely, extremely small.
So this was one difference from Tuesday is that when
we arrived, police already had a visible presence in downtown,
stationed around Woodriff Park. So a group of people just
launch from Woodriff Park. They kind of split off in
different different little sub subgroups. Lots of people are just

(42:00):
sationed outside of Marta stops handing out flyers, and that
is what people are doing right now. Police seem relatively
confused and are trying to like mobilize the different areas
where they feel like something might happen, but it's just
people handing out flyers.

Speaker 9 (42:17):
And they decided to split into groups and engage in
like just some typical outreach activity that you would see,
you know from any group, like just passing out flyers
and pamphlets and attempting from what I saw to have
like one on one conversations with anyone who wanted to.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
So this this group that it broke off into these
smaller subgroups. The group that we kind of accompanied stationed
themselves around some Marta stops around I believe it was
like the it was the Peachtree Lata station. Yeah, So
they stationed at the at the like the three different
exits or entrances for that, just just handing out flyers,
handing out leaflets, trying to you know, talk to anybody

(42:52):
who walks by. Another group of people standing outside of
a public transit spot handing out flyers, probably like on
a four or five other small, small groups doing similar
things throughout downtown, which means police have a lot more
places to be as opposed to just following one big group.

Speaker 9 (43:10):
The group that we followed had its own police presence
follow it, and then when they split into three more groups,
each group had its own police presence follow it, and
police stuck to the protesters the entire time. And of course,
like there's there's white transport vans that are full of
cops kind of driving by.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
I think white van full of police officers just showed
up across the street. Army Green Tan SWAT vehicle just
parked a block away from the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters.
There was an Atlanta swat vehicle parked outside of the Hooters.

Speaker 9 (43:42):
Totally normal response. Totally normal response. And so the leafleting
goes on for you know, like forty five minutes, and
then all of the groups start to gather together, conveniently
with the group that like we had embedded with.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
All right, there's actually a pretty decent number of people
gather here for the flywering event today. You know, normal
police response to people handing out flyers. Just fifty officers
in a swat team. But yeah, there's probably at this point,
like two or three dozen people that have kind of
all converged together. They started off very small, people were
very very spread out. They splintered off into little, little,

(44:19):
smaller groups, but now they've all kind of coalesced together
back again. So all the little subgroups kind of meet
up on Andrew Jung and Peach Tree, right next to
the Hooters and the hard Rock Cafe.

Speaker 9 (44:32):
This area is like the business district, so in the
middle of the day, it's like really busy. It's a
fairly like good spot to pass out leaflets.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
So they are passing out these leaflets. Pedestrians are still
able to like walk through the sidewalks. It's pretty it's
pretty chill. And then APD approaches the crowd. Like the
APD has already been around this area. There's there's this
vehicle across the street watching people hand out flyers. But
then Lieutenant and Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives

(45:03):
them a dispersal order.

Speaker 5 (45:05):
Okay, can I read the dispersal order?

Speaker 21 (45:08):
All right?

Speaker 22 (45:08):
So I'm a Lieutenant Neil Welch, Police Officer, City of Atlanta,
I hereby declare that being on this sidewalk, you are
obstructing or repeating the normal and reasonable movement of pedestrian
traffic in violation of Atlanta City Ordinance. Okay, in the
name of the people is Saya, Georgia. I hereby command
that all present in the sidewalk, All present here in

(45:31):
the sidewalk, immediately exit the street or the roadway or sidewalk.
If you do not do so, you may be detained
or arrested. Should you fail to exit the sidewalk in
accordance with this lawful command, you shall be in violation
of Section one five zero two six six substructing pedestrian Traffic,

(45:53):
which prohibits standing or being on any street, roadway, or
sidewalk in a manner to obstructor impede the more reasonable
pedestrian traffic.

Speaker 5 (46:02):
Cops threatened arrest and detainment.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
They claimed that people were blocking the sidewalk, which they
absolutely were not. I was walking freely, as was all
of like downtown pedestrian traffic. They were not blocking anything.

Speaker 5 (46:15):
This is this is.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
Pretty silly, utterly, utterly ridiculous response to people handing out flyers.
So they were told they cannot be on the sidewalk.
Obviously they can't be on the street. Where where are
you allowed to protest if not the sidewalk or the street.
Seemed like very like flimsy legal footing. But obviously they

(46:38):
police can arrest anyone they want to at any time
for any reason. So people decided to move. They cross
over the street, they walk like a block north, they
cross the street again, and they move on to this
part of the sidewalk that is like really large, like
a massive, massive, open open section that.

Speaker 9 (46:53):
Yeah, right in front of the mall. So it's it's
it's meant to like have a bunch of people passed
by it.

Speaker 5 (46:59):
So people continue to hand out flyers while this is happening.

Speaker 9 (47:02):
Uh, there's another group who comes in to the side
of Petree Center Mall and enters the mall to find
Mayor Andre Dickens. There are a couple boards in Atlanta
that stipulate the mayor is like the head of the board,
and this is one of them, and it meets in
Peatree Center.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Mall as one does.

Speaker 5 (47:22):
So the mayor is having a meeting in the mall.

Speaker 9 (47:25):
The office spaces, you know, sort of above the mall.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
And this group of people from the Muscogie Nation enter
and try to meet up with the mayor to hand
off a letter.

Speaker 13 (47:36):
Objection.

Speaker 6 (47:37):
Objection, We have a letter being delivered from the Muscoge
Creek Nation on behalf of Muscogee Creek spiritual leadership and
opposition to COMS.

Speaker 15 (47:47):
I came all the way on the trail of tears
to deliver this letter to you, folks. We want you
to know that the contemporary Muscogee people are now making
their journey back to our home lands. And hereby give
notice to Mayor Andrew Dickens, the Atlanta City Council, the
Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Police Foundation, the DeKalb County

(48:11):
Sheriff's Office, and so called copp City that you must
immediately vacate Muscogee homelands and cease violence and policing of
Indigenous and Black people and Muscogee lands. We lived as
stewards and in relationship to this land for more than
thirteen thousand years until the illegitimate State of Georgia negotiated

(48:33):
with the Tyrant Andrew Jackson for the militarized for the
militarized force removal of Muscogee and Cherokee relatives to Indian territories.
Mayor Dickens, can I give this letter to you? He
got one, Mayor, we want to talk to you about

(48:56):
our homeland.

Speaker 12 (48:57):
The Muskogee Creek.

Speaker 9 (48:58):
People, three indigenous An activists along with Kamal Franklin, arrive
and they find the mayor. They enter the board meeting
and they begin to read this letter from the Muscogi
Nation aloud. And in the letter it essentially says that
Atlanta is being evicted out of the Louis Lanni Forest
and the most Scogie people are going to return and

(49:20):
reclaim their ancestral land. Mayor Dickens, in true mayor fashion,
bolts away from this, running through an exit door, which
is then like blocked by a guard which I think
that has its own like set of legal issues, essentially
just ignoring them over his shoulder. He calls out, I've
got a copy of the letter and hides just completely

(49:44):
trying to escape what is not a good look for him.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
The Atlanta Police Department APEX SWAT team was called to
the mall, and right as the activists were able to exit,
the special police units rushed into the building, finding no
one by now, the police repression during this week of
action far exceeded police activity during any of the prior
weeks of action, and this trend would continue as the

(50:11):
week entered its last few days. The next episode will
wrap up our coverage for the week, as well as
contain a bit more analysis of the police repression and
the fallout of Sunday's direct action. But then there will
be a fifth bonus episode that gives an overview of
what's happened in the Malani Forest in the intervening two months.
See You on the other Side Music festival audio courtesy

(50:39):
of Unicorn Riot Welcome back to it could happen here.

(51:08):
I'm Garrison Davis. This is episode four of my mini
series and detailing the March twenty twenty three week of
Action to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia. This episode,
we'll be hearing from a lot of new people as
we close out the day to day coverage of this
week of action. One of the last big organized rallies

(51:30):
was on Thursday night and it was put on by
Community Movement Builders and other black led groups from Atlanta.

Speaker 9 (51:37):
The big event Thursday night was a six o'clock rally
that met at the Martin Luther King National Historic Site.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
There was police stationed at King Center before anyone got there.
We saw like dozens and dozens of police cars going by.

Speaker 9 (51:51):
All around the site are various quick response forces and
riot cops just ready.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
To move in large police response in the area already,
as has been expected for the past few days. Multiple
Sandy Springs police buses were driving by. There was multiple
unmarked white vans full of officers. The areas crawling with
police cars. And now there's a small detail of officers
across the street from the people gathering here in the park.

Speaker 9 (52:22):
We are currently surrounded on every side by groups of
police officers in riodegear. The crowd started off like actually
fairly decently sized, maybe like fifty people, and then continued
as swell as the speeches progressed to I would say
like two hundred two hundred fifty, maybe even a little
bit more. They were passing out signs, so like anyone

(52:43):
who came, like they had a sign ready for you.
Andre Dickins is a sellout of course, as a very
popular one. There were stop Coop City like banners that
people could like hold atl of verse twelve, like you know,
just a bunch of like really clever sort of protest
slogans and things that people get behind. The makeup of
the crowd was definitely leaned like far less like white

(53:04):
anarchists than certainly the accusations of this movement, I think
more representative of the movement as a whole, Like it
was a mix of a bunch of different people. I
would say like it probably accurately reflected Atlanta demographics.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Defend the forest signs and banners and being handed out
throughout the crowd. Other people are passing around the Jail
Support number and Jill Support contact information.

Speaker 5 (53:28):
People are starting to get ready.

Speaker 9 (53:29):
So it meets it at six o'clock and for about
an hour and a half we listened to a series
of speeches as the crowd begins to swell.

Speaker 19 (53:38):
So we are here in solidarity together today to make
it clear to the mayor.

Speaker 12 (53:43):
That he's not gonna keep lying on our names.

Speaker 19 (53:45):
They'll literally be filling the last of Atlanta have to
repressed life and kill. We find it ridiculous, we find
it disgusting, We find it embarrassing. Tickets would fix his
mouth to say that black people want to be killed
by the police, that black people walk Crop City. The

(54:08):
man must have forgotten that our ancestors were literally fighting
abolition since they were brutally brought to this country. They
were fighting for freedom, fighting the original police right, the
slave patrols that captured black bodies to take them back
to their white masters. He's talking to the same black

(54:29):
people whose elders were fighting here in the same streets
in the sixties and the seventies to stop police occupation
of our communities.

Speaker 5 (54:37):
That's right.

Speaker 19 (54:39):
Resistance to police, resistance to stay violence is literally in
our blood as black people.

Speaker 13 (54:45):
It is in our DNA.

Speaker 19 (54:47):
They're lying on our name because they want money from
the same white corporations that are funding Cop City, Home Depot,
Chick fil A, Coca Cola, Norfolk, Southern and Cops enterprises
who own to ajac And this is a fight that
we will win, that we are committed to winning. And

(55:10):
so when we talk about winning, it's important to say
what do we mean when we say that we'll win.
We mean no Cops City anywhere, not in South Atlanta,
not in the cab not in North Atlanta, nowhere.

Speaker 5 (55:26):
When we say that.

Speaker 19 (55:27):
We will win, we are meaning that this fight does
not stop with Cops City. This is a fight for
the liberation of all oppressed people here and abroad. That's right,
and that's why it's disgusting that the mayor and that
these corporations will talk about outside agitators. Okay, the reason
that there are people coming from all over the world

(55:48):
to support this fight is because this is a fight
that affects.

Speaker 13 (55:51):
All of us, that's right.

Speaker 19 (55:52):
The Atlanta Police Foundation admitted that percent of the cops
being trained at that facility will not be in George.
So when people come from Tennessee, from New York, from California,
it's because they know that their local police might learn
how to kill them better here, that's right. And when
people come from abroad, they know that currently the Atlanta

(56:15):
Police Department trans with the Israeli police. So the same
techniques being used to brutalize black people are being used
to practice genocide on the Palestinian people, and the same
tactics being used to practice genofide on the Palestinian people
are being used to brutalize black people right here. Yes,
So when people come from all over the world to

(56:36):
say stop caught City, they're not outside agitators. They're standing
in solidarity with us because it's the.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
Fight's a call. As the rain picked up, Tortillita's mother,
Belquise Taran, spoke next on the cards.

Speaker 23 (56:53):
The friend that I called them, I caned them to
come here to support us.

Speaker 24 (56:59):
On from different religions, come here and help us.

Speaker 13 (57:04):
This is a.

Speaker 5 (57:05):
Matter of the earth.

Speaker 13 (57:09):
We're talking about Earth that.

Speaker 24 (57:12):
Is dying right needs our love. That earth needs our attention,
and we are we have conscience. We know that this
is not right.

Speaker 12 (57:27):
Don't go by yourself when we go.

Speaker 24 (57:30):
To activities and stay together, don't go outside by yourself.

Speaker 23 (57:35):
Don't We need to make understand that this is the
right thing to do.

Speaker 24 (57:42):
We are the correct people.

Speaker 13 (57:44):
We are right because we are driving by.

Speaker 23 (57:48):
Love, by carry by concerns, and we love all the
I love you you.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
A speaker from Black Votes Matter addressed to the crowd next,
starting off by talking about the importance of mass action.

Speaker 18 (58:11):
I just want to explain something because sometimes people get confused,
they get it twisted.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
They say, oh, y'all, look like vote.

Speaker 12 (58:15):
It's better all y'all do is talk about voting.

Speaker 18 (58:18):
Be clear, we understand that the way that we get
to liberation is not going to come just through a vote.
That's never been how it's worked for our people in
this country. Sister Harry didn't get a chance to vote
for liberations. She didn't get a chance to vote to
take our people off the plantation right.

Speaker 12 (58:34):
So we are very clear that what we have got
to be.

Speaker 18 (58:37):
In fact, we just celebrated, commemorated the anniversary of Selma
and the marks of Montgomery. But be clear, the people
of Selma didn't vote for a voting rights act.

Speaker 12 (58:47):
They had to fight for it. They had to march
for it.

Speaker 18 (58:49):
In some cases, they bled for it, they had to
resist for it, they had to take to the streets
for it.

Speaker 5 (58:55):
It's a that tradition that.

Speaker 13 (58:57):
We are out here today.

Speaker 5 (58:58):
So yes, not believe.

Speaker 18 (59:01):
I believe in the power of the vote, but house
to believe in the power of mass action.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
He then talked about the intersection of cop City and
efforts to further restrict the democratic process in Georgia.

Speaker 18 (59:13):
The same corporations that are that are funding cop City
are the same ones that are funding the.

Speaker 12 (59:19):
Bonus Questions, the same ones we've did.

Speaker 18 (59:23):
Our whole campaign a couple of years ago in Georgia,
says that Bonus Prission bill, and we called out home
Depot and Coca Cola and tell them many of the
other corporations that give money to the people that are
that are taken away our rights to vote. And then
if you don't have a government that reflects the people,
then what do you need.

Speaker 12 (59:43):
You need a police force to enforce the fact that
you don't have a government that reflects the people.

Speaker 18 (59:49):
And so our message from Mary Dickens, our message for
the city Council is that if you don't respond to
the people, you our the little house are We've got
that power.

Speaker 12 (01:00:04):
We've got to make that happen.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Students from the Atlanta University Center consortium of four black
colleges in Atlanta, were some of the last people to
give speeches before the march.

Speaker 25 (01:00:16):
We have attempted to reform our police force, add de
el escalation training, add civil rights history training, and give
more money to our police, but we continue to see
black bodies across social media platforms, television and other media
platforms being displayed being murdered.

Speaker 13 (01:00:32):
The victims have received no justice.

Speaker 12 (01:00:35):
And when we say no justice, what do we say?

Speaker 21 (01:00:37):
No justice, no justice, no justice.

Speaker 19 (01:00:44):
The building of the Atlanta Public Training Center is an
insult and an act of the utmost disrespect from our
city leaders.

Speaker 12 (01:00:52):
We have a duty to fight for the change that
we seek.

Speaker 19 (01:00:55):
As an active member of this community, I refuse to
sit by and.

Speaker 13 (01:00:59):
Be idle and just let things happen.

Speaker 26 (01:01:02):
This city has been my home ever since I was born.

Speaker 12 (01:01:07):
I've been to various events here.

Speaker 18 (01:01:09):
I have seen the sights and have lived through some
of the most important events right here in this city.

Speaker 26 (01:01:14):
This is my home. This is your home. This is
our home. This is the home of Black excellence. This
is the home of doctor Martin Luther King Junior. This
is the home of John Lewis. This is the home
of Joseph Evelyn and Joseph E.

Speaker 18 (01:01:32):
Lowie. This is the home of civil rights. This is
the home of CT Givion. This is the home of
great blackness itself. This is the home of every single
black person here in America. This city, this house, this
place of Black excellence, says no to cop city.

Speaker 27 (01:01:56):
My Afro pessimist friends and revolutionaries both agree we are
at war. The police in the city have said as
much loudly with their words and their actions. It feels
obvious to me that we need warriors weapons, and I
know that that fact may give some of us trepidation,
But I want to assure you that we need so

(01:02:18):
much more than soldiers to win this fight. Whatever it
is that you do, whatever skill you bring, I just
ask that.

Speaker 12 (01:02:26):
You make it a weapon.

Speaker 27 (01:02:27):
If we are ever going to experience democracy, we need
your tools to be repurposed in this fight against Cop City.
If you're a writer like me, child that Patty better
look like a threat to cop City. If you do
mutual aid, caring for community ain't gonna get any easier.

(01:02:48):
Please show us the way. If you're an artist, where
are my artists at?

Speaker 5 (01:02:56):
You got a lot of.

Speaker 13 (01:02:57):
Them out here.

Speaker 27 (01:02:58):
Let every painting room feel the truth, including the joy
and freedom that abolition calls us to. Let us make
songs that inspire revolution. If you're a healer, get ready.
We need you. Much will be lost in this struggle.
Let us not forget. If you're a teacher, well, we

(01:03:22):
got a lot to learn about this war we're fighting
and how police practice urban warfare. If you're a lawyer,
guide us when they say that any fighter is a criminal.
If you're a digital organizer and keep your finger on
the pulse and tell our stories far and wide. And
if you're a community organizer, we need to tend to

(01:03:42):
our relationships, not just use them. We need real solidarity
which goes beyond unity. We need pluralism, making space for
many strategies to coexist, and ultimately, we need to practice democracy.

Speaker 12 (01:03:57):
If we plan to build one cop city, is.

Speaker 27 (01:03:59):
The police and the establishment of preparing for domestic war
right here in the.

Speaker 12 (01:04:04):
City of Atlanta's that's right.

Speaker 27 (01:04:06):
Any further training of the police is training against our existence.

Speaker 12 (01:04:15):
That shit cannot be built.

Speaker 13 (01:04:19):
It will best.

Speaker 27 (01:04:22):
We all must fight for the democracy we've never seen before.
What are you willing to do? Thank you?

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
So, after about an hour of speeches, people are now
foundly getting ready to move.

Speaker 5 (01:04:36):
They announced on the.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
Loud speaker where we are going. We are marching to
the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters on Peachtree, the same location
that had the front windows broken on the protest following
the killing of Tortighita that Saturday. So people leave, they
stick on to the sidewalk because there's cops staring at them,
and cops that definitely had had indicated that if people

(01:05:01):
step on to the street they would be arrested. The
length of the march is stretching for about two or
three city blocks, just because you know, trying to cram
three hundred people onto a sidewalk makes sen stretch out
really long. But the cops have been pretty pretty adamant

(01:05:22):
that if anyone steps onto the street, they're going to
get arrested.

Speaker 5 (01:05:25):
That is a banner being carried across that says.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
What you water grows, fund our future, Stop cop city,
defend the forest. People with the stop cop city signs
in the Coca Cola font signs that read Atlanta versus
cop City, No cop city on stolen land. The Thursday

(01:05:50):
march definitely had the most amount of signs out of
all of the individual marches or actions that I want
to both small handheld signs and also signs with really
tall handles to hold up above the crowd. All right,
people are being led into the street now after walking,

(01:06:12):
after walking on the hidewalk for a decent while, people
have now taken to the street along the path of
the march. The projector was set up projecting like stop
coop city slogans onto the side of a building, almost
like really really good graphic design.

Speaker 9 (01:06:27):
Visuals is definitely a strength of the movement.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
There's this police riot helmet that has a tree growing
underneath it and breaking apart the helmet. It says trees
give life, police take it. We got a police riot
line set up a few blocks ahead of the people
marching on the street, right next to the building, with
these with the stop Coop city stuff projected onto the side.
Rather than let the police do an escalatory show of violence,

(01:06:53):
people opted to move back onto the sidewalk to continue
the march uninhibited. People seem to be moving, sir, back
onto the sidewalk as they're staring down this riot line,
and police are now heading back inside. They're white rent
to bush little vans that they've been staging their riot
cops out of and they're driving off. People are now

(01:07:16):
in downtown Atlanta outside of the Georgia Pacific Center.

Speaker 5 (01:07:21):
We have like twelve regular police.

Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
Cars, the two two white vans full of riot cops and.

Speaker 5 (01:07:30):
Lots of them cops is stage in places I cannot
currently see.

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
All right, We're marching north along Peachtree Street.

Speaker 5 (01:07:40):
Heading heading to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Got the two the two bus Max rented buses full
of full of riot cops right the side, right beside
the march. Cops really out of it about not letting
anybody march in the street. It's funny because a few
days ago they wouldn't let people stand on the sidewalk either.
Most of the cops that are surrounding the march right
now are still in their vehicles, at least from this

(01:08:05):
current vantage point. I was opposed to the non violent
direct active march. I was opposed to the nonviolent direct
action marches and actions that have happened launching out of
Woodward Park the past week, in which the police just
tailed and surrounded the march on foot. I think this
march is just slightly I think this march is just

(01:08:25):
slightly too big to use that tactic, so they're surrounding
them with vehicles instead. As the march arrived at the
Atlanta Police Foundation, the hundreds of protesters crammed onto the
sidewalk were greeted by armed APD officers. Riot police are
standing in front of the boarded up Atlanta Police Foundation
headquarters at one nine to one Peach Tree. There is

(01:08:49):
a large, large crowd in front of these relatively small
amount of officers standing in front of the boarded up doors.
A few dozen cops, some armed with a fifteen's, A
lot of cops stationed outside the APF headquarters and even
more stationed inside APF headquarters. Police blocked off traffic in
the on this section of Peachtree Street, basically sandwiching everybody in.

(01:09:14):
They they could have mass arrested as I'm sure they
wanted to.

Speaker 9 (01:09:18):
Yeah, the police were ready to mass rest the entire time.

Speaker 5 (01:09:23):
This is this is kind of a wild sighte.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
We have hundreds of people staring down about three dozen
officers from the Atlanta Police Department on their fifteen's, obviously
all of their handguns. For hundreds of hundred of people
holding signs staring down the police. You can you can
feel the kind of you can feel the temperature rising
a little bit here. The cops look very nervous as one.

(01:09:47):
Hundreds of people who are chanting at them.

Speaker 5 (01:09:50):
And I'm not very happy are facing them down.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
They're so they're so close together, We're they're just sandwiched in.
This is such a tense situation right now. No one
in the crowd has any visible weapons of any kind.
Of course, they're holding big signs. Cops have some zip
cuffs ready, cops have all their guns ready. I was
able to see inside the building via a small slit

(01:10:15):
in the Plywood. There were tons of riot cops inside
with shields, and all the cops on the inside of
the building had gas masks strapped to their leg. At
least one riot cop on the other side of the
door was wearing a unique armored suit, not like the
regular police suits with riot armor like on the outside.
This armored padding was built into the clothing. He had

(01:10:38):
these massive, bulky leg pants with armor on the insides
of them and like a massive riot helmet. He was
one of those cops who doesn't need a riot shield
because his body is the riot shield. It was very weird,
But for those first few minutes, it was a very
high stress situation in front of the APF building. It

(01:10:59):
felt like an neither the crowd nor the police knew
exactly what was about to go down as a few
hundred angry protesters were pushed up against a line of
armed police. But as time went on, you got the
impression that this crowd was probably not going to initiate
conflict with the police, and I feel like some of
the moods maybe kind of died down. Cops are trying

(01:11:20):
to kind of move around the crowd a bit. There's
cops being stationed to the north, to the south, to
behind the crowd on the other side of the street.
This could go so many ways right now, This could
end in so many different scenarios. But people have not
initiated anything other than standing on the sidewalk and.

Speaker 5 (01:11:41):
Chanting and giving speeches.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
If you look, there's a small section of the APF
building where there's still a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of
glass by one of the doors, and you can see
lots of cops stationed inside with riot shields. But I
do not believe this crowd's going to be busting down
any doors. Camu Franklin, the founder of Community Movement Builders,

(01:12:03):
was the last person to speak in front of the
Atlanta Police Foundation.

Speaker 12 (01:12:08):
Really know cop city.

Speaker 21 (01:12:09):
It is nothing but a strategy for over policing our communities.

Speaker 12 (01:12:15):
We know that cop city is.

Speaker 21 (01:12:17):
Nothing but a strategy to stop our movements.

Speaker 12 (01:12:21):
And what movements are those?

Speaker 21 (01:12:22):
The movements against police follans and terrorism in our community.
It is in twenty twenty one that they introduced this
idea to stop, to put cop city out here to
stop our movements. When people were talking about to fund
the police, abolish the police, find alternatives of public safety,
they said, hell no, we want more police, and they

(01:12:46):
put that idea out there and the movement was born
to stop cop City. This moment is two years old
and it doesn't look like it's going to stop.

Speaker 8 (01:12:56):
To me.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
By the end, you got this a sense that this
march did exactly what it wanted to. There were three
hundred people standing like a foot away from two dozen cops,
staring them down, giving speeches, chanting. If people wanted to
other things could have happened. This rally could have resulted
in many ways, many of them probably very ugly and
carrying a very high cost.

Speaker 21 (01:13:20):
The reason we did a march like this today was
to say to all the nice saves. Black folks don't
want cop citycaudn't this.

Speaker 12 (01:13:30):
People don't want cop City. White folks don't want cop City.
At lanteds don't want cop City.

Speaker 21 (01:13:37):
Folks from outside Atlanta don't want cop City.

Speaker 12 (01:13:41):
Nobody in the United States wants cop City. So Morones,
Citians don't work cops City. The people in America I don't
want cop City.

Speaker 21 (01:13:50):
Don't mean in this world don't we work cop City.

Speaker 12 (01:13:55):
We wanted to make sure that we.

Speaker 21 (01:13:58):
Came in safety and welieve in safety.

Speaker 12 (01:14:02):
We wanted to make sure that we.

Speaker 21 (01:14:05):
Don't have any more political prisoners today. That we wanted
this to be a march about our unity and our
safety in numbers, and as we wrap up today, that's
what we want.

Speaker 12 (01:14:18):
It's not like we gotta give them an excuse.

Speaker 21 (01:14:20):
When you are around the cop, the same way when
you're around the wild animal.

Speaker 12 (01:14:24):
What do you gotta do.

Speaker 21 (01:14:26):
You gotta be cautious, you gotta be careful, you gotta
move a certain way, you gotta know which way to
go because you're looking to protect your safety and right
now looking to protect our safety. So as we depart
here today, we are departing in unity, We are departing together.

(01:14:48):
We are gonna walk back in close quarters together where
our cars work.

Speaker 12 (01:14:53):
If you're going to Martyr, you're gonna walk close.

Speaker 21 (01:14:56):
Together with other people as you go to Martyr man
and pick you up. If you can't take murder two
blutch this way by deposit.

Speaker 12 (01:15:09):
So we want you to be safe, secure, because you
want to be out here again to fight out.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):
There was this sense that the people there wanted to
show that if they wanted to do things, they could have,
but they knew that this was not this was not
the right time, nor the right.

Speaker 9 (01:15:28):
Place, restraint and and understanding of what like practice I
would say in that situation is.

Speaker 2 (01:15:34):
And I mean in the speeches that happened beforehand, there
was people from community movement builders, from Black Votes Matter,
a whole bunch of other black led groups in the city.
And similarly, like like like what happened at the clergy event,
there was not a single whiff of condemnation of militant tactics,
of of of property, destruction, of actions that people take

(01:15:55):
this They people there who gave speeches recognized that such
tactics were a staple of the civil rights movement. Early
Saturday morning, I woke up to news that police had
begun another raid, but instead of raiding the Wallani Forest,
the police were searching the ten acre property of the

(01:16:15):
Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation or LEAF, a local nonprofit that
was offering safe haven for people during.

Speaker 5 (01:16:22):
The week of Action.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
All right, so the Atlant police have executed a warrant
on the LEAF meet up spot in southeast Atlanta that
people have been using as a welcome center as like
a medic station and just enough spot to hang out.
It was set up after the raid Sunday night, and
it is now Saturday morning. The police have executed this

(01:16:45):
warrant to search Parmasis Id everyone who's there. We got
a group of people it's being able to leave right now.
There has been a prison transport vehicle called in and
cops have like blocked off interactions around the area. No
one's allowed to get close. People are not allowed to
return to their cars. People are not allowed to return
to the private property. Since Sunday night, the land was

(01:17:05):
being used as a medic hub and provided a secondary
place to camp for those who didn't feel safe staying
in the forest. During their raid Saturday morning, police detained
at least twenty two people and refused to show anyone
the search warrant.

Speaker 5 (01:17:21):
And yeah, the group that got released is just walking
up now. Maybe like two dozen people have been able
to walk up.

Speaker 28 (01:17:29):
We just got through their police lines and we're gonna, yeah,
huddle up and get to a safe place. We were
woken up by helicopters. There had been helicopters doing rounds
all evening and I don't even know what time, seven something,

(01:17:52):
we heard loud speakers saying that they had a warrant
to search the property private property.

Speaker 12 (01:18:01):
And.

Speaker 28 (01:18:04):
That was very disorienting. Obviously, I was in the middle
of sleeping. We came out with our hands open, our
hands up. We had more than twenty guns pointed at us.
Some people have their fingers on triggers. Certainly they were
screaming at me. And as I was waking up, we

(01:18:26):
came through the line. They said that they had a
warrant to search the property. We know that Homeland Security
was one of the departments that was arrested, that was
part of the arrest crew or extraction crew or whatever.
It's very traumatic. Obviously, it's freezing. This is the coldest
day this week, and so we are, you know, worried

(01:18:49):
about people's health because people are cold. They detained us,
they took identification. It was yeah, extremely violent situation, but
everyone here was really taking care of each other and
remaining prom.

Speaker 2 (01:19:04):
To address the raid, activists scheduled a press conference for
later that day after a youth rally to defend the
forest was to take place in East Village. And I
think you can hear said youths in the background, so
excuse their joyous young screams.

Speaker 3 (01:19:20):
We thought that it was important for us to not
only amplify the wonderful children's march that happened here today.
The community in East Atlanta, this community where they are
proposing to build COP City, came out this morning overwhelmingly
to say that they don't want COP City. So we
had parents, we had children, we had other neighbors and

(01:19:41):
community stakeholders who gathered right here in Brownwood Park today
at East Atlanta to say that we are East Atlanta
and COP City is not a part of what we
imagine an envision for this community. Also this morning, unfortunately,
there is a place that was held as a co
commune for campers who wanted to stand in solidarity during

(01:20:03):
this week of action. The place is called LEIF l EAF.
That is the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, a nonprofit organization
that's dedicated to combating food insecurity here within the city
of Atlanta, offered up their space to be used for
people who did not feel safe camping in the forest

(01:20:24):
because of the over aggression of police there, and they
wanted to stand in solidarity with this Week of Action,
So LEIF offered up their space for those people to
camp safely. Unfortunately, this morning, a gang of police officers
descended upon that sacred space.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
During the raid up to forty officers swarmed the property,
ransacking the infrastructure set up at the Leaf Encampment site.
Cops slashed departs, two medical supply tents, disrupting metal operations,
broke windows of a camper van parked on the site,
and ripped apart a greenhouse. Police took pictures of the
people detained at Leaf and collected their ideas, but after

(01:21:07):
being held for several hours, the police let all but
one person go free. To quote an article by Candice
Burned in Truth Out Quote, one person was arrested for
an outstanding parking ticket, demonstrating the state's desperation to snatch
up anyone associated with the Stop Copcity movement.

Speaker 5 (01:21:26):
Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Marlon Katz.

Speaker 29 (01:21:29):
I'm an organizer with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, where a
civil liberties and anti repression organization that exists to make
sure that people who participate in social movements have the
right to protest and don't suffer from repression. So the
reason I'm here is because, as we've all heard previously,

(01:21:50):
there was an incident of political repression.

Speaker 5 (01:21:53):
Early this morning.

Speaker 29 (01:21:56):
Police executed a search warrant and performed a raid against
the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, which is a community space
in Lakewood, Atlanta that exists primarily to serve artists and musicians.
It's clear that it was part of a political strategy
to repress and intimidate protesters who are associated with the

(01:22:17):
Stop Pop City movement, a movement to defend the forest.
This is very concerning, especially when taken in context. Of course,
it's very likely that police are going to report that
this was part of a routine investigation, a law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
Matter that they had every right to conduct.

Speaker 29 (01:22:37):
The other thing that police are likely to claim is
that they made an arrest on scene, and our understanding
is that they did make an arrest due to somebody
who was there having an old traffic ticket from a
long time ago. So it's important to clarify that the
arrest was because of a traffic ticket, not because of

(01:22:58):
any alleged crime related to the movement or any other
serious criminal activity. So it's important that we understand this
raid as part of a series of ongoing abuses of
the legal process to harass and intimidate political protesters. They
were unable to demonstrate any criminal activity during their raid

(01:23:19):
on the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, but they're continuing to
abuse every justification that they can to raid spaces, to
make arrests and to hold people in jail.

Speaker 3 (01:23:35):
So before the police come out and say we raided
this place where all of these outside aggressors were and
we picked up some violent offenders, we want you to
know that our brothers and sisters who were standing with
us in solidarity just saying hey, we want to camp here,
since we don't feel safe camping in the people's park

(01:23:56):
that's been overrun with police repression and aggression.

Speaker 1 (01:24:00):
They raided that place.

Speaker 3 (01:24:02):
They snatched people up, some people were sleeping, They took
pictures of people, they took their IDs, and they searched
and searched, found nothing else, never produced a warrant, and
only one person was arrested because of an outstanding parking ticking.

Speaker 2 (01:24:20):
About a week after the raid, the Guardian obtained evidence
of the search warrant. The warrant stated that there was
probable cause for believing that evidence of quote conspiracy to
commit domestic terrorism unquote could be found at the Lakewood
location listed in the warrant where objects officers sought, which

(01:24:40):
included quote, cameras, radios, boxes of nails, lighters, tents, camping equipment,
spray paint, black clothing, and literature related to defend the forest.
These were the materials tied to domestic terrorism. As the
week progressed, there were an increasing number of reports of

(01:25:02):
police tailing people coming and going from a march's and
especially the actions downtown. Basically, officers would follow people suspected
of participating in the movement, pull them over, try to
id anyone within the vehicles, and then issue some nonsense
traffic citation. This continued on Thursday after the Community Movement

(01:25:24):
Builders march, as people were heading home from the public Park,
police stocked a few individuals and pulled over multiple vehicles.
A van carrying one of the speakers was targeted, as
well as two other cars that were pulled over as
they were leaving the protest. Marlin from the Atlanta Solidarity
Fund talked about the various ways police had been using

(01:25:45):
their power to intimidate activists and suppress protest.

Speaker 29 (01:25:50):
Our organization has gotten many reports of pretext stops of
political protesters or people who are suspected of being political protesters,
of bumper stickers on their car or the state that
their license plate is from. We've gotten reports of people
being stop and frisked simply because they're profiled as looking

(01:26:12):
like political activists. And of course we've seen dozens of
protesters or suspected protesters arrested and charged with domestic terrorism
simply because they were found at a music festival that's
associated with the stock Coop City movement. And so we
can see that every step of the way police and

(01:26:33):
prosecutors are abusing the legal process to intimidate and discourage
this movement.

Speaker 9 (01:26:39):
Throughout this time, police have been watching or monitoring one
of the off site locations in the forest. They've parked
in front of this site and kept up surveillance on it.
And then leading all the way up into Friday, there
was a journalist pulled over leaving the final non violent
direct action from Woodriff Park. They were pulled over with

(01:27:01):
two other people in the car and detained briefly, ostensibly
to you know, continue to identify and connect people.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
A big part of the story for this week of
action is the excess of the police response to quite
typical acts of quote unquote nonviolent protest, the sort that
the government and even the police loved to claim that
they actually protect. With every single action downtown this week,
virtually no laws were being broken, not even any civil disobedience.

(01:27:32):
People were handing out flyers, marching on sidewalks, giving out letters,
and the police's response was to deploy SWAT, to mobilize
hundreds of officers, to shut down multiple city blocks, to
carry ar fifteens as they tail crowds of a few
dozen people just walking on the sidewalk and yelling at
people if they accidentally miss step off the curb and

(01:27:53):
threaten violent arrest. This was the sort of extremely aggressive
response to people doing protests quote unquote the right way.

Speaker 9 (01:28:02):
We should highlight that. That is the apparent goal of
these protests was to show that even when they are
doing things the right way, this is how the state
reacts to dissent.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
It reacts in this militarized fashion where you like it's
it's I think a big part of what's happened in
these types of protests that have happened the past week
is demonstrating why people are campaigning to stop cop City,
because the sheer amount of resources that the police already
have in the city to to be deploying hundreds and
hundreds of officers every single day to respond to people

(01:28:35):
handing out flyers.

Speaker 5 (01:28:37):
It's like to.

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):
Respond to people who are walking on the sidewalks. They
have this massive amount of resources. They're using tear gas
in the woods, they're using paper balls, they're using flash bangs,
They're they're having multiple different swat teams follow around people
handing out pamphlets. The level of police militarization in Atlanta
is already at this extremely high point, and cop City

(01:29:01):
is only going to intensify that. And that is the
reason they want to build cop City. It's for this
type of urban counterinsurgency training to quell civil unrest and
to quell protest.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
On Thursday night, we held a very peaceful and successful
march in downtown Atlanta, starting at the King Center. We
had someone who was stopped by the police and asked
if he was picking up protesters taking out of the vehicle,
handcuffed for no reason. They couldn't find a reason to
detain him any longer, so they had to let him go.

(01:29:37):
But Atlanta, this is why we're standing against cop City,
because if cop City is built, you can guarantee that
you won't even be able to go to the grocery
store without being harassed by the police for no reason
at all.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49):
When I spoke with Matthew Johnson, he brought up a
similar point.

Speaker 8 (01:29:54):
With the resources that the police had to respond in
the way that they did. The assertion that the they
need more training in a militarized facility or they need
more resources is crazy because you had them literally outnumbering
protesters and kettling them. And we have credible sources that

(01:30:17):
say that there were swat forces who had instructed the
officers to arrest nonviolent protesters and there were actually police
officers that refused to take that order, which I think
is another fascinating dynamic that is worth exploring and understanding more.
But just with the resources that they had to try

(01:30:41):
to shut down protesters, harass folks, constantly, ticket and pull
over people that they saw, you know, creating like a
logistical framework for the week of action is nuts, and
they're making our point for us. Like on Fry, the
word came out that Tortu Ghita had bullet holes through

(01:31:05):
both of their palms and that they were more than
likely sitting cross leg with their hands up when they
were shot by police. And now we are supposed to
be convinced that these people that lied about this killed
somebody that was absolutely no threat to them. On the
same grounds that they're trying to build this police training facility.

(01:31:28):
We're supposed to believe that this is going to make
them less violent towards people, like as you're building a
militarized police training facility and like people that try to
convince themselves that these is going to be a place
where people are also being taught de escalation tactics while
like everything around it is militarized. It's like if you

(01:31:49):
had somebody build a water park and you're like, oh, yeah,
I'm just trying to stay dry, I don't want to
get splashed or anything like that, and it's like, oh no, no, no,
don't worries. We have a food court right in the
middle of it, and it's great. You're really just coming
there for the food court, so don't worry about it.
And then like you go there and then you get splashed.

(01:32:12):
What were you expecting? Like, that's obviously not what that
facility's for because all the infrastructure around it is made
to be a water park or a militarized police training facility.
So don't be surprised when maybe they might have one
de escalation program and like you know where the food
court would be, and then somebody gets killed, right, because

(01:32:33):
they're actually building the infrastructure for killing. So that's where
we're at.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
This Week of Action has shown a lot about how
the police are operating post the twenty twenty uprising, how
they will respond to people exercising their First Amendment right,
and the indiscriminate way that police will respond to any
active protest. One of the main takeaways from this week
is that their response to protest is deployed against people

(01:33:00):
without target or focus. They care very little if you
are breaking a window or if you're marching on the sidewalk,
They're still gonna send the swat team. Police are acting
as if they are entirely incapable of differentiating between acts
of descent. Toward the end of the week, I sat
down and talked with an unnamed forest defender to get

(01:33:22):
their thoughts on the Week of Action. For security reasons,
we did a vocal replacement.

Speaker 30 (01:33:27):
The police presence has been pretty unprecedented. I haven't seen
shit like that here since twenty twenty, not downtown at least,
I mean shit, I don't think we had seen gas
in Atlanta in a minute. And then they gassed the forest.
It'd been a while, but yeah, I mean they're punching out,
especially like Tuesday, they were putting out one hundred and
fifty two hundred cops the entirety of downtown. I mean
multi jurisdictional task forces deployed, multiple different Atlanta APD SWAT

(01:33:51):
teams between like regular APD SWAT and APEX, which is
like the Drug and Gang Interdiction Unit. I mean a
fucking whole drone unit, GSP, some unmarked cars that I
won't speculate on, helicopters, all that shit, you know, the
type of police response you would expect to see in
like a dystopian fucking police state. For some people handing
out flyers that just say this is bad for the environment,

(01:34:12):
doesn't matter how milk toast or not, and like I
shouldn't say milk toasts, like that's not a bad thing.
We need people to go hand out flyers. We need
to inform people as far as what this is to
get people involved. But like as non violent as you
can get, and still they're going to treat you like
your fucking al Qaeda, you know, and it puts you
in a weird position because then it's like, okay cool.
If you're going to treat us the exact same for

(01:34:32):
being nonviolent, why not do crime. If the police response
to an assault on an outpost that drove the police
out and burned five things down, the police response to
fifteen people handing out flyers downtown are going to be
about the same, then why not take more militant radical action.

Speaker 2 (01:34:46):
The twenty three people arrested on Sunday, March fifth were
not arrested as anyone was torching equipment. They were not
arrested at the power line cut. It was people who
were attending a music festival. Arrests were not widely targeted
against people who police knew were engaged in property destruction.
They were targeted against anyone the cops could grab. Same

(01:35:08):
was the case at the January twenty first action, where
people were marching downtown the saturday after Tortugita was killed.
The only people arrested and subsequently charged with domestic terrorism
was anyone the police could get their hands on. Officers
went after people who were carrying banners the entire duration
of the march. It was not targeted against people who

(01:35:30):
were engaged in militant action. Among all this talk of
police repression and multiple raids. It's easy to overlook that
throughout the week people still sought opportunities for finding joy
and resistance, because most people wouldn't dedicate years of their

(01:35:51):
life to this if it was just miserable battles with
police the whole time.

Speaker 9 (01:35:56):
I think one thing that's been lost in all of this,
too is all of the light heart events that have
continued to go on through the week, and like the
joy of the movement that was represented in the Bouncy
Castle rip.

Speaker 2 (01:36:09):
But that joy is continuing in the woods, like people
still continue to camp in the woods. People are still
having dinner in the woods. People are still having camp fires,
people are still talking the woods. It is still a
place that people are gathering at and are enjoying each other.
Is company in now are enjoying the woods in it
It is a place that the morale has never been
fully crushed.

Speaker 9 (01:36:28):
The morale has never been fully crushed, and like the
participatory acts of the Week of Action, are continuing like
none of that has been quashed.

Speaker 2 (01:36:41):
An example of the joyful continuous resistance during the Week
of Action can be found at the youth rally that
happened on Saturday the eleventh.

Speaker 5 (01:36:50):
All right, so I'm at.

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
The youth rally Saturday after the warrant was served on
the meetup spot in southeast Atlanta. There's around two hundred
people marching through East Village in Atlanta. Pretty pretty joyous
group here actually, and they're actually like on the streets.

Speaker 5 (01:37:05):
This is the first time we've had a large march
like this take to.

Speaker 2 (01:37:08):
The streets because every action that was in downtown or
midtown Atlanta was just so heavily surveilled by police who
were not letting anyone get near the street at all.

Speaker 5 (01:37:19):
But there's no police here.

Speaker 2 (01:37:20):
They were busy doing the search war and so this
group is actually is actually able to take to the streets.
It's like everyone kind of in this area of Atlanta
is pretty pretty pro pro this little protest here. There's
like workers from the little shops and stores nodding along
Bullen County Shares.

Speaker 9 (01:37:40):
Just walked by the march like on there, just you know,
off shift workout routine, wearing Fulden County gear.

Speaker 5 (01:37:46):
That's pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (01:37:47):
People dancing in the streets, Families walking with their kids
through the streets all right, walking around the park that
the Youth rally started at and the press conference about
the raid this morning just ended at There's as you
can probably.

Speaker 5 (01:38:04):
Hear kids playing in the park.

Speaker 2 (01:38:06):
People are handing out food, a massive, massive amount of
food just in the middle of the park, with levels
the table set up. Overall, this is kind of one
of the more joyous events that we've had since the
initial Saturday rally at Gresham Park, just with the amount
of food, the amount of kids just running around and playing,
all the information tables that are handing out literature and

(01:38:29):
giving you know, making connections with people. Yeah, when I
was down here in January, the mood was very somber.
The mood was very grim like coming to the vigil
when there was the destroyed remains of the gazebo, the
torn up parking lot, all of the trees in there
still within their like winter state, with all of the
leaves gone. Everything was very kind of barren. And the

(01:38:51):
first thing I noticed on Saturday as we were marching
is like there's new life springing in the woods. There's
this invigorated sense of the almost assurance of victory that
people are carrying with them as they take action, And
I think that really does change what the action you
take is and that does change the types of results
that people will see, is if they go at this

(01:39:13):
with the idea that we are going to win this.

Speaker 9 (01:39:16):
And I think that that is kind of why the
non violent direct actions have become like that have moved
to the foe.

Speaker 10 (01:39:22):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:39:23):
When you think that you're going to lose and you
have nothing to lose, you engage in these incredibly radical
actions because what else are you going to do? Yeah,
and then when you have this belief that no, we
can win, we just have to find that pathway.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
And that is a part of the diversity of tactics
is using both of those and almost every ecological movement
that's been successful has demonstrated that the pathway to success
is often paved with a diversity of tactics, with people
doing non violent action at noon, which will pull a
massive militarized police response as people are doing regular ass shit.

(01:40:00):
And then a part of diversity of tactics is also
people leaving a music festival to go torch a bulldozer,
and both both of those things are a diversity of tactics.
Now I stand by most of that statement. However, issues
can arise when there is a ticking clock, and during
the time spent looking for this pathway, the enemy meanwhile

(01:40:22):
is making steady progress. Issues may also arise when a
large diversity of tactics is shoved under just one roof.
I had a lot of conversations with movement participants regarding
the direct action that happened on Sunday night and how
it cast a shadow of repression over the whole week

(01:40:43):
of action. To synthesize the many conversations. In general, most
people thought that what physically happened was good. The actual
actions at the North Gate were successful and justified. But
there are other things on the piferree of that action
that make it slightly more complicated.

Speaker 8 (01:41:04):
And now we can have lots of questions about tactics
and cost benefit analysis about that action, which I did
not think it would be wise, especially being so visible
for me to have to be anywhere near on that day.
We can have questions about that. But what was for
certain was that the way in which the police responded

(01:41:25):
was absurd and predictably so. Now with the destruction that
I saw, etc. Cost them less than a million dollars
and maybe like two weeks actually of construction that they
were pushed back max. These are like max numbers. Was
that worth twenty three people being arrested and quaching what

(01:41:45):
could have been a larger occupation and wider participation and
wider buying in the movement. Instead, by the time we
got to Monday, the clergy was having to do clean
up rather than like cast division of what the world
could be. And so these are tradeoffs right where even
though we have to be very clear about what a

(01:42:08):
diversity of tactics means and also a separation of time
and space. So I mean, we can't just look at
a diversity of tactics and everybody does what they want
as if they're operating in asylum. But rather we give
space for one another to do different things that may work,
respectful of the fact that some of our actions may

(01:42:31):
affect one another.

Speaker 2 (01:42:32):
In the lead up to the Week of Action, nighttime
sabotage actions decreased around Atlanta in favor of these big
public demos during daylight. That seems to result in more
people getting arrested. And what are the results of Sunday's
action happening in such close proximity to the festival and
the encampments, is that the people at the festival and

(01:42:55):
in the woods who did not consent to participating in
a high pro file direct action got disproportionately hit with
the immediate repression from police. A lot of the people
who were arrested were completely unaware of the actions that
took place at the North Gate. Even if those actions
were one hundred percent justified in the end, it still

(01:43:17):
creates a dynamic with an unequal distribution of police violence. Now, obviously,
the woods are an inherently dangerous place to be, and
people are not responsible for actions that police choose to take,
but there are still considerations to be had regarding the
proximity of space and time when engaging in more risky actions,

(01:43:40):
and how the consequences of those actions may affect people
who did not consent to participating in actions at other locations,
especially when people are lulled into a false sense of
safety by claiming that police have never cracked down hard
in the forest during previous weeks of action.

Speaker 30 (01:44:00):
In terms of the actions done Sunday, in reference to
a group of people assaulting a like police position, driving
them out with force, and then burning their shit, that
was all good, and we should not denounce that or
step away from it. It only harms the movement to
back away from radical action and act like there are
definitions of good or bad protesters, because eventually the logical
conclusion of that is snitching, and that only furthers like

(01:44:22):
the GBI's motivations to tear the movement apart. What went
wrong Sunday is as a result of two things. It's
one that the police used indiscriminate violence when people beat them.
They were beaten, they got angry, and they were beaten
because they got their shit rocked by like fireworks. And
then they use in discriminate violence against people who they
knew were on the side of where the events were

(01:44:43):
that weren't where all the militants were coming back from.
They didn't want to go up against those people because
they're cowards. And second, because of how big the movement's
gotten over the past two years, the strategy of the
Weeks of Action has stagnated. It's made it so work,
so compact in a singular week that when you have
all the diversity of tactics that exists within defend the
Atlanta Forest and stop Coop City, those tactics with how

(01:45:06):
big everything is now, they start to step on each
other's toes. They can hurt each other sometimes because yeah,
not everyone who was at the RC field was like
ready for the consequences of like a militant radical action
like that. And that doesn't mean that the action wasn't
good or justified because the action was wildly successful. There
were no arrests made at that action. There were a
rest made when the police got angry and used indiscriminate

(01:45:26):
violence because they were pissed off and they wanted.

Speaker 2 (01:45:28):
To riot, so they retaliated at a music festival that
was happening nearby.

Speaker 30 (01:45:34):
Yes, and that's the fault of nobody but the police.
That's not the fault of the people who went and
assaulted that outpost. That's only the fault of the police,
and really the fault of a bad long term strategy
of two heavily compacting factors of you know, being just
like a weak and where making it so this movement
where people can take radical action, it feels so limited
to just inside the forest because that puts people in

(01:45:55):
harm's way, and that put people in harms way, including
the people who so you know, went and did the
thing on Sunday. But no, it would be wrong as
the movement to like balk out a radical action like that.
Radical action like that is such a big part of
why this movement has been as successful as it has been.
It's a huge part of why the police didn't do
like a full sweep or a larger sweep or a
series of raids in the following days because they were

(01:46:18):
afraid that those three hundred to four hundred people who
hit that out posts were lying and waiting in the
forest ready to attack them, because they were afraid of
militant radical action.

Speaker 2 (01:46:26):
On Thursday, when I was in front of the APF building,
I could like hear some of the supervisors and coordinators
talking about being scared of ambushes or like being scared
of splinter groups like being staged to attack officers. It's
it's bizarre how fearful they are of the types of
people who are opposing the Cop City project.

Speaker 30 (01:46:48):
The most afraid of the people who are willing to
go do physical violence to them, and not even physical violence,
but people who are just willing to like throw a
rock at them or like a firework. Once they realized
that they haven't paralyzed somebody with fear, Once they realized
that they have not made you so afraid of taking action,
they become such cowards.

Speaker 2 (01:47:05):
In the aftermath of the police killing forest defender Tortigita,
law enforcement agencies tried to claim that Tortighita shot at
them first, leaving one officer injured, but recently released findings
from multiple autopsies have cast more doubt on the state's
version of events. On the afternoon of Friday, March tenth,

(01:47:26):
towards the end of the week of action, the family
of Tortighita released the findings of an independent autopsy done
by former GBI Chief Medical Examiner doctor Chris Sperry. The
results suggested that Tortighito was sitting cross legged with their
hands in front of their face when shot, and bullet
exit wounds through the palms of both of their hands.

(01:47:48):
The family ordered autopsy also did not find any evidence
of gunshot residue from a GSR test kit, and then
a month later, De Cab County released the results of
their official autopsy, which found at least fifty seven bullet
wounds across Tortiguita's body, and according to this autopsy, torte

(01:48:09):
did not have any gunpowder residue on its hands. Then,
a few days later, via a public records request, the
Atlanta Community Press Collective received the gunshot residue test kit
from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's crime lab. The document
contained the names of six Georgia State Patrol SWAT members
who shot and killed Tortighita, Bryland L. Myers, Jerry A. Parish,

(01:48:35):
Jonathan Salceda, Jonathan Mark Lamb, Ronaldo Kegel, and Royce Zaw,
with Zaw being the subject of a lawsuit after he
shot a protester in the face with a less lethal
round during the George Floyd protests in May of twenty twenty.
The document also included the results of the GBI's crime

(01:48:55):
lab report claiming that they found quote the presence of
more than five parts characteristic of gunshot primer residue unquote
from a test kit, with the report also stating, quote
it should be noted that it is possible for a
victim of gunshot wounds to have GSR present on their
hands unquote, considering that among the more than fifty seven

(01:49:19):
gunshot wounds were entrance and exit wounds on Tortighita's hands,
which could be cause for gunshot residue. If the crime
lab findings are genuine. The findings do not point to
any specific interpretation of events, as it's not unusual to
find primer residue on the hands of a victim following
the path of a bullet. Plus, coupled with the ever

(01:49:39):
changing story from the GBI on the ground chatter from
APD officers claiming that Georgia State Patrol quote fucked their
own officer up quote, as well as reports from forced
defenders from the day of the shooting, there is indication
that Georgia State Patrol most likely suffered from so called
friendly fire, with many people believing that the killing Tortighita

(01:50:01):
was essentially an execution instant. Reports obtained via public records
requests also revealed that GSP fired a quote unquote, a
Leslie thal pepperball gun at Torteghita's tent as Swat initially approached,
once again contradicting the claims made by GBI officials in
the months since the killing. As the week came to

(01:50:24):
a close on Sunday, March eleventh, a memorial service for
Tortighita was held in the Malani forest, where Tort's family
spread their ashes in the forest it died to protect
I attended the Sunday morning memorial. The sky opened up
and poured down rain in South Atlanta throughout the whole morning.

(01:50:47):
Hundreds of people gathered in Wolanne People's Park to light
candles under a canopy and hear from Towrt's family. Then,
led by Tortighita's mother, we walked through the forest to
the site of the shooting, where a banner hung that read,
quote on this ground gsp assassinated forest defender, comrade, friend,

(01:51:09):
lover Tortigita unquote. Family and friends spread Tortigita's ashes throughout
the woods along the path to quote Candice burned in
truth out. In contrast to its tumultuous start, Sunday's vigil
and ceremony provided a somber and heartfelt close to the

(01:51:30):
fifth Week of Action. I met up with Matthew Johnson
after the memorial to discuss the Week of Action, and
we briefly touched on the memorial in the forest.

Speaker 8 (01:51:42):
I think that we have to hold space for very
real grief. We lost a friend, and at the same time,
just two days ago, on a Friday, what we always
knew to be true was found to clearly true. Torte
Ghita was murdered and we have to bear the brunner

(01:52:05):
of that pain. And all the people in power lied
and even gave their condolences to a state trooper that
seemed as if he was shot by a state trooper
and did not say a mumbling word to even acknowledge
our friend's existence and the value of their life. And

(01:52:27):
this morning was beautiful. I had been able to meet Bilkish,
Tortighita's mother previously, and as she really does have a
beautiful spirit. I've really grown appreciation for that family, and
just to see just how large these gatherings were like

(01:52:49):
throughout the week, even in spite of the hoopla and
the opening weekend, it was very encouraging. But in a
lot of ways, Tortigita has become the face of this
movement because they really did light up wherever they were.
One thing that's gotten me through thinking about when you

(01:53:14):
would just see them sometimes and they would just give
you the biggest, like cheesiest smile, like out of no where.

Speaker 2 (01:53:19):
I just.

Speaker 8 (01:53:22):
And like that like got me through the first week
after their passing. Yeah, but I've grown a great appreciation
for that family because in so many ways, Tortigita is
their hero, and just to learn how consistent they were

(01:53:44):
as like such a welcoming and loving and caring person
just meant so much. I mean to know that this
wasn't something new that they had stumbled upon. They had
lived this whole life of caring and making space for others.

Speaker 2 (01:53:58):
Some of Towards friends have raised concerns that a side
effect of Toward unwittingly becoming the face of the movement
is that the details around their death have eclipsed some
of what they died fighting for in doing so, stripping
toward of their individuality and removing their own agency to
turn them into this perfect liberal friendly avatar of the

(01:54:20):
movement to simply be used as a political tool and
add to a list of demands.

Speaker 30 (01:54:27):
There's a thing that's been happening more and more recently
that I've been bothered by, which is when organizations, specifically
more liberal organizations, are invoking Towards Name actions, they're misgendering
the hell out of them, and it's alienating a lot
of people. And I understand that Sunday's action alienated a
lot of liberal orgs. This is a problem with the
week of Action type strategy, with the diversity of tactics

(01:54:50):
all being forced under one roof. But we cannot stand
to alienate each other. And it's really frustrating and really
angering to see this really beautiful soul be flattened into
just a murder that they liberals want them to be,
stripping them of so much of their life and what
was a revolutionary life and a revolutionary death into just martyrdom,
by taking away their identity and who they were and
making them nothing more than someone who was murdered when

(01:55:13):
they were someone who was living such a full and
beautiful life until the day they died. And this movement
will tear itself apart if we do not accept the
fullness of towards life, what it stood for, and what
they live for. This movement has always been built on
a lot of trans people in the woods fucking the
cops up, and if we alienate those people were fucked,
there's no winning and we can't lose. We don't have

(01:55:34):
a choice about this anymore. We have to win by
any means necessary.

Speaker 2 (01:55:38):
That will wrap up our day to day coverage of
the entire week of action, But much has happened in
the intervening two months, So in the next episode we'll
cover where the movement is now, discuss the future of
the fight to Stop Cop City, and offer a more
critical retrospective on the fifth Week of action. See You

(01:55:58):
on the other Side Music festival audio courtesy of Unicorn Riot.

(01:56:35):
Welcome back to It could Happen Here. This is a
bonus fifth episode following my coverage of the Stopcop City
Week of Action in March of twenty twenty three. This
will be a more critical retrospective on the week as
a whole and offer a glimpse into what the movement
might look like in the next few months as we
are rapidly approaching summer. In the last episode, we talked

(01:56:57):
about the police repression of protests and demonstrations as they happen,
but we have yet to mention the various methods of
state repression the movement is facing day to day. Repression
for the Week of Action started well before the kickoff
rally in Gresham Park. Emails from early February obtained via
public records requests found that the Atlanta Police Foundation and

(01:57:19):
its contractors were waiting for quote indictments to the leaders
unquote of the Stopcob City and Defend the Atlanta Forest
Movement to quote the Atlantic Community Press Collective. In a
February third email to APF board members, the director of
Public Affairs, Rob Baskin, calls the defend the Atlanta Forest
and stop Coop City movement a quote conspiracy of protesters

(01:57:40):
against the public Safety Training Center, investigated by a consortium
of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Unquote. Baskin
promised the APF board in an email quote that the
recent arrests our receipt of the land and disturbance permit,
the mayor's announcement of the project will be moving forward,
and the continued investigation by lawnfes Horsement will dampen activists' efforts.

(01:58:02):
We will likely see more indictments in the coming weeks unquote.
Back in February, Brestfield and Gory, the general contractor for
the project, planned to mobilize for land clearing around April,
but told the Atlanta Police Foundation that subcontractor bidding wouldn't
happen quote until indictments have happened unquote, And then, of course,

(01:58:24):
a few weeks later, twenty three people were charged with
domestic terrorism at a music festival. Matt from the Atlanta
Community Press Collective talked about the history of domestic terrorism
charges in the movement and how they affected bail proceedings.

Speaker 9 (01:58:39):
The domestic terrorism charges go back to the middle of December,
that's when the first of them happened, and up until
the week of Action, there have been a total of
nineteen arrest or individuals who have been charged with domestic terrorism.
And then of those people, anyone who did not have

(01:58:59):
either a Georgia license or could not prove like Georgia residency,
they were all initially denied bond, but everyone who lives
here they were able to get bond. Before the bond hearing,
we're kind of there are discussions that there's no way

(01:59:19):
that they're going to hold twenty three people without bond
with on such flimsy evidence.

Speaker 2 (01:59:26):
That's the most people that have been like arrested and
held in one day. It really is in relation to
the movement so far.

Speaker 9 (01:59:33):
Yeah, this is the largest mass arrest of the movement,
So it's kind of inconceivable for twenty three people to
be held without bond. So we get to the bail hearing,
the first person has their mother come on. Their lawyer
brings their mother on, who swears essentially on like every

(01:59:53):
religious text ever written, that her child will immediately go
home with her and she will personally bring her child
back to every court hearing, and her child will have no,
you know, further contact with the movement and all of
these things. And the judge denies the bond. So at

(02:00:15):
that point it's like, okay, there, you know, I guess
we're going to go back to the old thing. If
you can't prove residency, you're you're you're not getting out.
It was like person number five is from Athens, Georgia,
which is about an hour outside of Atlanta, and the
judge denies her bond, not because the judge thinks she's

(02:00:37):
a flight risk, but because she is a threat to
the community. And that was the moment where the understanding changed.
It was like, oh no, like nobody's getting out of it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:49):
Yeah, this is this isn't this isn't a real this
isn't a real bond.

Speaker 12 (02:00:52):
Here.

Speaker 2 (02:00:53):
At the press conference after the leaf raid, Comeal Franklin
from the Community Movement Builders spoke about it the years
of state repression against people fighting to stop cop City.

Speaker 31 (02:01:03):
This movement has been repressed by the states, by the
city since its very beginnings, where we first started organizing
in twenty twenty one, where we had rallies in demonstration,
we would have police break them up, throw people to
the grounds, pepper stray them, and arrest them. We had

(02:01:24):
over twenty arrest in our first years of rallying and
demonstrating against cop City. At the time, those folks were
charged with resisting arrests obstruction of governmental administration. And then
the police decided to step up their tactics and they
started to form a task force, a task force that

(02:01:45):
included the Atlanta Police to Dekap County Police, the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation, Georgia State Troopers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
and Homeland Security, where they began to talk about bringing
charges of domestic ties against organizers and activists.

Speaker 5 (02:02:02):
And so now we're coming to a.

Speaker 31 (02:02:04):
Point where they're raiding houses, where they're telling organizers and
activists that they can't stand on corners and legally give
out leaflet.

Speaker 9 (02:02:15):
And then the judge kept saying like, I'm not here
to hear anything on evidentiary claims and I'm not here
to engage with the domestic terrorism Statute. Like both of
those were I think very valid things that defense attorneys
kept bringing up because.

Speaker 1 (02:02:31):
Yeah, they're problematic.

Speaker 5 (02:02:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:02:33):
One of the defense attorneys mentioned that the way people
are being charged with domestic terrorism right now doesn't really
have any legal basis in the state of Georgia, because
the terrorism law works as like an enhancement for other
felonious charges, and these people aren't being charged with anything
besides domestic terrorism. There's no evidence these people committed any
actual crimes, so they're just being charged with terrorism. This

(02:02:54):
like nebulous concept. The judge said that the legal basis
of these claims will have to be decid another day. Similarly,
they said that in regards to actual evidence that these
people charged did any crimes, she said that she had
none of this evidence in front of her and that
evidence is for another day. One of the main reasons
the judge said that defendants were denied bond was due

(02:03:17):
to quote a lack of ties to community in Atlanta.
But regarding this ties to the community aspect, the judge
had this weird double standard. There was this one person
arrested and charged who lives with their partner in Atlanta,
who also had ties to another state where they had
previously lived. So despite them having ties to the community
in Atlanta, which was one of the main things the

(02:03:39):
judge considered for this one individual. They were still denied
bond on the basis that this individual also has ties
to a different community, thus deeming them a flight risk
even though they currently live in Atlanta. One of the
reasons that the judge mentioned is based on the arrest
warrants that she was given for whise people were a
threat to the community, is that the state claims that

(02:04:00):
they were in possession of metal shields as they were
being arrested. You know, shields, the the offensive weapon that
that shows that you are a threat you holding a shield.
And so first of all, that's that's that's funny on
us on that on that level.

Speaker 9 (02:04:16):
When you and I were coming in on Saturday and
along with the march, we passed by a bunch of shields,
right and they were kind of placed near the end
of the path, like in anticipation that there might be
police presence. And I took pictures of the shields and
they are evidently plastic shields. There's no way of mistaking

(02:04:40):
them for anything other than plastic.

Speaker 2 (02:04:43):
The plastic five gallon shields that you see at almost
every protest in every city across the country. The cops
know what these things are. That the fact that they
claimed that people were arrested carrying metal shields is so
ludicrous because there was not There was not a single
metal shield at this festival. And there's a lot of
footage of these arrests. I don't there's I've not seen

(02:05:04):
evidence that every that any person was arrested that was
carrying a shield, let alone a metal one.

Speaker 9 (02:05:10):
There's this weird thing where so typically when you do
these these bail hearings, the defense attorneys waive the reading
of the warrant, typically because they have already gone over
that with their client and you know, everybody's aware, and
it just kind of speeds up the process. And it
was like really notable that these attorneys weren't doing it,

(02:05:31):
and once you started to listen to them, you notice
this very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway
through we get to a lawyer who straight up calls
out the fact that these warrants seem like they were
just copy pasted.

Speaker 2 (02:05:47):
For like every single person all the way down line.
During the first hearing, only one person was let out
on bail and they were an NLG legal observer and
lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center. After the week
of action, on March twenty third, there were a second
set of bail hearings for ten of the people arrested
on March fifth at the South River Music Festival. In

(02:06:08):
a rare move, the second in command of the State
of Georgia's Attorney General's Office, John Fowler, was deployed to
argue against granting bond. Fowler, along with several top county prosecutors,
weaved a complex narrative of a grand conspiracy of protesters
dating back to twenty nineteen, saying that the quote unquote
organization behind Defend the Forest is responsible for quote one

(02:06:32):
hundred incidents nationwide unquote. Fowler claimed that the force defenders
are a well funded group with millions of dollars hiding
behind five oh one c three nonprofit organizations, and that
the so called autonomous zone at the Wendy's where Rayshard
Brooks was murdered in twenty twenty is a part of
the same organization. Fowler also tempted to tie the use

(02:06:55):
of laser pointers in the forest to a racial justice
protests in twenty twenty, as well as a sophisticated communication
network of prepaid phones, telegram channels, proton mails, and rise
up accounts. Prosecutor lance Cross stated that the quote unquote
leader of the Defend the Lanta Forest movement never actually
goes into the forest. Okay, So, to paraphrase a friend

(02:07:19):
of mine. As potentially dangerous as claims like these are,
it will never stop being funny that the state just
simply cannot conceive of horizontal organizing as like a real
thing that exists and not just a smoke screen for
this shadowy cabal of protesters. Prosecutor Lance Cross claimed that
anyone at the music festival is a party to the

(02:07:41):
crime of the direct action that took place around one
and a half kilometers away at the construction site, and
that after the direct action, individuals left to return to
the other side of the woods, crossing over the creek
and changing out of their black block. For the first
defendant at this hearing, Prosecutor Cross said that there's police
helicopter video of this first person changing out of their

(02:08:04):
black block. But when asked by the judge if the
state has any evidence that this defendant did anything illegal,
not just change clothing in a forest, the prosecutor was
unable to provide any such evidence. This defendant received a
twenty five thousand dollars bond with a stay away from
Georgia order and a no contact order with any co
defendants or anyone associated with the defend the Atlanta Forest movement.

(02:08:28):
Only one other defendant was granted bond during this hearing,
a second year law student who was arrested as they
were eating food at a food truck. At the hearing,
they presented letters of support from Tibetan monks, a former mayor,
numerous academics, and Charlotte's mayor pro tem was on the call.
Bond was also set at twenty five k along with

(02:08:48):
having to surrender their passport, were an ankle monitor, and
maintain no contact with co defendants nor join any future protests.
To paraphrase my friend again, these are old Green Scare
tests back in action and kicked into high gear. Courts
are being used as a meat cleaver to hack off
and isolate people from their communities, regardless of evidence. This

(02:09:10):
is the type of repression that courts were born to do.
Much of the repression we're seeing in Atlanta is a
revamped version of the Green scare with additional tactics and
knowledge the state gained from the twenty twenty protests, including
the targeting of jail support and bail fund organizations. Another
thread in this grand cabal of Forest Defender's narrative that

(02:09:32):
the state was trying to weave was that prosecutors claimed
that having an Atlanta Solidarity Fund jail support number on
your person is evidence of criminal intent and that the
Solidarity Fund is quote being investigated as a part of
this whole thing, unquote. The majority of the eight individuals
denied bond were not even found to be at the

(02:09:53):
site of the direct action, and none of the eight
individuals had any evidence against them showing they committed any
crime at that location, but were still deemed a risk
to the community and denied bond. Being held against them
is the fact that they had a jail support number
on their person. As former communications director at the Southern
Center of a Human Rights hannah' riiley said, it is

(02:10:15):
a gross irony that a jail support number is being
framed as evidence of intent to commit crimes, where in
fact it's evidence that we live in a horrifying police estate.
A defense attorney pointed out that all of the warrants
had the same bits of evidence copy pasted like this
alleged possession of a metal shield, to which the prosecution

(02:10:36):
claimed this was simply a typo, meaning that people were
being held in jail based on typos, and also the
prosecutor responded by saying, quote, there were thirty forty fifty
shields out there, I can't attest that he was carrying one.
When referring to a specific defendant. For one individual denied bond,
prosecutors claimed that they were an anarchist based on information

(02:10:59):
provided by Customs and Border Protection, and yet no evidence
of criminal acts were presented. Extra scrutiny was put on
two defendants who were foreign nationals, with prosecutors wondering how
someone from out of country could possibly know the solidarity
funded jail support number. A defense attorney tried to point
out that jail support numbers are often passed out to

(02:11:21):
everyone present at protests by volunteers, and in the case
of the circumstances regarding the raid of the music festival,
Panicked concertgoers were instructed to write down the jail support
number as it became clear that police were indiscriminately grabbing people.
Deputy Attorney General Fowler argued that wearing black clothes at
a protest is akin to wearing a football uniform, indicating

(02:11:45):
a player was part of the team who took to
the field.

Speaker 5 (02:11:49):
During the game.

Speaker 2 (02:11:50):
And even if we may not know they carried the football,
we do know that they were on the field, which
I don't even want to get into, but it is
still a fact that the majority of people were denied
bond because some had black clothing, mud on their shoes
and ran from police. This is what made them a

(02:12:10):
quote unquote threat to our community, and this is the
evidence being used against people who were allegedly engaged in
domestic terrorism. Near the end of the hearing, the judge
claimed that everyone is presumed innocent and that the state
does have to bear the burden of proof beyond a
reasonable doubt at some point, but not now. During this

(02:12:31):
spelle hearing, one of the claims was that the reason
why people were arrested is because they had mud on
their clothes. The night before the festival started, there was
a tornado warning in Atlanta. I've forgotten about that, and
there was rain, which makes I don't know if the
prosecutors know this, but when rain mixes with dirt, they

(02:12:52):
creates something called that we refer to as mud. So
when people are at this music festival in a field
full of dirt, they might get mud on their clothes.

Speaker 9 (02:13:01):
And yeah, so if you've ever been to a music festival,
standing around for a very long period of time, really annoying,
people like to sit down. So I like, my feet
were caked in mud, and I sat down a few times.
I'm I'm my docker partments are still caked in mud.
Not to mention, the parking lot completely torn up, covered

(02:13:21):
in mud, and as I mentioned earlier, the you know
the person having like fill in mud all along the
trails with gravel. So there's mud everywhere, and it is
an inescapable fact of just being in both the forest
and the festival.

Speaker 2 (02:13:36):
At the time of the bail hearings, they've very clearly
had no evidence linking individuals to crimes. So the best
they could come up with was metal shields and mud,
two things, two things that are completely nonsense. There was
no there was no metal shields. And oh wow, you
have mud on your you have mud on your clothing.
This is why you're a terrorist. During the hearing, a
defense lawyer alleged that the twelve people who were detained

(02:13:58):
at the music festival but not arrested and were later
released at Gresham Park were all from Atlanta, and by
releasing these twelve locals, police can claim that the people
arrested were from fourteen different states, which is obviously part
of an attempt to continue accelerating the outside agitator narrative
that they've been pushing out since last in December.

Speaker 9 (02:14:17):
Of the twenty three who were charged, only two had
the Georgia licenses, the person from Athens and the legal observer.
The rest were out of state and two were out
of country. So at one point during the proceedings the
bail proceedings, one of the lawyers says that from what

(02:14:41):
they understand, the twelve individuals who were let go Sunday
night all had in state licenses, So it does appear
that APD released people to continue this outside agitator narrative
that they have been using for month now, since since May,

(02:15:02):
since early summer.

Speaker 2 (02:15:03):
Prosecutor Cross responded to claims that detained local Atlantan's were
let go by saying that the people released were interviewed
did not have the jail support number on their arm
and quote unquote knew little about the movement. At a
press conference, Marlin from the Solidarity Fund talked about how
repression has taken form and concerns of what other tactics

(02:15:26):
the state may try to employ.

Speaker 29 (02:15:28):
No evidence has been presented to support any of these
claims of domestic terrorism, including on the other eighteen people
who've been given this charge previously. In this movement, police,
some prosecutors are not involved in a law enforcement effort.
They're involved in a political campaign to suppress a political movement,
which they find objectionable because as the police, they have

(02:15:49):
a vested interest in the construction of copcity. From a
civil liberties perspective, we find this very concerning. We find
it to be an abuse of power, and we're committed
to ensuring that all of that activists who are targeted
have access to the legal resources that they need not
only to defend themselves from these bogus charges, but also
toue civil litigation against police who have abused their power

(02:16:10):
and violated people's rights. We are concerned about the possibility
that prosecutors may try to use RICO charges against organizers
because RICO is understood as a way of suppressing organizations,
and the narrative that we've seen coming from police and
prosecutors is their belief that the broad and diverse Stock

(02:16:32):
Cop City movement is in fact a criminal conspiracy whose
members conspire to commit acts of terrorism.

Speaker 1 (02:16:40):
This could not be further.

Speaker 5 (02:16:41):
From the truth.

Speaker 29 (02:16:42):
This is like a clear misrepresentation of a broad movement
that encompasses all of society. But this is the narrative
that prosecutors are trying to promulgate to make it easier
to target activists.

Speaker 2 (02:16:53):
In the intervening month and a half, five more people
were let out on bond. Then on May third, a
side the series of preliminary hearings took place for the
last three people being held into Cab County Jail from
amongst the twenty three individuals arrested at the music festival
and charged with domestic terrorism. Before the changes to the
law in twenty seventeen, the State of Georgia required ten

(02:17:14):
or more people to be killed for domestic terrorism charges
to even be filed. During a wave of anti protest bills,
while citing racially motivated mass shootings to get the bill passed,
the State of Georgia removed any death threshold and essentially
replaced it with references to property damage. To quote a
write up by the Atlantic Community Press collective quote, Decab

(02:17:36):
County Magistrate Judge James Altman explained that he decided whether
to uphold the charges based on two criteria. The first
was whether prosecutors provided enough evidence to satisfy the conditions
set forth in the Georgia Domestic Terrorism Statute, namely the
threat to critical infrastructure. The second criteria prosecutors needed to
meet was identification, or their ability to show that the

(02:17:59):
defendants were each a party to the alleged crimes committed
on March fifth, unquote, and it's worth noting that the
threshold for probable cause is much lower than the threshold
needed to convict someone of a crime. In opening arguments,
Assistant Da Lance Cross claimed that Defend the Forest activists
are well funded and quote have a pretty good propaganda

(02:18:22):
arm on social media, and that doing direct action while
chanting stop Coopcity qualifies activists to be charged under the
Georgia Domestic Terrorism Statute because it's using violence to advocate
change of government policy. Judge Altman found that the first
criteria of the domestic terrorism charges were met for all

(02:18:43):
three defendants on the basis that setting fires at the
construction site in such close proximity to a power line
tower was an attack on critical infrastructure, even if the
defendants did not themselves start any fires. Georgia Bureau of
Investigation Special Agent Ryan Long testified that the entire music
festival was cover for the direct action against the construction site,

(02:19:06):
even without evidence of defendants in black bloc or proof
that they engaged in any destructive acts. Assistant da Cross
said that everyone at the site was enabling the destruction
of the property and as such is party to the crime.
Due to the assertion that the alleged crimes were only
possible due to the large size of the crowd, one
of the state's witnesses, a sergeant of the APD, said

(02:19:29):
that he wouldn't be able to recognize anyone who was
at the site and that he could not tell if
the defendant was even in the crowd of people at
the north gate, let alone through rocks or set fires.
Defense argued that mere presence at a location should not
be automatic aiding and a betting, but Judge Altman said
there was a sufficient evidence presented showing the acts of

(02:19:51):
the crowd and that the defendant's presence is at least
sufficient for being party to the crime even by simply
participating at the music festival.

Speaker 5 (02:20:00):
One of the.

Speaker 2 (02:20:00):
Hearings was for the indigenous person who was tased at
the music festival, who was specifically witnessed to be there
during the duration of the direct action. Under questioning from
the defense, special Agent Long said that the defendant was
not visible on the helicopter footage of the incident. After
initially suggesting that the defendant was identified by a helicopter pilot,
Long rolled that back by saying he was unsure if

(02:20:23):
the chopper was able to track the defendant and then
had to leave to go make a few calls to
get a more definitive answer, which he failed to provide,
But the judge still found that the second criteria of
identification was sufficient to find two of the defendants at
least party to the actions at the construction site. Special
Agent Long testified that there is a quote unquote command

(02:20:46):
structure in the Stop Coop City movement and described the
movement as a pyramid scheme created by activists with different
names like stop Coop City and Defend the Forest to
act as little different subgroups to attract new subordinate members
to opt to under leadership. Long asserted that activists pretend
to be ecologists one day and then anarchists the next

(02:21:08):
to further their cause, which, once again we have to
point out, is on one hand, a dangerous thing to claim,
on the other hand, extremely funny. Social media posts were
brought up by prosecutors as evidence linking defendants to criminal
acts and a conspiracy of terrorism. During the first hearing,
special Agent Long claimed that they knew that the defendant

(02:21:30):
was at the construction site due to street Pol camera
footage and social media posts allegedly made by the defendant's friend.
In another hearing, agent Long claimed that on the defendant's
social media they were posts of stop coop City banners
and flyers, demonstrating an awareness of the nature of the

(02:21:51):
stop cop City movement. The state also cited alleged social
media posts of the defendant self describing as anti capitalist
and anti colonial as proof of criminal intent. Near the
end of the last hearing, Judge Altman said that social
media posts do not count towards probable cause. However, the

(02:22:13):
framing of social media posts by prosecutors as an indication
of guilt is still cause for alarm, and what gets
admitted as evidence during trial is still yet to be determined.
When the prosecution asked if a defendant had a jail
support number on their arm, the judge noted that, quote,
the existence or non existence of an organization doesn't really

(02:22:34):
seem to me as an element of the crime unquote.
Similar to the March twenty third hearings, Prosecutor Johnson tried
to argue that the solidarity fund and jail support is
an arm of this top Copcity movement, to which the
judge reiterated that participation in an alleged organization is not
part of the crime of domestic terrorism. For one defendant,

(02:22:56):
the judge granted bond on the conditions of twenty five
thousand dollars bail, with the defendant having to turn over
her passport, a no contact order with other co defendants,
and no participation in discussion of stop Kopcity on social media.
Bond for the other two defendants was denied. Ultimately, Judge
Altman upheld the domestic terrorism charges against all three defendants

(02:23:19):
on the low barrier of evidence sufficient for ruling probable cause.
Judge Altman said that quote, whether it gets any further
than that is not my problem, unquote, and that if
the DA wanted further charges brought against defendants, he must
use a grand jury. As the judge did not find
probable cause for arson or assault on an officer, Judge

(02:23:41):
Altman mentioned that he was concerned about alleged witness intimidation
by members of the Defend the Forest movement. Meanwhile, in
the adjacent Fulton County, there was also a preliminary hearing
for one of the six people arrested at the protest
in downtown Atlanta on January twenty first, the saturday following
the killing of Tortighita. Judge Ashley Drake upheld a total

(02:24:04):
of eight charges, including one of domestic terrorism, and the
next day the defendant was released on bail. One thing
of note from this hearing is that Deputy Attorney General
John Fowler compared the Defend the Forest movement to nine
eleven by saying, quote, protesters were trying to knock out
the windows of one to nine to one Peachtree Street.

(02:24:28):
That is a dangerous situation. That's a twin towers unquote.
When talking about the various hearings, I mentioned helicopter and
street pole camera footage of the direct action on Sunday
that both prosecutors and the defense were using to support

(02:24:48):
their claims, and I think it's worth diving a bit
deeper into specifically the police helicopter footage, since I like
keeping up with the methods that police are using to
surveil and suppress pro test.

Speaker 5 (02:25:01):
I'm going to start by.

Speaker 2 (02:25:02):
Letting Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum walk us through what
was able to be observed via helicopter mounted cameras based
on his testimony during the city council meeting that took place
less than twenty four hours after the incident.

Speaker 17 (02:25:15):
Individuals were seeing changing out of the clothes that they
were wearing at the concert and were now dressing themselves
in all black with backpacks with items fensive nature approaching.
What we saw is this group moved rather quickly to
the site for the proposed public Safety trading center. They
move quickly on the group of officers that were assembled there.
These officers had been stationary at the site protecting the location.

(02:25:38):
In the first line, there are individuals with shields that
are forming The officers attempted to first to de escalate
by repositioning themselves thank you repositioning themselves inside of the
fenced in area. The officers again start to reposition because
they can tell this is not a peaceful demonstration.

Speaker 14 (02:25:54):
You just start to.

Speaker 17 (02:25:55):
See smoke occurring as fires are set, maltav cocktails are thrown,
and fireworks are discharged from our air unit that is
deployed in the area. You will see individuals that have
started to move against the officers. They will have start
throwings fireworks as they are pushing the officers in the
area where we see individuals as another group is engaging

(02:26:16):
the officers with rocks, Malotov cocktails and bottles are moving
to set fire to the various equipments that in the area.
What you see in the left hand of the gentleman
with the mask over his face is a Malotov cocktail.
There will be accelerants in his hands that will be
used also to attack some of the construction equipment that
is in the area. These individuals are massed hide their identity.

(02:26:36):
This is playing out across the area that had been
previously been fenced in.

Speaker 14 (02:26:42):
There will be generators.

Speaker 17 (02:26:43):
That are will be destroyed, other pieces of equipment that's
being destroyed. There you see more accelerant being thrown onto
the vehicle that is being set on fire. And what
you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some of
the individuals that had just previously attacked the work site
return back into the woods, they start changing back into
the clothes that they were just wearing moments before, as

(02:27:05):
they were portraying themselves to be attendees of the event
that was occurring in the music. So it was clear
today that we saw repeat of what we've seen in
the past, where events that are shown to be peaceful
and to be being publicized as to be peaceful are
being used by individuals as cover to launch illegal and
criminal attacks. We had a rapid response from our partners

(02:27:27):
at the Decab County Police Department, the Sheriff of Fulton County,
as well as the Georgia State Patrol. Those officers entered
into the woods as individuals were attempting to flee, hide
the weapons they had just used, as well as to
change their clothing, and we began to make a number
of arrest.

Speaker 2 (02:27:44):
I spoke with the unnamed Forest defender about the surveillance
capabilities of the state on full display during the week
of action.

Speaker 30 (02:27:51):
I find that thermal helicopter video fascinating for a variety
of reasons. One, it's interesting to look at the surveillance
capacity of the state. It's to my memory, the first
time the EAT has ever posted their own thermal chopper footage.
It's a very similar camera to the type you would
see on a birector on some kind of armed unmanned
aerial vehicle. What I found most interesting about the thermals
is exactly how they were using that type of targeting

(02:28:13):
software to attract people, and I think it's worth people
knowing what they were doing with it so we have
an idea how to counter it. When you're using a
software to tract targets on optical lens, at least during
a daytime event. Thermals are easier because it breaks the
image up into just two colors white and then like
black and gray, so they can track the body heat
shapes of people in white and then just click the
thermals off, get a snapshot of the outfit they're wearing,
click the thermals back on, and track them easier than

(02:28:34):
it is to track them with just a normal camera.
This gives them a clear image of what they're wearing
before they d blocked, and then they can go back
to tracking that person, follow them to where they're de blocking,
wait for them to deplock it, another picture with the
regular camera, and then arrest them. So that meant that
when people were leaving, it was advantageous to be deplocking
under overhead cover, under thick brush, under thick canopy, out
of direct line of site with the chopper, you know,

(02:28:54):
not in the open air. It's definitely a really hard
thing to counter. The surveillance State's one of the things
that I find the most fearful about the police state.
Not like individual beat cops. They're guns and shit are
cool or whatever, but man, those cameras they're really something.
You know, I think the Portland Police Bureau just got
a new spy plane and new Sessna loaded up with
surveillance equipment and shit like that. All that stuff does
so much more to fuck you up than just like

(02:29:15):
a riot team does. You can throw mortars at a
riot team. Sorry I shouldn't say mortars. Fireworks that are
called mortars.

Speaker 13 (02:29:20):
My bad.

Speaker 30 (02:29:21):
Don't want to lean into the explosives narratives. Honestly, they're
fucking weird about fireworks. But you know, those surveillance capacities
are one of the hardest things to counter.

Speaker 2 (02:29:29):
One term that's already come up during our coverage of
stop Coop City is Fuco's boomerang, And while that still
applies here, we're now also kind of getting into some
panaptocon territory as shown by this type of surveillance capacity,
specifically at actions. And one of the biggest reasons why
the panopticon works is that people are scared of it.
It scares you away from even taking action in the

(02:29:52):
first place.

Speaker 30 (02:29:53):
And like, as soon as you overcome that paralyzing fear,
the cops become really afraid of you. That's why we
say that like the biggest that the state has his fear,
because like the cops go from these big, fucking tough
guys to like whining cowards. The second you just become
not afraid, you don't even have to beat them, you
don't have to overcome the actual physical weapons. But once
you get out of that headspace, that paralyzing fear, once

(02:30:14):
you let it pass over you and through you, they're
fucking terrified. And if we're gonna win, we need to
be their worst nightmare.

Speaker 2 (02:30:21):
As state repression against the stop cop City movement continues,
the coalition against the police training facility only continues to grow.
Last month, Angela Davis returned an award proclamation given to
her by the Atlanta City Council in protest of cop City.

Speaker 10 (02:30:38):
If the attempts by the Atlanta Police to build the
largest police training grounds in the country are successful, this
will represent a major setback for the movement for radical
democratic futures, not only throughout the US, but globally well.

(02:31:01):
As a person who has participated in campaigns against prisons
and police for far longer than a half century, I
want to salute all those who are involved in the
stop cup City movement, and I want to urge people

(02:31:24):
everywhere to find ways to generate support for them.

Speaker 2 (02:31:29):
Angela Davis made it clear that she stood in solidarity
with force defenders facing repression from the police and the
city of Atlanta, and joined in calls to halt the
construction of this facility, which will only serve as a
tool to advance what she called militarized police racism and repression.

Speaker 10 (02:31:47):
Atlanta activists are on the front lines of the abolitionist movement,
at its crucial intersection with movements to save our forests, indeed,
to save our planet. The attempt to build a massive

(02:32:07):
militarized police training facility is a dangerous and ominous development
that we have to oppose with all our might. And
so I want to join those who are standing strong
in defense of the forest against the construction of this

(02:32:29):
police training ground. I urge people everywhere to join the
campaign to stop Cop City.

Speaker 2 (02:32:40):
After Angeliae Davis's announcement, the Walter Rodney Foundation released a
statement supporting Davis's decision and against the construction of Cop City.

Speaker 9 (02:32:49):
It's interesting to see their more mainline sort of center
or center left like organizations that have begun to come
on board. Even with what happened Sunday and especially the
Thursday march and rally, had it necessitated a response from
the city. So Friday morning there was actually an organization

(02:33:13):
Concerned Black Clergy who had a press conference like calling
out Cop City protesters, and so you had this like
very state run. One of the city council members, Antonio Lewis,
was there like live streaming at the entire time. And
so you can tell the efficacy of a lot of
things that have happened this week by how the city
is reacting and how like it is necessitating them going

(02:33:36):
to greater and greater lengths to try to show that
the movement is wrong.

Speaker 2 (02:33:43):
One way that the city has been working to advocate
for the further development of the cop City project is
by launching a website of their own for the Public
Safety Training Center, full of videos of the mayor and
police chief walking through South Atlanta trying to convince neighbors
that the project is a good In the past few months,
the city has also been turning the official City of

(02:34:05):
Atlanta Twitter account into a hilarious Coppcity propaganda outlet. About
two weeks after the end of the Week of Action,
on March twenty fourth, to Cab County CEO Michael Thurmond
announced an executive order to indefinitely close Entrenchment Creek Park,
also known as Wahlani People's Park, claiming that the park
was a danger to the public due to booby traps

(02:34:27):
allegedly found in the forest. At a press conference, Thurman
displayed photos of wooden boards with nails sticking out of
them allegedly found in the park. The executive order reads
that the park will quote remain closed until further notice
to protect the safety of the families, residents and visitors
and their pets in the area, and to county personnel.

Speaker 5 (02:34:49):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:34:50):
A few days after the announcement to CAB police led
a joint task force in a raid of the Wallani
Forest and Entrenchment Creek Park. The land was effectively of
all force defenders, with one person being arrested. During the raid,
The memorial for Tortigito was destroyed by the police, and
cement barricades were set up around the entrances and exits

(02:35:11):
to the park. Days later, police and contractors began cutting
trees in the Willanne Forest, with no one around to
resist the destruction. The Solidarity Fund to put out a
statement saying, quote, closing down a public park in order
to prevent protests from happening in that space is unconstitutional.
To CAB CEO Michael Thurmond, is trying to do an

(02:35:33):
end run around the First Amendment quote. Dacab County Commissioner
Ted Terry is pushing to reopen the park through a
resolution expected to be introduced in early May. But it
wasn't just the park's closure that made force defense more challenging.
After the mass action at the North Gate in early March,
security was greatly increased at the construction sites in the

(02:35:55):
Willanne Forest, with massive spotlights illuminating the area to daylight
levels twenty four hours a day, which made returning to
the sort of nighttime sabotage actions in the forest that
pioneered some of the movements militancy in its early days
to be much more complicated. During my conversations with forest defenders,

(02:36:15):
there was still a desire to see more of those
of small sabotage actions, as the large daytime mass actions
seemed to result in more people getting arrested near the
site of militant activity.

Speaker 30 (02:36:28):
People are angry, you know, like their friend, our friend
was murdered. You can just feel however you want about this,
but like a lot of people, and I guess myself included,
are just really angry. There's this kind of blinding rage
that comes with it of just like eye for an eye,
blood for blood. You know that the police killed our
friend and that they need to hurt for that one,

(02:36:49):
and they need to hurt for all the people that
they've murdered and all the things they're trying to do,
And that leads people to take actions that may not
be well thought out, but that are very well intentioned
and have tangible results that hurt the police state, but
that are actions that do bring harm to themselves or others,
because there are not you know, these like middle of
the night slash and run sabotage attacks that don't have

(02:37:09):
arrests happen that are safer, and I think we should
see a return of that tactic because the level of
police presence that we saw at all the actions this
week post Sunday, like doing shit at downtown protests, fuck that, Like,
that's not like we're not pulling shit off there without
a mass arrest or like everyone's getting gassed. Like it's
not a tactically advantageous or viable way of doing things.

(02:37:32):
But I think people wanted to prove to the cops
that like, no, no, no, we could open field fuck
them up. And yeah, there were consequences to that, but
people fuck them up in the open field, and that's
worth a plotting.

Speaker 2 (02:37:42):
The bounds of the forest is not the only location
actions take place. Just about a week after the park
closure and when some of the clear cutting began, a
report back was posted online that read quote, on the
night of Wednesday, April fifth, we set fire to three
Excavators owned by Brent Scarbro Company on a site across
from the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta. Brent Scarborough is the

(02:38:05):
company and individual responsible for clear cutting the Willani Forest.
Copcity will never be built, unquote. The March twenty twenty
three Week of Action was always going to be a
kind of turning point in showcasing what will be seen
in the struggle to defend the forest to this spring,
and how that will then lead into the summer, and
what forms of resistance people will choose to take, whether

(02:38:28):
that be another singular week of action or taken notes
from the Old Earth First playbook and try to do
a whole summer of action. How do you kind of
see the movement too Top Cup City like changing or
evolving in the next few months. I mean, because all
this is kind of felt like it's been kind of
very much on the heels of what happened in January.

(02:38:49):
People have tried to, like, you know, just try to
find new paths of resistance in the wake of the
police killing. How do you see like the fight continuing
at this stage where like they have some land of
Germans permits, there's early construction. What are like the avenues
of resistance that people are trying to go down.

Speaker 8 (02:39:10):
I think that we have to be very clear and
assessing what has worked installing the project and what will
work to stop the project, because those aren't necessarily the
same things. I think there are nuances in particular strategies.
There is a difference between, especially in our particular context.

(02:39:34):
That's similar between the difference between gorilla warfare and urban
guerrilla warfare. And I say that guerrilla warfare is more
so when people have been destroying equipment, you know, at contractors,
you know, offices or wherever, or like near the forest,
et cetera, and you could just hide off into the

(02:39:56):
woods and just like disappear back into nothingness. Nobody gets touched.
What we have to look at with the actions at
the music festival were it exposed a lot of people.
And this is once again because the police acted so
heavy handedly. But we also know that the police act

(02:40:17):
heavy handedly, which is why we're here. So that gets
kind of dicey because that's like kind of like urban
guerilla warfare where you have the gorillas just shooting paw
Pa pal and then like running into somebody's grandma's house.
People do not fuck with the people that just running
Grandma's house for cover, right, And that's where things get
a little bit dicey, because in many ways, a lot

(02:40:39):
of us were looking at means to open up the
movement with this week of action, and that was what
was widely understood for a lot of people. And nevertheless,
when you just come in with the boomstick from the beginning,
that dictates the tone of the rest of the week.
And then where you could, you know, for instance, operate
from a space of like moral authority, it becomes much

(02:41:03):
easier for people on the fence to justify to themselves, well,
what are the police supposed to think? Right? I mean,
we have to realize that there are several like mental
resistances that have been taught to people for them to
try to discredit us. And I just I think there's
some important context. Right when Martin Luther King Junior was

(02:41:25):
doing like the nonviolent direct action, at a certain point
they had to make a calculated decision to include women
and children in the marches because they had assessed in
America had become too desensitized to seeing black men beaten
in the streets, right, So that was a tactical decision
to bring in more people. Right, So there are like

(02:41:45):
calculations that people have to make and assessments that they
have to make based on the information that we're dealing with.

Speaker 2 (02:41:51):
Through talking with forced defenders, I've heard a variety of
internal critiques of the week of Action format because it
is such a concentrated time period. The week of Action
can give police a very concentrated time to over police
and over surveil, and for activists it can open up
an expenditure of energy during the week, which then can

(02:42:12):
lead to a lack of energy leading up to what's
been called the week of repression in the past. Every
time following a week of action, after people from out
of town leave, it then leads into a week of
repression where police will then do a rate of the
forest and have their sort of retaliation the week after.
There's been talk of potential changes to some of the

(02:42:33):
Week of Action format, perhaps doing something more akin to
a summer of resistance.

Speaker 30 (02:42:39):
So the week of repression is always the week that
comes after the Week of Action where the cops are like, Okay,
the bulk of your reserves, you're out of state supporter
is gone. We're going to come fuck you up. Now
they are less of you. Now you're less ready to
deal with us. And that is like a major strategic
flaw in the Weeks of Action because it kind of
creates a activist tourism for people coming out of state,

(02:43:00):
and not that Atlanta doesn't appreciate their support and their solidarity,
and that so many of those out of state people
do stay long term, but it does create a situation
where like, yeah, we're having an influx of people for
a week building infrastructure for a week, and then the
bulk of those people, a good percentage are going to
go home because yeah, like traveling long term is hard.
People have jobs, kids, whatever, you have commitments wherever you are,

(02:43:20):
and they have to go home. And then the cops
just wreck our shit and do raids, and like, unless
people want to get on board with doing some pretty
crazy shit, those raids are hard to counter. It would
behoove us to take a realistic audit of what the
Weeks of Action have meant and what they are actually
useful for which the strategic gains of the Weeks of
Action are always now going to be more metaphysical than physical.
They bring people to this space, they give them a

(02:43:42):
closeness to the forest that they would not achieve without
actually coming here. But as far as tangibly like materially
stopping cop City, those kind of middle of the night
slash and run attacks, tertiary targeting of contractors, all that stuff.
That's how you pressure the money, and the money is
where you win.

Speaker 2 (02:43:56):
Ultimately, it's up to the autonomous actors that makeup this
is so moment and how their choices will determine how
the fight to stop Cop City will grow and evolve.
As I'm writing this, just thirty minutes ago we found
out that the clear cutting at the Cop City construction
site has essentially been completed. The overhead photos are devastating.

(02:44:22):
Where there were young, growing trees just weeks ago is
now a flattened mound of red clay and dirt, as
if the ground itself was bleeding. I counted over one
hundred trees uprooted from the earth. Hundreds of people have
dedicated years of their life to defending this forest, and
the sight of sizeable destruction has brought out a variety

(02:44:44):
of grieving reactions. If Cop City doesn't get built in
the WALLAWNI, the land could be carefully reforested and healed
via regenerative permaculture. With intentional stewardship, the forest could grow
to be ecologically healthier than it was before. In some ways,
the destruction that has already taken place makes it even

(02:45:05):
more vital to try and stop the construction of Cop City.
No one is advocating a defeatist approach where force defenders
essentially give up and let the Police Foundation build it,
because there are still numerous ways to fight against the
construction of this facility. But now is not the time
to sugarcoat the dire situation people are in, and there

(02:45:27):
should be time allowed to grieve this loss as well
as strike back against the destruction. It would be a
mistake to gaslight each other and act as if we're
closer than ever to halting the Cop City project. The
fact that it's gotten this far itself is devastating. From
the beginning. People have said that even if they do
believe that cop City will never be built, the Atlanta

(02:45:49):
Police Foundation and police will absolutely attempt to do as
much damage as they can possibly get away with anyway,
both to force defenders and to the force itself. The
past few months, I've been increasingly hearing the vice versa
of that sentiment. If cop City does end up getting built,

(02:46:10):
people have pledged that the Atlanta Police Foundation will have
to pay for every inch they take. Even if there
is no longer hope to save the entire Wilani Forest,
then we must do so without hope. At least there
is always vengeance. It is a long road ahead, and
there is still much to do. To quote my favorite
anarchomonarchist Tolkien, at this moment, the movement will hone its

(02:46:35):
focus to prevent or at the very least disincentivize, the
physical construction of cop City.

Speaker 30 (02:46:41):
I think it'd be worth thinking of this movement as
an almost two year old movement that's outgrown the.

Speaker 14 (02:46:46):
Week of action.

Speaker 30 (02:46:46):
You know, why limit ourselves to seven days?

Speaker 14 (02:46:48):
Fuck it?

Speaker 30 (02:46:49):
Do a summer, you know, do three months of like
we're doing three months of action in Atlanta. Come to
Atlanta whenever you want, and then go home and do
shit at home. There wills fargos where you live. There
are chase banks where you live, There are at less
construction off us.

Speaker 10 (02:47:00):
Is where you live.

Speaker 30 (02:47:01):
And yeah, you should come to Atlanta and you should
come see the space, and you should be in the
forest and you should feel like the love and community
that's there. We win by fighting on enough fronts that
they can't fight us back on all of them. The
state dies by a thousand cuts, not by all of
us being in one place where they can kettle our asses. Like,
that's just not how we're gonna win. So, yeah, if
we had three months of like we're occupying the forest

(02:47:23):
for three months, come to the space whenever you feel
like it. But you know, hopefully when people go home,
they feel inspired to understand that they can do just
as much hitting those companies where they live as they
can here, because the money's all going to the same place.
The CEO at the top doesn't care if you hit
their businesses in Georgia or in fucking Illinois or in
Oregon or Washington or whatever. The money's all the same.

Speaker 2 (02:47:43):
A phrase I've been hearing a lot lately is copp
City is everywhere to quota communicate, posted on scenes, no
blocks dot org quote. We will keep winning, not just
here in so called Atlanta, but we must attack all
across these so called states. The money and power that
seek to kill us and a destroyab LAUNI are nationwide,

(02:48:04):
and so our movement must be nationwide. A net of resistance,
too vast to comprehend and too resilient to suppress. Reality
is the battlefield, but so called America, all of it
is the backdrop.

Speaker 5 (02:48:20):
When Chief A.

Speaker 2 (02:48:20):
Sheerbaum gave testimony at City Council even he mentioned the
far reaching manifestations of the fight to stop cop City.

Speaker 17 (02:48:29):
We have been seeing over the last number of months
crimes that have been occurring in other cities focused towards
the public safety training center. So we have seen arsons
in cities outside of Atlanta. We've seen the destruction of
property outside of Atlanta, and we've seen the harassment of
private sector employees outside of Atlanta.

Speaker 14 (02:48:47):
So that is the next.

Speaker 17 (02:48:49):
Is where the Federal Pure of Investigation has been assisting
in this administigation.

Speaker 2 (02:48:55):
Like I said in the second episode, the stakes of
the movement may soon exceed the bounds of the forest
and cop City, and in fact that process may have
already begun. We are seeing stop Coop City turn into
a new mode of insurgency and resistance to modern policing
in general, not simply limited to the construction of this
one training center. As the police are trying to build

(02:49:19):
a training center to practice quelling future civil unrest, the
site of the Malani Forest and beyond has been a
training ground for anarchists and those who fight the ever
growing police estate the past two years. It's been a
dangerous playground for experimentation and liberation. Applications for the lessons
learned in the Mulani Forest extend far past the barriers

(02:49:42):
of the woods. As far right attacks on abortion and
trans people are accelerating across this country, but especially the South,
perhaps some of the organizing infrastructure that's been developed can
take new focus on these battlegrounds, and even just the
mere existence of the struggle against cop City in Atlanta
has been a deterrent for other cities and states seeking

(02:50:05):
to push forward similar proposals. But as the movement possibly
expands past its original scope in these next few months,
people will need to be careful that the idyllic notion
of the struggle doesn't eclipse the original and still active goal,
which is to stop cop City. Cop City is indeed everywhere,
but the current manifestation in Atlanta is unique to Atlanta,

(02:50:28):
and the corresponding struggle to stop the physical construction of
this training facility cannot be overlooked in favor of fantasies
of utopian anarchy to steal an idea from Matt of
the Community Press Collective. One interpretation of the phrase cop
city is everywhere is the realization that Atlanta is cop city,

(02:50:50):
and it already has been for years without us knowing it,
and if we don't turn back the tide here, cop
city will be exported everywhere.

Speaker 8 (02:51:00):
At Atlanta once again, because of the Atlanta Police Foundation
is the most surveiled city in the country, because of
twenty seventeen's Operation Shield program where they put tons of
cameras all throughout the city and essentially made it a
surveillance state. Once again, crime has continued to go up
during this time, and that would have significantly more to

(02:51:22):
do with the disparity of wealth than opportunities of Black
Atlantans that are born under the poverty line. Only five
percent of them are projected to ever cross that line.
At the same time, the average median income of black
households is one third that of the average median income

(02:51:45):
of white households in Atlanta, So that's about thirty five
thousand dollars to one hundred and four thousand dollars. And
so the wealth is just so disproportionately spread and so
much of the labor intensive economy is predicated on it
that black people are pigeonholed into service economy jobs and

(02:52:08):
they have very few opportunities here. Now, that type of
inequality breeds discontent and people looking for other opportunities, and
the police are ready to catch them at every turn
for arresting the juvenile. In the point system that they

(02:52:29):
have for Atlanta Police Department, it's five points. However, you
only receive a quarter of a point as a police
officer if you answer a service call. So police officers
often ignore service calls because that doesn't give them the
credit that they want. So just to put that in context,
you get twenty times the credit in Atlanta's point quota

(02:52:50):
system for arresting a juvenile then going where people actually
wanted police to show up. And we're supposed to be
convinced that this system is made to keep us safe. Right.

Speaker 2 (02:53:03):
The City of Atlanta and the Police Foundation wants cop
City to be a national training center for police to
come and practice militaristic counterinsurgency for export across the country.
They murdered someone to further this goal. All eyes must
be on Atlanta.

Speaker 3 (02:53:19):
Cop City is a symbol of police repression. Cop City
is a symbol of the oppression of the people of Atlanta.
I want you to look around and see the families
here in this part today. These are people who came
because they're concerned for their children. These are people who
are concerned because they don't want their city overrun by militarization.

Speaker 2 (02:53:43):
The level of repression the movement is facing is a
sign that the state feels like this movement is a threat,
and the state feels like this movement has the possibility
of actually succeeding, So in response, they're increasing repression. And
on the flip side of that, during this past week
of action, I saw a lot of affirmation that this

(02:54:04):
is going to be successful and that people believe that
they will stop cop City. A common refrain during the
past week of action is that cop City will never
be built, and I believe that we will win. There's
been such a unique emphasis on the fact that people
believe that this fight is one winnable and that people

(02:54:24):
do have the ability to stop cop City, and the
people who are participating truly believe that, and I think
that is an important part of why it's gotten as
far as it has.

Speaker 18 (02:54:33):
So we can get everything we want for this city.
We can stop cop city. We don't got the power,
but we just got the believe the last There's gonna
be a lot of.

Speaker 12 (02:54:47):
People telling us about what we can't do, about.

Speaker 18 (02:54:50):
What these organizers are here can't do.

Speaker 8 (02:54:52):
Tell me what it tells us about what we what
we can't do?

Speaker 18 (02:54:55):
Well to tell you all of a sudden here we're organizers,
no business.

Speaker 10 (02:55:01):
I've taken that.

Speaker 12 (02:55:02):
With all the papers. Impossible, way you make it possible?
You say, will we believe that we will win?

Speaker 2 (02:55:21):
This is interesting to me because in my experience, a
lot of leftists and anarchists approach much of their praxis
with the concept of them expecting to not succeed, but
they're going to do it anyway, which there is a
kind of fated beauty to that in a certain way.
And part of that is taking action even if you
don't think it will lead to a decisive victory. But

(02:55:44):
also I feel that being in that mindset might set
you up for that outcome. If you're preparing to fail,
that means you're probably gonna fail, or at the very
least limit the ways that you do action. And throughout
this movement, thus far, it's been interesting the degree to
which people are convinced that they are going to win.

Speaker 30 (02:56:03):
If you're being prepared to fail, you won't take the
radical action that it takes to win. Winning's hard, and
winning means doing things that are scary and uncomfortable and
doing things that put you in danger, and doing things
that are new and unknown and different, and taking new
strategies and doing new things. And we in the US
and a lot of other places, but this is US
based movement. So there's so much learned helplessness on the

(02:56:26):
left here from so many years of like we lost
it Occupy and then we lost in Ferguson and Standing
Rock and in twenty twenty, all of these movements that
put big body blows to the state put some hits in,
but we're just followed by these waves and waves of oppression.
We've learned so much helplessness. And for the first time
in my life, I'm looking at a movement that I'm like, no, no,

(02:56:48):
we can fucking beat them. And people are stagnating, We're
blinking because of what happened on Sunday, and like, no, no, no,
what happened on Sunday? Prove that we can win. It
proved that we can one fight them in the open
field and beat them, that they are afraid of us,
that they will see territory if we hit them, and
it proved that they are so afraid of us that
they need to mobilize fucking ten different police departments to

(02:57:11):
come deal. And then they won't even step into the
actual brush of the forest because they think we're the
fucking Vietcong. That proves we can win more than anything
that proves we can win. And if we do not
accept that, what is proved that we can win is
like property destruction, and to a degree doing violence, we
won't win. Those fireworks helped a lot. They pushed the

(02:57:32):
cops out, and like, we shouldn't balk at that, And
I guess I don't classify that as violence. The police
classify that is violence what they consider taking hits, I guess.
But yeah, we are so on the cusp of a
make or break kind of deal here, and the only
way that we win is not this internal debate we're
having about the efficacy of tactics. It's doubling down on
what we are already doing because it's working, and expanding

(02:57:53):
on it.

Speaker 2 (02:57:54):
Do you believe that cop city will be actually stopped.

Speaker 1 (02:57:58):
We got to.

Speaker 8 (02:58:00):
And here's what I mean by that. This is the line.
Right we have environmental racism, police militarization and brutality, and
police and racism, and it's all coming to a head
right here in this particular movement. We have to win

(02:58:25):
because what they're doing now is to build capacity to
make sure that we can't win, right And so why
people are pushing so hard is that, as we've seen
over the past couple of weeks, the police have plenty
of like tanks and shit and all sorts of militarized
and tactical gear, and now they're trying to build another

(02:58:49):
base and the blackest part of the city and to
build up more capacity to put down any sense of
rebellion or pushback against empire. We cannot allow it to happen.
And I mean, there is so much money going to
kill people in end life. And if we win right

(02:59:12):
here and make this stand right here, that changes the
potentiality for how we view how to keep one another
safe and how to reinvest in ourselves and our people
throughout this country in a huge way. I think that
we are at the precipice of not only winning cup City,

(02:59:34):
but pushing back the tide of the cult of death
that this country has become.

Speaker 2 (02:59:41):
The clear cuts in the Malaani forest at this stage
serve a threefold purpose. One, it obviously gets them closer
to construction and the mass of land grading that is
scheduled to start on May twenty third two, It's a
ployee by the APF to secure additional needed funds from
cop City investors. And finally, it to demoralize the people
who spent years of their life working to stop this project.

Speaker 9 (03:00:05):
Everything that police have done is essentially always a reprisal, right,
the movement does something and the police clamp down in
a reprisal to try to repress the movement.

Speaker 2 (03:00:16):
Police always escalate, but they have always been like in
response to something.

Speaker 9 (03:00:19):
And their goal, of course is to quiet and chill
free speech and end the movement. But every time this happens,
the opposite effect is what comes out of it. And
from the domestic terrorism rest in December, like really, that's
when this even larger groundswell of national support happened and

(03:00:41):
people started to take notice because this was an extreme measure.

Speaker 2 (03:00:44):
And then with the killing of Tortighita in January, that
changed so much about the movement, including people's personal connection
to this struggle, where no longer are people doing this
simply because they believe it is what's right. They are
doing this because they have to, because the state cannot
get away with this, This death cannot be in vain.

(03:01:06):
And now people believe that they have to succeed or
at the very least make this state pay for every inch,
and that may mean looking beyond the binary of a
victory and defeat. According to a construction timeline from this
past April, the Atlanta Police Foundation plans to start construction
on August twenty ninth, twenty twenty three, in order for

(03:01:29):
a quote unquote soft opening of the facility in December
of twenty twenty four. One hiccup that the APF has
run into is that it seems they have yet to
secure enough money to finish the project and have been
forced to ask their investors and the city for more
additional money despite scaling back their plans for the project.
As a short clip put together by the Atlanta Community

(03:01:51):
Press Collective explains.

Speaker 32 (03:01:53):
The city Council will in fact have to vote on
whether or not to allocate thirty three million taxpayer dollars
to the construction of Cop City in the very near future. Additionally,
the Atlanta Police Foundation budget documents show that current construction
plans have been scaled back from what was originally promised.
This indicates a failure by the Foundation to raise the
promise sixty million dollars in private funds. Should the city

(03:02:15):
vote down this funding package of thirty three million, it
is difficult to see a path forward for the Atlanta
Police Foundation's effort to begin construction on Cop City anytime
in the near future.

Speaker 2 (03:02:26):
The City Council has actually not yet voted to approve
the allocation of millions of dollars in city funds to
the Cop City project.

Speaker 32 (03:02:34):
Through an open records request, we were able to get
our hands on emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and
Atlanta's Deputy Chief Operating Officer L. Chandra Berks. In this
email exchange, the Police Foundation expressed a need for the
city to provide thirty three point five million dollars in
funding for the project. Berts responded by mentioning the need
for legislative action to secure the funds. The emails state

(03:02:56):
that the Police Foundation wants to pass this legislation before
June thirtieth because they need the City of Atlanta's money
to secure their construction loan.

Speaker 2 (03:03:05):
It's expected that as soon as May fifteenth, a member
of the City Council will introduce legislation to allocate public
funds to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build cop City,
and a final vote could happen as soon as June fifth.
One thing that the movement to stop cop City has
shown us is that no matter what police do, people
continue to show up despite what happens, and the movement

(03:03:28):
keeps expanding. As the unnamed forest defender told.

Speaker 30 (03:03:32):
Me, infrastructure wise, this Week of Action was the biggest
infrastructure I've seen doing a week of action. I thought
that the infrastructure we put together for Week one was
pretty big, but I mean it doesn't even compare. It's
not the same ballpark as what happened for Week five.
Just from how the medics were set up and how
food was handled. There was a shuttle bus program, there
was a welcome table at a church at one point,

(03:03:53):
there was like twenty four to seven clinic spaces, there
was twenty four to seven ride programs, and medics on standby,
and like all these things that were ready to support
everybody like there was all this infrastructure set up to
make sure that people were as supported as possible and
to make it as easy as possible and lower the
barrier of entry to the movement as much as possible,
more than there has been in any other week of
action so far. I feel like the way that we

(03:04:15):
continue that is to take lessons, learn from what's happened
this week, from the problems with the infrastructure, the issues
that it had, expand on it, and then fucking do
it for way longer, like we could do this for
an entire summer. I am fully of the belief that
the infrastructure I saw on display during the fifth week
of Action we could do that for a summer. I
believe in the kind of people who put it together,
and I believe in the people.

Speaker 14 (03:04:35):
Who did it.

Speaker 30 (03:04:36):
To do that, we just have to kind of look
at what went wrong, what went right, and fix it.
All the things that existed in this week of action,
as far as they're being food rides, medics and like
group supplies. All these things existed during weeks of Action
one through four.

Speaker 10 (03:04:50):
It's just grown.

Speaker 30 (03:04:50):
It's gotten more logistically intense. There are more and more
people filling those roles there's more and more stuff coming in,
Like the amount of supplies that we just got sent
in or people brought with them from o A State
has just so vastly expanded since the first Week of Action.
It's just gotten more i don't know, like not professional,
but more polished. It's become a much more polished setup
system as time went on, from the first camp that

(03:05:11):
we had during the first Week of Action to now,
you know, almost two years later. And that's a huge
part of why I think we've outgrown the Week of Action.
We have these types of thought processes and logistics to
do this for a summer, for a month. We just
need people and resources. We need more people to be willing,
because I don't want people to get tired.

Speaker 2 (03:05:30):
Just last month, another Week of Action was called for
June twenty fourth to July first, directly leading into what's
being called the Wollawnie Summer, with locals in Atlanta calling
on supporters and forced defenders everywhere to come to Atlanta
for the week and stay for the summer. With Entrenchment
Creek Park still closed and they're being ongoing efforts to

(03:05:53):
have it be reopened what the week and following summer
will look like. Is it still very unknown?

Speaker 30 (03:06:00):
We always are going to need more people. People are
a most important resource.

Speaker 1 (03:06:04):
Always.

Speaker 30 (03:06:04):
The way that we limit burnout is by having more
and more people so that the burden falls less and
less heavy on small groups of people, and so that
people can take breaks. And that's another problem I have
with like the Week of Action as a strategy, is
you're just going non fucking stop for a week. If
you had three months, you're like, ah, I'm going to
chill for a couple of weeks. I'll be back, you know,

(03:06:25):
because I have all this time, and it frees up
people from out of state to come in, have times
to work it out in their schedule more.

Speaker 2 (03:06:32):
There will be more information put out in the coming weeks.
You can keep up to date by following stop coop
City on Instagram, Defend atl Forest on Twitter, or by
checking out stopcopsitysolidarity dot org, ideally with a VPN and
tour slash Brave browser.

Speaker 30 (03:06:47):
If you were at the music festival and you're just
a normal person, you weren't involved with the movement before this,
and you were at the music festival and you kind
of saw why we're fighting for this, You saw that space,
and then you saw the type of violence that the
police were willing to output to do it. Let that
move you to get involved further. You don't have to
join an organization. You know, I don't want to speak
for other people. I'm a hard anarchist. Fuck organizations to

(03:07:08):
a large degree. But have an affinity group. Get your
friends together. If you guys want to be helping out
with the food people, help out with the food.

Speaker 14 (03:07:14):
People.

Speaker 30 (03:07:15):
You want to be medics, go join a medic collective,
like find what everything calls to you and just go
and do it. Because we need people and there's no
barrier of entry to join the movement. There's no test
you have to take. You just have to show up.

Speaker 2 (03:07:27):
I will end this Week of Action retrospective with a
promise from the Forest Defenders. See you on the other side.

Speaker 13 (03:07:35):
We well, we well, well.

Speaker 2 (03:07:44):
Well. Music Festival audio courtesy of Unicorn Riot.

Speaker 1 (03:08:19):
A welcome to it could happen here. This is Robert
Evans Uh and it could happen here is a podcast
about things falling apart, uh and you know, sometimes about
making them better. Today we're talking both about something that
is implicated in a number of you know, aspects of
what we call the crumbles here in the United States,

(03:08:41):
which is the police. And we're also talking about the
the tremendous difficulty that people encounter whenever they try to
improve this particular aspect of American society, the near impossibility
of reform within the police. And to talk with me
about that and to talk with me about their incredible
new book, Writers Come Out at Night is Ali Winston.

(03:09:03):
Ali co wrote this book with Darwin bond Gram and
it covers particularly the Oakland Police and a scandal that
kind of happened at around the same time as the
Rampart scandal in Los Angeles, focused around a group of
Oakland police officers called the Writers who Well, I'm gonna

(03:09:25):
let Ali tell you about that. It's a it's a
pretty pretty shocking and bleak story. Though, Ali, welcome to
the show, either doing, I'm doing good. How are you today? Lovely, Lovely, Ali.
This is a great book. It's it's very deeply reported.
I want to talk a little bit about kind of
the the what sort of brought you into this story,

(03:09:45):
because this is something that kind of happened around the
turn of the last century, and it's kind of adjacent
to a lot of issues that are still very much
relevant in kind of the problems we have with policing,
both kind of the thin blue line code of silence,
the way in which police departments act in a very

(03:10:08):
gang like fashion to protect bad actors, the way in
which kind of ill thought out reform policies targeted at
kind of assuaging the fears of business owners lead to
policies of tremendous violence. A lot of things that are
still very much kind of at play all around the country.

(03:10:29):
It's fascinating to me.

Speaker 33 (03:10:31):
So we came at this book both kind of independently.
We came out this as to reporters who'd worked kind
of handing glove together for about ten well since twenty twelve.
When we signed our contract, it was twenty twenty. But
I'd started reporting on the Oakland Police Department in two

(03:10:53):
thousand and eight when I moved to the Bay Area
for graduate school at cal Gobert's, and I'd kind of
dove right into the topic of police and police conduct
in Oakland because i'd wanted to. I'd been messing around
with criminal justice reporting when I was back east in

(03:11:13):
New York and north of New Jersey, where I was working.

Speaker 4 (03:11:16):
And.

Speaker 14 (03:11:18):
There really was.

Speaker 33 (03:11:20):
There were some really egregious shootings at that point in
time in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, late
two thousands, OPD about average, I think eight to fourteen
officer involved shootings police shootings a year. Invariably there would
be one or two or three or four depending on
the years, maybe more that involves someone who's unarmed fleeing

(03:11:41):
it was an awful but lawful shoot or maybe just
an awful shoot that the DA didn't charge or didn't
properly investigate. And at that time it was really tough
to get information about police shootings in California because of
a combination of laws and Supreme Court California Supreme Court
decisions that intersected and kind of shut the door on

(03:12:02):
any sort of record you could get from about police
disciplinary action or their past histories. So you kind of
had to mine the civil courts and look for back
doors and through the DA's offices and just kind of
or source up really well to try and report out
these incidents. And Darwin and I met about around twenty twelve.

(03:12:23):
We started interrogating questions about power and the political economy
of law enforcement. We started to raise questions about the
percentage of budgetary allocation that OPD receives.

Speaker 14 (03:12:35):
It's about forty percent of the city's billion.

Speaker 33 (03:12:37):
Dollar budget give or takes, so we're talking three hundred
and fifty four hundred million.

Speaker 14 (03:12:41):
Dollars every year.

Speaker 33 (03:12:44):
The result, the net result for public safety is questionable.

Speaker 14 (03:12:49):
At best.

Speaker 33 (03:12:50):
Doesn't really tie into increase in police funding, increase in menpower,
decreasing crime. Oakland's a very violent city, often ranks in
the top ten or top five nationally in per ca
at a crime per one hundred thousand residents. And it's
also been under this reform program forever. And this is
the backdrop to all our reporting. There was always this

(03:13:11):
backdrop of court ordered reforms. There's external oversight. The external
oversight is oftentimes how the public and the press became
aware of some very deep seated issues in the department
and how they would get addressed because the politicians here
are feckless, were inexperienced, or complicit, or.

Speaker 14 (03:13:28):
All the above.

Speaker 33 (03:13:30):
So we, over the course of our reporting together kind
of yoked together. Around a decade eight years or so,
we kind of realized, Okay, we have a paragraph in
each one of our stories that explains the backdrop, or
maybe a little bit more, depending on how legalistic appease
it was.

Speaker 14 (03:13:47):
We need to peel all this back.

Speaker 33 (03:13:48):
We need to explain to people because this is the
longest running oversight regime in the country, right, two decades now,
over two decades since the consent Degree, the negotiated settlement
Agreement was signed, and we just needed to explain to
people why this city had gone so far, why it
was an edge case, why it.

Speaker 14 (03:14:06):
Was an outlier.

Speaker 33 (03:14:08):
And in order to do that, we couldn't We couldn't
use five thousand words. We needed one hundred and two
hundred and sixty thousand.

Speaker 1 (03:14:15):
Yeah, this is a dense book in a way that's
still intensely readable, and I think part of what makes
it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of
effort laying out things that people kind of know in
broad and a good example of this would be people
talk a lot about, you know, the kind of concept

(03:14:36):
of you know, the bad apples that you know there's
that's both on the side of people defending police departments
that it's a few bad apples, and then kind of
and you find this more on sort of people on
the left criticizing police as an institution, the idea that, like, well,
the fact that those bad apples are supported and defended
by the rest of the department kind of means that
they're all but bad. You get this these kind of

(03:14:57):
like broad you know, discussions of that phenomenon. What you
do in this in this book is kind of get
very granular with the way in which that actually functions
on the ground. I'm thinking about a specific point where
you've got one of the characters, you know, one of
the people that is a major source kind of for
this book, and a major source for this scandal was

(03:15:18):
a police officer who effectively turned on his fellow officers
and reported all of this illegal violence being done by
this this gang. And there's a point where this guy,
after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusioned by what,
you know, he's the guys that he's writing with are doing,
goes to other people in the department who are like, yeah,

(03:15:39):
those guys are like messed up, and it's it's bad,
and you just kind of have to you should just
kind of like, you know, try to try to move on,
but don't make waves about it, right, And it's this
it's this the the kind of the fact, the degree
to which other people cannot just know in the department
what's happening but be disgusted by it, and still when
I'm kind of if the shit hits the fan, fundamentally

(03:16:02):
defend the officers doing it right, Like the fact that
they're able to warn other officers away from you know,
being around those guys doesn't mean that they won't like
absolutely throw down to defend them, which is, you know,
something I think people are kind of broadly aware of.
But the kind of going into the actual personal dynamics

(03:16:24):
is I think really valuable, and you do a very
good job of capturing that at the ground level.

Speaker 33 (03:16:29):
Well, what we wanted to do is explain how so
it's a bad apple theory I think is Yeah, Honestly,
it's a distraction, and frankly it's an excuse. What you're
dealing with is culture, right, and culture eats politics and
policy for lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the meals

(03:16:51):
in between every single time. You can't change culture unless
you understand it. So what we wanted to do, and
we were able to do this because because we had
very good sourcing, not only inside and around the department,
current former officers.

Speaker 14 (03:17:05):
We had reams of records.

Speaker 33 (03:17:06):
I mean we sued for I want to say, hundreds
of thousands of record pages of records, videos, audio files,
got old court transcripts, cassette tapes of old internal affairs interviews,
backstop those by talking to the people there and involved,
and we were really able to we were able to
kind of reconstruct, not just the initial scandal of the

(03:17:29):
writers of which stem from this young officer, Keith Batt,
who is from a city from Sebastopol, which is a
bit north of Oakland, very different place, rural, a bit crunchy,
quite crunchy, not nearly the real rough and tumble grit
of Oakland.

Speaker 14 (03:17:49):
Around the turn of the millennium, and Keith comes in.

Speaker 33 (03:17:53):
He's a criminal justice major in college, really idealistic, wanted
to join an active police department. Applied to dozens of apartments,
to several departments around the area, and the first one
that took him was Oakland, and Oakland had a good
reputation among police culture.

Speaker 14 (03:18:07):
It was an active department.

Speaker 33 (03:18:08):
The cops worked hard, they were well trained, they were
decently paid, and it wasn't a.

Speaker 14 (03:18:17):
You know, in the Bay Area like the two.

Speaker 33 (03:18:18):
Departments that people look to are like are the Oakland
Police Department in SFPD, and SFPD is a closed shop.

Speaker 14 (03:18:24):
It is a legacy.

Speaker 33 (03:18:25):
Department is run by an intense old boy network of
Italian and Irish folks, some Chinese, some Asian immigrants that
are kind of led into that now, but it is
just it's such an insular place. OPD is actually typically
more welcoming of recruits from outside, and they really like
people who are hard chargers, active, willing to learn. And

(03:18:46):
Keith finished the top of his near the top of
his academy, excellent shot, really sharp on the uptake. His
instructors liked him, and right when he was about to
go on the street, they one of his instructors pulled
him aside and said, hey, I hear you got a
side uh to chuck To Clarence Mabanang, who was his
field training officer, he said, okay, listen, you need to

(03:19:09):
keep your mouth shut and you need to keep your
eyes open. You're gonna see some crazy shit, but just
go along to get along, you know, just keep.

Speaker 14 (03:19:18):
Your head down. Yeah, And Keith was like, wait, what
are you talking about?

Speaker 33 (03:19:22):
Like that's that's some wild that's a wild ship, like,
that's not what I'm expecting.

Speaker 14 (03:19:26):
It's a little bit odd. And these are older officers
who you respected. He goes out and.

Speaker 33 (03:19:31):
Gets in the car with Chuck, and Chuck is this little,
you know, very very intense buzz cut Filipino dude, and
he's like, all right, I'm gonna teach you. I'm gonna
take take you out and toughen you up, like this
is not the academy anymore. I'm gonna teach you how
to be in the streets. We're gonna get a fight,
and we're gonna get in a fight tonight. This is
beast first shot night on the job, first time stepping

(03:19:53):
into a Crown Victoria patrol car with with his FTO
and he's like what And sure enough, Chuck gets in
a confrontation that very night, someone drunk in front of
his own house, just drunk in front of his own house,
threatens to shoot the guy's dog, takes the guy in
after beating him up.

Speaker 14 (03:20:11):
And Keith is like, wait what you shoot dogs? And yeah,
they told him that.

Speaker 33 (03:20:16):
You know, every now and then they would encounter somebody
with the dog and they would shoot the dog and
then cut the leash. In order to make it seem
like the dog was going to attack them. And that
was just his introduction to it. And over the two
weeks that he worked with several officers on shift, there
were three other officers who kind of made up this

(03:20:37):
little click of of free wheeling cops that they called
themselves the Riders, and they were Jude Siapno, Frank Vasquez,
and Matt Hornung. And those three were kind of at
the center of it, and they would they basically took
it on themselves.

Speaker 14 (03:20:58):
They were not a task force. They were just patrol officers.

Speaker 33 (03:21:00):
They would kind of roam around West Oakland going out
and looking for people to arrest, just jumping out a
random folks.

Speaker 14 (03:21:05):
They were pro not reactive, they were proactive.

Speaker 33 (03:21:09):
So they essentially ended up kidnapping people, planning drugs on
them when they didn't find drugs, beating the tar out
of them, torturing them. Sap who's nickname was the foot
Doctor because he had a habit of taking his asps
retractable but time and beating detainees on the soles of
their feet till they couldn't walk. Yeah, their bruises were
so painful.

Speaker 1 (03:21:28):
For some reference, that's that was called bastinado by the
Spanish Inquisition who loved to do the exact same thing.

Speaker 33 (03:21:35):
Yeah, No, it's it's really it's grim, it's really really grim.

Speaker 12 (03:21:40):
Shit.

Speaker 14 (03:21:40):
So Keith sees all.

Speaker 33 (03:21:42):
This stuff, it's just like two weeks of like training
day of that film, it's two weeks of that, it's
not just one week. And he's like, I can't do this.
This can't be the way policing is. And he keeps going,
you know, kind of casting around for help and the
cash twenty two that he's in and is that anybody
who he tells about this behavior is obligated by OPDS

(03:22:05):
regulations to then report said misconduct and if they don't,
then they're guilty of failing to report misconduct. So he
has to kind of hedge his words and you know,
talk around these issues. And his friends who work in OPD,
who work in CHP, California Higway Patrol he tells about
this stuff in this roundabout way, are all giving him

(03:22:26):
the same advice.

Speaker 14 (03:22:27):
You know, I don't know, do you want to write
out your career? Like can you do this?

Speaker 33 (03:22:31):
Is there a way you can switch out? Is there
a way that you can thread the needle? And it
gets to be too much, and so one day, after
two weeks, he decides, I can't do this anymore. I
can't put more I can't put in this in people
in jail. I can't forge paperwork for my supervisors. I
can't forge their overtime. You know, I can't help them

(03:22:52):
steal money from the taxpayers like this. So he goes
into the you know, he confronts them in a parking
garage in front of a church in right north of
downtown Oakland that these guys called the light Cave that
they would hang out at. And he's telling Chuck, listen,
you know, I can't do this. This isn't the right way.
And Mabnag's as well, you know you have a problem. No, no,
I don't think you're really getting this. He's trying to

(03:23:14):
like talk him past it, and then Keith keeps bringing
up Frank Fasquez and Frank he'd seen Frank choke people.
He'd see Frank empty cant of pepper spray into somebody's mouth,
put his fingers into their eyes like a bowling ball.

Speaker 14 (03:23:28):
He said, oh, well, if you have a problem with Frank,
you can talk to him.

Speaker 33 (03:23:31):
Fasquez comes over and you know drives over there that
have a conversation about that.

Speaker 14 (03:23:36):
And Keith at this point is so wired up and
so terrified.

Speaker 33 (03:23:40):
He's looking at Mabadag and looking at Fasquez and thinking
to himself, Okay, can I get to my pistol before
they get to theirs if they.

Speaker 14 (03:23:49):
Want to hurt me?

Speaker 33 (03:23:50):
And if we have a shootout, how's it going to
look if three Oakland cops are bucking led at each
other in uniform on shift. He's running this calculus in
his head, doesn't come to that. In the end, Mabini
con vises him to go in and sign a resignation letter,
and when he does that at OPD headquarters, one of

(03:24:11):
his supervisors from the academy gets hold of him, gets
a hold of him, says, no, no, no, this isn't what's
this is not you what he's going on? And they
convince him to go upstairs and talk to internal affairs,
and then he spills the beans on the what he's
seen the past two weeks, and that blows the lid
Office scandal.

Speaker 1 (03:24:30):
There had been a number of people who had attempted
to kind of like victims of this particular gang of
guys who had that's right, like, attempted to complain, attempted
to come forward. But yeah, it's not really until this
officer on the inside, with a very good record is
willing to say something that anything starts to happen.

Speaker 33 (03:24:50):
So you have to remember the context here. I'm sorry
for cutting in, but he no, no, I was remiss
on this. So the context of Oakland in late nineteen
nineties early two thousands is that it's in the middle
of New York style urban renewal. Jerry Brown, who later
became governor of California, was kind of on his way
back up the political rung, and Oakland was his first stop.

Speaker 14 (03:25:10):
He was re elected mayor in nineteen ninety eight.

Speaker 33 (03:25:13):
I believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he
was going to turn Oakland into this socialist, you know,
environmental friendly metropolis. But he gets into office, he starts
going to community meetings, and he realizes public safety is
the number one concerns. So he becomes Rudy Giuliani West,
as one of his former employees put it to us,

(03:25:35):
pushes a massive building program in downtown Oakland for new
residential market rate housing, and enlists his police department to
go on a clean up the streets spree by any
means necessary, and he would go into the lineup and
cheer them on route them on, say listen, you know,
I got your back, all back your play, you know,
just take back those corners from these dealers. That's what

(03:25:57):
those officers, that's what Mabinang Hornogs, Siapno Vasquez were responding to.
They were responding to the instructions from their supervisors, from
their chief, from their mayor that came down the command
chain to clean up the streets and do this sort
of stuff. And they were actually, you know, mamdig and
Vasquez in particular, were very highly valued officers. They were proactive,

(03:26:19):
They made their supervisors look good.

Speaker 14 (03:26:21):
It was this kind of one hand washes the other bit.

Speaker 1 (03:26:24):
Yeah, and I one of the things that I found
particularly kind of impactful is the way in which you
describe both the violence, the absolute like horrifying cruelty of
what these guys are getting up to, and how that
intersects with Jerry Brown's political career, with the kind of

(03:26:44):
promises he's making to clean up the city and the
kind of metrics that are established, you know, to provide
basically evidence that this plan is succeeding. You know, it's
it really like kind of gives on their ground context
to what this kind of can windows style policing, what
it actually means in terms of a human cost, and

(03:27:06):
it's it's devastating. And equally devastating is the lawsuit that
kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed. One
of the things that was most shocking to me because
I was I was only kind of broadly aware of
this case at all, is when when these guys, the
officers in this in this gang get you know, go

(03:27:28):
on trial or sort of when that process starts, one
of them, this guy Vasquez, like goes on the run,
steals an AR fifteen from his department and fucking disappears
and he's still in the wind. No one's ever found
this guy. Yeah, he was most likely in Mexico.

Speaker 33 (03:27:45):
He's from Mexico, He's born down there and has family
around media. The theory is that he, I mean, you know,
he was stopped by a cop. That's when, yeah, the
people realized that he had been that he'd stolen a
gun from the department. But he kind of badges his
way out of this encounter with a cop in Slus city,

(03:28:05):
which is a Delta town near where he lived and
are near his house, and that was the last anybody
had seen of him, has seen of him.

Speaker 14 (03:28:13):
The theory, the theory that's rattled.

Speaker 33 (03:28:16):
Around quite often, and there's more often than there's probably
some hef to it is that somebody from the either
the department or the police union helped him down to
the border in Chula Vista and he walked across. So
the odds are that he's in Mexico. Estensibly the FBI
are still looking for him. He's a fugitive, but he's

(03:28:37):
never never been found.

Speaker 1 (03:28:39):
No, and he when this happens, because his buddies in
the writers are all all do in fact, go on trial,
and you know, you might think the fact that one
of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing
a gun would have an impact on things, but no, no,
in court, they're not. You know, the prosecutors aren't allowed

(03:29:00):
to tell the jury what happened with Fasquez because it's
worried that it might prejudice them, which is wild to me.

Speaker 33 (03:29:07):
Well, in the first trial, so there were two trials,
fast forward a little bit. All three cops in their
first trial, there's hung juries in them. I think there
were one or two holdouts maybe, And from the reporting
that we did, the interview that we did with the
ADA on the case, Dave Holliser, it seemed that these
were people who were convinced that these were good cops
and the ends justified the means or therefore, you know,

(03:29:30):
this kind of noble noble cause corruption actually has an
audience among some segments of the population around here. I
mean it, I'm sure you see this across the bay
now in San Francisco. There's all these people who were,
you know, kind of advocating the sort of vigilante violence
that former fire commissioner was committed any and so against
homeless folks on house.

Speaker 1 (03:29:51):
Yeah, for folks who aren't aware, the fire commissioner of
San Francisco. This was a couple of months ago, right
around the time that there was a big wave of
San Francisco was collapsed into anarchy sort of stories.

Speaker 14 (03:30:02):
Which happened every ten years, which.

Speaker 1 (03:30:04):
Yeah, yeah, and have been. You know, it happened at
the same time that that tech CEO was stabbed to death.
Turns out by another tech founder. Well, but yeah, this
story that the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's
this video of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man.
It turns out he had been going around at night
and macing homeless people at random. One of the Yeah,

(03:30:24):
hairspray was crazy, it was awful ship.

Speaker 33 (03:30:29):
Yeah, and then someone attacked him with the homeless with
a with a crowbar. But all that those facts were
emitted anyway. So the bottom line is with the with
Horning of Horning, Vasquez and sap they're they're hung on
the first trial, and then the second trial they're acquitted.

Speaker 18 (03:30:45):
Uh.

Speaker 14 (03:30:45):
There, Horning is acquitted.

Speaker 33 (03:30:46):
Of some charges and there's hung juries in the rest
of his charges and those first sapno and mabenang. But
in the second trial. First trial, the defense was, well,
they didn't do what Keith did. Keith's bad as lying.
The second trial was well, the defense turned to a
strategy of well, actually, Frank Ifasquez was the leader, so
it's all Frank's fault.

Speaker 1 (03:31:07):
Yeah, it's easy to throw that guy under the bus
because he's gone.

Speaker 14 (03:31:10):
Exactly, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 33 (03:31:11):
And you know, to say he was a ringleader is
absurd because everyone knew in OPD and outside OPD that
Mabadang was the shot caller in that little gang. What's
interesting is the lawsuit, So there's a little vegary here
about the criminal investigation into the riders. The police department
and the police department's internal affairs investigators and the police

(03:31:33):
chief made a decision from day one from on high
that the investigation would only be limited to what Keith
Bat saw, that it would not expand out beyond his
two weeks on the job and the incidents that he
witnessed personally, and that they were able to corroborate with
other people. And there was another cop, Scott Huson, who
did corroborate some of this stuff. Once it came out

(03:31:55):
that he'd falsified some reports, he decided to save his
own skin. So he also caught some of the flak
that Bat did, but not nearly the same sort of
death threat type shit that Keith caught. So with regard
to the broader, the broader lay of the land, the
criminal the investigation didn't go into a broader pattern of

(03:32:17):
what else was happening on these shifts?

Speaker 14 (03:32:19):
What are their cops were involved?

Speaker 33 (03:32:20):
Because the writers, you know, there's a ball that they
actually signed for each other, and there's several names on
that ball.

Speaker 14 (03:32:26):
It's not just those four cops.

Speaker 33 (03:32:28):
So the civil suit there was a civil suit brought
by two civil rights two attorneys in the area, John
Burris and Jim Channon, who had been suing the department
for years. They'd actually received walkins the victims that you'd
mentioned earlier over the years, alleging that they'd been arrested,
beaten up, framed up, tortured by these cops in West Oakland.

(03:32:51):
And when the news of Keith bat blowing the whistle
on the writers hit the newspapers, it clicked for them
and they realized they been seeing this pattern. So they
opened up their own pattern and practice investigation and did
their own investigation of complaints in canvassed neighborhoods and got

(03:33:12):
names from people who had filed complaints and alleged similar
patterns of misconduct, and came up with one hundred and
nineteen plaintiffs who who laid out a pattern of abuses
that spanned much more of the city, the downtown area,
other parts of West Oakland, even as far as East Oakland,

(03:33:32):
and a much broader time frame stretching back almost basically
to nineteen ninety five, five years prior, so the reality
of opd's abuses and their kind of deep corruption in
that period of time was far larger than the criminal
case against those four riders would have it. And I

(03:33:54):
should say that these civil attorneys took up the challenge
where both the state of Attorney General and the federal authorities,
both the local U United States Attorney and federal and
civil rights in main justice dropped the ball. They did
not open pattern and practice investigations into OPD. And we

(03:34:15):
have it from the ADA himself, who's in the room
when he presented their case, because they were cross designated
as as their cross editor, as designated as US attorneys
during their whole investigation, and vice versa. He presented the
case to the city United States Attorney at the time,
one Robert Mueller, who should be familiar to your listeners

(03:34:38):
as the former head of the FBI.

Speaker 1 (03:34:40):
Twice over swinging Bob Miller, that's right.

Speaker 33 (03:34:43):
And you know Miller flipped through the pages and was looking,
you know, trying to see if any connections to Russia
and Alpha Bank and so on. But no, actually, I
mean he's flipping through and he pulls out these files
and he looks at the long rap sheet of some
of these witnesses.

Speaker 14 (03:34:58):
And these were people in the street.

Speaker 33 (03:35:00):
These are people who had been arrested before, had been
involved in narcotic sales, petty assaults, that robbery's, burglaries, what
have you like. They were people who were not They
were not kids, they were not clean sheets. And he
handed the file back to Hollister, to the ADA and said,
I wish you the best of luck. It's important to
note that this was a different era. A CoP's word

(03:35:21):
was very, very very hard to impeach on the stand.
There was no body camera video, There were no cell
phoned videos at the time. You would maybe have a
rough camcorder every now and then if somebody shooting like
a little video on the street, kind of grainy digital cameras,
and they were The sound wasn't great, but there wasn't
much beyond eyewitness testimony. And that's why Keith's words were

(03:35:45):
so important, Why his testimony was so critical, is that
you had a cop coming out and blowing the whistle
on his department and saying, no, this is not right,
this is what they're doing.

Speaker 14 (03:35:55):
They should be punished for it.

Speaker 1 (03:35:57):
You know, I can't help but thinking about the the
story that's kind of blown up right now about there's
a man on the subway recently in New York City
who was, you know, acting kind of erradically yelling and stuff,
but had not done any violence to anyone, and a
bystander straphanger restrained him, put him in a headlock for
fifteen minutes, and he died. And kind of the response

(03:36:20):
that I'm seeing from guys like Matt Walsh, the Daily
Wire crew, you know, particularly in right wing media, is well,
this guy had been arrested, you know, forty times or whatever.
It's like, well, that's not germane to anything.

Speaker 14 (03:36:30):
That's doesn't give you the right to lynch someone.

Speaker 1 (03:36:33):
Yeah, exactly like that, Like, the penalty for having been
arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death.
That's not the way the system is. That's not the
way any of this is supposed to work. And it's
it's interesting. There's a degree to which I guess it
hasn't changed, and there's a degree to which I'm kind
of worried that the sort of nature of social media

(03:36:54):
means that we're a lot more open about the kind
of violence we're willing to accept for.

Speaker 14 (03:36:59):
People who, yeah, agree with that entirely.

Speaker 33 (03:37:01):
I mean, that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of
to both Black Lives Matter cycles in twenty fourteen, fifteen,
and the current cycle.

Speaker 14 (03:37:12):
Is a lot more virulent.

Speaker 33 (03:37:15):
Then you'd have it if you just watched kind of
the soft focus PBS frontline documentary versions of it. There's
a lot of really naked justification and support for extra
legal violence, and that is part of the issue with
law enforcement and holding them accountable. There is always going

(03:37:39):
to be a segment, small, sometimes vocal, sometimes not, of
the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law,
beyond the constraints of our system. And that's why oversight,
why running the rule over law enforcement and making sure
that they according to the laws and that they are

(03:38:02):
operating within the bounds of their limits in so far
as we have set them out for them, and in
so far as like it look. This book is not
a book questioning whether or not police should exist. It's
a history. They do exist, They have existed. This is
what it has looked like to date. Right if other
people want to make those cases and look at you know,

(03:38:23):
hypotheticals or envisioned a different future, that's totally fine. What
we're trying to do is lay out the ways in
which people have pushed back on one of the most
egregious departments in the country consistently for over a century
and actually had some sort of lasting impact on it.
And there have been some impacts that have really changed

(03:38:46):
because of Look, they don't there are there's no more
public strip searching of people in the streets that happen
in Oakland on the regular every day. As late as
twenty nine and ten, it was common that the cops
would say, look, I'm going in your ass for rocks.
You'd better not have anything there, right in the middle
of the morning, on a crowded street, in front of

(03:39:09):
people driving by on the way to work. That sort
of civil rights violation would happen all the time. The
department no longer shoots, shoots maybe about three or four
people a year. That's way down from fourteen to fifteen
a year a decade twelve years ago. That's because they've
changed their chase policy, their pursuit policy. They used to
pursue people with an intent to catch them at all costs.

(03:39:29):
That ended up resulting in cops chasing people down blind
alleys or ending up way too close to a suspect
and pulling out their weapon and opening up fire, regardless
of whether or not they actually had the suspect had
a firearm or another weapon, or whether the cops were
under threat. The change in the pursuit policy has led
to more of the instruction now is to contain, don't

(03:39:51):
pursue close call for backup, set a perimeter, preserve life.
That's not been that change was not something to it's
submitted to voluntarily. They are brought. They are kicking and screaming.
But because there has been this outside and position of
court oversight for so long, because it hasn't gone away,
because it's not overseen by the Justice Department or the

(03:40:14):
state attorney general, so you know, some of the political
figure can't like they can't there can't be a deal
cut in the back room between a senator's staffer and
the federal Department of Justice, or the mayor and the
state attorney general and their wife or whatever.

Speaker 2 (03:40:30):
Like.

Speaker 33 (03:40:30):
That sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's
attorneys aren't beholding to anybody other than themselves, and when
the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation
play out as it will and whole and both judges
on this case have actually been very by the book
and very stringent on how the oversight has gone. So

(03:40:52):
that's why it's gone on for twenty years, and it
actually has resulted in good changes. There are a lot
of people who bitch about it, who cry that, oh, well,
we need to be out from this oversight. It's hampering
the police, they can't do their job as they will. Well,
do you want to go back to twenty years ago?
Do you really want that? Do you want that sort
of abuse?

Speaker 14 (03:41:10):
No?

Speaker 33 (03:41:10):
And that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that
did manage to change a lot of things around. There's
a police commission here that now oversees the department. It's
not perfect, it's very much in the infancy, but that's
a body that existed to take control away from the
mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a
police department. And this is yeah, it's a long arc,

(03:41:33):
but the bottom line is that it's not about a
one or a zero. There's no linear progress here. It's
kind of goes in ways. But there has been progress,
which is a crazy thing to say when you look
at the the shit that's in the book.

Speaker 1 (03:41:45):
Yeah, yeah, but it is, like it's important both, you know.
I think our our audience is definitely much more of
our audiences in the constituency of, you know, get rid
of the police entirely, even if you're coming at it
from that, I mean, especially if you're coming at from
that standpoint. Actually, I think kind of one of the
mistakes that a lot of people who are are on

(03:42:05):
that side of things, which is generally where I find myself,
is using that as an excuse to not actually understand
how the police function, using their sort of distaste for
the institution as an excuse to not understand how the
institution works, why it's resilient, and the ways in which
you know, both harms can to an extent be mitigated,

(03:42:26):
but also kind of just on its strategic level, how
it functions to defend itself. And I think that this
book does an exceptional job of going through that in
a way that's nuanced and detailed but also compelling and readable,
Like you're not going to have to I do really
recommend your book. People are not going to have like
trouble getting into it. Like I was drawn in from

(03:42:50):
the first page. So I really do think this is
something folks should look into. No matter where you live
in the United States, even if you've never been to Oakland,
you will get a lot out of this.

Speaker 33 (03:43:01):
I would say that we didn't make an explicit attempt
to make the city the main character, so to draw
people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the
same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles and City
of Courts.

Speaker 14 (03:43:14):
May he rest in peace. It was a great inspiration
for us.

Speaker 33 (03:43:17):
But more than anything else, there are tons of parallels
in Oakland to other places.

Speaker 14 (03:43:22):
It's not a unique place. I mean, it is a
unique place, but it's.

Speaker 33 (03:43:24):
Also very typical for an American city, like Los Angeles
and New York and Chicago are completely atypical. They're huge,
they don't most American cities are like four hundred to
six hundred thousand people large. Oakland's racial balance is almost
thirty thirty thirty white, Latino Black, ten percent Asian, and

(03:43:46):
roughly eight to ten percent Asian.

Speaker 14 (03:43:48):
Then everyone else thrown in there.

Speaker 33 (03:43:51):
It's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative,
and it's also you know, rust belt city in certain respects,
although that's changed a lot with the tech boom.

Speaker 14 (03:44:01):
We could be going back the other way.

Speaker 33 (03:44:04):
But it really there are echoes in stuff that's happened
in New York and Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in New Orleans,
in Portland and Seattle. It's the experience that we've had here,
particularly with police oversight in and reform. I mean Portland
and Seattle are two other cities that have actually undergone
very similar programs with departments that.

Speaker 14 (03:44:26):
Are more alike to OPD than not.

Speaker 1 (03:44:29):
Yeah, well, Allie, is there anything else you wanted to
make sure to get into in this conversation or Yeah.

Speaker 33 (03:44:37):
I think your point about I just wanted to touch
on your point about where people come out for the institution.

Speaker 14 (03:44:42):
I think it's really important.

Speaker 33 (03:44:43):
Even regardless of what you believe about where we should
and shouldn't be with law enforcement, you've got to understand it. Yeah,
because it's such a huge institution in our society. It
is basically the main point of contact most people have
with the state now in many Americans cities. Because we've
stripped down so many other aspects of our societies.

Speaker 14 (03:45:03):
Mental hospitals are gone, our schools are.

Speaker 33 (03:45:05):
Failing, public housing barely exists, our healthcare system is decimated,
and cops essentially catch a lot of the end product
of those problems. It's one of the reasons why I
started reporting on criminal justice because you can look at
so many other issues of American society through that system.
And also you can see ways in which like political agendas,

(03:45:29):
the way that police departments lobby, and the messaging that
they push out. They don't do it in isolated fashion.
It's coordinated, like there are these big swings that happen
on the national political stage, if you will. Like we
were at one moment with police reform and abolishing the police,
defunding them with Black Lives matters. The immediate pushback within

(03:45:49):
six months was there's a crime wave. There's a crime wave.
There's a crime wave. We need to support our cops.
And now we're at the point where people are taking
act or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they
have it in their head that things.

Speaker 14 (03:46:04):
Are so out of control.

Speaker 33 (03:46:06):
In New York, homemlest man's choked to death because he's
he's having an episode on the train.

Speaker 14 (03:46:11):
San Francisco.

Speaker 33 (03:46:12):
This fire commissioner is going around bare spring people who
are camping out on in the streets. This is the
sort of the back and forth swing that oftentimes starts
with people who are trying to protect their budget line,
who are trying to protect their political power, and it
ends up with consequences like that where people take it

(03:46:33):
to that level. And I think that looking at law
enforcement as a political actor is really important for understanding
how we are where we are in this society and
also understanding the ways in which you can try and
rain them back in and keep your boot on their neck,
because realistically they will if you let if there's no oversight,

(03:46:53):
if oversight is pulled back. There is a reactionary core
at the heart of American law enforcement. It's always been there.
We document it back basically to the turn of the
century in Oakland in Justice One City, which is a
newer city in the States. And if you don't, if
you let that go, that core will rise up and
basically take over the department. That's what happened with the writers,

(03:47:14):
That's what they were. They were a representation of a
hardcore that existed in Oakland for decades.

Speaker 14 (03:47:20):
And I think that that's.

Speaker 33 (03:47:21):
Really a really I think that's a critical takeaway for
readers from this book.

Speaker 1 (03:47:25):
Yeah, I would absolutely agree. Well, folks, the book is
called The Writers Come Out at Night. Brutality, Corruption and
Cover Up in Oakland. It's by Ali Winston, who you've
just been listening to, and Darwin Bond Graham. I can't
recommend it enough. Ali, thank you so much for being
on the show.

Speaker 14 (03:47:44):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (03:47:44):
Robert, Oh my goodness, it could happen here. A podcast

(03:48:07):
about things falling apart, putting them back together, and the
Sissifician task of occasionally trying to stop them from crumbling
as fast as they otherwise would. I'm Robert Evans, who
is not great at introducing this podcast, and I'm joined
with James, who is better at introducing this podcast. But
I strong harmed him out of it. Not true. Well,

(03:48:32):
we'll let the audience decide. So James, today, you and
I are here to talk to a journalist that we
both like quite a lot, Amy Westervelt. Amy is the
host of a podcast called Drilled, which focuses on shady
stuff done by the oil and gas industry, and particularly
we're talking about season eight of Drilled, which is focused

(03:48:56):
on what Exxon is doing in a South American country
call Guyana, and it's a really fascinating story. There's a
lot here, including kind of the way in which oil
and gas companies move in and in a kind of
predatory way, create contracts with smaller countries that don't maybe
have the legal resources to set themselves up as well

(03:49:19):
as they otherwise would, that don't have kind of the
long basis of environmental law rulings, that like areas that
have been you know, used for by the oil and
gas industry for longer periods of time have and kind
of the fight by activists in that country to rest
control back from Exon, and a bunch of other stuff

(03:49:39):
besides Amy, welcome to the show. I think that's that's
enough of an intro from me.

Speaker 13 (03:49:44):
Hi, thank you, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (03:49:47):
Yeah, Amy, I'm curious kind of what got you started
thinking about and focusing on and really digging into what's
been happening in Guyana, because obviously this is you know, uh,
the oil and gas industry is a topic of concern
for most progressives, but people tend to focus on, you know,
kind of the Permian basin, the Gulf of Mexico, obviously,

(03:50:09):
the Middle East, these places that are kind of seen
as traditionally more the bread basket of the oil and
gas industry.

Speaker 13 (03:50:15):
Yeah, I started looking at Guyana because I follow a
lot of Exxon's shareholder briefings and reports like that, and
I kept seeing them talking about about the project in
Guyana and just how like the projections kept increasing so quickly,

(03:50:38):
And it got to a point where I was like,
hold on a second, they are projecting that this is
going to be producing more than the Permian Basin by
twenty twenty five. And this is a country that shipped
its first barrel of oil in twenty nineteen. That's incredible,
kind of unheard of that something would happen that fast.
So and I happened, like just so happened to have

(03:51:02):
had a friend years and years and years ago in
San Francisco who who like helped do I don't know,
like marketing for the tourism board in Guyana, and was
constantly telling me about how Guyana was this amazing eco
tourism destination. So I had this So I had this like,
this idea of Guyana in my head is like ecotourism central,

(03:51:25):
and then I kept seeing all of these updates around
around drilling there. So that's kind of what initially got
me interested. And then I got a press release about
a lawsuit being filed there by an attorney who was
trying to kind of stop the oil drilling.

Speaker 1 (03:51:42):
So yeah, yeah, and this attorney has a has a
pretty interesting backstory herself, right, she does.

Speaker 13 (03:51:50):
And that was also very interesting because she actually was
in house council for BP. Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly. So
she grew up in Guyana, her family lap. When she
was around twelve or thirteen, there was quite a bit
of political unrest in Guyana, spurred like so many places

(03:52:12):
by Daa and oh gosh, like the history of Gana
is really interesting. But anyway, so there was a lot
of political unrest. I really felt it unsafe. They left.
They went to Zambia and then Trinidad, and then you
end up going to school in England, went to Oxford,

(03:52:33):
you know, has this like very posh enge accent now.
And then at one point decided, you know, she was
working for BP and traveling all over and and just
kind of got that up with it and wanted to
move back to So she moved back started working for

(03:52:54):
a corporate law firm there to get very interested in
environmental laws because at the time the country he was
just starting to write its first environmental laws. This is
like mid nineties ish.

Speaker 1 (03:53:08):
Yeah. And one of the things you make a point
on in the podcast that is really is interesting is,
you know, I grew up in Texas and I had
a lot of friends from the Permian basin, and you
don't think of it, and you don't think of the
Gulf as like an area of strong environmental regulations. And
if you've spent any time speaking in the Gulf of Mexico,
you certainly don't feel that way. But it actually, I mean,

(03:53:29):
it is, which is not to say that they're strong enough,
you know, it's not to say that they are sufficient,
but it's I mean, and it's not just that there's
stronger regulations there, and the regulations are largely a product
of how long people have been taking gas out of
oil out of the ground, but it's also that because
it's got a century, you know, or so of being

(03:53:50):
utilized by the industry, there's kind of a there's a
level of institutional knowledge built up about how to do
it relatively, which Number one speaks to how inherently dangerous
it is. Because the Deep Water Horizon disaster happens right
in the heart of this area. But it also means
that when you've got a company like x On starting
work in a place like Guyana, they don't have any

(03:54:11):
of that, any of that build up, built up kind
of competence or expertise in sort of dealing with these problems.

Speaker 13 (03:54:17):
Yeah, that's right, they don't have. You don't have kind
of the heavy benchful of you know, experts just hanging
out looking for jobs. You don't have the disaster response
to expertise in case of the spill, for example. And
you also don't have the regulatory oversight expertise, which has

(03:54:38):
been a huge problem in Guyana. They got they got
a grant from the World Bank at one point. This
was also super controversial.

Speaker 14 (03:54:47):
That's really interesting to me. Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:54:49):
Yeah, it was like it was right like right before
the World Bank issued its whole you know, we're not
gonna recommend fossil fuel as much anymore kind of pronouncement.
They sort of fast tracked this grant to Guyana to
create and grow like a petroleum regulatory department in its

(03:55:12):
EPA because they didn't have, like it didn't exist before,
so they started to build that out. And but you know,
it's almost like they're building the regulatory apparatus as they're
starting to drill, so you can imagine like how well
that's I think.

Speaker 34 (03:55:32):
So I think you said in your podcast they dropped
this hundreds of pages, like environmental risk report, and it
got to prove the same day that they received it, right,
that's right.

Speaker 13 (03:55:41):
Yeah, it's like stamped, like the date of receipt and
the date of approval are stamped on the report and
it's the same day. So there's not a lot of
oversight happening.

Speaker 1 (03:55:52):
Hey, some people are speed readers, amy, you know, they.

Speaker 34 (03:55:58):
Spent all that well banked mine on speed reading courses. Yeah, yeah,
really really moving it up.

Speaker 1 (03:56:03):
Yeah, and a lot of all I'm going.

Speaker 13 (03:56:05):
To guess they're very focused over there, yes, yeah, so
you know, I mean they I actually talked to I
actually talked to this guy who ran the EPA in Dayana,
like the first couple of years that they were producing oil,

(03:56:26):
and he had formerly worked for the Department of Energy
in the US and was trying to set up like
real oversight and like his recommendation was that they have
an EPA staff member actually physically on the production Bethel
at all times, which like, uh yeah, no one was into.

(03:56:48):
So that guy got fired.

Speaker 14 (03:56:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 34 (03:56:53):
Great, So maybe I'm talking about like the legal panser
of Texas and the different system in Guyana would be
a good way to segue into talking about this this
like right space approach that they used to I guess
ultimately try and ensure some kind of responsibility was taken
by the oil companies can Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:57:14):
Yeah, do you want to explain that for people.

Speaker 13 (03:57:18):
In terms of like the right to a healthy environment?

Speaker 26 (03:57:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (03:57:20):
I think it's very interesting.

Speaker 13 (03:57:22):
Yeah, it's really interesting. It's super interesting. So Melinda Jinki,
this lawyer who us worked for BP from Guyana, moved
home starts working on these laws. She helped to write
the country's first kind of environmental protection Act, which established
its EPA, and then in nineteen eighty six and again
in two thousand and three, there were some revisions to

(03:57:46):
the constitution. So in early two thousand's she worked on
getting a right to a healthy environment integrated into the constitution,
which basically just says, you know, every has the right
to a livable environment for you know, themselves and for
future generations. So that actually opened up the ability for

(03:58:13):
citizens to sue the government over this oil drilling project.
So there's a couple of people who are doing that,
and they are arguing that the government is violating their
right to a healthy environment by not just permitting this
offshore drilling, but doing it in this really kind of
reckless way where either sort of rubber stamping permits, they're

(03:58:36):
not really providing any oversight excellon, like brags constantly about
how this project is, like, you know, we've done in
five years, what usually takes ten? I asked them. I
was like, oh, is there like a new technology or
like a new drilling approach or something like. The answer is,
you know, more or less boils down to a very

(03:58:57):
quote unquote collaborative government it so.

Speaker 1 (03:59:02):
You know, oh boy, that's good. Faster you need to
dig into that aproach break things.

Speaker 13 (03:59:14):
Not totally exactly, And and the guyes government has this
idea I think that, well they've they've actually said this
out loud a few times that like net zero is uh,
you know, commitments to net zero is sort of like
their timeline, you know, where they're like, okay, well, you
know everyone wants to get to net zero by such

(03:59:35):
and such dates, So we need to get oil out
of the ground as fast as possible and sell it
so that we can meet that zero and so, and
because of how really crappy the contract is for Anna,

(03:59:57):
they are kind of incentivized to that as well, because
the faster they can get oil out of the ground
and sold, the faster they might be able to kind
of get to a place where actually getting sort of
their promised share of the oil money. So they they're
incentivized to move fast and kind of look the way

(04:00:19):
on stuff. I mean, there's the first two years of
that project. Exon talked publicly about the fact that a
pretty key piece of equipment on the boat was broken
for two years.

Speaker 5 (04:00:32):
Two years.

Speaker 13 (04:00:35):
That's cool. Yeah, And again it's like it's an offshore
deep water drilling project. This is like the most risky
type of oil drem there is. There's an enormous amount
of pressure at that level of depth of the ocean.
It's exactly the sort of situation that deep water spill
happened in, and a lot of like similar kind of

(04:00:57):
approaches to maintenance and safety happening. So yeah, not great.

Speaker 1 (04:01:06):
I wanted to talk a little bit one of the
things that you you kind of open up the series
with that I found very very intriguing and it's something
i've heard from other journalists in the same beat as you,
is that when you start work on a project that
focuses on Exon, some peculiar things start to happen, just
like and nothing nothing, nothing we can say for certain

(04:01:28):
is like tied to Exxon Mobile. That's right, y, Yeah,
you do notice some like weird things. I wanted to
chat a little bit about that because it's it does
scan with other things I've heard from from other folks.

Speaker 13 (04:01:38):
True, it's true. And I you know, I report on
all of the oil comp and none of them particularly
like journalists, especially journalists, and they, you know, will kind
of do the usual thing of sending you nasty emails
or refusing to have their executives talk to you. It's
like that, but Exon and it's like every every time

(04:02:02):
I'm working on an Excellon story, it's just like, you know,
if I'm traveling, all my travel plans get canceled. There's
always just there's always just weird stuff that happens, like
you know, you start to feel like being watched and
followed a lot, and and yeah, it's super not just

(04:02:24):
me then that experience. I know that everyone I know
that has reported on them has said that's definitely like
there's you know, just a kind of an intimation thing
that they like to do. I actually was surprised that
Steve call who wrote the book Private Empire about Exon,

(04:02:44):
said to me, and I have this in the podcast too,
that he has, you know, reported on al Qaeda and
reported on the CIA, and if he's ever like disappeared,
he hold everyone he knows that it's probably Exon. So
so yeah, yeah then, and that definitely happened on this

(04:03:06):
project too, Like we my hotel room got canceled. The
hotel room also got broken into. Yeah, and it was
one of those where it's like I had cash on
the nightstand was still there, but like my computer was
open with like certain files open, things like that, and

(04:03:26):
I don't keep like you know, sensitive files on my
laptop and even in my hotel room. But it was
definitely like, Okay, this seems very pointed, and you know.

Speaker 1 (04:03:38):
Yeah, it's intimidation.

Speaker 34 (04:03:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, normal and good
And I know, no.

Speaker 13 (04:03:46):
People always ask me, they're like, are you afraid of
getting sued by Exxon? And I was like, well, I
guess if I had assets, I would be afraid.

Speaker 33 (04:03:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (04:03:58):
Thing yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 34 (04:04:01):
Yeah, but like I wonder I was really interested in
I get this legal approach which is very successful in Guyana, Right,
and if we compare that, like if we come back
to the United States and I know there's a court
case I think it was, like it was I'm pretty
sure it's Boulder, Colorado. I might be wrong, but it
was somewhere like that where they they tried to sue

(04:04:26):
oil companies for causing fires.

Speaker 13 (04:04:29):
Right, Yes, there's a climate liability case there and it's
still going. Actually it's still it's still alive. They just
got like a move in their favor at the Supreme Court.

Speaker 34 (04:04:42):
Because yeah, isn't the case in the US is a
bit different, right, where we don't have this constitutional right
to like a healthy environment and we don't.

Speaker 13 (04:04:52):
Yeah, let me tell you, although actually, guess who does
have that in the US the Montana, the state of Montana. Yes,
and so there's like there's a case there actually that's
invoking their state constitutional right, which is very's.

Speaker 1 (04:05:08):
There's this A lot of people don't know this about
kind of the northern western part of the country, you know,
Montana is it's not really the PNW, but it's the
Mountain West, which is that they had especially kind of
in like the seventies and eighties, this weird history of
like Republican governors, I think into the nineties of the

(04:05:29):
early nineties too, like Republican state leaders who were also
because I guess our national discourse wasn't so inherently toxic,
really progressive in bizarre ways. It's one of like probably
the best governor Oregon ever had was a Republican who's
like one of his chief accomplishments was he made all
of the coastline in Oregon, both like Lake and River

(04:05:51):
coastline and the Ocean coastline public property. He like set
it up so that it's regulated like highways, basically so
that no one can own private beach. Now, there's some
little janky ways kind of around aspects of that, but
like as a general rule, it's a really positive thing,
and it's like not what you would expect from a Republican.
I think the same thing is true of that law
in Montana, where it's just like you used to be

(04:06:13):
able to have republic I mean, like Nixon created the
e p A right, it just didn't used to be
the same kind of partisan that it is today.

Speaker 5 (04:06:20):
Even like.

Speaker 34 (04:06:23):
In the early Trump era, there were a decent number
of Republican folks who like specifically opposed drilling in bears
ears or like d.

Speaker 1 (04:06:35):
Was interesting wherever they went hunting or something.

Speaker 35 (04:06:37):
Yeah, was like yeah, yeah because we I was like
the outdoor industry had to stop doing tradeios in Utah
because Utah was gonna The governor of Utah supported de
monumentizing it.

Speaker 34 (04:06:49):
A lot of their like quote unquote hook, hook and
bullet people were like, yeah, fuck this, it's bad.

Speaker 1 (04:06:55):
Yeah, I mean it's the same I think that's the
same category as like John McCain having a good take
on torture right where it's like, yeah, I mean they
live right there. Of course they don't want it destroyed,
but everybody's okay with, you know, poisoning the Gulf or
you know the stuff that the that the coke industries
was guilty of having like a fucking pipelines full of

(04:07:18):
holes running under towns but then explode.

Speaker 13 (04:07:21):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, And that is actually like the number
It's like the number one thing that gets people on
and on board with environmental regulation is like having something
happen and there in the community where they were like,
wait a minute, this doesn't seem fair. Same with Pennsylvania,
Like people were really into frecking until it became like wait,

(04:07:43):
so if my neighbor has a lease and that lease
ends up poisoning my well, I have no recourds. Yes,
that's how it works. Welcome to America.

Speaker 1 (04:07:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 (04:08:00):
So no, I mean they're all like, actually, there's there's
towns and now that are act speing of the right
space thing that are invoking home rule and baking rights
of nature into their charters. And these are like pretty
conservative districts too, and the whole reason they're doing it
have more local control over land use decision.

Speaker 1 (04:08:20):
Yeah, which is probably I'm sure a mixed bag to
some degree.

Speaker 13 (04:08:24):
Exactly, because you could imagine that going in a bunch
of different ways.

Speaker 34 (04:08:28):
Yes, yeah, yeah, school board levels exactly.

Speaker 13 (04:08:34):
Yeah, right now, it's like to get rid of fracking
waste sites, but it could easily be yeah, we don't
want any I don't know, in degraded schools here, for example, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 12 (04:08:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 34 (04:08:51):
I wonder it's different in the US in the sense that,
like I underd right, this this case in Guyana went
to the Supreme Court of Guyana right, and.

Speaker 19 (04:09:02):
Is that right?

Speaker 13 (04:09:02):
Several so, so Melinda has now filed seven different cases.
She's very busy, and most of them have wound up
at at the High Court of Guyana, which is their
supreme court. They just had a big verdict in another

(04:09:23):
case that she filed, which is really interesting and potentially
huge game changer for oil drilling kind of around the globe.
They so in the environmental permit that Exon had to
get in order to start drilling offshore, it is laid
out as a requirement of that permit that they have
to have insurance policy from an independent insurer. So they

(04:09:49):
can't self insure, which is what oil companies usually do.
They all have like their own insurance companies to ensure
their projects. It's bizarre, but anyway, so it really it
stipulates an independent insurance company and an unlimited parent company guarantee.
That's really really huge because basically in Guyana, as in

(04:10:12):
most other places that they're operating outside of the US,
they use like a local subsidiary that has very few assets.
So they have so Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, which
is worth you know, maybe two billion dollars on paper,
and so you know, it's very handy for them to

(04:10:32):
you know, something bad happens and subsidiary might get drained,
but the parent company is protected. It was actually written
into their permits. They had to have this unlimited guarantee
that they will cover whatever damage is, which is important
because in all of the environmental impact assessments, you know
Exxon's own environmental impact assessments, they're saying if there were

(04:10:57):
a well blowout, which is like what happened with deep water,
it would hit up to fourteen different Caribbean islands plus
various countries in like the northern coast of South America,
so like a really big problem. And these are mostly
countries that ran tourism and for their economies. So the

(04:11:18):
argument that Melinda Baide was, look, because the government has
been lacked in regulation and now they haven't required this guarantee,
you're opening up the citizens of this country to risk
because if there's a spill like this, these countries could
come to Guyana asking to be paid for damages and

(04:11:43):
we're not able to ut And now you've taken, you know,
exoning for it off the table. So anyway, the judge
in their favor and said, yeah, you're right, Exon you
need to have this in writing within thirty days. Yeah,
it's incredible. I mean that could really make It would

(04:12:05):
change the math considerably for this project, and I would
say most other projects that they're working on. The ep
is it's the e p A m exon or sort
of like co defendants. In this case, the e p
A is appealing. Also like just by way, when your
EPA is a co defendant with an oil company, there's

(04:12:26):
something very wrong.

Speaker 1 (04:12:28):
Might it might not be doing the p part.

Speaker 13 (04:12:32):
Exactly xactly. So they're appealing, and you know, there's a
lot of government corruption and stuff going on, so we'll see,
we'll see what happens. But this judge, everyone was like,
I was talking to a journalist that we've been working
with there and she was like, yes, everyone's very worried
for his safety because like this this was a big deal.

(04:12:53):
And he really, I mean in like the most prim
and proper legally is possible. He repeatedly was like, e PA,
why are you just being ex all's bitch here?

Speaker 1 (04:13:10):
What's going on?

Speaker 13 (04:13:13):
It was like a real like whoa bomb of a ruling.
So so yeah, that's a big win. The constitutional case
is still they're still waiting for a ruling in that case.
But that's also the Supreme Court that will be ruling
on it because it's a constitutional argument.

Speaker 34 (04:13:32):
Yeah, talking of being people's bait, it's probably time for
us to hate from our advertisers.

Speaker 1 (04:13:38):
Ah, yes, great, great, great great.

Speaker 34 (04:13:41):
Yeah, you laid off and I disduncted.

Speaker 1 (04:13:45):
These advertisers, none of whom are in any way involved
in the oil and gas industry.

Speaker 4 (04:13:50):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (04:13:51):
Actually can't promise that, but you know, pretend we can.

Speaker 5 (04:13:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:13:57):
Ah, We're back and continue to be blameless. All right,
let's uh should we move on to talking about We
chatted a little before this started, and one of the
things that kind of is perennially on or perpetually on
our beat is different laws and rules and attempts around

(04:14:20):
the world to crack down on the ability of people
to protest and exercise dissent, which you have some some
some thoughts on, and also some some information on kind
of the way in which the oil and gas industry
is tied to a lot of these legal kind of assaults.

Speaker 2 (04:14:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (04:14:38):
Yeah, yeah, they are very into cracking down on protests,
and that I think is really interesting right now is
that you have the fossil fuel industry on the one hand,
working behind the scenes to you know, the American Fuel
and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which is the lobbying group for like
coke industries and a bunch of oil companies and all

(04:15:00):
of that. They helped to write sample legislation in the
way of Standing Rock to pass around to all of
these Republicans that would increase science associated with protests and
jail time. And they also did a lot to try
to broaden it out to include organizations, so you know,

(04:15:23):
any anyone, any organization thing to organize or plan protests
can also be fined. In Kansas, they included a reco
charge in that, so you know, they're trying to make
protest organized crime. But at the same time that they're
doing all of that stuff, the number one argument that

(04:15:45):
the fossil fuel industry is making in all of the
climate cases against it in the US is corporate free
speech argument, and that is like it's terrifying. So actually,
and you mentioned Boulder before, there's been there's like twenty
four should these cases where towns or cities or states

(04:16:05):
are saying, hey, it's really expensive for us to adapt
to all of these climate risks, and it would be
less expensive if the oil and gas companies had kept
everyone from doing anything about this for the last forty years,
therefore they should pay some portion of the cost. That's
like the basic argument. And the oil companies for the

(04:16:27):
last three or four years have been saying, you know, oh,
you're trying to get around federal law by bringing these
in state court, and these cases belong in still court.
The Supreme Court finally declined to hear that argument. That
Department of Justice was like, they can stay in state court,
it's fine. So that argument is sort of dead in
the water. But they've already started with like their next

(04:16:50):
attempt to get these cases to the Supreme Court, and
it's this free speech argument that they've been making, which
basically says, look, anything we've ever said about climate change
was in the interest of shaping policy. That makes it
political speech or in like legal words, petitioning speech, and

(04:17:11):
therefore protected by the First Amendment. Now they're saying, in
these cases, our First Amendment argument is foundational to our arguments. Therefore, uh,
these can't be in state court. State courts can't rule
on on like key First Amendment issues. So I'm like
convinced that one of these cases is going to be

(04:17:33):
the next Citizens United and this Supreme Court. That's very
very scary because you know, they're talking about blurring that,
like they're basically saying, like lying can be free, can
be protected if it's in the interest of shaping policy
a particular way.

Speaker 1 (04:17:53):
Yeah, it's fine if we're okay with lying for us,
which is is enity. I'm pulled over by the police,
but probably probably oil and gas company should be helped
you so you can see.

Speaker 13 (04:18:07):
It's like bad, but like really for everything, very bad
if that gets that. Yeah, So yeah, they're doing that
at the same time that they're trying to limit individual
free speech. And I think that parallel is well a
not accidental, but very very gross and disturbing.

Speaker 34 (04:18:27):
Yeah, very much, sir. Like I think it's interesting yet
that try like that. They very clearly see this Supreme
Court it's like the one to go for, right, not
that it's going anywhere anytime soon. I guess didn't Amy
County parrots like like dad, wasn't her dad like a shell?

Speaker 13 (04:18:43):
Yeah, he worked for like twenty years.

Speaker 34 (04:18:46):
He sure did, of course, because yeah, there's a plus
thing happening and.

Speaker 13 (04:18:51):
She never recuses herself on any of these cases ever,
also Elito, I think it's Alito has stock in coniccophillas.
That cool, that's cool. Yeah, it was gifted to him
by someone.

Speaker 5 (04:19:10):
Statue.

Speaker 13 (04:19:11):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think it's it's and and
I mean they they have said out loud in multiple
places that the whole push to criminalize protests was one
hundred percent a reaction to Standing Rock. They were very
freaked out by that. I think they always have like

(04:19:35):
a an ozed reaction to anything that Indigenous people are doing. Period.
It's like that whole gross extra layer to it. And
then actually elsewhere too, like in in Canada this like
we're working with a reporter who's been looking into this

(04:19:56):
in Canada for a while. His name is Jeff Dembicky,
and he's found that there's the oil and gas companies
there like wrote down in strategies. I don't know why
these guys write this stuff down all the time, but
they wrote down, we're going to make First Nations people
the face of climate protests because that'll make it vilified

(04:20:17):
climate protest in the press.

Speaker 5 (04:20:20):
Wow.

Speaker 34 (04:20:21):
Yeah, Jesus Christ, sorry that one fully sent me.

Speaker 13 (04:20:27):
Yeah. Yeah, so a very similar thing there too, where
it's like increasing fines and jail time, and you know, yeah,
it's interesting.

Speaker 34 (04:20:37):
How Yeah, it's like in the US anyway, Like if
you look at the bleeding edge of settler colonialism, it's
it's nearly always fossil fuel extraction, right, Like if like
Oak Flat, the proposed extraction of lithium on tribal lands,
like a lot of these the nexus of like protesting

(04:21:00):
and yet like colonialism will be these I guess, not
with them of fossil fuel, but these extractive projects on
tribal land.

Speaker 13 (04:21:08):
Yeah, yes, yes, which is why actually the the rights
of nature stuff is becoming really interesting in tribal courts.
So I don't know you guys followed this, but like
with the Line three protests, the the tribe there, they

(04:21:33):
they actually filed a case against the Minnesota I don't know,
a Department of Public Works or something like that, and
they they they were like, uh, we have a in
their case. It's monomen the rights of monomen So monomen is.

(04:21:53):
Oh god, I just went out of my mind entirely.
It's uh wild rice all right, Okay, monoman is the
word is the Indigenous for wild rice, and they have
rights for this rice written into their tribal laws and
so they're saying, look, based on our treaties, you are

(04:22:17):
actually violating this law, and therefore we can we can
take you to court in tribal court to stop this pipelint.
It didn't work to stop line three, but actually the
case is still making its way through the courts because
the Minnesota DPW tried to say, look, tibal court has
action over us and the state court. It was like, uh,

(04:22:40):
yeah they do actually, because treaties exist. So it's really
interesting because now it's the same tribe that is potentially
impacted by line five in Michigan and they are looking
at using the same argument and it could end up

(04:23:01):
actually working there because there's now been enough time that
you know, could it could make its way to the
courts and set a president. But anyway, yeah, it's really
really really interesting.

Speaker 34 (04:23:13):
Yeah, that's very that's really weirdly similar to the Kumii
people here in San Diego who are challenging the construction
or quote unquote repair, which is not what's happening of
bottle wall.

Speaker 18 (04:23:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (04:23:26):
Yeah, that's what they all say about the pipelines too.
It's always repairing an old pipeline. But you look at
the plan and it's like, that's a whole new ass pipeline. Yeah,
in a different place than it was before.

Speaker 5 (04:23:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 34 (04:23:38):
Yeah, yeah, they were repairing a three foot fence with
a thirty foot steel barrier. But yeah, they it cuts
directly through burial grounds here, and they're repairing it by
destroying the burial grounds, which again they they've opposed with
mixed results, I guess, but it's yeah, I guess if
folks are listening and they're interested, there are a lot

(04:23:59):
of places where they can they can help those struggles,
like different ways to do that, but that there might
be more effective here than going to the Supreme Court,
given the Supreme Court's composition.

Speaker 13 (04:24:10):
I guess, exactly, yeah, exactly, that's why. Yeah, with the
the tribal court stuff, I think will be interesting to
watch in the next couple of years to see if
they're able to to do anything. But you know, tribal
solompties all under attack by the Supreme Yes.

Speaker 34 (04:24:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, They're likelihood of this resulting in like
Indigenous nations getting ever more fucked by the US is
equally high as I could have Ember having success, I guess.

Speaker 8 (04:24:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (04:24:45):
Yeah, anyway, sorry, I got really far Afield there the
counter protest stuff is very very very much being driven
by oil and gas, and there's it just keeps going too.
I mean every year there's like, you know, multiple more
of these laws being proposed and passed. I think we're

(04:25:05):
at twenty eights now have passed them, fourteen or fifteen
have actually implemented them. And yeah, it's not not great.

Speaker 19 (04:25:18):
No.

Speaker 13 (04:25:19):
I also think, like, you know, you're seeing the expansion
of the whole eco terrorist and really like come back
with a vengeance too. I feel like that was something
that happened in like early posts nine to eleven days
and is now happening again where it's it's like, I
don't know, let's expand the definition of terrorism to include

(04:25:42):
environmental activists and then we can you know, go after
them with those charges too. That happened in cop City too, right,
weren't they using.

Speaker 1 (04:25:53):
Yes, they are in the process, so still doing that.
Yeah great, Yeah, well, Amy, this is all really important.
You have a bit depressive, so no, we are. This
is a this is a real meeting of the people
who are fun at parties, sit down and you know

(04:26:16):
that descent has been criminalized. Yeah, I don't know, man,
I guess I'll have a Manhattan like, what do you
what do you want?

Speaker 34 (04:26:28):
The last party Robot and I attended together, we we
saw a car bomb happened, so at least that we.

Speaker 1 (04:26:33):
Didn't see a car bomb happen. Yeah, bring positive vibes.
Just a demonstrative car bomb you know people?

Speaker 34 (04:26:45):
Yeah, no, no, no, it was an Irish car who
would have gotten more people.

Speaker 1 (04:26:55):
That's a little bit of a little bit of I r
a humor for the audience. Okay, we should probably go.
I'm making the next slash motion. Yeah all right, well, Amy,
thank you so much for coming on today, and thank
you for continuing to put out a podcast that is

(04:27:18):
keep that can, at least if people you know, listen,
keep them very updated on some of the most important
climate related news going on today and some of the
real like fuckery being carried out by the oil and
gas industry. Again, the podcast is Drilled. Season eight right
now is about exon in Guiana. Amy, do you have
anything else you wanted to say before we roll out?

Speaker 13 (04:27:41):
No, that's it. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Speaker 1 (04:27:44):
Yeah, thank you so much. Amy, really appreciate it. And
uh yeah, this has been Robert and James. We should
probably do something on the Thames at some point, James,
it'll rhyme. I know it's not pronounced that way. I
know this was just me.

Speaker 5 (04:28:02):
Let's do it anyway.

Speaker 1 (04:28:03):
We could call it Robert and Jim's on the Thames.
You know, there we go.

Speaker 34 (04:28:06):
Absolutely, no.

Speaker 1 (04:28:10):
Podcast is over. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more
episodes every week from now until the heat death of
the Universe. It could happen here as a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 29 (04:28:24):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com.

Speaker 15 (04:28:28):
Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 29 (04:28:33):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 15 (04:28:38):
Thanks for listening.