Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Come Monday morning, basically no one was in the forest.
Speaker 2: The police raid the night prior pushed out most of
Speaker 2: the people gathered for the music festival and week of action,
Speaker 2: and it was still unclear how the rest of the
Speaker 2: week would now proceed. This Monday happened to be the
Speaker 2: Jewish holiday Porum. Initially there were plans to have a
Speaker 2: perum celebration in the forest that evening, but it was
Speaker 2: unknown if people would feel comfortable returning to the woods.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 2: This is episode three of my miniseries covering the March
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three Week of Action to defend the Atlanta Forest. Monday,
Speaker 2: March sixth also happens to be the day of an
Speaker 2: Atlanta City Council meeting, and the Stop cop City Clergy
Speaker 2: coalition held a well attended press conference at noon outside
Speaker 2: City Hall. Reverend Keana Jones opened up at the press
Speaker 2: conference by making the clergy's position clear.
Speaker 3: We are the faith coalition against cop City, and we
Speaker 3: are here to again raise our voices so that Mayor
Speaker 3: Andre Dickens and the members of the City Council of
Speaker 3: Atlanta know that we will not stand for the atrocities
Speaker 3: that have been occurring. We will not stand for cop
Speaker 3: City to go forward. The community came out and made
Speaker 3: public comment for over seventeen hours when given an opportunity,
Speaker 3: and said emphatically, no, we don't want your cop City.
Speaker 3: We don't want more repression of black people. We don't
Speaker 3: want more polluted air, we don't want less green space
Speaker 3: in our community. We don't want more policing and terrorizing
Speaker 3: of black, brown, indigenous bodies in our community.
Speaker 2: Reverend Jones gave her own perspective as a local Atlanta
Speaker 2: with deep ties to the city.
Speaker 3: So we are here as faith leaders today and we
Speaker 3: are here to say, Mayor Dickens, if you didn't hear
Speaker 3: us the first time, we are here once again to
Speaker 3: let you know that we don't want cop City. This
Speaker 3: is our community, this is our land. I am a
Speaker 3: daughter of East Atlanta. I still live in East Atlanta.
Speaker 3: I don't want cop City. My granny owns a home
Speaker 3: that she's been in for almost fifty years in the
Speaker 3: heart of East Atlanta village. She does not want cop City.
Speaker 3: My neighbor across the street does not want cop City.
Speaker 3: The teachers at my daughter's school do not want cop City.
Speaker 2: She also addressed the outside agitators narrative that police and
Speaker 2: media have continued to craft against force defenders, including by
Speaker 2: only arresting and charging people thought to be from out
Speaker 2: of town at the music festival that previous night.
Speaker 3: So we're here today to make sure that we ring
Speaker 3: the alarm and dispel the false narrative that it's outside
Speaker 3: agitators who don't want this. We know that this is
Speaker 3: the rhetoric that's been going on ever since abolition began,
Speaker 3: that it's outside agitators. They said slaves didn't want to
Speaker 3: be free, but it was white people from the North
Speaker 3: who wanted it. That's a lie. They said that black
Speaker 3: people in the South didn't want civil rights, but it
Speaker 3: was white people from the north. That's a lie. Today
Speaker 3: they are claiming that the black people love Cop City,
Speaker 3: it's outside agitators from elsewhere, and that again is a lie.
Speaker 3: Simply because the police we have chosen to systematically arrest
Speaker 3: people from out of state doesn't mean that what they're
Speaker 3: saying is the truth.
Speaker 2: Reverend Leoshe addressed to other faith leaders and ask them
Speaker 2: to join in their calls to stop the Cop City project.
Speaker 4: We local Atlanta clergy and religious leaders representing diverse communities
Speaker 4: call on clergy, religious leaders and people of faith in
Speaker 4: moral conscience across this nation and in solidarity with local
Speaker 4: Atlanta leaders to stop Cop City, stop the swap, and
Speaker 4: defend the Atlanta forests. Wilani People's part Today, we're gathered
Speaker 4: for this press conference and we will be delivering a
Speaker 4: letter to Atlanta City Council. But we invite you to
Speaker 4: continue in this faithful work that we are doing and
Speaker 4: contribute wherever you find your space in this growing movement.
Speaker 4: We call on clergy religious leaders, who are a moral
Speaker 4: authority in our society, to use your power in support
Speaker 4: of the forest protectors. We are deeply concerned for the
Speaker 4: greater Atlanta community and the implications for the future of
Speaker 4: public safety in the United States if Kopsudy moves forward.
Speaker 2: At the press conference, the coalition presented a letter to
Speaker 2: the city council, signed by over two hundred clergy members.
Speaker 2: Reverend Leoshe also read it aloud.
Speaker 4: Despite a record breaking amount of public comment opposing the facility,
Speaker 4: Atlanta City councils still pass legislation to build cop City.
Speaker 4: We are troubled by leadership that stops acting on the
Speaker 4: will of the people and aligns itself instead with corporate
Speaker 4: money and the dominant power structure. Urged on by the
Speaker 4: message of peace and compassion in all our faiths, we
Speaker 4: deplore escalating militarization by city and state government, most recently
Speaker 4: since the police killing of Rayshard Brooks here in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty by the Atlanta Police Department and Tortugita January eighteenth
Speaker 4: of this year by Georgia Patrol. We applaud the rising
Speaker 4: consciousness and the need to protect humans and the more
Speaker 4: than human by resisting police violence everywhere.
Speaker 5: Yes, and may I.
Speaker 4: Add that in the face of the violent raid that
Speaker 4: took place last night, as city residents gathered in solidarity
Speaker 4: to defend this forest that is an example of the
Speaker 4: militarization that we are calling out through violence and greed.
Speaker 4: These lands have been subjected to centuries of abuse, from
Speaker 4: the forced removal of indigenous communities, to serving as a
Speaker 4: plantation for enslaved African labor, to the site of the
Speaker 4: old Atlanta Prison Honor Farm in the twentieth century that
Speaker 4: produced immense profits for the prison system. Today, the sounds
Speaker 4: of berg song from the forest canopy live alongside the
Speaker 4: sound of gunfire and the adjacent APD firing range.
Speaker 5: We are troubled.
Speaker 4: By the commodification of community, land, water, and air on
Speaker 4: which all.
Speaker 5: Of us depend.
Speaker 4: We are profoundly troubled by the use of military tactics
Speaker 4: and escalated legal charges on members of our community, suppressing
Speaker 4: legitimate resistance while at the same time clearcutting the forest
Speaker 4: trees despite not having the appropriate permits. The lands and
Speaker 4: the people of Atlanta have suffered violence for too long.
Speaker 5: We say no more, No more.
Speaker 4: We declare with faith, commitment and hope that this land
Speaker 4: will be a part of healing and repair. We Atlanta clergy,
Speaker 4: religious leaders, and all of those across the nation and
Speaker 4: world who are in agreement, join our voices with calling
Speaker 4: for the following, a complete stop of the cop City
Speaker 4: project and cancelation of the Atlanta Police Foundation's lease dropping
Speaker 4: all charges against forest defenders and protesters. We demand an
Speaker 4: independent investigation into the uses of domestic terrorism charges. We
Speaker 4: demand an independent investigation into the killing of Manuel Tehran Tortugita.
Speaker 5: We speak their name for which.
Speaker 4: Recently released video footage of the event suggests there was
Speaker 4: lying and deceit surrounding the incident on part of law
Speaker 4: enforcement in their initial reporting of the incident.
Speaker 2: The Muscogee elder Miko Chabbon, Colonel spoke at the press
Speaker 2: conference and called for land back and for the Muscogee
Speaker 2: people to return and remtreat the Wilani Forest in community
Speaker 2: with the black and brown residents of the area.
Speaker 6: Our ancestors lived here for over thirteen thousand years, and
Speaker 6: if you're to do the math correctly, this country that
Speaker 6: we now call the United States is somewhere in the
Speaker 6: neighborhood of two hundred and forty just over nearly two
Speaker 6: years ago. I came here to the Lawni Forest. I
Speaker 6: came here with my own family, my own children, with
Speaker 6: some of my elders, to just share a little bit
Speaker 6: about how this territory in this land feels to us
Speaker 6: as Muskogee people, because let it be known today, it
Speaker 6: was not our choice to leave here. We did go
Speaker 6: to war to protect these areas, We did go through
Speaker 6: much burden to protect these areas, only to be forced
Speaker 6: to leave here under military occupation, but also to be
Speaker 6: forced to leave here after treachery, after illegally lands were
Speaker 6: taken from us.
Speaker 5: This is our homeland.
Speaker 6: My ancestors for generation upon generation, for millennia are buried
Speaker 6: on the very ground that you walk on every day.
Speaker 6: And I think we have a say in how we
Speaker 6: should live as a society in this day and time.
Speaker 6: And so in this moment, our hope is to be
Speaker 6: able to come back to rematriate, to take our lives
Speaker 6: back and to the intimacy that we once had with
Speaker 6: everything that grows here in what you now i'll call
Speaker 6: the State of Georgia. Because no matter who we are
Speaker 6: and where we come from, we have to have air,
Speaker 6: we have to have water, we have to have the
Speaker 6: elements of this earth to take care of us. Regardless
Speaker 6: of what we think. We're dependent on this earth Mother,
Speaker 6: and she has been faithful in taking care of us.
Speaker 6: It's us that has not been faithful and respecting her.
Speaker 5: Our hope is that.
Speaker 6: This earth is not destroyed before we even have a
Speaker 6: chance to come back, that lives aren't destroyed before we
Speaker 6: have a chance to come back. So today, in whatever way,
Speaker 6: I come here to join the choruses of voices that
Speaker 6: you hear all around you saying, what is going on
Speaker 6: now is a violence against all of creation. What is
Speaker 6: going on now bringing death and harm and hurt is
Speaker 6: a violence against all of creation. And we stand in
Speaker 6: solidarity as Muskogee people. I stand in solidarity with the
Speaker 6: voices that we hear of those tenets, those persons who
Speaker 6: live in the land and now. But my hope is now,
Speaker 6: at this moment in time, that somehow we can change
Speaker 6: the trajectory of our species and go into a direction
Speaker 6: where we can value each other, and we can stop
Speaker 6: the criminalizing of descent. We should be able to say no,
Speaker 6: the increasing of the militarized forces out there does not
Speaker 6: ever create peace. It only creates harm, and it only
Speaker 6: harms those that are most vulnerable.
Speaker 5: That's the prayer that I carry today.
Speaker 2: Reverend Darcy Jarrett joined in the call for a stewardship
Speaker 2: of the Wallani Forest to be returned to the Muskogee people.
Speaker 7: City Schools of Decatur has a statement of solidarity an
Speaker 7: acknowledgment of harms to cab County and the City of Atlanta.
Speaker 7: We call on you to make good on these words,
Speaker 7: to give the land back to our indigenous siblings, so
Speaker 7: that they, as they have stated and will do and
Speaker 7: always have done, work in collaboration with the black and
Speaker 7: brown community. Right there near where the site is, outside
Speaker 7: of the Wee Lawni Forest, The City of Atlanta is
Speaker 7: ready to lease this land at just ten dollars an acre. Instead,
Speaker 7: give this land to the native inhabitants. Repatriate this land
Speaker 7: to the people to whom is their sacred call, to
Speaker 7: defend and work in community with the black and brown
Speaker 7: communities that are there. We call on you, Atlanta City Council,
Speaker 7: to be the moral compass and to not just halt
Speaker 7: the building of this structure, but to repatriate the land
Speaker 7: to the sovereign Muscogee Nation, the sacred keepers of this land.
Speaker 7: May it be so amen.
Speaker 2: Finally, Matthew Johnson spoke about the worrying amount of police
Speaker 2: repression and violence the movement has already seen.
Speaker 8: We're projecting by the end of the day, there will
Speaker 8: be forty people that have domestic terrorism charges, many of
Speaker 8: which just for being in a parking lot. I don't
Speaker 8: know how anybody can accept this when you have a
Speaker 8: projected forty people that are committed of domestic terrorism, not
Speaker 8: one dead body. Meanwhile, we can't even show the bruise
Speaker 8: on the police officer that was allegedly shut at but
Speaker 8: our friend's ashes. We have the ashes of a friend
Speaker 8: that we will spread. We can no longer accept this
Speaker 8: as a people, as at lanterns. If we can't figure
Speaker 8: out a way to fix public safety without lacking tons
Speaker 8: of black kids up in the blackest city in America,
Speaker 8: every person in that building needs to step down. If
Speaker 8: we can't do it here, we can't do it anywhere.
Speaker 2: Self and Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective were
Speaker 2: at the press conference, and we met up after to
Speaker 2: discuss the events of the day. During the press conference,
Speaker 2: some of the media's line of questioning was very much
Speaker 2: like aligned with the types of narratives being put out
Speaker 2: by police in relation to the events that previous night,
Speaker 2: the Sunday Direct Action and Music Festival. I think it's
Speaker 2: also worth noting that the people at the Clergy event
Speaker 2: did not openly like demonize the actions that people chose
Speaker 2: to take on Sunday, And it was very much like
Speaker 2: the media definitely gives them opportunities to try to throw
Speaker 2: people under the bus, and that did not happen.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and we've seen that all throughout the week. Every
Speaker 9: every chance that the media is trying to throw somebody
Speaker 9: to like cause dissension or divide amongst the movement has
Speaker 9: been really handily deflected by anyone who's come across it.
Speaker 9: And the Clergy did not just a good job of
Speaker 9: like not falling into that trap, but of actually pointing
Speaker 9: out how that line of thinking was like missing the
Speaker 9: point and where the true violence was coming from.
Speaker 10: Jams.
Speaker 8: This is how we in the lab And so why
Speaker 8: are there.
Speaker 11: A targets people engaging in violence coming from other states.
Speaker 3: The reality of it is that the ones who are
Speaker 3: engaging in violence are the police, and they're from right
Speaker 3: here in Atlanta, Georgia. You got APD, you got Georgia
Speaker 3: State Police, you got GBI, you got Georgia State Troopers,
Speaker 3: you got everybody except the Marta police who are engaging
Speaker 3: in violence and terrorism against the people who are standing
Speaker 3: against this illegal land swap. So I would suggest that
Speaker 3: the next time you decide that you are going to
Speaker 3: bring up your police rhetoric that you get from whichever
Speaker 3: police source, you go ahead and discuss that with them,
Speaker 3: because we don't know what they're doing. But what we
Speaker 3: do know is what we're doing and what we see
Speaker 3: from them that we know. I know when I get
Speaker 3: hit by an officer. I know when I see a
Speaker 3: mother with a child begging to be let up off
Speaker 3: the ground because her children are with her. I know
Speaker 3: when I see officers pointing a rifle inside a bouncy house.
Speaker 8: If I could just say, I'd like to just bring
Speaker 8: up a story. Initially, the colonizers that came onto this
Speaker 8: land attempted to use the indigenous folks as their slaves. However,
Speaker 8: the indigenous folks knew the land so they could get away. Now,
Speaker 8: when you ask me about why is it that you
Speaker 8: keep catching people that aren't from here that might not
Speaker 8: reflect the people that are actually involved in the resistance,
Speaker 8: God bless.
Speaker 5: You, thank you.
Speaker 2: After the press conference, people from the Clergy Coalition marched
Speaker 2: to the front door and entered City Hall before making
Speaker 2: it upstairs to sign up for public comment during the
Speaker 2: City Council meeting.
Speaker 12: We shall not be moved.
Speaker 13: Fighting for readA, we shall not be mole just like
Speaker 13: a street colandic by walls.
Speaker 12: We shall not.
Speaker 14: Move.
Speaker 2: The large group of the clergy and the people gathered
Speaker 2: for the Interface Coalition are now moving through City Hall.
Speaker 2: There's a whole bunch of cops here that looks relatively
Speaker 2: nervous about the easily sized group of people. The scary
Speaker 2: Christians are now invading City Hall.
Speaker 5: Lookout.
Speaker 9: So usually in city Hall there there are several APD
Speaker 9: officers who you know, just kind of hang out. But
Speaker 9: while the clergy are walking up to City Hall, you
Speaker 9: can look out and you there is APD on every corner.
Speaker 9: And then you enter into City Hall and there are
Speaker 9: clusters of APD there. There are I think four floors
Speaker 9: to city There are clusters of APD on three sides
Speaker 9: of every floor of City Hall.
Speaker 2: After an unexpectedly long Awards and proclamations ceremony, the public
Speaker 2: comment section of the City Council meeting finally began.
Speaker 4: I'm standing here today with the Faith Coalition. We are
Speaker 4: clergy and faith leaders, we are citizens, and we are
Speaker 4: protectors of the land that doesn't belong to us, but
Speaker 4: belongs to God. We are deeply concerned for our community members,
Speaker 4: for ourselves, and the implications for the future of public
Speaker 4: safety in the United States if this cop city development
Speaker 4: goes forward. We are asking for all people of faith,
Speaker 4: those of you who sit on council, regardless of your
Speaker 4: tradition or background, and those who stand with moral conscience,
Speaker 4: to stop the cop city project. My faith convicts me
Speaker 4: and tells all of us that there is a better way.
Speaker 4: We have a prophetic, moral imagination and opportunity here to
Speaker 4: do something different in Atlanta, to do something different for
Speaker 4: the South. Finally, we're asking for a community process. A
Speaker 4: community process. Let us come together with moral imagination to
Speaker 4: envision how the Wilani River forests can be the heart
Speaker 4: and lungs of community wellness and healing, not more militarization
Speaker 4: of police. We want a process that centers the voice
Speaker 4: and needs of Muskogee leaders and community members, our indigenous siblings,
Speaker 4: incarcerated folks and surrounding prisons, families and neighbors who live
Speaker 4: in cross proximity to the firing range and under police surveillance.
Speaker 5: We want holistic community.
Speaker 4: Safety, clean water, tree canopies, a future for every single
Speaker 4: one of our children. May it be so.
Speaker 2: Someone from the Muskogee Creek Reservation in Oklahoma spoke about
Speaker 2: the design to return to their homeland.
Speaker 15: The Miko of our Hellbi Ceremonial Grounds back home in
Speaker 15: Oklahoma has come here where our original fire was started,
Speaker 15: and then it was taken all the way to Oklahoma,
Speaker 15: and now we want to bring it back to our
Speaker 15: land and we want to start those fires again. Well,
Speaker 15: when we come back, we need a land to come
Speaker 15: back to. This is my first time coming back to
Speaker 15: visit my homelands. I wanted to visit here where my
Speaker 15: ancestors are, as a spiritual and personal journey. I didn't
Speaker 15: want to come here to try to fight the violence
Speaker 15: that I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is from the residence
Speaker 15: is they need investment in housing and public spaces, and
Speaker 15: not investment in further militarized policing. They want investment in
Speaker 15: the well being of incarcerated and not further violent incarceration,
Speaker 15: but the well being of the community members.
Speaker 13: Thank you, moto Chi Chadi's.
Speaker 11: I turned last week and I've lived in Atlanta my
Speaker 11: whole life. I'm not an outsider and I am here
Speaker 11: to say to you that I find cop City to
Speaker 11: be an abomination. My husband is a pastor of a
Speaker 11: church a couple of miles from here, and he could
Speaker 11: not be here today. He's out of town, but he
Speaker 11: stands with me with these comments. The people who have
Speaker 11: spoken before me have said the things I would say,
Speaker 11: but I would like to say that I pretty much
Speaker 11: agree with every single thing they have said about this
Speaker 11: insanity that you all are calling a police safety training facility.
Speaker 11: So I think you need to just cancel it, start
Speaker 11: having some real conversations with the people of this city
Speaker 11: to solve the real problems in a way that will
Speaker 11: actually be effective. And this facility is not going to
Speaker 11: be it. And the mayor's proposed task force is just
Speaker 11: one more way to try to propagandize us to believe
Speaker 11: that this is good for us, when we're not stupid
Speaker 11: and we know it's just lipstick on a pig.
Speaker 5: And if you hard in your heart, be.
Speaker 3: Reminded of the story of another pharaoh who had a
Speaker 3: very hard heart, who would not free the people of God,
Speaker 3: who would not lead them to their land. You know
Speaker 3: what happened in that story. Don't think that you will
Speaker 3: not suffer the same fate. Don't think that the infrastructure
Speaker 3: of this so called black Mecca will not come toppling over,
Speaker 3: because it will.
Speaker 9: There are a couple like things to note about how
Speaker 9: City council public comment works. City Council doesn't tend to
Speaker 9: pay attention to them. Essensibly the only one who pays
Speaker 9: attention is City Council President Doug Shipman, because it is
Speaker 9: his job to call time and to call up the
Speaker 9: next person. But you know, city councilors will like step
Speaker 9: in and out of the room, get something to eat
Speaker 9: during the seventeen hours of public comment for cop city,
Speaker 9: like one of them held a press conference.
Speaker 2: There are two council members notoriously bad at paying attention
Speaker 2: to public comment. Dustin Hillis who is the committee chair
Speaker 2: for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee. Basically he's in
Speaker 2: charge of police. And the other is Mary Norwood, who
Speaker 2: represents Buckhead and has what I would describe as ontologically
Speaker 2: evil vibes. Buckheed is the northern, primarily white neighborhood in
Speaker 2: Atlanta that is wanted to secede from the city, which
Speaker 2: in Atlanta has very uncomfortable segregation and redlining parallels. But
Speaker 2: despite not paying attention during public comment. These two, in particular,
Speaker 2: both paid extra attention after public comment when Police Chief
Speaker 2: Darren Sheerbaum gave testimony on what happened the night previous.
Speaker 16: Were there any firefighter or police city employee entries yesterday's event.
Speaker 17: At Kelsmer hillis there was not. We're very fortunate that
Speaker 17: that was the outcome. We're fortunate that there was no injuries.
Speaker 16: If this continues, do we have the ability to deploy
Speaker 16: even greater force to quill this? You know, the millions
Speaker 16: of damage, millions of dollars of damage to public and
Speaker 16: private properties.
Speaker 17: We will make adjustments as those that used various tactics.
Speaker 14: Yesterday was an escalation.
Speaker 17: We had not seen this large number of individuals engaged
Speaker 17: in this activity, and the aggressive manner in which.
Speaker 14: The officers were attacked.
Speaker 17: Was a significant change from what we had seen before,
Speaker 17: when it generally had been setting property on fire. We'd
Speaker 17: seen police cars set on fire, win those buses, but
Speaker 17: this was started as an attack against individuals, men and
Speaker 17: women who are employees of this city, So that was
Speaker 17: an escalation. Council Member hillis that we have already made
Speaker 17: adjustments for both within our capability as well as with
Speaker 17: our partners.
Speaker 2: Throughout to Sheerbaum's testimony, it was interesting the degree to
Speaker 2: which the Chief framed Sunday's direct action as primarily being
Speaker 2: targeted against officers and not the destruction of equipment and
Speaker 2: machinery at the North Gate. From the video that APD
Speaker 2: themselves released of the incident, it's clear that engagement with
Speaker 2: the police was limited to keeping officers at bay as
Speaker 2: construction equipment was targeted, and despite the continued referring of
Speaker 2: fireworks as quote unquote mortars or explosives, as the Chief
Speaker 2: himself admitted, no officers were harmed during the direct action.
Speaker 2: In a later episode, we'll hear more of Chief Sheerbaum's
Speaker 2: explanation of Sunday Night's events, as it gives insight into
Speaker 2: the police's own surveillance capabilities and their ability to respond
Speaker 2: quickly to direct actions. But until then, back to the
Speaker 2: events of Monday, March sixth, After the city council meeting,
Speaker 2: I dressed up in the gayest little outfit that I
Speaker 2: had with me and went back to the woods for
Speaker 2: the first time since Sunday Night for Perham. Initially, people
Speaker 2: were very cautious when entering the woods again, but As
Speaker 2: the night went on, more and more people started to
Speaker 2: pour into the forest, with some choosing to return to
Speaker 2: their camp. Later that night, I enjoyed an experimental noise
Speaker 2: show in the living room, probably to the detriment of
Speaker 2: people trying to sleep in the area. I went to
Speaker 2: the Perham in the Woods. I got to share my
Speaker 2: memory of the Veggietail's ester story starring the tickle Monsters.
Speaker 2: I got to bond with a few exangelicals about that,
Speaker 2: so that was fine. Then there was an experimental noise
Speaker 2: show in the forest, and really, I think it actually
Speaker 2: is worth talking about because this was the first time.
Speaker 5: People return to the forest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was the first time that people like returned
Speaker 2: to the forest in mass since Sunday, and you started
Speaker 2: to kind of feel people's energy get reinvigorated. The woods
Speaker 2: became a place again that people were able to be
Speaker 2: in and feel like they were able to be in
Speaker 2: community in the woods again.
Speaker 9: And that is in keeping with sort of how this
Speaker 9: movement has always responded to what we I guess could
Speaker 9: call a loss, right.
Speaker 2: Like, twenty three people getting arrested in charge is a
Speaker 2: is a great loss.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and the bounce back period is pretty quick like
Speaker 9: the resiliency is is continual and always strengthening. Every time
Speaker 9: that you know, the repression grows, like it does seem
Speaker 9: like the resiliency grows with it.
Speaker 2: People were not scared away from the woods. People still
Speaker 2: still were like, no, this is something I care about.
Speaker 2: I am still going to be in the woods. I'm
Speaker 2: still going to defend these woods. And you kind of
Speaker 2: have like there's always this essence of like fear kind
Speaker 2: of kind of underlying whenever you're like in the Wollani Forest,
Speaker 2: because you know, people have been arrested and charged for
Speaker 2: laying in a hammock like that.
Speaker 5: With another defender, with another defendant.
Speaker 2: And like so you know that it is it is
Speaker 2: fundamentally a risky place to be, but people think the
Speaker 2: potential cost is worth it, Like they will they continue
Speaker 2: to be here because they know this is a winnable
Speaker 2: fight and they know it that it is worth it
Speaker 2: to defend these woods. Early Tuesday morning, a few stop
Speaker 2: Coop City banner drops happen throughout the city. Two people
Speaker 2: were detained by police during one of these banner drops,
Speaker 2: but were later released with a traffic citation after being
Speaker 2: interrogated separately and extensively photographed by law enforcement officials only
Speaker 2: identified as quote Georgia Police and Homeland Security unquote. Tuesday
Speaker 2: was the start of a series of non violent direct
Speaker 2: actions that were being launched around downtown and midtown. Tuesday morning,
Speaker 2: I followed a small group that went to the headquarters
Speaker 2: of Norfolk Southern, one of the Atlanta Police Foundation's financial
Speaker 2: contributors and noted enemy of Ohio.
Speaker 9: They entered the lobby and it's a very small group,
Speaker 9: but like I think half of it was.
Speaker 2: It was like five people and another five like press people.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So they enter and they read allowed a letter
Speaker 9: to Alan Shaw, the CEO of Norfolk Southern, calling forward
Speaker 9: investment of Norfolk Southern from Copcity. And immediately they are
Speaker 9: met with a security guard screaming like go you get.
Speaker 5: Out of the lobby.
Speaker 9: Leave, You're you're being criminally trust or you're being trespassed.
Speaker 5: You have to leave.
Speaker 9: One of the other security guards runs around with a
Speaker 9: cell phone camera and like shoves it in everybody's faces,
Speaker 9: reaching rather rudely over you to get my face, and.
Speaker 2: They got very close to me and during the Norfolk
Speaker 2: Southern building, please.
Speaker 12: Please let.
Speaker 13: It's playing a horrible row in the city, where.
Speaker 12: Can you.
Speaker 9: And so the whole thing lasts like less than five minutes,
Speaker 9: maybe ride about five minutes when they finished reading the letter,
Speaker 9: Like all they asked was that the letter go to
Speaker 9: the CEOP.
Speaker 2: While people were ins the headquarters, security called ns Police,
Speaker 2: which is the Norfolk Southern Police who are legally allowed
Speaker 2: to arrest people.
Speaker 13: Anyone you can see.
Speaker 2: For your building.
Speaker 9: But nobody was arrested at that non violent direct action.
Speaker 9: The whole thing was over pretty quickly, and you know,
Speaker 9: as we were walking out, we saw like the the
Speaker 9: a force of Norfolk Southern Police like swarm kind of
Speaker 9: the exterior of the campus and like keep an.
Speaker 14: Eye out on things.
Speaker 2: And then we moved over to Woodriff Park, which was
Speaker 2: the meeting place for these non violent direct actions that
Speaker 2: happened about every every day at noon starting on starting
Speaker 2: on Tuesday. It's Tuesday, March seventh, around noon, there's about
Speaker 2: fifty or so people gathered in Woodriff Park who are
Speaker 2: heading out and marching to go stop by two of
Speaker 2: the Atlanta Police Foundation corporate funders.
Speaker 9: We roll up and I think at that point they
Speaker 9: were like twenty is protesters.
Speaker 18: It was.
Speaker 9: It started off very small there was no police, like
Speaker 9: no real visible police presence. They were like maybe a
Speaker 9: cruiser or two like kind of around and actually start
Speaker 9: to gather and kind of talk about like what their
Speaker 9: plan is for the day, which was just to march
Speaker 9: around to three different sites. They wanted the EIGHTE and
Speaker 9: T Building, the Georgia Pacific Building, and GSU Georgia State University.
Speaker 2: They are now leaving Woodriff Park. They got to Georgia Pacific,
Speaker 2: one of the COP City financial backers, without much incident
Speaker 2: and without much in terms of visible police presence. People
Speaker 2: called on Mayor Dickens, who is the chair of the
Speaker 2: board of directors for Georgia Pacific, to cancel the Atlanta
Speaker 2: Police Foundation lease of the land that cop City is
Speaker 2: slated to be built on.
Speaker 19: Mayor Dickens, we want you to cancel this lace. We
Speaker 19: know that you had the authority.
Speaker 5: To do so.
Speaker 2: They finished up that george Pacific, they set up a
Speaker 2: little vigil for Torti Guita.
Speaker 9: And from Georgia Pacific they began their trek to the
Speaker 9: AT and T Building.
Speaker 2: They left a little vigil for Torti Ghita in front
Speaker 2: of the Georgia Pacific Center and the group of like
Speaker 2: more than fifty people are continuing to march north.
Speaker 5: Police eight to ten.
Speaker 2: Police officers are directly behind them, and their whole bunch
Speaker 2: of police cars are blocking Peachtree along the path to
Speaker 2: at and D was the APF's headquarters just across the street,
Speaker 2: And as the crowd approached this intersection, the amount of
Speaker 2: police ballooned massively. In the block around the Atlantic Police
Speaker 2: Foundation headquarters. There's got to be about thirty to forty
Speaker 2: officers stationed walking off the entrance to the APF, and
Speaker 2: also just like following the crowd around as they're as
Speaker 2: they're marching through the through the sidewalks, there's definitely over god,
Speaker 2: there's I think around seventy five office deployed in this
Speaker 2: area right now.
Speaker 5: The number keeps growing.
Speaker 2: As we start walking down different sidewalks and different streets,
Speaker 2: you just see more officers that are already stationed.
Speaker 9: There are fifty activists and what certainly over one hundreds
Speaker 9: some were probably between one hundred one hundred and twenty
Speaker 9: police officers started marching not like behind, not in front,
Speaker 9: but directly beside the march, sort of pinning the march
Speaker 9: to the wall, and like essentially kettling the march.
Speaker 2: There was police station in front, there was police station behind,
Speaker 2: and police stationed on the side. It was surrounding the
Speaker 2: surrounding like these fifty people who were simply walking on
Speaker 2: the sidewalk stumbling upon a new group of officers.
Speaker 5: Got to be about one hundred officers in this area
Speaker 5: right now.
Speaker 2: At one point a police vehicle was just parked on
Speaker 2: the sidewalk, completely blocking it. During this entire time, police
Speaker 2: were blocking all of the traffic in these intersections and roads.
Speaker 9: Driving wrong way up one way, like just you know,
Speaker 9: doing police things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a Geordia State University canine unit this blocking off
Speaker 2: the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle.
Speaker 2: They're trying to make it impossible for people to actually
Speaker 2: move on the sidewalk. But for the most part, people
Speaker 2: have been able to move around the police and keep
Speaker 2: their movement going instead of just stalling in one spot
Speaker 2: or like trying to tychically confront what is now like
Speaker 2: hundreds one hundreds of law enforcement officers from Fulton County
Speaker 2: Sheriffs and Atlanta Police Department and even like Georga State
Speaker 2: University police. So the group is split up in between
Speaker 2: two streets right now because people are trying to follow
Speaker 2: the crossing signals because otherwise police are going to tackle
Speaker 2: and violently assault people. No one was arrested, People marched
Speaker 2: to their perspective locations.
Speaker 9: People very pointedly kept to laws. There was a couple
Speaker 9: of times when like the crosswalk changed and the group
Speaker 9: kind of had to split. They would stay and wait
Speaker 9: until the crosswalk went back to walk, and then crossover
Speaker 9: and join.
Speaker 2: It's so funny that the cops are so insistent if
Speaker 2: you stepped on the streets, you're going to get arrested,
Speaker 2: and makeing sure people stay on the side of walks.
Speaker 2: But the result of that is that all the cops
Speaker 2: are standing in the street and they're blocking off like
Speaker 2: miles of traffic downtown right now. People just arrived at
Speaker 2: the fifty one Peach Street Center Avenue AT and T
Speaker 2: Building in downtown Atlanta. Police were already stationed in front
Speaker 2: of the AT and T building, so there wasn't much
Speaker 2: to do. After a brief speech talking about AT and
Speaker 2: T's contributions to the Police Foundation and Cop City, the
Speaker 2: crowd moved on. Now people are turning west in the
Speaker 2: opposite direction from the AT and t headquarters, heading back
Speaker 2: into the Woodruff Park area where this march began. Police
Speaker 2: with long guns here. Finally, the crowd stopped at Georgia
Speaker 2: State University and talked about GSU's connections to the Atlanta
Speaker 2: Police Foundation. What is of note for this action, and
Speaker 2: really all of the actions that happened the next few days,
Speaker 2: is not what the protesters did. It's the police is
Speaker 2: disproportionate response to just fifty people walking on the sidewalk,
Speaker 2: chanting and giving short speeches outside of businesses tied to APF.
Speaker 9: With a small line of officers in front of GSU,
Speaker 9: they gave their their last round of speeches and sort
Speaker 9: of dispersed for.
Speaker 19: The day before we wrap today and gave these clouds
Speaker 19: something else that got do.
Speaker 13: We will be out here.
Speaker 19: We will be out here for the rest of the week,
Speaker 19: for the rest of the month, for the year.
Speaker 12: We won't fight. Got here.
Speaker 4: We wait.
Speaker 2: Some of the police are now grouping up and opening
Speaker 2: up the sidewalk so people can actually leave. It seems
Speaker 2: officers were in fact instructed to make arrests during this action,
Speaker 2: but for some reason did not follow through on those orders.
Speaker 2: According to scanner audio from Atlanta Police department's swat team.
Speaker 20: About fifty of them. The problem is they've been telling
Speaker 20: them to make a risk, but also is not making
Speaker 20: a risk. I guess they weren't supposed to. I don't know,
Speaker 20: but I'm lit with that. We'll just hold what we
Speaker 20: got at spawn as leaders.
Speaker 2: Extensive police activity continued. Later that night, at around five
Speaker 2: thirty to six pm, police started staging around the forest
Speaker 2: in a way that usually indicates that a raid is forthcoming.
Speaker 2: Word spread around the recovering encampment that police could be
Speaker 2: preparing for a raid.
Speaker 9: So the initial reports were like that there were fifty
Speaker 9: police officers staged at Key Road and ready to go,
Speaker 9: and then the Caab County Swat starts to roll up
Speaker 9: at the fire station, and I would say a fair
Speaker 9: amount of like panic starts to set it at camp.
Speaker 2: Multiple multiple police copters are getting are getting flown overhead,
Speaker 2: multiple different spat teams being brought in. At least like
Speaker 2: three or four different agencies are stationing officers around the woods.
Speaker 2: I believe it's estimated that at least one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty police officers were being staged in the area directly
Speaker 2: surrounding the forest and in the area by the power
Speaker 2: line cut on Key Road.
Speaker 9: And it should be said that you know, up until
Speaker 9: this point, the police have never brought in that many
Speaker 9: resources to any protest action that I'm aware of, and
Speaker 9: not come in and engaged. So I was with a
Speaker 9: group offsite who like immediately began to fear, like you know,
Speaker 9: for they wouldn't be able to get back to their
Speaker 9: camp size, they wouldn't be able to get their gear,
Speaker 9: they wouldn't be able to get their medication, and that,
Speaker 9: from what I understand, was the general vibe around.
Speaker 2: But nothing happened, Nothing seemed to happen. And then at
Speaker 2: around seven police started to almost like express confusion on
Speaker 2: what was going on, and then everyone else expressed confusion
Speaker 2: for why the police were confused. And we think we've
Speaker 2: kind of put together what may have happened.
Speaker 5: So Clark, what.
Speaker 2: Is suspected of going down here?
Speaker 9: So the one thing that police don't understand and probably
Speaker 9: will never understand, is humor. Now they become the butt
Speaker 9: of the joke often, but they don't understand comedy. So
Speaker 9: at seven o'clock that evening was scheduled comedy in the forest,
Speaker 9: and from what we've gathered, the police thought that the
Speaker 9: Comedy in the Forest event was going to be a
Speaker 9: cover for another Sunday night like action.
Speaker 2: So this event was scheduled on the public Defend the
Speaker 2: Atlanta Forest calendar that anyone can look at online is
Speaker 2: this Comedy in the Woods event for people to tell
Speaker 2: jokes around a campfire. And I guess they thought it
Speaker 2: was like it was like this event that was like
Speaker 2: a red herring so that people could then go do
Speaker 2: violent militancy in around the woods. So when seven o'clock
Speaker 2: came in, went like police were expecting people to like
Speaker 2: arrive at the woods or something, and that just didn't
Speaker 2: happen because it turns out a few minutes before seven o'clock,
Speaker 2: this comedy event was canceled for like unrelated reasons. The
Speaker 2: organizer had had things come up, so this event just
Speaker 2: didn't happen. But there still was comedy in the Woods.
Speaker 2: It just was that the police wasted probably over one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars mobilizing over one hundred officers. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 2: I think some people in the woods were you know,
Speaker 2: had some frustration that that that you know, they experienced
Speaker 2: this fear of this possibly incoming rate that then resulted
Speaker 2: in there being nothing. I think it's always important to
Speaker 2: when people are relaying information, they relay information that is
Speaker 2: known without like unadue speculation. So like it is a
Speaker 2: fact to say that there's over a hundred cops stationing
Speaker 2: by the woods and they've never had that many cops
Speaker 2: there before without doing some sort of raid or some
Speaker 2: sort of some sort of like activity forest.
Speaker 9: And part of what I've heard go on since then was,
Speaker 9: you know, some very generative conversations about how they're going
Speaker 9: to take into account like this new paradigm that developed
Speaker 9: that night. And I think that again speaks to sort
Speaker 9: of just how the movement continues to develop and grow
Speaker 9: and like you know, handle new new challenges and shifts.
Speaker 2: So, with the Forest camp still intact, the week of
Speaker 2: action continued on as planned, with another downtown nonviolent direct
Speaker 2: action that next morning.
Speaker 9: So Wednesday noon is a lot smaller of direct action
Speaker 9: than the day before.
Speaker 2: It starts with like a dozen people. It slowly grows
Speaker 2: like a few dozen, but yeah, it started extremely, extremely small.
Speaker 2: So this was one difference from Tuesday is that when
Speaker 2: we arrived, police already had a visible presence in downtown,
Speaker 2: stationed around Woodriff Park. So a group of people just
Speaker 2: launch from Woodriff Park. They kind of split off in
Speaker 2: different different little sub subgroups. Lots of people are just
Speaker 2: sationed outside of Marta stops handing out flyers, and that
Speaker 2: is what people are doing right now. Police seem relatively
Speaker 2: confused and are trying to like mobilize the different areas
Speaker 2: where they feel like something might happen, but it's just
Speaker 2: people handing out flyers.
Speaker 9: And they decided to split into groups and engage in
Speaker 9: like just some typical outreach activity that you would see,
Speaker 9: you know from any group, like just passing out flyers
Speaker 9: and pamphlets and attempting from what I saw to have
Speaker 9: like one on one conversations with anyone who wanted to.
Speaker 2: So this this group that it broke off into these
Speaker 2: smaller subgroups. The group that we kind of accompanied stationed
Speaker 2: themselves around some Marta stops around I believe it was
Speaker 2: like the it was the Peachtree Lata station. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: they stationed at the at the like the three different
Speaker 2: exits or entrances for that, just just handing out flyers,
Speaker 2: handing out leaflets, trying to you know, talk to anybody
Speaker 2: who walks by. Another group of people standing outside of
Speaker 2: a public transit spot handing out flyers, probably like on
Speaker 2: a four or five other small, small groups doing similar
Speaker 2: things throughout downtown, which means police have a lot more
Speaker 2: places to be as opposed to just following one big group.
Speaker 9: The group that we followed had its own police presence
Speaker 9: follow it, and then when they split into three more groups,
Speaker 9: each group had its own police presence follow it, and
Speaker 9: police stuck to the protesters the entire time. And of course,
Speaker 9: like there's there's white transport vans that are full of
Speaker 9: cops kind of driving by.
Speaker 2: I think white van full of police officers just showed
Speaker 2: up across the street. Army Green Tan SWAT vehicle just
Speaker 2: parked a block away from the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters.
Speaker 2: There was an Atlanta swat vehicle parked outside of the Hooters.
Speaker 9: Totally normal response. Totally normal response. And so the leafleting
Speaker 9: goes on for you know, like forty five minutes, and
Speaker 9: then all of the groups start to gather together, conveniently
Speaker 9: with the group that like we had embedded with.
Speaker 2: All right, there's actually a pretty decent number of people
Speaker 2: gather here for the flywering event today. You know, normal
Speaker 2: police response to people handing out flyers. Just fifty officers
Speaker 2: in a swat team. But yeah, there's probably at this point,
Speaker 2: like two or three dozen people that have kind of
Speaker 2: all converged together. They started off very small, people were
Speaker 2: very very spread out. They splintered off into little, little,
Speaker 2: smaller groups, but now they've all kind of coalesced together
Speaker 2: back again. So all the little subgroups kind of meet
Speaker 2: up on Andrew Jung and Peach Tree, right next to
Speaker 2: the Hooters and the hard Rock Cafe.
Speaker 9: This area is like the business district, so in the
Speaker 9: middle of the day, it's like really busy. It's a
Speaker 9: fairly like good spot to pass out leaflets.
Speaker 2: So they are passing out these leaflets. Pedestrians are still
Speaker 2: able to like walk through the sidewalks. It's pretty it's
Speaker 2: pretty chill. And then APD approaches the crowd. Like the
Speaker 2: APD has already been around this area. There's there's this
Speaker 2: vehicle across the street watching people hand out flyers. But
Speaker 2: then Lieutenant and Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives
Speaker 2: them a dispersal order.
Speaker 5: Okay, can I read the dispersal order?
Speaker 21: All right?
Speaker 22: So I'm a Lieutenant Neil Welch, Police Officer, City of Atlanta,
Speaker 22: I hereby declare that being on this sidewalk, you are
Speaker 22: obstructing or repeating the normal and reasonable movement of pedestrian
Speaker 22: traffic in violation of Atlanta City Ordinance. Okay, in the
Speaker 22: name of the people is Saya, Georgia. I hereby command
Speaker 22: that all present in the sidewalk, All present here in
Speaker 22: the sidewalk, immediately exit the street or the roadway or sidewalk.
Speaker 22: If you do not do so, you may be detained
Speaker 22: or arrested. Should you fail to exit the sidewalk in
Speaker 22: accordance with this lawful command, you shall be in violation
Speaker 22: of Section one five zero two six six substructing pedestrian Traffic,
Speaker 22: which prohibits standing or being on any street, roadway, or
Speaker 22: sidewalk in a manner to obstructor impede the more reasonable
Speaker 22: pedestrian traffic.
Speaker 5: Cops threatened arrest and detainment.
Speaker 2: They claimed that people were blocking the sidewalk, which they
Speaker 2: absolutely were not. I was walking freely, as was all
Speaker 2: of like downtown pedestrian traffic. They were not blocking anything.
Speaker 5: This is this is.
Speaker 2: Pretty silly, utterly, utterly ridiculous response to people handing out flyers.
Speaker 2: So they were told they cannot be on the sidewalk.
Speaker 2: Obviously they can't be on the street. Where where are
Speaker 2: you allowed to protest if not the sidewalk or the street.
Speaker 2: Seemed like very like flimsy legal footing. But obviously they
Speaker 2: police can arrest anyone they want to at any time
Speaker 2: for any reason. So people decided to move. They cross
Speaker 2: over the street, they walk like a block north, they
Speaker 2: cross the street again, and they move on to this
Speaker 2: part of the sidewalk that is like really large, like
Speaker 2: a massive, massive, open open section that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right in front of the mall. So it's it's
Speaker 9: it's meant to like have a bunch of people passed
Speaker 9: by it.
Speaker 5: So people continue to hand out flyers while this is happening.
Speaker 9: Uh, there's another group who comes in to the side
Speaker 9: of Petree Center Mall and enters the mall to find
Speaker 9: Mayor Andre Dickens. There are a couple boards in Atlanta
Speaker 9: that stipulate the mayor is like the head of the board,
Speaker 9: and this is one of them, and it meets in
Speaker 9: Peatree Center.
Speaker 1: Mall as one does.
Speaker 5: So the mayor is having a meeting in the mall.
Speaker 9: The office spaces, you know, sort of above the mall.
Speaker 2: And this group of people from the Muscogie Nation enter
Speaker 2: and try to meet up with the mayor to hand
Speaker 2: off a letter.
Speaker 13: Objection.
Speaker 6: Objection, We have a letter being delivered from the Muscoge
Speaker 6: Creek Nation on behalf of Muscogee Creek spiritual leadership and
Speaker 6: opposition to COMS.
Speaker 15: I came all the way on the trail of tears
Speaker 15: to deliver this letter to you, folks. We want you
Speaker 15: to know that the contemporary Muscogee people are now making
Speaker 15: their journey back to our home lands. And hereby give
Speaker 15: notice to Mayor Andrew Dickens, the Atlanta City Council, the
Speaker 15: Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Police Foundation, the DeKalb County
Speaker 15: Sheriff's Office, and so called copp City that you must
Speaker 15: immediately vacate Muscogee homelands and cease violence and policing of
Speaker 15: Indigenous and Black people and Muscogee lands. We lived as
Speaker 15: stewards and in relationship to this land for more than
Speaker 15: thirteen thousand years until the illegitimate State of Georgia negotiated
Speaker 15: with the Tyrant Andrew Jackson for the militarized for the
Speaker 15: militarized force removal of Muscogee and Cherokee relatives to Indian territories.
Speaker 15: Mayor Dickens, can I give this letter to you? He
Speaker 15: got one, Mayor, we want to talk to you about
Speaker 15: our homeland.
Speaker 12: The Muskogee Creek.
Speaker 9: People, three indigenous An activists along with Kamal Franklin, arrive
Speaker 9: and they find the mayor. They enter the board meeting
Speaker 9: and they begin to read this letter from the Muscogi
Speaker 9: Nation aloud. And in the letter it essentially says that
Speaker 9: Atlanta is being evicted out of the Louis Lanni Forest
Speaker 9: and the most Scogie people are going to return and
Speaker 9: reclaim their ancestral land. Mayor Dickens, in true mayor fashion,
Speaker 9: bolts away from this, running through an exit door, which
Speaker 9: is then like blocked by a guard which I think
Speaker 9: that has its own like set of legal issues, essentially
Speaker 9: just ignoring them over his shoulder. He calls out, I've
Speaker 9: got a copy of the letter and hides just completely
Speaker 9: trying to escape what is not a good look for him.
Speaker 2: The Atlanta Police Department APEX SWAT team was called to
Speaker 2: the mall, and right as the activists were able to exit,
Speaker 2: the special police units rushed into the building, finding no
Speaker 2: one by now, the police repression during this week of
Speaker 2: action far exceeded police activity during any of the prior
Speaker 2: weeks of action, and this trend would continue as the
Speaker 2: week entered its last few days. The next episode will
Speaker 2: wrap up our coverage for the week, as well as
Speaker 2: contain a bit more analysis of the police repression and
Speaker 2: the fallout of Sunday's direct action. But then there will
Speaker 2: be a fifth bonus episode that gives an overview of
Speaker 2: what's happened in the Malani Forest in the intervening two months.
Speaker 2: See You on the other Side Music festival audio courtesy
Speaker 2: of Unicorn Riot Welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I'm Garrison Davis. This is episode four of my mini
Speaker 2: series and detailing the March twenty twenty three week of
Speaker 2: Action to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia. This episode,
Speaker 2: we'll be hearing from a lot of new people as
Speaker 2: we close out the day to day coverage of this
Speaker 2: week of action. One of the last big organized rallies
Speaker 2: was on Thursday night and it was put on by
Speaker 2: Community Movement Builders and other black led groups from Atlanta.
Speaker 9: The big event Thursday night was a six o'clock rally
Speaker 9: that met at the Martin Luther King National Historic Site.
Speaker 2: There was police stationed at King Center before anyone got there.
Speaker 2: We saw like dozens and dozens of police cars going by.
Speaker 9: All around the site are various quick response forces and
Speaker 9: riot cops just ready.
Speaker 2: To move in large police response in the area already,
Speaker 2: as has been expected for the past few days. Multiple
Speaker 2: Sandy Springs police buses were driving by. There was multiple
Speaker 2: unmarked white vans full of officers. The areas crawling with
Speaker 2: police cars. And now there's a small detail of officers
Speaker 2: across the street from the people gathering here in the park.
Speaker 9: We are currently surrounded on every side by groups of
Speaker 9: police officers in riodegear. The crowd started off like actually
Speaker 9: fairly decently sized, maybe like fifty people, and then continued
Speaker 9: as swell as the speeches progressed to I would say
Speaker 9: like two hundred two hundred fifty, maybe even a little
Speaker 9: bit more. They were passing out signs, so like anyone
Speaker 9: who came, like they had a sign ready for you.
Speaker 9: Andre Dickins is a sellout of course, as a very
Speaker 9: popular one. There were stop Coop City like banners that
Speaker 9: people could like hold atl of verse twelve, like you know,
Speaker 9: just a bunch of like really clever sort of protest
Speaker 9: slogans and things that people get behind. The makeup of
Speaker 9: the crowd was definitely leaned like far less like white
Speaker 9: anarchists than certainly the accusations of this movement, I think
Speaker 9: more representative of the movement as a whole, Like it
Speaker 9: was a mix of a bunch of different people. I
Speaker 9: would say like it probably accurately reflected Atlanta demographics.
Speaker 2: Defend the forest signs and banners and being handed out
Speaker 2: throughout the crowd. Other people are passing around the Jail
Speaker 2: Support number and Jill Support contact information.
Speaker 5: People are starting to get ready.
Speaker 9: So it meets it at six o'clock and for about
Speaker 9: an hour and a half we listened to a series
Speaker 9: of speeches as the crowd begins to swell.
Speaker 19: So we are here in solidarity together today to make
Speaker 19: it clear to the mayor.
Speaker 12: That he's not gonna keep lying on our names.
Speaker 19: They'll literally be filling the last of Atlanta have to
Speaker 19: repressed life and kill. We find it ridiculous, we find
Speaker 19: it disgusting, We find it embarrassing. Tickets would fix his
Speaker 19: mouth to say that black people want to be killed
Speaker 19: by the police, that black people walk Crop City. The
Speaker 19: man must have forgotten that our ancestors were literally fighting
Speaker 19: abolition since they were brutally brought to this country. They
Speaker 19: were fighting for freedom, fighting the original police right, the
Speaker 19: slave patrols that captured black bodies to take them back
Speaker 19: to their white masters. He's talking to the same black
Speaker 19: people whose elders were fighting here in the same streets
Speaker 19: in the sixties and the seventies to stop police occupation
Speaker 19: of our communities.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 19: Resistance to police, resistance to stay violence is literally in
Speaker 19: our blood as black people.
Speaker 13: It is in our DNA.
Speaker 19: They're lying on our name because they want money from
Speaker 19: the same white corporations that are funding Cop City, Home Depot,
Speaker 19: Chick fil A, Coca Cola, Norfolk, Southern and Cops enterprises
Speaker 19: who own to ajac And this is a fight that
Speaker 19: we will win, that we are committed to winning. And
Speaker 19: so when we talk about winning, it's important to say
Speaker 19: what do we mean when we say that we'll win.
Speaker 19: We mean no Cops City anywhere, not in South Atlanta,
Speaker 19: not in the cab not in North Atlanta, nowhere.
Speaker 5: When we say that.
Speaker 19: We will win, we are meaning that this fight does
Speaker 19: not stop with Cops City. This is a fight for
Speaker 19: the liberation of all oppressed people here and abroad. That's right,
Speaker 19: and that's why it's disgusting that the mayor and that
Speaker 19: these corporations will talk about outside agitators. Okay, the reason
Speaker 19: that there are people coming from all over the world
Speaker 19: to support this fight is because this is a fight
Speaker 19: that affects.
Speaker 13: All of us, that's right.
Speaker 19: The Atlanta Police Foundation admitted that percent of the cops
Speaker 19: being trained at that facility will not be in George.
Speaker 19: So when people come from Tennessee, from New York, from California,
Speaker 19: it's because they know that their local police might learn
Speaker 19: how to kill them better here, that's right. And when
Speaker 19: people come from abroad, they know that currently the Atlanta
Speaker 19: Police Department trans with the Israeli police. So the same
Speaker 19: techniques being used to brutalize black people are being used
Speaker 19: to practice genocide on the Palestinian people, and the same
Speaker 19: tactics being used to practice genofide on the Palestinian people
Speaker 19: are being used to brutalize black people right here. Yes,
Speaker 19: So when people come from all over the world to
Speaker 19: say stop caught City, they're not outside agitators. They're standing
Speaker 19: in solidarity with us because it's the.
Speaker 2: Fight's a call. As the rain picked up, Tortillita's mother,
Speaker 2: Belquise Taran, spoke next on the cards.
Speaker 23: The friend that I called them, I caned them to
Speaker 23: come here to support us.
Speaker 24: On from different religions, come here and help us.
Speaker 13: This is a.
Speaker 5: Matter of the earth.
Speaker 13: We're talking about Earth that.
Speaker 24: Is dying right needs our love. That earth needs our attention,
Speaker 24: and we are we have conscience. We know that this
Speaker 24: is not right.
Speaker 12: Don't go by yourself when we go.
Speaker 24: To activities and stay together, don't go outside by yourself.
Speaker 23: Don't We need to make understand that this is the
Speaker 23: right thing to do.
Speaker 24: We are the correct people.
Speaker 13: We are right because we are driving by.
Speaker 23: Love, by carry by concerns, and we love all the
Speaker 23: I love you you.
Speaker 2: A speaker from Black Votes Matter addressed to the crowd next,
Speaker 2: starting off by talking about the importance of mass action.
Speaker 18: I just want to explain something because sometimes people get confused,
Speaker 18: they get it twisted.
Speaker 1: They say, oh, y'all, look like vote.
Speaker 12: It's better all y'all do is talk about voting.
Speaker 18: Be clear, we understand that the way that we get
Speaker 18: to liberation is not going to come just through a vote.
Speaker 18: That's never been how it's worked for our people in
Speaker 18: this country. Sister Harry didn't get a chance to vote
Speaker 18: for liberations. She didn't get a chance to vote to
Speaker 18: take our people off the plantation right.
Speaker 12: So we are very clear that what we have got
Speaker 12: to be.
Speaker 18: In fact, we just celebrated, commemorated the anniversary of Selma
Speaker 18: and the marks of Montgomery. But be clear, the people
Speaker 18: of Selma didn't vote for a voting rights act.
Speaker 12: They had to fight for it. They had to march
Speaker 12: for it.
Speaker 18: In some cases, they bled for it, they had to
Speaker 18: resist for it, they had to take to the streets
Speaker 18: for it.
Speaker 5: It's a that tradition that.
Speaker 13: We are out here today.
Speaker 5: So yes, not believe.
Speaker 18: I believe in the power of the vote, but house
Speaker 18: to believe in the power of mass action.
Speaker 2: He then talked about the intersection of cop City and
Speaker 2: efforts to further restrict the democratic process in Georgia.
Speaker 18: The same corporations that are that are funding cop City
Speaker 18: are the same ones that are funding the.
Speaker 12: Bonus Questions, the same ones we've did.
Speaker 18: Our whole campaign a couple of years ago in Georgia,
Speaker 18: says that Bonus Prission bill, and we called out home
Speaker 18: Depot and Coca Cola and tell them many of the
Speaker 18: other corporations that give money to the people that are
Speaker 18: that are taken away our rights to vote. And then
Speaker 18: if you don't have a government that reflects the people,
Speaker 18: then what do you need.
Speaker 12: You need a police force to enforce the fact that
Speaker 12: you don't have a government that reflects the people.
Speaker 18: And so our message from Mary Dickens, our message for
Speaker 18: the city Council is that if you don't respond to
Speaker 18: the people, you our the little house are We've got
Speaker 18: that power.
Speaker 12: We've got to make that happen.
Speaker 2: Students from the Atlanta University Center consortium of four black
Speaker 2: colleges in Atlanta, were some of the last people to
Speaker 2: give speeches before the march.
Speaker 25: We have attempted to reform our police force, add de
Speaker 25: el escalation training, add civil rights history training, and give
Speaker 25: more money to our police, but we continue to see
Speaker 25: black bodies across social media platforms, television and other media
Speaker 25: platforms being displayed being murdered.
Speaker 13: The victims have received no justice.
Speaker 12: And when we say no justice, what do we say?
Speaker 21: No justice, no justice, no justice.
Speaker 19: The building of the Atlanta Public Training Center is an
Speaker 19: insult and an act of the utmost disrespect from our
Speaker 19: city leaders.
Speaker 12: We have a duty to fight for the change that
Speaker 12: we seek.
Speaker 19: As an active member of this community, I refuse to
Speaker 19: sit by and.
Speaker 13: Be idle and just let things happen.
Speaker 26: This city has been my home ever since I was born.
Speaker 12: I've been to various events here.
Speaker 18: I have seen the sights and have lived through some
Speaker 18: of the most important events right here in this city.
Speaker 26: This is my home. This is your home. This is
Speaker 26: our home. This is the home of Black excellence. This
Speaker 26: is the home of doctor Martin Luther King Junior. This
Speaker 26: is the home of John Lewis. This is the home
Speaker 26: of Joseph Evelyn and Joseph E.
Speaker 18: Lowie. This is the home of civil rights. This is
Speaker 18: the home of CT Givion. This is the home of
Speaker 18: great blackness itself. This is the home of every single
Speaker 18: black person here in America. This city, this house, this
Speaker 18: place of Black excellence, says no to cop city.
Speaker 27: My Afro pessimist friends and revolutionaries both agree we are
Speaker 27: at war. The police in the city have said as
Speaker 27: much loudly with their words and their actions. It feels
Speaker 27: obvious to me that we need warriors weapons, and I
Speaker 27: know that that fact may give some of us trepidation,
Speaker 27: But I want to assure you that we need so
Speaker 27: much more than soldiers to win this fight. Whatever it
Speaker 27: is that you do, whatever skill you bring, I just
Speaker 27: ask that.
Speaker 12: You make it a weapon.
Speaker 27: If we are ever going to experience democracy, we need
Speaker 27: your tools to be repurposed in this fight against Cop City.
Speaker 27: If you're a writer like me, child that Patty better
Speaker 27: look like a threat to cop City. If you do
Speaker 27: mutual aid, caring for community ain't gonna get any easier.
Speaker 27: Please show us the way. If you're an artist, where
Speaker 27: are my artists at?
Speaker 5: You got a lot of.
Speaker 13: Them out here.
Speaker 27: Let every painting room feel the truth, including the joy
Speaker 27: and freedom that abolition calls us to. Let us make
Speaker 27: songs that inspire revolution. If you're a healer, get ready.
Speaker 27: We need you. Much will be lost in this struggle.
Speaker 27: Let us not forget. If you're a teacher, well, we
Speaker 27: got a lot to learn about this war we're fighting
Speaker 27: and how police practice urban warfare. If you're a lawyer,
Speaker 27: guide us when they say that any fighter is a criminal.
Speaker 27: If you're a digital organizer and keep your finger on
Speaker 27: the pulse and tell our stories far and wide. And
Speaker 27: if you're a community organizer, we need to tend to
Speaker 27: our relationships, not just use them. We need real solidarity
Speaker 27: which goes beyond unity. We need pluralism, making space for
Speaker 27: many strategies to coexist, and ultimately, we need to practice democracy.
Speaker 12: If we plan to build one cop city, is.
Speaker 27: The police and the establishment of preparing for domestic war
Speaker 27: right here in the.
Speaker 12: City of Atlanta's that's right.
Speaker 27: Any further training of the police is training against our existence.
Speaker 12: That shit cannot be built.
Speaker 13: It will best.
Speaker 27: We all must fight for the democracy we've never seen before.
Speaker 27: What are you willing to do? Thank you?
Speaker 2: So, after about an hour of speeches, people are now
Speaker 2: foundly getting ready to move.
Speaker 5: They announced on the.
Speaker 2: Loud speaker where we are going. We are marching to
Speaker 2: the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters on Peachtree, the same location
Speaker 2: that had the front windows broken on the protest following
Speaker 2: the killing of Tortighita that Saturday. So people leave, they
Speaker 2: stick on to the sidewalk because there's cops staring at them,
Speaker 2: and cops that definitely had had indicated that if people
Speaker 2: step on to the street they would be arrested. The
Speaker 2: length of the march is stretching for about two or
Speaker 2: three city blocks, just because you know, trying to cram
Speaker 2: three hundred people onto a sidewalk makes sen stretch out
Speaker 2: really long. But the cops have been pretty pretty adamant
Speaker 2: that if anyone steps onto the street, they're going to
Speaker 2: get arrested.
Speaker 5: That is a banner being carried across that says.
Speaker 2: What you water grows, fund our future, Stop cop city,
Speaker 2: defend the forest. People with the stop cop city signs
Speaker 2: in the Coca Cola font signs that read Atlanta versus
Speaker 2: cop City, No cop city on stolen land. The Thursday
Speaker 2: march definitely had the most amount of signs out of
Speaker 2: all of the individual marches or actions that I want
Speaker 2: to both small handheld signs and also signs with really
Speaker 2: tall handles to hold up above the crowd. All right,
Speaker 2: people are being led into the street now after walking,
Speaker 2: after walking on the hidewalk for a decent while, people
Speaker 2: have now taken to the street along the path of
Speaker 2: the march. The projector was set up projecting like stop
Speaker 2: coop city slogans onto the side of a building, almost
Speaker 2: like really really good graphic design.
Speaker 9: Visuals is definitely a strength of the movement.
Speaker 2: There's this police riot helmet that has a tree growing
Speaker 2: underneath it and breaking apart the helmet. It says trees
Speaker 2: give life, police take it. We got a police riot
Speaker 2: line set up a few blocks ahead of the people
Speaker 2: marching on the street, right next to the building, with
Speaker 2: these with the stop Coop city stuff projected onto the side.
Speaker 2: Rather than let the police do an escalatory show of violence,
Speaker 2: people opted to move back onto the sidewalk to continue
Speaker 2: the march uninhibited. People seem to be moving, sir, back
Speaker 2: onto the sidewalk as they're staring down this riot line,
Speaker 2: and police are now heading back inside. They're white rent
Speaker 2: to bush little vans that they've been staging their riot
Speaker 2: cops out of and they're driving off. People are now
Speaker 2: in downtown Atlanta outside of the Georgia Pacific Center.
Speaker 5: We have like twelve regular police.
Speaker 2: Cars, the two two white vans full of riot cops and.
Speaker 5: Lots of them cops is stage in places I cannot
Speaker 5: currently see.
Speaker 2: All right, We're marching north along Peachtree Street.
Speaker 5: Heading heading to the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Speaker 2: Got the two the two bus Max rented buses full
Speaker 2: of full of riot cops right the side, right beside
Speaker 2: the march. Cops really out of it about not letting
Speaker 2: anybody march in the street. It's funny because a few
Speaker 2: days ago they wouldn't let people stand on the sidewalk either.
Speaker 2: Most of the cops that are surrounding the march right
Speaker 2: now are still in their vehicles, at least from this
Speaker 2: current vantage point. I was opposed to the non violent
Speaker 2: direct active march. I was opposed to the nonviolent direct
Speaker 2: action marches and actions that have happened launching out of
Speaker 2: Woodward Park the past week, in which the police just
Speaker 2: tailed and surrounded the march on foot. I think this
Speaker 2: march is just slightly I think this march is just
Speaker 2: slightly too big to use that tactic, so they're surrounding
Speaker 2: them with vehicles instead. As the march arrived at the
Speaker 2: Atlanta Police Foundation, the hundreds of protesters crammed onto the
Speaker 2: sidewalk were greeted by armed APD officers. Riot police are
Speaker 2: standing in front of the boarded up Atlanta Police Foundation
Speaker 2: headquarters at one nine to one Peach Tree. There is
Speaker 2: a large, large crowd in front of these relatively small
Speaker 2: amount of officers standing in front of the boarded up doors.
Speaker 2: A few dozen cops, some armed with a fifteen's, A
Speaker 2: lot of cops stationed outside the APF headquarters and even
Speaker 2: more stationed inside APF headquarters. Police blocked off traffic in
Speaker 2: the on this section of Peachtree Street, basically sandwiching everybody in.
Speaker 2: They they could have mass arrested as I'm sure they
Speaker 2: wanted to.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the police were ready to mass rest the entire time.
Speaker 5: This is this is kind of a wild sighte.
Speaker 2: We have hundreds of people staring down about three dozen
Speaker 2: officers from the Atlanta Police Department on their fifteen's, obviously
Speaker 2: all of their handguns. For hundreds of hundred of people
Speaker 2: holding signs staring down the police. You can you can
Speaker 2: feel the kind of you can feel the temperature rising
Speaker 2: a little bit here. The cops look very nervous as one.
Speaker 2: Hundreds of people who are chanting at them.
Speaker 5: And I'm not very happy are facing them down.
Speaker 2: They're so they're so close together, We're they're just sandwiched in.
Speaker 2: This is such a tense situation right now. No one
Speaker 2: in the crowd has any visible weapons of any kind.
Speaker 2: Of course, they're holding big signs. Cops have some zip
Speaker 2: cuffs ready, cops have all their guns ready. I was
Speaker 2: able to see inside the building via a small slit
Speaker 2: in the Plywood. There were tons of riot cops inside
Speaker 2: with shields, and all the cops on the inside of
Speaker 2: the building had gas masks strapped to their leg. At
Speaker 2: least one riot cop on the other side of the
Speaker 2: door was wearing a unique armored suit, not like the
Speaker 2: regular police suits with riot armor like on the outside.
Speaker 2: This armored padding was built into the clothing. He had
Speaker 2: these massive, bulky leg pants with armor on the insides
Speaker 2: of them and like a massive riot helmet. He was
Speaker 2: one of those cops who doesn't need a riot shield
Speaker 2: because his body is the riot shield. It was very weird,
Speaker 2: But for those first few minutes, it was a very
Speaker 2: high stress situation in front of the APF building. It
Speaker 2: felt like an neither the crowd nor the police knew
Speaker 2: exactly what was about to go down as a few
Speaker 2: hundred angry protesters were pushed up against a line of
Speaker 2: armed police. But as time went on, you got the
Speaker 2: impression that this crowd was probably not going to initiate
Speaker 2: conflict with the police, and I feel like some of
Speaker 2: the moods maybe kind of died down. Cops are trying
Speaker 2: to kind of move around the crowd a bit. There's
Speaker 2: cops being stationed to the north, to the south, to
Speaker 2: behind the crowd on the other side of the street.
Speaker 2: This could go so many ways right now, This could
Speaker 2: end in so many different scenarios. But people have not
Speaker 2: initiated anything other than standing on the sidewalk and.
Speaker 5: Chanting and giving speeches.
Speaker 2: If you look, there's a small section of the APF
Speaker 2: building where there's still a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of
Speaker 2: glass by one of the doors, and you can see
Speaker 2: lots of cops stationed inside with riot shields. But I
Speaker 2: do not believe this crowd's going to be busting down
Speaker 2: any doors. Camu Franklin, the founder of Community Movement Builders,
Speaker 2: was the last person to speak in front of the
Speaker 2: Atlanta Police Foundation.
Speaker 12: Really know cop city.
Speaker 21: It is nothing but a strategy for over policing our communities.
Speaker 12: We know that cop city is.
Speaker 21: Nothing but a strategy to stop our movements.
Speaker 12: And what movements are those?
Speaker 21: The movements against police follans and terrorism in our community.
Speaker 21: It is in twenty twenty one that they introduced this
Speaker 21: idea to stop, to put cop city out here to
Speaker 21: stop our movements. When people were talking about to fund
Speaker 21: the police, abolish the police, find alternatives of public safety,
Speaker 21: they said, hell no, we want more police, and they
Speaker 21: put that idea out there and the movement was born
Speaker 21: to stop cop City. This moment is two years old
Speaker 21: and it doesn't look like it's going to stop.
Speaker 8: To me.
Speaker 2: By the end, you got this a sense that this
Speaker 2: march did exactly what it wanted to. There were three
Speaker 2: hundred people standing like a foot away from two dozen cops,
Speaker 2: staring them down, giving speeches, chanting. If people wanted to
Speaker 2: other things could have happened. This rally could have resulted
Speaker 2: in many ways, many of them probably very ugly and
Speaker 2: carrying a very high cost.
Speaker 21: The reason we did a march like this today was
Speaker 21: to say to all the nice saves. Black folks don't
Speaker 21: want cop citycaudn't this.
Speaker 12: People don't want cop City. White folks don't want cop City.
Speaker 12: At lanteds don't want cop City.
Speaker 21: Folks from outside Atlanta don't want cop City.
Speaker 12: Nobody in the United States wants cop City. So Morones,
Speaker 12: Citians don't work cops City. The people in America I don't
Speaker 12: want cop City.
Speaker 21: Don't mean in this world don't we work cop City.
Speaker 12: We wanted to make sure that we.
Speaker 21: Came in safety and welieve in safety.
Speaker 12: We wanted to make sure that we.
Speaker 21: Don't have any more political prisoners today. That we wanted
Speaker 21: this to be a march about our unity and our
Speaker 21: safety in numbers, and as we wrap up today, that's
Speaker 21: what we want.
Speaker 12: It's not like we gotta give them an excuse.
Speaker 21: When you are around the cop, the same way when
Speaker 21: you're around the wild animal.
Speaker 12: What do you gotta do.
Speaker 21: You gotta be cautious, you gotta be careful, you gotta
Speaker 21: move a certain way, you gotta know which way to
Speaker 21: go because you're looking to protect your safety and right
Speaker 21: now looking to protect our safety. So as we depart
Speaker 21: here today, we are departing in unity, We are departing together.
Speaker 21: We are gonna walk back in close quarters together where
Speaker 21: our cars work.
Speaker 12: If you're going to Martyr, you're gonna walk close.
Speaker 21: Together with other people as you go to Martyr man
Speaker 21: and pick you up. If you can't take murder two
Speaker 21: blutch this way by deposit.
Speaker 12: So we want you to be safe, secure, because you
Speaker 12: want to be out here again to fight out.
Speaker 2: There was this sense that the people there wanted to
Speaker 2: show that if they wanted to do things, they could have,
Speaker 2: but they knew that this was not this was not
Speaker 2: the right time, nor the right.
Speaker 9: Place, restraint and and understanding of what like practice I
Speaker 9: would say in that situation is.
Speaker 2: And I mean in the speeches that happened beforehand, there
Speaker 2: was people from community movement builders, from Black Votes Matter,
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of other black led groups in the city.
Speaker 2: And similarly, like like like what happened at the clergy event,
Speaker 2: there was not a single whiff of condemnation of militant tactics,
Speaker 2: of of of property, destruction, of actions that people take
Speaker 2: this They people there who gave speeches recognized that such
Speaker 2: tactics were a staple of the civil rights movement. Early
Speaker 2: Saturday morning, I woke up to news that police had
Speaker 2: begun another raid, but instead of raiding the Wallani Forest,
Speaker 2: the police were searching the ten acre property of the
Speaker 2: Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation or LEAF, a local nonprofit that
Speaker 2: was offering safe haven for people during.
Speaker 5: The week of Action.
Speaker 2: All right, so the Atlant police have executed a warrant
Speaker 2: on the LEAF meet up spot in southeast Atlanta that
Speaker 2: people have been using as a welcome center as like
Speaker 2: a medic station and just enough spot to hang out.
Speaker 2: It was set up after the raid Sunday night, and
Speaker 2: it is now Saturday morning. The police have executed this
Speaker 2: warrant to search Parmasis Id everyone who's there. We got
Speaker 2: a group of people it's being able to leave right now.
Speaker 2: There has been a prison transport vehicle called in and
Speaker 2: cops have like blocked off interactions around the area. No
Speaker 2: one's allowed to get close. People are not allowed to
Speaker 2: return to their cars. People are not allowed to return
Speaker 2: to the private property. Since Sunday night, the land was
Speaker 2: being used as a medic hub and provided a secondary
Speaker 2: place to camp for those who didn't feel safe staying
Speaker 2: in the forest. During their raid Saturday morning, police detained
Speaker 2: at least twenty two people and refused to show anyone
Speaker 2: the search warrant.
Speaker 5: And yeah, the group that got released is just walking
Speaker 5: up now. Maybe like two dozen people have been able
Speaker 5: to walk up.
Speaker 28: We just got through their police lines and we're gonna, yeah,
Speaker 28: huddle up and get to a safe place. We were
Speaker 28: woken up by helicopters. There had been helicopters doing rounds
Speaker 28: all evening and I don't even know what time, seven something,
Speaker 28: we heard loud speakers saying that they had a warrant
Speaker 28: to search the property private property.
Speaker 12: And.
Speaker 28: That was very disorienting. Obviously, I was in the middle
Speaker 28: of sleeping. We came out with our hands open, our
Speaker 28: hands up. We had more than twenty guns pointed at us.
Speaker 28: Some people have their fingers on triggers. Certainly they were
Speaker 28: screaming at me. And as I was waking up, we
Speaker 28: came through the line. They said that they had a
Speaker 28: warrant to search the property. We know that Homeland Security
Speaker 28: was one of the departments that was arrested, that was
Speaker 28: part of the arrest crew or extraction crew or whatever.
Speaker 28: It's very traumatic. Obviously, it's freezing. This is the coldest
Speaker 28: day this week, and so we are, you know, worried
Speaker 28: about people's health because people are cold. They detained us,
Speaker 28: they took identification. It was yeah, extremely violent situation, but
Speaker 28: everyone here was really taking care of each other and
Speaker 28: remaining prom.
Speaker 2: To address the raid, activists scheduled a press conference for
Speaker 2: later that day after a youth rally to defend the
Speaker 2: forest was to take place in East Village. And I
Speaker 2: think you can hear said youths in the background, so
Speaker 2: excuse their joyous young screams.
Speaker 3: We thought that it was important for us to not
Speaker 3: only amplify the wonderful children's march that happened here today.
Speaker 3: The community in East Atlanta, this community where they are
Speaker 3: proposing to build COP City, came out this morning overwhelmingly
Speaker 3: to say that they don't want COP City. So we
Speaker 3: had parents, we had children, we had other neighbors and
Speaker 3: community stakeholders who gathered right here in Brownwood Park today
Speaker 3: at East Atlanta to say that we are East Atlanta
Speaker 3: and COP City is not a part of what we
Speaker 3: imagine an envision for this community. Also this morning, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: there is a place that was held as a co
Speaker 3: commune for campers who wanted to stand in solidarity during
Speaker 3: this week of action. The place is called LEIF l EAF.
Speaker 3: That is the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, a nonprofit organization
Speaker 3: that's dedicated to combating food insecurity here within the city
Speaker 3: of Atlanta, offered up their space to be used for
Speaker 3: people who did not feel safe camping in the forest
Speaker 3: because of the over aggression of police there, and they
Speaker 3: wanted to stand in solidarity with this Week of Action,
Speaker 3: So LEIF offered up their space for those people to
Speaker 3: camp safely. Unfortunately, this morning, a gang of police officers
Speaker 3: descended upon that sacred space.
Speaker 2: During the raid up to forty officers swarmed the property,
Speaker 2: ransacking the infrastructure set up at the Leaf Encampment site.
Speaker 2: Cops slashed departs, two medical supply tents, disrupting metal operations,
Speaker 2: broke windows of a camper van parked on the site,
Speaker 2: and ripped apart a greenhouse. Police took pictures of the
Speaker 2: people detained at Leaf and collected their ideas, but after
Speaker 2: being held for several hours, the police let all but
Speaker 2: one person go free. To quote an article by Candice
Speaker 2: Burned in Truth Out Quote, one person was arrested for
Speaker 2: an outstanding parking ticket, demonstrating the state's desperation to snatch
Speaker 2: up anyone associated with the Stop Copcity movement.
Speaker 5: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Marlon Katz.
Speaker 29: I'm an organizer with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, where a
Speaker 29: civil liberties and anti repression organization that exists to make
Speaker 29: sure that people who participate in social movements have the
Speaker 29: right to protest and don't suffer from repression. So the
Speaker 29: reason I'm here is because, as we've all heard previously,
Speaker 29: there was an incident of political repression.
Speaker 5: Early this morning.
Speaker 29: Police executed a search warrant and performed a raid against
Speaker 29: the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, which is a community space
Speaker 29: in Lakewood, Atlanta that exists primarily to serve artists and musicians.
Speaker 29: It's clear that it was part of a political strategy
Speaker 29: to repress and intimidate protesters who are associated with the
Speaker 29: Stop Pop City movement, a movement to defend the forest.
Speaker 29: This is very concerning, especially when taken in context. Of course,
Speaker 29: it's very likely that police are going to report that
Speaker 29: this was part of a routine investigation, a law enforcement.
Speaker 1: Matter that they had every right to conduct.
Speaker 29: The other thing that police are likely to claim is
Speaker 29: that they made an arrest on scene, and our understanding
Speaker 29: is that they did make an arrest due to somebody
Speaker 29: who was there having an old traffic ticket from a
Speaker 29: long time ago. So it's important to clarify that the
Speaker 29: arrest was because of a traffic ticket, not because of
Speaker 29: any alleged crime related to the movement or any other
Speaker 29: serious criminal activity. So it's important that we understand this
Speaker 29: raid as part of a series of ongoing abuses of
Speaker 29: the legal process to harass and intimidate political protesters. They
Speaker 29: were unable to demonstrate any criminal activity during their raid
Speaker 29: on the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, but they're continuing to
Speaker 29: abuse every justification that they can to raid spaces, to
Speaker 29: make arrests and to hold people in jail.
Speaker 3: So before the police come out and say we raided
Speaker 3: this place where all of these outside aggressors were and
Speaker 3: we picked up some violent offenders, we want you to
Speaker 3: know that our brothers and sisters who were standing with
Speaker 3: us in solidarity just saying hey, we want to camp here,
Speaker 3: since we don't feel safe camping in the people's park
Speaker 3: that's been overrun with police repression and aggression.
Speaker 1: They raided that place.
Speaker 3: They snatched people up, some people were sleeping, They took
Speaker 3: pictures of people, they took their IDs, and they searched
Speaker 3: and searched, found nothing else, never produced a warrant, and
Speaker 3: only one person was arrested because of an outstanding parking ticking.
Speaker 2: About a week after the raid, the Guardian obtained evidence
Speaker 2: of the search warrant. The warrant stated that there was
Speaker 2: probable cause for believing that evidence of quote conspiracy to
Speaker 2: commit domestic terrorism unquote could be found at the Lakewood
Speaker 2: location listed in the warrant where objects officers sought, which
Speaker 2: included quote, cameras, radios, boxes of nails, lighters, tents, camping equipment,
Speaker 2: spray paint, black clothing, and literature related to defend the forest.
Speaker 2: These were the materials tied to domestic terrorism. As the
Speaker 2: week progressed, there were an increasing number of reports of
Speaker 2: police tailing people coming and going from a march's and
Speaker 2: especially the actions downtown. Basically, officers would follow people suspected
Speaker 2: of participating in the movement, pull them over, try to
Speaker 2: id anyone within the vehicles, and then issue some nonsense
Speaker 2: traffic citation. This continued on Thursday after the Community Movement
Speaker 2: Builders march, as people were heading home from the public Park,
Speaker 2: police stocked a few individuals and pulled over multiple vehicles.
Speaker 2: A van carrying one of the speakers was targeted, as
Speaker 2: well as two other cars that were pulled over as
Speaker 2: they were leaving the protest. Marlin from the Atlanta Solidarity
Speaker 2: Fund talked about the various ways police had been using
Speaker 2: their power to intimidate activists and suppress protest.
Speaker 29: Our organization has gotten many reports of pretext stops of
Speaker 29: political protesters or people who are suspected of being political protesters,
Speaker 29: of bumper stickers on their car or the state that
Speaker 29: their license plate is from. We've gotten reports of people
Speaker 29: being stop and frisked simply because they're profiled as looking
Speaker 29: like political activists. And of course we've seen dozens of
Speaker 29: protesters or suspected protesters arrested and charged with domestic terrorism
Speaker 29: simply because they were found at a music festival that's
Speaker 29: associated with the stock Coop City movement. And so we
Speaker 29: can see that every step of the way police and
Speaker 29: prosecutors are abusing the legal process to intimidate and discourage
Speaker 29: this movement.
Speaker 9: Throughout this time, police have been watching or monitoring one
Speaker 9: of the off site locations in the forest. They've parked
Speaker 9: in front of this site and kept up surveillance on it.
Speaker 9: And then leading all the way up into Friday, there
Speaker 9: was a journalist pulled over leaving the final non violent
Speaker 9: direct action from Woodriff Park. They were pulled over with
Speaker 9: two other people in the car and detained briefly, ostensibly
Speaker 9: to you know, continue to identify and connect people.
Speaker 2: A big part of the story for this week of
Speaker 2: action is the excess of the police response to quite
Speaker 2: typical acts of quote unquote nonviolent protest, the sort that
Speaker 2: the government and even the police loved to claim that
Speaker 2: they actually protect. With every single action downtown this week,
Speaker 2: virtually no laws were being broken, not even any civil disobedience.
Speaker 2: People were handing out flyers, marching on sidewalks, giving out letters,
Speaker 2: and the police's response was to deploy SWAT, to mobilize
Speaker 2: hundreds of officers, to shut down multiple city blocks, to
Speaker 2: carry ar fifteens as they tail crowds of a few
Speaker 2: dozen people just walking on the sidewalk and yelling at
Speaker 2: people if they accidentally miss step off the curb and
Speaker 2: threaten violent arrest. This was the sort of extremely aggressive
Speaker 2: response to people doing protests quote unquote the right way.
Speaker 9: We should highlight that. That is the apparent goal of
Speaker 9: these protests was to show that even when they are
Speaker 9: doing things the right way, this is how the state
Speaker 9: reacts to dissent.
Speaker 2: It reacts in this militarized fashion where you like it's
Speaker 2: it's I think a big part of what's happened in
Speaker 2: these types of protests that have happened the past week
Speaker 2: is demonstrating why people are campaigning to stop cop City,
Speaker 2: because the sheer amount of resources that the police already
Speaker 2: have in the city to to be deploying hundreds and
Speaker 2: hundreds of officers every single day to respond to people
Speaker 2: handing out flyers.
Speaker 5: It's like to.
Speaker 2: Respond to people who are walking on the sidewalks. They
Speaker 2: have this massive amount of resources. They're using tear gas
Speaker 2: in the woods, they're using paper balls, they're using flash bangs,
Speaker 2: They're they're having multiple different swat teams follow around people
Speaker 2: handing out pamphlets. The level of police militarization in Atlanta
Speaker 2: is already at this extremely high point, and cop City
Speaker 2: is only going to intensify that. And that is the
Speaker 2: reason they want to build cop City. It's for this
Speaker 2: type of urban counterinsurgency training to quell civil unrest and
Speaker 2: to quell protest.
Speaker 3: On Thursday night, we held a very peaceful and successful
Speaker 3: march in downtown Atlanta, starting at the King Center. We
Speaker 3: had someone who was stopped by the police and asked
Speaker 3: if he was picking up protesters taking out of the vehicle,
Speaker 3: handcuffed for no reason. They couldn't find a reason to
Speaker 3: detain him any longer, so they had to let him go.
Speaker 3: But Atlanta, this is why we're standing against cop City,
Speaker 3: because if cop City is built, you can guarantee that
Speaker 3: you won't even be able to go to the grocery
Speaker 3: store without being harassed by the police for no reason
Speaker 3: at all.
Speaker 2: When I spoke with Matthew Johnson, he brought up a
Speaker 2: similar point.
Speaker 8: With the resources that the police had to respond in
Speaker 8: the way that they did. The assertion that the they
Speaker 8: need more training in a militarized facility or they need
Speaker 8: more resources is crazy because you had them literally outnumbering
Speaker 8: protesters and kettling them. And we have credible sources that
Speaker 8: say that there were swat forces who had instructed the
Speaker 8: officers to arrest nonviolent protesters and there were actually police
Speaker 8: officers that refused to take that order, which I think
Speaker 8: is another fascinating dynamic that is worth exploring and understanding more.
Speaker 8: But just with the resources that they had to try
Speaker 8: to shut down protesters, harass folks, constantly, ticket and pull
Speaker 8: over people that they saw, you know, creating like a
Speaker 8: logistical framework for the week of action is nuts, and
Speaker 8: they're making our point for us. Like on Fry, the
Speaker 8: word came out that Tortu Ghita had bullet holes through
Speaker 8: both of their palms and that they were more than
Speaker 8: likely sitting cross leg with their hands up when they
Speaker 8: were shot by police. And now we are supposed to
Speaker 8: be convinced that these people that lied about this killed
Speaker 8: somebody that was absolutely no threat to them. On the
Speaker 8: same grounds that they're trying to build this police training facility.
Speaker 8: We're supposed to believe that this is going to make
Speaker 8: them less violent towards people, like as you're building a
Speaker 8: militarized police training facility and like people that try to
Speaker 8: convince themselves that these is going to be a place
Speaker 8: where people are also being taught de escalation tactics while
Speaker 8: like everything around it is militarized. It's like if you
Speaker 8: had somebody build a water park and you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 8: I'm just trying to stay dry, I don't want to
Speaker 8: get splashed or anything like that, and it's like, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 8: don't worries. We have a food court right in the
Speaker 8: middle of it, and it's great. You're really just coming
Speaker 8: there for the food court, so don't worry about it.
Speaker 8: And then like you go there and then you get splashed.
Speaker 8: What were you expecting? Like, that's obviously not what that
Speaker 8: facility's for because all the infrastructure around it is made
Speaker 8: to be a water park or a militarized police training facility.
Speaker 8: So don't be surprised when maybe they might have one
Speaker 8: de escalation program and like you know where the food
Speaker 8: court would be, and then somebody gets killed, right, because
Speaker 8: they're actually building the infrastructure for killing. So that's where
Speaker 8: we're at.
Speaker 2: This Week of Action has shown a lot about how
Speaker 2: the police are operating post the twenty twenty uprising, how
Speaker 2: they will respond to people exercising their First Amendment right,
Speaker 2: and the indiscriminate way that police will respond to any
Speaker 2: active protest. One of the main takeaways from this week
Speaker 2: is that their response to protest is deployed against people
Speaker 2: without target or focus. They care very little if you
Speaker 2: are breaking a window or if you're marching on the sidewalk,
Speaker 2: They're still gonna send the swat team. Police are acting
Speaker 2: as if they are entirely incapable of differentiating between acts
Speaker 2: of descent. Toward the end of the week, I sat
Speaker 2: down and talked with an unnamed forest defender to get
Speaker 2: their thoughts on the Week of Action. For security reasons,
Speaker 2: we did a vocal replacement.
Speaker 30: The police presence has been pretty unprecedented. I haven't seen
Speaker 30: shit like that here since twenty twenty, not downtown at least,
Speaker 30: I mean shit, I don't think we had seen gas
Speaker 30: in Atlanta in a minute. And then they gassed the forest.
Speaker 30: It'd been a while, but yeah, I mean they're punching out,
Speaker 30: especially like Tuesday, they were putting out one hundred and
Speaker 30: fifty two hundred cops the entirety of downtown. I mean
Speaker 30: multi jurisdictional task forces deployed, multiple different Atlanta APD SWAT
Speaker 30: teams between like regular APD SWAT and APEX, which is
Speaker 30: like the Drug and Gang Interdiction Unit. I mean a
Speaker 30: fucking whole drone unit, GSP, some unmarked cars that I
Speaker 30: won't speculate on, helicopters, all that shit, you know, the
Speaker 30: type of police response you would expect to see in
Speaker 30: like a dystopian fucking police state. For some people handing
Speaker 30: out flyers that just say this is bad for the environment,
Speaker 30: doesn't matter how milk toast or not, and like I
Speaker 30: shouldn't say milk toasts, like that's not a bad thing.
Speaker 30: We need people to go hand out flyers. We need
Speaker 30: to inform people as far as what this is to
Speaker 30: get people involved. But like as non violent as you
Speaker 30: can get, and still they're going to treat you like
Speaker 30: your fucking al Qaeda, you know, and it puts you
Speaker 30: in a weird position because then it's like, okay cool.
Speaker 30: If you're going to treat us the exact same for
Speaker 30: being nonviolent, why not do crime. If the police response
Speaker 30: to an assault on an outpost that drove the police
Speaker 30: out and burned five things down, the police response to
Speaker 30: fifteen people handing out flyers downtown are going to be
Speaker 30: about the same, then why not take more militant radical action.
Speaker 2: The twenty three people arrested on Sunday, March fifth were
Speaker 2: not arrested as anyone was torching equipment. They were not
Speaker 2: arrested at the power line cut. It was people who
Speaker 2: were attending a music festival. Arrests were not widely targeted
Speaker 2: against people who police knew were engaged in property destruction.
Speaker 2: They were targeted against anyone the cops could grab. Same
Speaker 2: was the case at the January twenty first action, where
Speaker 2: people were marching downtown the saturday after Tortugita was killed.
Speaker 2: The only people arrested and subsequently charged with domestic terrorism
Speaker 2: was anyone the police could get their hands on. Officers
Speaker 2: went after people who were carrying banners the entire duration
Speaker 2: of the march. It was not targeted against people who
Speaker 2: were engaged in militant action. Among all this talk of
Speaker 2: police repression and multiple raids. It's easy to overlook that
Speaker 2: throughout the week people still sought opportunities for finding joy
Speaker 2: and resistance, because most people wouldn't dedicate years of their
Speaker 2: life to this if it was just miserable battles with
Speaker 2: police the whole time.
Speaker 9: I think one thing that's been lost in all of this,
Speaker 9: too is all of the light heart events that have
Speaker 9: continued to go on through the week, and like the
Speaker 9: joy of the movement that was represented in the Bouncy
Speaker 9: Castle rip.
Speaker 2: But that joy is continuing in the woods, like people
Speaker 2: still continue to camp in the woods. People are still
Speaker 2: having dinner in the woods. People are still having camp fires,
Speaker 2: people are still talking the woods. It is still a
Speaker 2: place that people are gathering at and are enjoying each other.
Speaker 2: Is company in now are enjoying the woods in it
Speaker 2: It is a place that the morale has never been
Speaker 2: fully crushed.
Speaker 9: The morale has never been fully crushed, and like the
Speaker 9: participatory acts of the Week of Action, are continuing like
Speaker 9: none of that has been quashed.
Speaker 2: An example of the joyful continuous resistance during the Week
Speaker 2: of Action can be found at the youth rally that
Speaker 2: happened on Saturday the eleventh.
Speaker 5: All right, so I'm at.
Speaker 2: The youth rally Saturday after the warrant was served on
Speaker 2: the meetup spot in southeast Atlanta. There's around two hundred
Speaker 2: people marching through East Village in Atlanta. Pretty pretty joyous
Speaker 2: group here actually, and they're actually like on the streets.
Speaker 5: This is the first time we've had a large march
Speaker 5: like this take to.
Speaker 2: The streets because every action that was in downtown or
Speaker 2: midtown Atlanta was just so heavily surveilled by police who
Speaker 2: were not letting anyone get near the street at all.
Speaker 5: But there's no police here.
Speaker 2: They were busy doing the search war and so this
Speaker 2: group is actually is actually able to take to the streets.
Speaker 2: It's like everyone kind of in this area of Atlanta
Speaker 2: is pretty pretty pro pro this little protest here. There's
Speaker 2: like workers from the little shops and stores nodding along
Speaker 2: Bullen County Shares.
Speaker 9: Just walked by the march like on there, just you know,
Speaker 9: off shift workout routine, wearing Fulden County gear.
Speaker 5: That's pretty funny.
Speaker 2: People dancing in the streets, Families walking with their kids
Speaker 2: through the streets all right, walking around the park that
Speaker 2: the Youth rally started at and the press conference about
Speaker 2: the raid this morning just ended at There's as you
Speaker 2: can probably.
Speaker 5: Hear kids playing in the park.
Speaker 2: People are handing out food, a massive, massive amount of
Speaker 2: food just in the middle of the park, with levels
Speaker 2: the table set up. Overall, this is kind of one
Speaker 2: of the more joyous events that we've had since the
Speaker 2: initial Saturday rally at Gresham Park, just with the amount
Speaker 2: of food, the amount of kids just running around and playing,
Speaker 2: all the information tables that are handing out literature and
Speaker 2: giving you know, making connections with people. Yeah, when I
Speaker 2: was down here in January, the mood was very somber.
Speaker 2: The mood was very grim like coming to the vigil
Speaker 2: when there was the destroyed remains of the gazebo, the
Speaker 2: torn up parking lot, all of the trees in there
Speaker 2: still within their like winter state, with all of the
Speaker 2: leaves gone. Everything was very kind of barren. And the
Speaker 2: first thing I noticed on Saturday as we were marching
Speaker 2: is like there's new life springing in the woods. There's
Speaker 2: this invigorated sense of the almost assurance of victory that
Speaker 2: people are carrying with them as they take action, And
Speaker 2: I think that really does change what the action you
Speaker 2: take is and that does change the types of results
Speaker 2: that people will see, is if they go at this
Speaker 2: with the idea that we are going to win this.
Speaker 9: And I think that that is kind of why the
Speaker 9: non violent direct actions have become like that have moved
Speaker 9: to the foe.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 9: When you think that you're going to lose and you
Speaker 9: have nothing to lose, you engage in these incredibly radical
Speaker 9: actions because what else are you going to do? Yeah,
Speaker 9: and then when you have this belief that no, we
Speaker 9: can win, we just have to find that pathway.
Speaker 2: And that is a part of the diversity of tactics
Speaker 2: is using both of those and almost every ecological movement
Speaker 2: that's been successful has demonstrated that the pathway to success
Speaker 2: is often paved with a diversity of tactics, with people
Speaker 2: doing non violent action at noon, which will pull a
Speaker 2: massive militarized police response as people are doing regular ass shit.
Speaker 2: And then a part of diversity of tactics is also
Speaker 2: people leaving a music festival to go torch a bulldozer,
Speaker 2: and both both of those things are a diversity of tactics.
Speaker 2: Now I stand by most of that statement. However, issues
Speaker 2: can arise when there is a ticking clock, and during
Speaker 2: the time spent looking for this pathway, the enemy meanwhile
Speaker 2: is making steady progress. Issues may also arise when a
Speaker 2: large diversity of tactics is shoved under just one roof.
Speaker 2: I had a lot of conversations with movement participants regarding
Speaker 2: the direct action that happened on Sunday night and how
Speaker 2: it cast a shadow of repression over the whole week
Speaker 2: of action. To synthesize the many conversations. In general, most
Speaker 2: people thought that what physically happened was good. The actual
Speaker 2: actions at the North Gate were successful and justified. But
Speaker 2: there are other things on the piferree of that action
Speaker 2: that make it slightly more complicated.
Speaker 8: And now we can have lots of questions about tactics
Speaker 8: and cost benefit analysis about that action, which I did
Speaker 8: not think it would be wise, especially being so visible
Speaker 8: for me to have to be anywhere near on that day.
Speaker 8: We can have questions about that. But what was for
Speaker 8: certain was that the way in which the police responded
Speaker 8: was absurd and predictably so. Now with the destruction that
Speaker 8: I saw, etc. Cost them less than a million dollars
Speaker 8: and maybe like two weeks actually of construction that they
Speaker 8: were pushed back max. These are like max numbers. Was
Speaker 8: that worth twenty three people being arrested and quaching what
Speaker 8: could have been a larger occupation and wider participation and
Speaker 8: wider buying in the movement. Instead, by the time we
Speaker 8: got to Monday, the clergy was having to do clean
Speaker 8: up rather than like cast division of what the world
Speaker 8: could be. And so these are tradeoffs right where even
Speaker 8: though we have to be very clear about what a
Speaker 8: diversity of tactics means and also a separation of time
Speaker 8: and space. So I mean, we can't just look at
Speaker 8: a diversity of tactics and everybody does what they want
Speaker 8: as if they're operating in asylum. But rather we give
Speaker 8: space for one another to do different things that may work,
Speaker 8: respectful of the fact that some of our actions may
Speaker 8: affect one another.
Speaker 2: In the lead up to the Week of Action, nighttime
Speaker 2: sabotage actions decreased around Atlanta in favor of these big
Speaker 2: public demos during daylight. That seems to result in more
Speaker 2: people getting arrested. And what are the results of Sunday's
Speaker 2: action happening in such close proximity to the festival and
Speaker 2: the encampments, is that the people at the festival and
Speaker 2: in the woods who did not consent to participating in
Speaker 2: a high pro file direct action got disproportionately hit with
Speaker 2: the immediate repression from police. A lot of the people
Speaker 2: who were arrested were completely unaware of the actions that
Speaker 2: took place at the North Gate. Even if those actions
Speaker 2: were one hundred percent justified in the end, it still
Speaker 2: creates a dynamic with an unequal distribution of police violence. Now, obviously,
Speaker 2: the woods are an inherently dangerous place to be, and
Speaker 2: people are not responsible for actions that police choose to take,
Speaker 2: but there are still considerations to be had regarding the
Speaker 2: proximity of space and time when engaging in more risky actions,
Speaker 2: and how the consequences of those actions may affect people
Speaker 2: who did not consent to participating in actions at other locations,
Speaker 2: especially when people are lulled into a false sense of
Speaker 2: safety by claiming that police have never cracked down hard
Speaker 2: in the forest during previous weeks of action.
Speaker 30: In terms of the actions done Sunday, in reference to
Speaker 30: a group of people assaulting a like police position, driving
Speaker 30: them out with force, and then burning their shit, that
Speaker 30: was all good, and we should not denounce that or
Speaker 30: step away from it. It only harms the movement to
Speaker 30: back away from radical action and act like there are
Speaker 30: definitions of good or bad protesters, because eventually the logical
Speaker 30: conclusion of that is snitching, and that only furthers like
Speaker 30: the GBI's motivations to tear the movement apart. What went
Speaker 30: wrong Sunday is as a result of two things. It's
Speaker 30: one that the police used indiscriminate violence when people beat them.
Speaker 30: They were beaten, they got angry, and they were beaten
Speaker 30: because they got their shit rocked by like fireworks. And
Speaker 30: then they use in discriminate violence against people who they
Speaker 30: knew were on the side of where the events were
Speaker 30: that weren't where all the militants were coming back from.
Speaker 30: They didn't want to go up against those people because
Speaker 30: they're cowards. And second, because of how big the movement's
Speaker 30: gotten over the past two years, the strategy of the
Speaker 30: Weeks of Action has stagnated. It's made it so work,
Speaker 30: so compact in a singular week that when you have
Speaker 30: all the diversity of tactics that exists within defend the
Speaker 30: Atlanta Forest and stop Coop City, those tactics with how
Speaker 30: big everything is now, they start to step on each
Speaker 30: other's toes. They can hurt each other sometimes because yeah,
Speaker 30: not everyone who was at the RC field was like
Speaker 30: ready for the consequences of like a militant radical action
Speaker 30: like that. And that doesn't mean that the action wasn't
Speaker 30: good or justified because the action was wildly successful. There
Speaker 30: were no arrests made at that action. There were a
Speaker 30: rest made when the police got angry and used indiscriminate
Speaker 30: violence because they were pissed off and they wanted.
Speaker 2: To riot, so they retaliated at a music festival that
Speaker 2: was happening nearby.
Speaker 30: Yes, and that's the fault of nobody but the police.
Speaker 30: That's not the fault of the people who went and
Speaker 30: assaulted that outpost. That's only the fault of the police,
Speaker 30: and really the fault of a bad long term strategy
Speaker 30: of two heavily compacting factors of you know, being just
Speaker 30: like a weak and where making it so this movement
Speaker 30: where people can take radical action, it feels so limited
Speaker 30: to just inside the forest because that puts people in
Speaker 30: harm's way, and that put people in harms way, including
Speaker 30: the people who so you know, went and did the
Speaker 30: thing on Sunday. But no, it would be wrong as
Speaker 30: the movement to like balk out a radical action like that.
Speaker 30: Radical action like that is such a big part of
Speaker 30: why this movement has been as successful as it has been.
Speaker 30: It's a huge part of why the police didn't do
Speaker 30: like a full sweep or a larger sweep or a
Speaker 30: series of raids in the following days because they were
Speaker 30: afraid that those three hundred to four hundred people who
Speaker 30: hit that out posts were lying and waiting in the
Speaker 30: forest ready to attack them, because they were afraid of
Speaker 30: militant radical action.
Speaker 2: On Thursday, when I was in front of the APF building,
Speaker 2: I could like hear some of the supervisors and coordinators
Speaker 2: talking about being scared of ambushes or like being scared
Speaker 2: of splinter groups like being staged to attack officers. It's
Speaker 2: it's bizarre how fearful they are of the types of
Speaker 2: people who are opposing the Cop City project.
Speaker 30: The most afraid of the people who are willing to
Speaker 30: go do physical violence to them, and not even physical violence,
Speaker 30: but people who are just willing to like throw a
Speaker 30: rock at them or like a firework. Once they realized
Speaker 30: that they haven't paralyzed somebody with fear, Once they realized
Speaker 30: that they have not made you so afraid of taking action,
Speaker 30: they become such cowards.
Speaker 2: In the aftermath of the police killing forest defender Tortigita,
Speaker 2: law enforcement agencies tried to claim that Tortighita shot at
Speaker 2: them first, leaving one officer injured, but recently released findings
Speaker 2: from multiple autopsies have cast more doubt on the state's
Speaker 2: version of events. On the afternoon of Friday, March tenth,
Speaker 2: towards the end of the week of action, the family
Speaker 2: of Tortighita released the findings of an independent autopsy done
Speaker 2: by former GBI Chief Medical Examiner doctor Chris Sperry. The
Speaker 2: results suggested that Tortighito was sitting cross legged with their
Speaker 2: hands in front of their face when shot, and bullet
Speaker 2: exit wounds through the palms of both of their hands.
Speaker 2: The family ordered autopsy also did not find any evidence
Speaker 2: of gunshot residue from a GSR test kit, and then
Speaker 2: a month later, De Cab County released the results of
Speaker 2: their official autopsy, which found at least fifty seven bullet
Speaker 2: wounds across Tortiguita's body, and according to this autopsy, torte
Speaker 2: did not have any gunpowder residue on its hands. Then,
Speaker 2: a few days later, via a public records request, the
Speaker 2: Atlanta Community Press Collective received the gunshot residue test kit
Speaker 2: from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's crime lab. The document
Speaker 2: contained the names of six Georgia State Patrol SWAT members
Speaker 2: who shot and killed Tortighita, Bryland L. Myers, Jerry A. Parish,
Speaker 2: Jonathan Salceda, Jonathan Mark Lamb, Ronaldo Kegel, and Royce Zaw,
Speaker 2: with Zaw being the subject of a lawsuit after he
Speaker 2: shot a protester in the face with a less lethal
Speaker 2: round during the George Floyd protests in May of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: The document also included the results of the GBI's crime
Speaker 2: lab report claiming that they found quote the presence of
Speaker 2: more than five parts characteristic of gunshot primer residue unquote
Speaker 2: from a test kit, with the report also stating, quote
Speaker 2: it should be noted that it is possible for a
Speaker 2: victim of gunshot wounds to have GSR present on their
Speaker 2: hands unquote, considering that among the more than fifty seven
Speaker 2: gunshot wounds were entrance and exit wounds on Tortighita's hands,
Speaker 2: which could be cause for gunshot residue. If the crime
Speaker 2: lab findings are genuine. The findings do not point to
Speaker 2: any specific interpretation of events, as it's not unusual to
Speaker 2: find primer residue on the hands of a victim following
Speaker 2: the path of a bullet. Plus, coupled with the ever
Speaker 2: changing story from the GBI on the ground chatter from
Speaker 2: APD officers claiming that Georgia State Patrol quote fucked their
Speaker 2: own officer up quote, as well as reports from forced
Speaker 2: defenders from the day of the shooting, there is indication
Speaker 2: that Georgia State Patrol most likely suffered from so called
Speaker 2: friendly fire, with many people believing that the killing Tortighita
Speaker 2: was essentially an execution instant. Reports obtained via public records
Speaker 2: requests also revealed that GSP fired a quote unquote, a
Speaker 2: Leslie thal pepperball gun at Torteghita's tent as Swat initially approached,
Speaker 2: once again contradicting the claims made by GBI officials in
Speaker 2: the months since the killing. As the week came to
Speaker 2: a close on Sunday, March eleventh, a memorial service for
Speaker 2: Tortighita was held in the Malani forest, where Tort's family
Speaker 2: spread their ashes in the forest it died to protect
Speaker 2: I attended the Sunday morning memorial. The sky opened up
Speaker 2: and poured down rain in South Atlanta throughout the whole morning.
Speaker 2: Hundreds of people gathered in Wolanne People's Park to light
Speaker 2: candles under a canopy and hear from Towrt's family. Then,
Speaker 2: led by Tortighita's mother, we walked through the forest to
Speaker 2: the site of the shooting, where a banner hung that read,
Speaker 2: quote on this ground gsp assassinated forest defender, comrade, friend,
Speaker 2: lover Tortigita unquote. Family and friends spread Tortigita's ashes throughout
Speaker 2: the woods along the path to quote Candice burned in
Speaker 2: truth out. In contrast to its tumultuous start, Sunday's vigil
Speaker 2: and ceremony provided a somber and heartfelt close to the
Speaker 2: fifth Week of Action. I met up with Matthew Johnson
Speaker 2: after the memorial to discuss the Week of Action, and
Speaker 2: we briefly touched on the memorial in the forest.
Speaker 8: I think that we have to hold space for very
Speaker 8: real grief. We lost a friend, and at the same time,
Speaker 8: just two days ago, on a Friday, what we always
Speaker 8: knew to be true was found to clearly true. Torte
Speaker 8: Ghita was murdered and we have to bear the brunner
Speaker 8: of that pain. And all the people in power lied
Speaker 8: and even gave their condolences to a state trooper that
Speaker 8: seemed as if he was shot by a state trooper
Speaker 8: and did not say a mumbling word to even acknowledge
Speaker 8: our friend's existence and the value of their life. And
Speaker 8: this morning was beautiful. I had been able to meet Bilkish,
Speaker 8: Tortighita's mother previously, and as she really does have a
Speaker 8: beautiful spirit. I've really grown appreciation for that family, and
Speaker 8: just to see just how large these gatherings were like
Speaker 8: throughout the week, even in spite of the hoopla and
Speaker 8: the opening weekend, it was very encouraging. But in a
Speaker 8: lot of ways, Tortigita has become the face of this
Speaker 8: movement because they really did light up wherever they were.
Speaker 8: One thing that's gotten me through thinking about when you
Speaker 8: would just see them sometimes and they would just give
Speaker 8: you the biggest, like cheesiest smile, like out of no where.
Speaker 2: I just.
Speaker 8: And like that like got me through the first week
Speaker 8: after their passing. Yeah, but I've grown a great appreciation
Speaker 8: for that family because in so many ways, Tortigita is
Speaker 8: their hero, and just to learn how consistent they were
Speaker 8: as like such a welcoming and loving and caring person
Speaker 8: just meant so much. I mean to know that this
Speaker 8: wasn't something new that they had stumbled upon. They had
Speaker 8: lived this whole life of caring and making space for others.
Speaker 2: Some of Towards friends have raised concerns that a side
Speaker 2: effect of Toward unwittingly becoming the face of the movement
Speaker 2: is that the details around their death have eclipsed some
Speaker 2: of what they died fighting for in doing so, stripping
Speaker 2: toward of their individuality and removing their own agency to
Speaker 2: turn them into this perfect liberal friendly avatar of the
Speaker 2: movement to simply be used as a political tool and
Speaker 2: add to a list of demands.
Speaker 30: There's a thing that's been happening more and more recently
Speaker 30: that I've been bothered by, which is when organizations, specifically
Speaker 30: more liberal organizations, are invoking Towards Name actions, they're misgendering
Speaker 30: the hell out of them, and it's alienating a lot
Speaker 30: of people. And I understand that Sunday's action alienated a
Speaker 30: lot of liberal orgs. This is a problem with the
Speaker 30: week of Action type strategy, with the diversity of tactics
Speaker 30: all being forced under one roof. But we cannot stand
Speaker 30: to alienate each other. And it's really frustrating and really
Speaker 30: angering to see this really beautiful soul be flattened into
Speaker 30: just a murder that they liberals want them to be,
Speaker 30: stripping them of so much of their life and what
Speaker 30: was a revolutionary life and a revolutionary death into just martyrdom,
Speaker 30: by taking away their identity and who they were and
Speaker 30: making them nothing more than someone who was murdered when
Speaker 30: they were someone who was living such a full and
Speaker 30: beautiful life until the day they died. And this movement
Speaker 30: will tear itself apart if we do not accept the
Speaker 30: fullness of towards life, what it stood for, and what
Speaker 30: they live for. This movement has always been built on
Speaker 30: a lot of trans people in the woods fucking the
Speaker 30: cops up, and if we alienate those people were fucked,
Speaker 30: there's no winning and we can't lose. We don't have
Speaker 30: a choice about this anymore. We have to win by
Speaker 30: any means necessary.
Speaker 2: That will wrap up our day to day coverage of
Speaker 2: the entire week of action, But much has happened in
Speaker 2: the intervening two months, So in the next episode we'll
Speaker 2: cover where the movement is now, discuss the future of
Speaker 2: the fight to Stop Cop City, and offer a more
Speaker 2: critical retrospective on the fifth Week of action. See You
Speaker 2: on the other Side Music festival audio courtesy of Unicorn Riot.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to It could Happen Here. This is a
Speaker 2: bonus fifth episode following my coverage of the Stopcop City
Speaker 2: Week of Action in March of twenty twenty three. This
Speaker 2: will be a more critical retrospective on the week as
Speaker 2: a whole and offer a glimpse into what the movement
Speaker 2: might look like in the next few months as we
Speaker 2: are rapidly approaching summer. In the last episode, we talked
Speaker 2: about the police repression of protests and demonstrations as they happen,
Speaker 2: but we have yet to mention the various methods of
Speaker 2: state repression the movement is facing day to day. Repression
Speaker 2: for the Week of Action started well before the kickoff
Speaker 2: rally in Gresham Park. Emails from early February obtained via
Speaker 2: public records requests found that the Atlanta Police Foundation and
Speaker 2: its contractors were waiting for quote indictments to the leaders
Speaker 2: unquote of the Stopcob City and Defend the Atlanta Forest
Speaker 2: Movement to quote the Atlantic Community Press Collective. In a
Speaker 2: February third email to APF board members, the director of
Speaker 2: Public Affairs, Rob Baskin, calls the defend the Atlanta Forest
Speaker 2: and stop Coop City movement a quote conspiracy of protesters
Speaker 2: against the public Safety Training Center, investigated by a consortium
Speaker 2: of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Unquote. Baskin
Speaker 2: promised the APF board in an email quote that the
Speaker 2: recent arrests our receipt of the land and disturbance permit,
Speaker 2: the mayor's announcement of the project will be moving forward,
Speaker 2: and the continued investigation by lawnfes Horsement will dampen activists' efforts.
Speaker 2: We will likely see more indictments in the coming weeks unquote.
Speaker 2: Back in February, Brestfield and Gory, the general contractor for
Speaker 2: the project, planned to mobilize for land clearing around April,
Speaker 2: but told the Atlanta Police Foundation that subcontractor bidding wouldn't
Speaker 2: happen quote until indictments have happened unquote, And then, of course,
Speaker 2: a few weeks later, twenty three people were charged with
Speaker 2: domestic terrorism at a music festival. Matt from the Atlanta
Speaker 2: Community Press Collective talked about the history of domestic terrorism
Speaker 2: charges in the movement and how they affected bail proceedings.
Speaker 9: The domestic terrorism charges go back to the middle of December,
Speaker 9: that's when the first of them happened, and up until
Speaker 9: the week of Action, there have been a total of
Speaker 9: nineteen arrest or individuals who have been charged with domestic terrorism.
Speaker 9: And then of those people, anyone who did not have
Speaker 9: either a Georgia license or could not prove like Georgia residency,
Speaker 9: they were all initially denied bond, but everyone who lives
Speaker 9: here they were able to get bond. Before the bond hearing,
Speaker 9: we're kind of there are discussions that there's no way
Speaker 9: that they're going to hold twenty three people without bond
Speaker 9: with on such flimsy evidence.
Speaker 2: That's the most people that have been like arrested and
Speaker 2: held in one day. It really is in relation to
Speaker 2: the movement so far.
Speaker 9: Yeah, this is the largest mass arrest of the movement,
Speaker 9: So it's kind of inconceivable for twenty three people to
Speaker 9: be held without bond. So we get to the bail hearing,
Speaker 9: the first person has their mother come on. Their lawyer
Speaker 9: brings their mother on, who swears essentially on like every
Speaker 9: religious text ever written, that her child will immediately go
Speaker 9: home with her and she will personally bring her child
Speaker 9: back to every court hearing, and her child will have no,
Speaker 9: you know, further contact with the movement and all of
Speaker 9: these things. And the judge denies the bond. So at
Speaker 9: that point it's like, okay, there, you know, I guess
Speaker 9: we're going to go back to the old thing. If
Speaker 9: you can't prove residency, you're you're you're not getting out.
Speaker 9: It was like person number five is from Athens, Georgia,
Speaker 9: which is about an hour outside of Atlanta, and the
Speaker 9: judge denies her bond, not because the judge thinks she's
Speaker 9: a flight risk, but because she is a threat to
Speaker 9: the community. And that was the moment where the understanding changed.
Speaker 9: It was like, oh no, like nobody's getting out of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this isn't this isn't a real this
Speaker 2: isn't a real bond.
Speaker 12: Here.
Speaker 2: At the press conference after the leaf raid, Comeal Franklin
Speaker 2: from the Community Movement Builders spoke about it the years
Speaker 2: of state repression against people fighting to stop cop City.
Speaker 31: This movement has been repressed by the states, by the
Speaker 31: city since its very beginnings, where we first started organizing
Speaker 31: in twenty twenty one, where we had rallies in demonstration,
Speaker 31: we would have police break them up, throw people to
Speaker 31: the grounds, pepper stray them, and arrest them. We had
Speaker 31: over twenty arrest in our first years of rallying and
Speaker 31: demonstrating against cop City. At the time, those folks were
Speaker 31: charged with resisting arrests obstruction of governmental administration. And then
Speaker 31: the police decided to step up their tactics and they
Speaker 31: started to form a task force, a task force that
Speaker 31: included the Atlanta Police to Dekap County Police, the Georgia
Speaker 31: Bureau of Investigation, Georgia State Troopers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Speaker 31: and Homeland Security, where they began to talk about bringing
Speaker 31: charges of domestic ties against organizers and activists.
Speaker 5: And so now we're coming to a.
Speaker 31: Point where they're raiding houses, where they're telling organizers and
Speaker 31: activists that they can't stand on corners and legally give
Speaker 31: out leaflet.
Speaker 9: And then the judge kept saying like, I'm not here
Speaker 9: to hear anything on evidentiary claims and I'm not here
Speaker 9: to engage with the domestic terrorism Statute. Like both of
Speaker 9: those were I think very valid things that defense attorneys
Speaker 9: kept bringing up because.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're problematic.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the defense attorneys mentioned that the way people
Speaker 2: are being charged with domestic terrorism right now doesn't really
Speaker 2: have any legal basis in the state of Georgia, because
Speaker 2: the terrorism law works as like an enhancement for other
Speaker 2: felonious charges, and these people aren't being charged with anything
Speaker 2: besides domestic terrorism. There's no evidence these people committed any
Speaker 2: actual crimes, so they're just being charged with terrorism. This
Speaker 2: like nebulous concept. The judge said that the legal basis
Speaker 2: of these claims will have to be decid another day. Similarly,
Speaker 2: they said that in regards to actual evidence that these
Speaker 2: people charged did any crimes, she said that she had
Speaker 2: none of this evidence in front of her and that
Speaker 2: evidence is for another day. One of the main reasons
Speaker 2: the judge said that defendants were denied bond was due
Speaker 2: to quote a lack of ties to community in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: But regarding this ties to the community aspect, the judge
Speaker 2: had this weird double standard. There was this one person
Speaker 2: arrested and charged who lives with their partner in Atlanta,
Speaker 2: who also had ties to another state where they had
Speaker 2: previously lived. So despite them having ties to the community
Speaker 2: in Atlanta, which was one of the main things the
Speaker 2: judge considered for this one individual. They were still denied
Speaker 2: bond on the basis that this individual also has ties
Speaker 2: to a different community, thus deeming them a flight risk
Speaker 2: even though they currently live in Atlanta. One of the
Speaker 2: reasons that the judge mentioned is based on the arrest
Speaker 2: warrants that she was given for whise people were a
Speaker 2: threat to the community, is that the state claims that
Speaker 2: they were in possession of metal shields as they were
Speaker 2: being arrested. You know, shields, the the offensive weapon that
Speaker 2: that shows that you are a threat you holding a shield.
Speaker 2: And so first of all, that's that's that's funny on
Speaker 2: us on that on that level.
Speaker 9: When you and I were coming in on Saturday and
Speaker 9: along with the march, we passed by a bunch of shields,
Speaker 9: right and they were kind of placed near the end
Speaker 9: of the path, like in anticipation that there might be
Speaker 9: police presence. And I took pictures of the shields and
Speaker 9: they are evidently plastic shields. There's no way of mistaking
Speaker 9: them for anything other than plastic.
Speaker 2: The plastic five gallon shields that you see at almost
Speaker 2: every protest in every city across the country. The cops
Speaker 2: know what these things are. That the fact that they
Speaker 2: claimed that people were arrested carrying metal shields is so
Speaker 2: ludicrous because there was not There was not a single
Speaker 2: metal shield at this festival. And there's a lot of
Speaker 2: footage of these arrests. I don't there's I've not seen
Speaker 2: evidence that every that any person was arrested that was
Speaker 2: carrying a shield, let alone a metal one.
Speaker 9: There's this weird thing where so typically when you do
Speaker 9: these these bail hearings, the defense attorneys waive the reading
Speaker 9: of the warrant, typically because they have already gone over
Speaker 9: that with their client and you know, everybody's aware, and
Speaker 9: it just kind of speeds up the process. And it
Speaker 9: was like really notable that these attorneys weren't doing it,
Speaker 9: and once you started to listen to them, you notice
Speaker 9: this very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway
Speaker 9: through we get to a lawyer who straight up calls
Speaker 9: out the fact that these warrants seem like they were
Speaker 9: just copy pasted.
Speaker 2: For like every single person all the way down line.
Speaker 2: During the first hearing, only one person was let out
Speaker 2: on bail and they were an NLG legal observer and
Speaker 2: lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center. After the week
Speaker 2: of action, on March twenty third, there were a second
Speaker 2: set of bail hearings for ten of the people arrested
Speaker 2: on March fifth at the South River Music Festival. In
Speaker 2: a rare move, the second in command of the State
Speaker 2: of Georgia's Attorney General's Office, John Fowler, was deployed to
Speaker 2: argue against granting bond. Fowler, along with several top county prosecutors,
Speaker 2: weaved a complex narrative of a grand conspiracy of protesters
Speaker 2: dating back to twenty nineteen, saying that the quote unquote
Speaker 2: organization behind Defend the Forest is responsible for quote one
Speaker 2: hundred incidents nationwide unquote. Fowler claimed that the force defenders
Speaker 2: are a well funded group with millions of dollars hiding
Speaker 2: behind five oh one c three nonprofit organizations, and that
Speaker 2: the so called autonomous zone at the Wendy's where Rayshard
Speaker 2: Brooks was murdered in twenty twenty is a part of
Speaker 2: the same organization. Fowler also tempted to tie the use
Speaker 2: of laser pointers in the forest to a racial justice
Speaker 2: protests in twenty twenty, as well as a sophisticated communication
Speaker 2: network of prepaid phones, telegram channels, proton mails, and rise
Speaker 2: up accounts. Prosecutor lance Cross stated that the quote unquote
Speaker 2: leader of the Defend the Lanta Forest movement never actually
Speaker 2: goes into the forest. Okay, So, to paraphrase a friend
Speaker 2: of mine. As potentially dangerous as claims like these are,
Speaker 2: it will never stop being funny that the state just
Speaker 2: simply cannot conceive of horizontal organizing as like a real
Speaker 2: thing that exists and not just a smoke screen for
Speaker 2: this shadowy cabal of protesters. Prosecutor Lance Cross claimed that
Speaker 2: anyone at the music festival is a party to the
Speaker 2: crime of the direct action that took place around one
Speaker 2: and a half kilometers away at the construction site, and
Speaker 2: that after the direct action, individuals left to return to
Speaker 2: the other side of the woods, crossing over the creek
Speaker 2: and changing out of their black block. For the first
Speaker 2: defendant at this hearing, Prosecutor Cross said that there's police
Speaker 2: helicopter video of this first person changing out of their
Speaker 2: black block. But when asked by the judge if the
Speaker 2: state has any evidence that this defendant did anything illegal,
Speaker 2: not just change clothing in a forest, the prosecutor was
Speaker 2: unable to provide any such evidence. This defendant received a
Speaker 2: twenty five thousand dollars bond with a stay away from
Speaker 2: Georgia order and a no contact order with any co
Speaker 2: defendants or anyone associated with the defend the Atlanta Forest movement.
Speaker 2: Only one other defendant was granted bond during this hearing,
Speaker 2: a second year law student who was arrested as they
Speaker 2: were eating food at a food truck. At the hearing,
Speaker 2: they presented letters of support from Tibetan monks, a former mayor,
Speaker 2: numerous academics, and Charlotte's mayor pro tem was on the call.
Speaker 2: Bond was also set at twenty five k along with
Speaker 2: having to surrender their passport, were an ankle monitor, and
Speaker 2: maintain no contact with co defendants nor join any future protests.
Speaker 2: To paraphrase my friend again, these are old Green Scare
Speaker 2: tests back in action and kicked into high gear. Courts
Speaker 2: are being used as a meat cleaver to hack off
Speaker 2: and isolate people from their communities, regardless of evidence. This
Speaker 2: is the type of repression that courts were born to do.
Speaker 2: Much of the repression we're seeing in Atlanta is a
Speaker 2: revamped version of the Green scare with additional tactics and
Speaker 2: knowledge the state gained from the twenty twenty protests, including
Speaker 2: the targeting of jail support and bail fund organizations. Another
Speaker 2: thread in this grand cabal of Forest Defender's narrative that
Speaker 2: the state was trying to weave was that prosecutors claimed
Speaker 2: that having an Atlanta Solidarity Fund jail support number on
Speaker 2: your person is evidence of criminal intent and that the
Speaker 2: Solidarity Fund is quote being investigated as a part of
Speaker 2: this whole thing, unquote. The majority of the eight individuals
Speaker 2: denied bond were not even found to be at the
Speaker 2: site of the direct action, and none of the eight
Speaker 2: individuals had any evidence against them showing they committed any
Speaker 2: crime at that location, but were still deemed a risk
Speaker 2: to the community and denied bond. Being held against them
Speaker 2: is the fact that they had a jail support number
Speaker 2: on their person. As former communications director at the Southern
Speaker 2: Center of a Human Rights hannah' riiley said, it is
Speaker 2: a gross irony that a jail support number is being
Speaker 2: framed as evidence of intent to commit crimes, where in
Speaker 2: fact it's evidence that we live in a horrifying police estate.
Speaker 2: A defense attorney pointed out that all of the warrants
Speaker 2: had the same bits of evidence copy pasted like this
Speaker 2: alleged possession of a metal shield, to which the prosecution
Speaker 2: claimed this was simply a typo, meaning that people were
Speaker 2: being held in jail based on typos, and also the
Speaker 2: prosecutor responded by saying, quote, there were thirty forty fifty
Speaker 2: shields out there, I can't attest that he was carrying one.
Speaker 2: When referring to a specific defendant. For one individual denied bond,
Speaker 2: prosecutors claimed that they were an anarchist based on information
Speaker 2: provided by Customs and Border Protection, and yet no evidence
Speaker 2: of criminal acts were presented. Extra scrutiny was put on
Speaker 2: two defendants who were foreign nationals, with prosecutors wondering how
Speaker 2: someone from out of country could possibly know the solidarity
Speaker 2: funded jail support number. A defense attorney tried to point
Speaker 2: out that jail support numbers are often passed out to
Speaker 2: everyone present at protests by volunteers, and in the case
Speaker 2: of the circumstances regarding the raid of the music festival,
Speaker 2: Panicked concertgoers were instructed to write down the jail support
Speaker 2: number as it became clear that police were indiscriminately grabbing people.
Speaker 2: Deputy Attorney General Fowler argued that wearing black clothes at
Speaker 2: a protest is akin to wearing a football uniform, indicating
Speaker 2: a player was part of the team who took to
Speaker 2: the field.
Speaker 5: During the game.
Speaker 2: And even if we may not know they carried the football,
Speaker 2: we do know that they were on the field, which
Speaker 2: I don't even want to get into, but it is
Speaker 2: still a fact that the majority of people were denied
Speaker 2: bond because some had black clothing, mud on their shoes
Speaker 2: and ran from police. This is what made them a
Speaker 2: quote unquote threat to our community, and this is the
Speaker 2: evidence being used against people who were allegedly engaged in
Speaker 2: domestic terrorism. Near the end of the hearing, the judge
Speaker 2: claimed that everyone is presumed innocent and that the state
Speaker 2: does have to bear the burden of proof beyond a
Speaker 2: reasonable doubt at some point, but not now. During this
Speaker 2: spelle hearing, one of the claims was that the reason
Speaker 2: why people were arrested is because they had mud on
Speaker 2: their clothes. The night before the festival started, there was
Speaker 2: a tornado warning in Atlanta. I've forgotten about that, and
Speaker 2: there was rain, which makes I don't know if the
Speaker 2: prosecutors know this, but when rain mixes with dirt, they
Speaker 2: creates something called that we refer to as mud. So
Speaker 2: when people are at this music festival in a field
Speaker 2: full of dirt, they might get mud on their clothes.
Speaker 9: And yeah, so if you've ever been to a music festival,
Speaker 9: standing around for a very long period of time, really annoying,
Speaker 9: people like to sit down. So I like, my feet
Speaker 9: were caked in mud, and I sat down a few times.
Speaker 9: I'm I'm my docker partments are still caked in mud.
Speaker 9: Not to mention, the parking lot completely torn up, covered
Speaker 9: in mud, and as I mentioned earlier, the you know
Speaker 9: the person having like fill in mud all along the
Speaker 9: trails with gravel. So there's mud everywhere, and it is
Speaker 9: an inescapable fact of just being in both the forest
Speaker 9: and the festival.
Speaker 2: At the time of the bail hearings, they've very clearly
Speaker 2: had no evidence linking individuals to crimes. So the best
Speaker 2: they could come up with was metal shields and mud,
Speaker 2: two things, two things that are completely nonsense. There was
Speaker 2: no there was no metal shields. And oh wow, you
Speaker 2: have mud on your you have mud on your clothing.
Speaker 2: This is why you're a terrorist. During the hearing, a
Speaker 2: defense lawyer alleged that the twelve people who were detained
Speaker 2: at the music festival but not arrested and were later
Speaker 2: released at Gresham Park were all from Atlanta, and by
Speaker 2: releasing these twelve locals, police can claim that the people
Speaker 2: arrested were from fourteen different states, which is obviously part
Speaker 2: of an attempt to continue accelerating the outside agitator narrative
Speaker 2: that they've been pushing out since last in December.
Speaker 9: Of the twenty three who were charged, only two had
Speaker 9: the Georgia licenses, the person from Athens and the legal observer.
Speaker 9: The rest were out of state and two were out
Speaker 9: of country. So at one point during the proceedings the
Speaker 9: bail proceedings, one of the lawyers says that from what
Speaker 9: they understand, the twelve individuals who were let go Sunday
Speaker 9: night all had in state licenses, So it does appear
Speaker 9: that APD released people to continue this outside agitator narrative
Speaker 9: that they have been using for month now, since since May,
Speaker 9: since early summer.
Speaker 2: Prosecutor Cross responded to claims that detained local Atlantan's were
Speaker 2: let go by saying that the people released were interviewed
Speaker 2: did not have the jail support number on their arm
Speaker 2: and quote unquote knew little about the movement. At a
Speaker 2: press conference, Marlin from the Solidarity Fund talked about how
Speaker 2: repression has taken form and concerns of what other tactics
Speaker 2: the state may try to employ.
Speaker 29: No evidence has been presented to support any of these
Speaker 29: claims of domestic terrorism, including on the other eighteen people
Speaker 29: who've been given this charge previously. In this movement, police,
Speaker 29: some prosecutors are not involved in a law enforcement effort.
Speaker 29: They're involved in a political campaign to suppress a political movement,
Speaker 29: which they find objectionable because as the police, they have
Speaker 29: a vested interest in the construction of copcity. From a
Speaker 29: civil liberties perspective, we find this very concerning. We find
Speaker 29: it to be an abuse of power, and we're committed
Speaker 29: to ensuring that all of that activists who are targeted
Speaker 29: have access to the legal resources that they need not
Speaker 29: only to defend themselves from these bogus charges, but also
Speaker 29: toue civil litigation against police who have abused their power
Speaker 29: and violated people's rights. We are concerned about the possibility
Speaker 29: that prosecutors may try to use RICO charges against organizers
Speaker 29: because RICO is understood as a way of suppressing organizations,
Speaker 29: and the narrative that we've seen coming from police and
Speaker 29: prosecutors is their belief that the broad and diverse Stock
Speaker 29: Cop City movement is in fact a criminal conspiracy whose
Speaker 29: members conspire to commit acts of terrorism.
Speaker 1: This could not be further.
Speaker 5: From the truth.
Speaker 29: This is like a clear misrepresentation of a broad movement
Speaker 29: that encompasses all of society. But this is the narrative
Speaker 29: that prosecutors are trying to promulgate to make it easier
Speaker 29: to target activists.
Speaker 2: In the intervening month and a half, five more people
Speaker 2: were let out on bond. Then on May third, a
Speaker 2: side the series of preliminary hearings took place for the
Speaker 2: last three people being held into Cab County Jail from
Speaker 2: amongst the twenty three individuals arrested at the music festival
Speaker 2: and charged with domestic terrorism. Before the changes to the
Speaker 2: law in twenty seventeen, the State of Georgia required ten
Speaker 2: or more people to be killed for domestic terrorism charges
Speaker 2: to even be filed. During a wave of anti protest bills,
Speaker 2: while citing racially motivated mass shootings to get the bill passed,
Speaker 2: the State of Georgia removed any death threshold and essentially
Speaker 2: replaced it with references to property damage. To quote a
Speaker 2: write up by the Atlantic Community Press collective quote, Decab
Speaker 2: County Magistrate Judge James Altman explained that he decided whether
Speaker 2: to uphold the charges based on two criteria. The first
Speaker 2: was whether prosecutors provided enough evidence to satisfy the conditions
Speaker 2: set forth in the Georgia Domestic Terrorism Statute, namely the
Speaker 2: threat to critical infrastructure. The second criteria prosecutors needed to
Speaker 2: meet was identification, or their ability to show that the
Speaker 2: defendants were each a party to the alleged crimes committed
Speaker 2: on March fifth, unquote, and it's worth noting that the
Speaker 2: threshold for probable cause is much lower than the threshold
Speaker 2: needed to convict someone of a crime. In opening arguments,
Speaker 2: Assistant Da Lance Cross claimed that Defend the Forest activists
Speaker 2: are well funded and quote have a pretty good propaganda
Speaker 2: arm on social media, and that doing direct action while
Speaker 2: chanting stop Coopcity qualifies activists to be charged under the
Speaker 2: Georgia Domestic Terrorism Statute because it's using violence to advocate
Speaker 2: change of government policy. Judge Altman found that the first
Speaker 2: criteria of the domestic terrorism charges were met for all
Speaker 2: three defendants on the basis that setting fires at the
Speaker 2: construction site in such close proximity to a power line
Speaker 2: tower was an attack on critical infrastructure, even if the
Speaker 2: defendants did not themselves start any fires. Georgia Bureau of
Speaker 2: Investigation Special Agent Ryan Long testified that the entire music
Speaker 2: festival was cover for the direct action against the construction site,
Speaker 2: even without evidence of defendants in black bloc or proof
Speaker 2: that they engaged in any destructive acts. Assistant da Cross
Speaker 2: said that everyone at the site was enabling the destruction
Speaker 2: of the property and as such is party to the crime.
Speaker 2: Due to the assertion that the alleged crimes were only
Speaker 2: possible due to the large size of the crowd, one
Speaker 2: of the state's witnesses, a sergeant of the APD, said
Speaker 2: that he wouldn't be able to recognize anyone who was
Speaker 2: at the site and that he could not tell if
Speaker 2: the defendant was even in the crowd of people at
Speaker 2: the north gate, let alone through rocks or set fires.
Speaker 2: Defense argued that mere presence at a location should not
Speaker 2: be automatic aiding and a betting, but Judge Altman said
Speaker 2: there was a sufficient evidence presented showing the acts of
Speaker 2: the crowd and that the defendant's presence is at least
Speaker 2: sufficient for being party to the crime even by simply
Speaker 2: participating at the music festival.
Speaker 5: One of the.
Speaker 2: Hearings was for the indigenous person who was tased at
Speaker 2: the music festival, who was specifically witnessed to be there
Speaker 2: during the duration of the direct action. Under questioning from
Speaker 2: the defense, special Agent Long said that the defendant was
Speaker 2: not visible on the helicopter footage of the incident. After
Speaker 2: initially suggesting that the defendant was identified by a helicopter pilot,
Speaker 2: Long rolled that back by saying he was unsure if
Speaker 2: the chopper was able to track the defendant and then
Speaker 2: had to leave to go make a few calls to
Speaker 2: get a more definitive answer, which he failed to provide,
Speaker 2: But the judge still found that the second criteria of
Speaker 2: identification was sufficient to find two of the defendants at
Speaker 2: least party to the actions at the construction site. Special
Speaker 2: Agent Long testified that there is a quote unquote command
Speaker 2: structure in the Stop Coop City movement and described the
Speaker 2: movement as a pyramid scheme created by activists with different
Speaker 2: names like stop Coop City and Defend the Forest to
Speaker 2: act as little different subgroups to attract new subordinate members
Speaker 2: to opt to under leadership. Long asserted that activists pretend
Speaker 2: to be ecologists one day and then anarchists the next
Speaker 2: to further their cause, which, once again we have to
Speaker 2: point out, is on one hand, a dangerous thing to claim,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, extremely funny. Social media posts were
Speaker 2: brought up by prosecutors as evidence linking defendants to criminal
Speaker 2: acts and a conspiracy of terrorism. During the first hearing,
Speaker 2: special Agent Long claimed that they knew that the defendant
Speaker 2: was at the construction site due to street Pol camera
Speaker 2: footage and social media posts allegedly made by the defendant's friend.
Speaker 2: In another hearing, agent Long claimed that on the defendant's
Speaker 2: social media they were posts of stop coop City banners
Speaker 2: and flyers, demonstrating an awareness of the nature of the
Speaker 2: stop cop City movement. The state also cited alleged social
Speaker 2: media posts of the defendant self describing as anti capitalist
Speaker 2: and anti colonial as proof of criminal intent. Near the
Speaker 2: end of the last hearing, Judge Altman said that social
Speaker 2: media posts do not count towards probable cause. However, the
Speaker 2: framing of social media posts by prosecutors as an indication
Speaker 2: of guilt is still cause for alarm, and what gets
Speaker 2: admitted as evidence during trial is still yet to be determined.
Speaker 2: When the prosecution asked if a defendant had a jail
Speaker 2: support number on their arm, the judge noted that, quote,
Speaker 2: the existence or non existence of an organization doesn't really
Speaker 2: seem to me as an element of the crime unquote.
Speaker 2: Similar to the March twenty third hearings, Prosecutor Johnson tried
Speaker 2: to argue that the solidarity fund and jail support is
Speaker 2: an arm of this top Copcity movement, to which the
Speaker 2: judge reiterated that participation in an alleged organization is not
Speaker 2: part of the crime of domestic terrorism. For one defendant,
Speaker 2: the judge granted bond on the conditions of twenty five
Speaker 2: thousand dollars bail, with the defendant having to turn over
Speaker 2: her passport, a no contact order with other co defendants,
Speaker 2: and no participation in discussion of stop Kopcity on social media.
Speaker 2: Bond for the other two defendants was denied. Ultimately, Judge
Speaker 2: Altman upheld the domestic terrorism charges against all three defendants
Speaker 2: on the low barrier of evidence sufficient for ruling probable cause.
Speaker 2: Judge Altman said that quote, whether it gets any further
Speaker 2: than that is not my problem, unquote, and that if
Speaker 2: the DA wanted further charges brought against defendants, he must
Speaker 2: use a grand jury. As the judge did not find
Speaker 2: probable cause for arson or assault on an officer, Judge
Speaker 2: Altman mentioned that he was concerned about alleged witness intimidation
Speaker 2: by members of the Defend the Forest movement. Meanwhile, in
Speaker 2: the adjacent Fulton County, there was also a preliminary hearing
Speaker 2: for one of the six people arrested at the protest
Speaker 2: in downtown Atlanta on January twenty first, the saturday following
Speaker 2: the killing of Tortighita. Judge Ashley Drake upheld a total
Speaker 2: of eight charges, including one of domestic terrorism, and the
Speaker 2: next day the defendant was released on bail. One thing
Speaker 2: of note from this hearing is that Deputy Attorney General
Speaker 2: John Fowler compared the Defend the Forest movement to nine
Speaker 2: eleven by saying, quote, protesters were trying to knock out
Speaker 2: the windows of one to nine to one Peachtree Street.
Speaker 2: That is a dangerous situation. That's a twin towers unquote.
Speaker 2: When talking about the various hearings, I mentioned helicopter and
Speaker 2: street pole camera footage of the direct action on Sunday
Speaker 2: that both prosecutors and the defense were using to support
Speaker 2: their claims, and I think it's worth diving a bit
Speaker 2: deeper into specifically the police helicopter footage, since I like
Speaker 2: keeping up with the methods that police are using to
Speaker 2: surveil and suppress pro test.
Speaker 5: I'm going to start by.
Speaker 2: Letting Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum walk us through what
Speaker 2: was able to be observed via helicopter mounted cameras based
Speaker 2: on his testimony during the city council meeting that took place
Speaker 2: less than twenty four hours after the incident.
Speaker 17: Individuals were seeing changing out of the clothes that they
Speaker 17: were wearing at the concert and were now dressing themselves
Speaker 17: in all black with backpacks with items fensive nature approaching.
Speaker 17: What we saw is this group moved rather quickly to
Speaker 17: the site for the proposed public Safety trading center. They
Speaker 17: move quickly on the group of officers that were assembled there.
Speaker 17: These officers had been stationary at the site protecting the location.
Speaker 17: In the first line, there are individuals with shields that
Speaker 17: are forming The officers attempted to first to de escalate
Speaker 17: by repositioning themselves thank you repositioning themselves inside of the
Speaker 17: fenced in area. The officers again start to reposition because
Speaker 17: they can tell this is not a peaceful demonstration.
Speaker 14: You just start to.
Speaker 17: See smoke occurring as fires are set, maltav cocktails are thrown,
Speaker 17: and fireworks are discharged from our air unit that is
Speaker 17: deployed in the area. You will see individuals that have
Speaker 17: started to move against the officers. They will have start
Speaker 17: throwings fireworks as they are pushing the officers in the
Speaker 17: area where we see individuals as another group is engaging
Speaker 17: the officers with rocks, Malotov cocktails and bottles are moving
Speaker 17: to set fire to the various equipments that in the area.
Speaker 17: What you see in the left hand of the gentleman
Speaker 17: with the mask over his face is a Malotov cocktail.
Speaker 17: There will be accelerants in his hands that will be
Speaker 17: used also to attack some of the construction equipment that
Speaker 17: is in the area. These individuals are massed hide their identity.
Speaker 17: This is playing out across the area that had been
Speaker 17: previously been fenced in.
Speaker 14: There will be generators.
Speaker 17: That are will be destroyed, other pieces of equipment that's
Speaker 17: being destroyed. There you see more accelerant being thrown onto
Speaker 17: the vehicle that is being set on fire. And what
Speaker 17: you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some of
Speaker 17: the individuals that had just previously attacked the work site
Speaker 17: return back into the woods, they start changing back into
Speaker 17: the clothes that they were just wearing moments before, as
Speaker 17: they were portraying themselves to be attendees of the event
Speaker 17: that was occurring in the music. So it was clear
Speaker 17: today that we saw repeat of what we've seen in
Speaker 17: the past, where events that are shown to be peaceful
Speaker 17: and to be being publicized as to be peaceful are
Speaker 17: being used by individuals as cover to launch illegal and
Speaker 17: criminal attacks. We had a rapid response from our partners
Speaker 17: at the Decab County Police Department, the Sheriff of Fulton County,
Speaker 17: as well as the Georgia State Patrol. Those officers entered
Speaker 17: into the woods as individuals were attempting to flee, hide
Speaker 17: the weapons they had just used, as well as to
Speaker 17: change their clothing, and we began to make a number
Speaker 17: of arrest.
Speaker 2: I spoke with the unnamed Forest defender about the surveillance
Speaker 2: capabilities of the state on full display during the week
Speaker 2: of action.
Speaker 30: I find that thermal helicopter video fascinating for a variety
Speaker 30: of reasons. One, it's interesting to look at the surveillance
Speaker 30: capacity of the state. It's to my memory, the first
Speaker 30: time the EAT has ever posted their own thermal chopper footage.
Speaker 30: It's a very similar camera to the type you would
Speaker 30: see on a birector on some kind of armed unmanned
Speaker 30: aerial vehicle. What I found most interesting about the thermals
Speaker 30: is exactly how they were using that type of targeting
Speaker 30: software to attract people, and I think it's worth people
Speaker 30: knowing what they were doing with it so we have
Speaker 30: an idea how to counter it. When you're using a
Speaker 30: software to tract targets on optical lens, at least during
Speaker 30: a daytime event. Thermals are easier because it breaks the
Speaker 30: image up into just two colors white and then like
Speaker 30: black and gray, so they can track the body heat
Speaker 30: shapes of people in white and then just click the
Speaker 30: thermals off, get a snapshot of the outfit they're wearing,
Speaker 30: click the thermals back on, and track them easier than
Speaker 30: it is to track them with just a normal camera.
Speaker 30: This gives them a clear image of what they're wearing
Speaker 30: before they d blocked, and then they can go back
Speaker 30: to tracking that person, follow them to where they're de blocking,
Speaker 30: wait for them to deplock it, another picture with the
Speaker 30: regular camera, and then arrest them. So that meant that
Speaker 30: when people were leaving, it was advantageous to be deplocking
Speaker 30: under overhead cover, under thick brush, under thick canopy, out
Speaker 30: of direct line of site with the chopper, you know,
Speaker 30: not in the open air. It's definitely a really hard
Speaker 30: thing to counter. The surveillance State's one of the things
Speaker 30: that I find the most fearful about the police state.
Speaker 30: Not like individual beat cops. They're guns and shit are
Speaker 30: cool or whatever, but man, those cameras they're really something.
Speaker 30: You know, I think the Portland Police Bureau just got
Speaker 30: a new spy plane and new Sessna loaded up with
Speaker 30: surveillance equipment and shit like that. All that stuff does
Speaker 30: so much more to fuck you up than just like
Speaker 30: a riot team does. You can throw mortars at a
Speaker 30: riot team. Sorry I shouldn't say mortars. Fireworks that are
Speaker 30: called mortars.
Speaker 13: My bad.
Speaker 30: Don't want to lean into the explosives narratives. Honestly, they're
Speaker 30: fucking weird about fireworks. But you know, those surveillance capacities
Speaker 30: are one of the hardest things to counter.
Speaker 2: One term that's already come up during our coverage of
Speaker 2: stop Coop City is Fuco's boomerang, And while that still
Speaker 2: applies here, we're now also kind of getting into some
Speaker 2: panaptocon territory as shown by this type of surveillance capacity,
Speaker 2: specifically at actions. And one of the biggest reasons why
Speaker 2: the panopticon works is that people are scared of it.
Speaker 2: It scares you away from even taking action in the
Speaker 2: first place.
Speaker 30: And like, as soon as you overcome that paralyzing fear,
Speaker 30: the cops become really afraid of you. That's why we
Speaker 30: say that like the biggest that the state has his fear,
Speaker 30: because like the cops go from these big, fucking tough
Speaker 30: guys to like whining cowards. The second you just become
Speaker 30: not afraid, you don't even have to beat them, you
Speaker 30: don't have to overcome the actual physical weapons. But once
Speaker 30: you get out of that headspace, that paralyzing fear, once
Speaker 30: you let it pass over you and through you, they're
Speaker 30: fucking terrified. And if we're gonna win, we need to
Speaker 30: be their worst nightmare.
Speaker 2: As state repression against the stop cop City movement continues,
Speaker 2: the coalition against the police training facility only continues to grow.
Speaker 2: Last month, Angela Davis returned an award proclamation given to
Speaker 2: her by the Atlanta City Council in protest of cop City.
Speaker 10: If the attempts by the Atlanta Police to build the
Speaker 10: largest police training grounds in the country are successful, this
Speaker 10: will represent a major setback for the movement for radical
Speaker 10: democratic futures, not only throughout the US, but globally well.
Speaker 10: As a person who has participated in campaigns against prisons
Speaker 10: and police for far longer than a half century, I
Speaker 10: want to salute all those who are involved in the
Speaker 10: stop cup City movement, and I want to urge people
Speaker 10: everywhere to find ways to generate support for them.
Speaker 2: Angela Davis made it clear that she stood in solidarity
Speaker 2: with force defenders facing repression from the police and the
Speaker 2: city of Atlanta, and joined in calls to halt the
Speaker 2: construction of this facility, which will only serve as a
Speaker 2: tool to advance what she called militarized police racism and repression.
Speaker 10: Atlanta activists are on the front lines of the abolitionist movement,
Speaker 10: at its crucial intersection with movements to save our forests, indeed,
Speaker 10: to save our planet. The attempt to build a massive
Speaker 10: militarized police training facility is a dangerous and ominous development
Speaker 10: that we have to oppose with all our might. And
Speaker 10: so I want to join those who are standing strong
Speaker 10: in defense of the forest against the construction of this
Speaker 10: police training ground. I urge people everywhere to join the
Speaker 10: campaign to stop Cop City.
Speaker 2: After Angeliae Davis's announcement, the Walter Rodney Foundation released a
Speaker 2: statement supporting Davis's decision and against the construction of Cop City.
Speaker 9: It's interesting to see their more mainline sort of center
Speaker 9: or center left like organizations that have begun to come
Speaker 9: on board. Even with what happened Sunday and especially the
Speaker 9: Thursday march and rally, had it necessitated a response from
Speaker 9: the city. So Friday morning there was actually an organization
Speaker 9: Concerned Black Clergy who had a press conference like calling
Speaker 9: out Cop City protesters, and so you had this like
Speaker 9: very state run. One of the city council members, Antonio Lewis,
Speaker 9: was there like live streaming at the entire time. And
Speaker 9: so you can tell the efficacy of a lot of
Speaker 9: things that have happened this week by how the city
Speaker 9: is reacting and how like it is necessitating them going
Speaker 9: to greater and greater lengths to try to show that
Speaker 9: the movement is wrong.
Speaker 2: One way that the city has been working to advocate
Speaker 2: for the further development of the cop City project is
Speaker 2: by launching a website of their own for the Public
Speaker 2: Safety Training Center, full of videos of the mayor and
Speaker 2: police chief walking through South Atlanta trying to convince neighbors
Speaker 2: that the project is a good In the past few months,
Speaker 2: the city has also been turning the official City of
Speaker 2: Atlanta Twitter account into a hilarious Coppcity propaganda outlet. About
Speaker 2: two weeks after the end of the Week of Action,
Speaker 2: on March twenty fourth, to Cab County CEO Michael Thurmond
Speaker 2: announced an executive order to indefinitely close Entrenchment Creek Park,
Speaker 2: also known as Wahlani People's Park, claiming that the park
Speaker 2: was a danger to the public due to booby traps
Speaker 2: allegedly found in the forest. At a press conference, Thurman
Speaker 2: displayed photos of wooden boards with nails sticking out of
Speaker 2: them allegedly found in the park. The executive order reads
Speaker 2: that the park will quote remain closed until further notice
Speaker 2: to protect the safety of the families, residents and visitors
Speaker 2: and their pets in the area, and to county personnel.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 2: A few days after the announcement to CAB police led
Speaker 2: a joint task force in a raid of the Wallani
Speaker 2: Forest and Entrenchment Creek Park. The land was effectively of
Speaker 2: all force defenders, with one person being arrested. During the raid,
Speaker 2: The memorial for Tortigito was destroyed by the police, and
Speaker 2: cement barricades were set up around the entrances and exits
Speaker 2: to the park. Days later, police and contractors began cutting
Speaker 2: trees in the Willanne Forest, with no one around to
Speaker 2: resist the destruction. The Solidarity Fund to put out a
Speaker 2: statement saying, quote, closing down a public park in order
Speaker 2: to prevent protests from happening in that space is unconstitutional.
Speaker 2: To CAB CEO Michael Thurmond, is trying to do an
Speaker 2: end run around the First Amendment quote. Dacab County Commissioner
Speaker 2: Ted Terry is pushing to reopen the park through a
Speaker 2: resolution expected to be introduced in early May. But it
Speaker 2: wasn't just the park's closure that made force defense more challenging.
Speaker 2: After the mass action at the North Gate in early March,
Speaker 2: security was greatly increased at the construction sites in the
Speaker 2: Willanne Forest, with massive spotlights illuminating the area to daylight
Speaker 2: levels twenty four hours a day, which made returning to
Speaker 2: the sort of nighttime sabotage actions in the forest that
Speaker 2: pioneered some of the movements militancy in its early days
Speaker 2: to be much more complicated. During my conversations with forest defenders,
Speaker 2: there was still a desire to see more of those
Speaker 2: of small sabotage actions, as the large daytime mass actions
Speaker 2: seemed to result in more people getting arrested near the
Speaker 2: site of militant activity.
Speaker 30: People are angry, you know, like their friend, our friend
Speaker 30: was murdered. You can just feel however you want about this,
Speaker 30: but like a lot of people, and I guess myself included,
Speaker 30: are just really angry. There's this kind of blinding rage
Speaker 30: that comes with it of just like eye for an eye,
Speaker 30: blood for blood. You know that the police killed our
Speaker 30: friend and that they need to hurt for that one,
Speaker 30: and they need to hurt for all the people that
Speaker 30: they've murdered and all the things they're trying to do,
Speaker 30: And that leads people to take actions that may not
Speaker 30: be well thought out, but that are very well intentioned
Speaker 30: and have tangible results that hurt the police state, but
Speaker 30: that are actions that do bring harm to themselves or others,
Speaker 30: because there are not you know, these like middle of
Speaker 30: the night slash and run sabotage attacks that don't have
Speaker 30: arrests happen that are safer, and I think we should
Speaker 30: see a return of that tactic because the level of
Speaker 30: police presence that we saw at all the actions this
Speaker 30: week post Sunday, like doing shit at downtown protests, fuck that, Like,
Speaker 30: that's not like we're not pulling shit off there without
Speaker 30: a mass arrest or like everyone's getting gassed. Like it's
Speaker 30: not a tactically advantageous or viable way of doing things.
Speaker 30: But I think people wanted to prove to the cops
Speaker 30: that like, no, no, no, we could open field fuck
Speaker 30: them up. And yeah, there were consequences to that, but
Speaker 30: people fuck them up in the open field, and that's
Speaker 30: worth a plotting.
Speaker 2: The bounds of the forest is not the only location
Speaker 2: actions take place. Just about a week after the park
Speaker 2: closure and when some of the clear cutting began, a
Speaker 2: report back was posted online that read quote, on the
Speaker 2: night of Wednesday, April fifth, we set fire to three
Speaker 2: Excavators owned by Brent Scarbro Company on a site across
Speaker 2: from the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta. Brent Scarborough is the
Speaker 2: company and individual responsible for clear cutting the Willani Forest.
Speaker 2: Copcity will never be built, unquote. The March twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three Week of Action was always going to be a
Speaker 2: kind of turning point in showcasing what will be seen
Speaker 2: in the struggle to defend the forest to this spring,
Speaker 2: and how that will then lead into the summer, and
Speaker 2: what forms of resistance people will choose to take, whether
Speaker 2: that be another singular week of action or taken notes
Speaker 2: from the Old Earth First playbook and try to do
Speaker 2: a whole summer of action. How do you kind of
Speaker 2: see the movement too Top Cup City like changing or
Speaker 2: evolving in the next few months. I mean, because all
Speaker 2: this is kind of felt like it's been kind of
Speaker 2: very much on the heels of what happened in January.
Speaker 2: People have tried to, like, you know, just try to
Speaker 2: find new paths of resistance in the wake of the
Speaker 2: police killing. How do you see like the fight continuing
Speaker 2: at this stage where like they have some land of
Speaker 2: Germans permits, there's early construction. What are like the avenues
Speaker 2: of resistance that people are trying to go down.
Speaker 8: I think that we have to be very clear and
Speaker 8: assessing what has worked installing the project and what will
Speaker 8: work to stop the project, because those aren't necessarily the
Speaker 8: same things. I think there are nuances in particular strategies.
Speaker 8: There is a difference between, especially in our particular context.
Speaker 8: That's similar between the difference between gorilla warfare and urban
Speaker 8: guerrilla warfare. And I say that guerrilla warfare is more
Speaker 8: so when people have been destroying equipment, you know, at contractors,
Speaker 8: you know, offices or wherever, or like near the forest,
Speaker 8: et cetera, and you could just hide off into the
Speaker 8: woods and just like disappear back into nothingness. Nobody gets touched.
Speaker 8: What we have to look at with the actions at
Speaker 8: the music festival were it exposed a lot of people.
Speaker 8: And this is once again because the police acted so
Speaker 8: heavy handedly. But we also know that the police act
Speaker 8: heavy handedly, which is why we're here. So that gets
Speaker 8: kind of dicey because that's like kind of like urban
Speaker 8: guerilla warfare where you have the gorillas just shooting paw
Speaker 8: Pa pal and then like running into somebody's grandma's house.
Speaker 8: People do not fuck with the people that just running
Speaker 8: Grandma's house for cover, right, And that's where things get
Speaker 8: a little bit dicey, because in many ways, a lot
Speaker 8: of us were looking at means to open up the
Speaker 8: movement with this week of action, and that was what
Speaker 8: was widely understood for a lot of people. And nevertheless,
Speaker 8: when you just come in with the boomstick from the beginning,
Speaker 8: that dictates the tone of the rest of the week.
Speaker 8: And then where you could, you know, for instance, operate
Speaker 8: from a space of like moral authority, it becomes much
Speaker 8: easier for people on the fence to justify to themselves, well,
Speaker 8: what are the police supposed to think? Right? I mean,
Speaker 8: we have to realize that there are several like mental
Speaker 8: resistances that have been taught to people for them to
Speaker 8: try to discredit us. And I just I think there's
Speaker 8: some important context. Right when Martin Luther King Junior was
Speaker 8: doing like the nonviolent direct action, at a certain point
Speaker 8: they had to make a calculated decision to include women
Speaker 8: and children in the marches because they had assessed in
Speaker 8: America had become too desensitized to seeing black men beaten
Speaker 8: in the streets, right, So that was a tactical decision
Speaker 8: to bring in more people. Right, So there are like
Speaker 8: calculations that people have to make and assessments that they
Speaker 8: have to make based on the information that we're dealing with.
Speaker 2: Through talking with forced defenders, I've heard a variety of
Speaker 2: internal critiques of the week of Action format because it
Speaker 2: is such a concentrated time period. The week of Action
Speaker 2: can give police a very concentrated time to over police
Speaker 2: and over surveil, and for activists it can open up
Speaker 2: an expenditure of energy during the week, which then can
Speaker 2: lead to a lack of energy leading up to what's
Speaker 2: been called the week of repression in the past. Every
Speaker 2: time following a week of action, after people from out
Speaker 2: of town leave, it then leads into a week of
Speaker 2: repression where police will then do a rate of the
Speaker 2: forest and have their sort of retaliation the week after.
Speaker 2: There's been talk of potential changes to some of the
Speaker 2: Week of Action format, perhaps doing something more akin to
Speaker 2: a summer of resistance.
Speaker 30: So the week of repression is always the week that
Speaker 30: comes after the Week of Action where the cops are like, Okay,
Speaker 30: the bulk of your reserves, you're out of state supporter
Speaker 30: is gone. We're going to come fuck you up. Now
Speaker 30: they are less of you. Now you're less ready to
Speaker 30: deal with us. And that is like a major strategic
Speaker 30: flaw in the Weeks of Action because it kind of
Speaker 30: creates a activist tourism for people coming out of state,
Speaker 30: and not that Atlanta doesn't appreciate their support and their solidarity,
Speaker 30: and that so many of those out of state people
Speaker 30: do stay long term, but it does create a situation
Speaker 30: where like, yeah, we're having an influx of people for
Speaker 30: a week building infrastructure for a week, and then the
Speaker 30: bulk of those people, a good percentage are going to
Speaker 30: go home because yeah, like traveling long term is hard.
Speaker 30: People have jobs, kids, whatever, you have commitments wherever you are,
Speaker 30: and they have to go home. And then the cops
Speaker 30: just wreck our shit and do raids, and like, unless
Speaker 30: people want to get on board with doing some pretty
Speaker 30: crazy shit, those raids are hard to counter. It would
Speaker 30: behoove us to take a realistic audit of what the
Speaker 30: Weeks of Action have meant and what they are actually
Speaker 30: useful for which the strategic gains of the Weeks of
Speaker 30: Action are always now going to be more metaphysical than physical.
Speaker 30: They bring people to this space, they give them a
Speaker 30: closeness to the forest that they would not achieve without
Speaker 30: actually coming here. But as far as tangibly like materially
Speaker 30: stopping cop City, those kind of middle of the night
Speaker 30: slash and run attacks, tertiary targeting of contractors, all that stuff.
Speaker 30: That's how you pressure the money, and the money is
Speaker 30: where you win.
Speaker 2: Ultimately, it's up to the autonomous actors that makeup this
Speaker 2: is so moment and how their choices will determine how
Speaker 2: the fight to stop Cop City will grow and evolve.
Speaker 2: As I'm writing this, just thirty minutes ago we found
Speaker 2: out that the clear cutting at the Cop City construction
Speaker 2: site has essentially been completed. The overhead photos are devastating.
Speaker 2: Where there were young, growing trees just weeks ago is
Speaker 2: now a flattened mound of red clay and dirt, as
Speaker 2: if the ground itself was bleeding. I counted over one
Speaker 2: hundred trees uprooted from the earth. Hundreds of people have
Speaker 2: dedicated years of their life to defending this forest, and
Speaker 2: the sight of sizeable destruction has brought out a variety
Speaker 2: of grieving reactions. If Cop City doesn't get built in
Speaker 2: the WALLAWNI, the land could be carefully reforested and healed
Speaker 2: via regenerative permaculture. With intentional stewardship, the forest could grow
Speaker 2: to be ecologically healthier than it was before. In some ways,
Speaker 2: the destruction that has already taken place makes it even
Speaker 2: more vital to try and stop the construction of Cop City.
Speaker 2: No one is advocating a defeatist approach where force defenders
Speaker 2: essentially give up and let the Police Foundation build it,
Speaker 2: because there are still numerous ways to fight against the
Speaker 2: construction of this facility. But now is not the time
Speaker 2: to sugarcoat the dire situation people are in, and there
Speaker 2: should be time allowed to grieve this loss as well
Speaker 2: as strike back against the destruction. It would be a
Speaker 2: mistake to gaslight each other and act as if we're
Speaker 2: closer than ever to halting the Cop City project. The
Speaker 2: fact that it's gotten this far itself is devastating. From
Speaker 2: the beginning. People have said that even if they do
Speaker 2: believe that cop City will never be built, the Atlanta
Speaker 2: Police Foundation and police will absolutely attempt to do as
Speaker 2: much damage as they can possibly get away with anyway,
Speaker 2: both to force defenders and to the force itself. The
Speaker 2: past few months, I've been increasingly hearing the vice versa
Speaker 2: of that sentiment. If cop City does end up getting built,
Speaker 2: people have pledged that the Atlanta Police Foundation will have
Speaker 2: to pay for every inch they take. Even if there
Speaker 2: is no longer hope to save the entire Wilani Forest,
Speaker 2: then we must do so without hope. At least there
Speaker 2: is always vengeance. It is a long road ahead, and
Speaker 2: there is still much to do. To quote my favorite
Speaker 2: anarchomonarchist Tolkien, at this moment, the movement will hone its
Speaker 2: focus to prevent or at the very least disincentivize, the
Speaker 2: physical construction of cop City.
Speaker 30: I think it'd be worth thinking of this movement as
Speaker 30: an almost two year old movement that's outgrown the.
Speaker 14: Week of action.
Speaker 30: You know, why limit ourselves to seven days?
Speaker 14: Fuck it?
Speaker 30: Do a summer, you know, do three months of like
Speaker 30: we're doing three months of action in Atlanta. Come to
Speaker 30: Atlanta whenever you want, and then go home and do
Speaker 30: shit at home. There wills fargos where you live. There
Speaker 30: are chase banks where you live, There are at less
Speaker 30: construction off us.
Speaker 10: Is where you live.
Speaker 30: And yeah, you should come to Atlanta and you should
Speaker 30: come see the space, and you should be in the
Speaker 30: forest and you should feel like the love and community
Speaker 30: that's there. We win by fighting on enough fronts that
Speaker 30: they can't fight us back on all of them. The
Speaker 30: state dies by a thousand cuts, not by all of
Speaker 30: us being in one place where they can kettle our asses. Like,
Speaker 30: that's just not how we're gonna win. So, yeah, if
Speaker 30: we had three months of like we're occupying the forest
Speaker 30: for three months, come to the space whenever you feel
Speaker 30: like it. But you know, hopefully when people go home,
Speaker 30: they feel inspired to understand that they can do just
Speaker 30: as much hitting those companies where they live as they
Speaker 30: can here, because the money's all going to the same place.
Speaker 30: The CEO at the top doesn't care if you hit
Speaker 30: their businesses in Georgia or in fucking Illinois or in
Speaker 30: Oregon or Washington or whatever. The money's all the same.
Speaker 2: A phrase I've been hearing a lot lately is copp
Speaker 2: City is everywhere to quota communicate, posted on scenes, no
Speaker 2: blocks dot org quote. We will keep winning, not just
Speaker 2: here in so called Atlanta, but we must attack all
Speaker 2: across these so called states. The money and power that
Speaker 2: seek to kill us and a destroyab LAUNI are nationwide,
Speaker 2: and so our movement must be nationwide. A net of resistance,
Speaker 2: too vast to comprehend and too resilient to suppress. Reality
Speaker 2: is the battlefield, but so called America, all of it
Speaker 2: is the backdrop.
Speaker 5: When Chief A.
Speaker 2: Sheerbaum gave testimony at City Council even he mentioned the
Speaker 2: far reaching manifestations of the fight to stop cop City.
Speaker 17: We have been seeing over the last number of months
Speaker 17: crimes that have been occurring in other cities focused towards
Speaker 17: the public safety training center. So we have seen arsons
Speaker 17: in cities outside of Atlanta. We've seen the destruction of
Speaker 17: property outside of Atlanta, and we've seen the harassment of
Speaker 17: private sector employees outside of Atlanta.
Speaker 14: So that is the next.
Speaker 17: Is where the Federal Pure of Investigation has been assisting
Speaker 17: in this administigation.
Speaker 2: Like I said in the second episode, the stakes of
Speaker 2: the movement may soon exceed the bounds of the forest
Speaker 2: and cop City, and in fact that process may have
Speaker 2: already begun. We are seeing stop Coop City turn into
Speaker 2: a new mode of insurgency and resistance to modern policing
Speaker 2: in general, not simply limited to the construction of this
Speaker 2: one training center. As the police are trying to build
Speaker 2: a training center to practice quelling future civil unrest, the
Speaker 2: site of the Malani Forest and beyond has been a
Speaker 2: training ground for anarchists and those who fight the ever
Speaker 2: growing police estate the past two years. It's been a
Speaker 2: dangerous playground for experimentation and liberation. Applications for the lessons
Speaker 2: learned in the Mulani Forest extend far past the barriers
Speaker 2: of the woods. As far right attacks on abortion and
Speaker 2: trans people are accelerating across this country, but especially the South,
Speaker 2: perhaps some of the organizing infrastructure that's been developed can
Speaker 2: take new focus on these battlegrounds, and even just the
Speaker 2: mere existence of the struggle against cop City in Atlanta
Speaker 2: has been a deterrent for other cities and states seeking
Speaker 2: to push forward similar proposals. But as the movement possibly
Speaker 2: expands past its original scope in these next few months,
Speaker 2: people will need to be careful that the idyllic notion
Speaker 2: of the struggle doesn't eclipse the original and still active goal,
Speaker 2: which is to stop cop City. Cop City is indeed everywhere,
Speaker 2: but the current manifestation in Atlanta is unique to Atlanta,
Speaker 2: and the corresponding struggle to stop the physical construction of
Speaker 2: this training facility cannot be overlooked in favor of fantasies
Speaker 2: of utopian anarchy to steal an idea from Matt of
Speaker 2: the Community Press Collective. One interpretation of the phrase cop
Speaker 2: city is everywhere is the realization that Atlanta is cop city,
Speaker 2: and it already has been for years without us knowing it,
Speaker 2: and if we don't turn back the tide here, cop
Speaker 2: city will be exported everywhere.
Speaker 8: At Atlanta once again, because of the Atlanta Police Foundation
Speaker 8: is the most surveiled city in the country, because of
Speaker 8: twenty seventeen's Operation Shield program where they put tons of
Speaker 8: cameras all throughout the city and essentially made it a
Speaker 8: surveillance state. Once again, crime has continued to go up
Speaker 8: during this time, and that would have significantly more to
Speaker 8: do with the disparity of wealth than opportunities of Black
Speaker 8: Atlantans that are born under the poverty line. Only five
Speaker 8: percent of them are projected to ever cross that line.
Speaker 8: At the same time, the average median income of black
Speaker 8: households is one third that of the average median income
Speaker 8: of white households in Atlanta, So that's about thirty five
Speaker 8: thousand dollars to one hundred and four thousand dollars. And
Speaker 8: so the wealth is just so disproportionately spread and so
Speaker 8: much of the labor intensive economy is predicated on it
Speaker 8: that black people are pigeonholed into service economy jobs and
Speaker 8: they have very few opportunities here. Now, that type of
Speaker 8: inequality breeds discontent and people looking for other opportunities, and
Speaker 8: the police are ready to catch them at every turn
Speaker 8: for arresting the juvenile. In the point system that they
Speaker 8: have for Atlanta Police Department, it's five points. However, you
Speaker 8: only receive a quarter of a point as a police
Speaker 8: officer if you answer a service call. So police officers
Speaker 8: often ignore service calls because that doesn't give them the
Speaker 8: credit that they want. So just to put that in context,
Speaker 8: you get twenty times the credit in Atlanta's point quota
Speaker 8: system for arresting a juvenile then going where people actually
Speaker 8: wanted police to show up. And we're supposed to be
Speaker 8: convinced that this system is made to keep us safe. Right.
Speaker 2: The City of Atlanta and the Police Foundation wants cop
Speaker 2: City to be a national training center for police to
Speaker 2: come and practice militaristic counterinsurgency for export across the country.
Speaker 2: They murdered someone to further this goal. All eyes must
Speaker 2: be on Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Cop City is a symbol of police repression. Cop City
Speaker 3: is a symbol of the oppression of the people of Atlanta.
Speaker 3: I want you to look around and see the families
Speaker 3: here in this part today. These are people who came
Speaker 3: because they're concerned for their children. These are people who
Speaker 3: are concerned because they don't want their city overrun by militarization.
Speaker 2: The level of repression the movement is facing is a
Speaker 2: sign that the state feels like this movement is a threat,
Speaker 2: and the state feels like this movement has the possibility
Speaker 2: of actually succeeding, So in response, they're increasing repression. And
Speaker 2: on the flip side of that, during this past week
Speaker 2: of action, I saw a lot of affirmation that this
Speaker 2: is going to be successful and that people believe that
Speaker 2: they will stop cop City. A common refrain during the
Speaker 2: past week of action is that cop City will never
Speaker 2: be built, and I believe that we will win. There's
Speaker 2: been such a unique emphasis on the fact that people
Speaker 2: believe that this fight is one winnable and that people
Speaker 2: do have the ability to stop cop City, and the
Speaker 2: people who are participating truly believe that, and I think
Speaker 2: that is an important part of why it's gotten as
Speaker 2: far as it has.
Speaker 18: So we can get everything we want for this city.
Speaker 18: We can stop cop city. We don't got the power,
Speaker 18: but we just got the believe the last There's gonna
Speaker 18: be a lot of.
Speaker 12: People telling us about what we can't do, about.
Speaker 18: What these organizers are here can't do.
Speaker 8: Tell me what it tells us about what we what
Speaker 8: we can't do?
Speaker 18: Well to tell you all of a sudden here we're organizers,
Speaker 18: no business.
Speaker 10: I've taken that.
Speaker 12: With all the papers. Impossible, way you make it possible?
Speaker 12: You say, will we believe that we will win?
Speaker 2: This is interesting to me because in my experience, a
Speaker 2: lot of leftists and anarchists approach much of their praxis
Speaker 2: with the concept of them expecting to not succeed, but
Speaker 2: they're going to do it anyway, which there is a
Speaker 2: kind of fated beauty to that in a certain way.
Speaker 2: And part of that is taking action even if you
Speaker 2: don't think it will lead to a decisive victory. But
Speaker 2: also I feel that being in that mindset might set
Speaker 2: you up for that outcome. If you're preparing to fail,
Speaker 2: that means you're probably gonna fail, or at the very
Speaker 2: least limit the ways that you do action. And throughout
Speaker 2: this movement, thus far, it's been interesting the degree to
Speaker 2: which people are convinced that they are going to win.
Speaker 30: If you're being prepared to fail, you won't take the
Speaker 30: radical action that it takes to win. Winning's hard, and
Speaker 30: winning means doing things that are scary and uncomfortable and
Speaker 30: doing things that put you in danger, and doing things
Speaker 30: that are new and unknown and different, and taking new
Speaker 30: strategies and doing new things. And we in the US
Speaker 30: and a lot of other places, but this is US
Speaker 30: based movement. So there's so much learned helplessness on the
Speaker 30: left here from so many years of like we lost
Speaker 30: it Occupy and then we lost in Ferguson and Standing
Speaker 30: Rock and in twenty twenty, all of these movements that
Speaker 30: put big body blows to the state put some hits in,
Speaker 30: but we're just followed by these waves and waves of oppression.
Speaker 30: We've learned so much helplessness. And for the first time
Speaker 30: in my life, I'm looking at a movement that I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 30: we can fucking beat them. And people are stagnating, We're
Speaker 30: blinking because of what happened on Sunday, and like, no, no, no,
Speaker 30: what happened on Sunday? Prove that we can win. It
Speaker 30: proved that we can one fight them in the open
Speaker 30: field and beat them, that they are afraid of us,
Speaker 30: that they will see territory if we hit them, and
Speaker 30: it proved that they are so afraid of us that
Speaker 30: they need to mobilize fucking ten different police departments to
Speaker 30: come deal. And then they won't even step into the
Speaker 30: actual brush of the forest because they think we're the
Speaker 30: fucking Vietcong. That proves we can win more than anything
Speaker 30: that proves we can win. And if we do not
Speaker 30: accept that, what is proved that we can win is
Speaker 30: like property destruction, and to a degree doing violence, we
Speaker 30: won't win. Those fireworks helped a lot. They pushed the
Speaker 30: cops out, and like, we shouldn't balk at that, And
Speaker 30: I guess I don't classify that as violence. The police
Speaker 30: classify that is violence what they consider taking hits, I guess.
Speaker 30: But yeah, we are so on the cusp of a
Speaker 30: make or break kind of deal here, and the only
Speaker 30: way that we win is not this internal debate we're
Speaker 30: having about the efficacy of tactics. It's doubling down on
Speaker 30: what we are already doing because it's working, and expanding
Speaker 30: on it.
Speaker 2: Do you believe that cop city will be actually stopped.
Speaker 1: We got to.
Speaker 8: And here's what I mean by that. This is the line.
Speaker 8: Right we have environmental racism, police militarization and brutality, and
Speaker 8: police and racism, and it's all coming to a head
Speaker 8: right here in this particular movement. We have to win
Speaker 8: because what they're doing now is to build capacity to
Speaker 8: make sure that we can't win, right And so why
Speaker 8: people are pushing so hard is that, as we've seen
Speaker 8: over the past couple of weeks, the police have plenty
Speaker 8: of like tanks and shit and all sorts of militarized
Speaker 8: and tactical gear, and now they're trying to build another
Speaker 8: base and the blackest part of the city and to
Speaker 8: build up more capacity to put down any sense of
Speaker 8: rebellion or pushback against empire. We cannot allow it to happen.
Speaker 8: And I mean, there is so much money going to
Speaker 8: kill people in end life. And if we win right
Speaker 8: here and make this stand right here, that changes the
Speaker 8: potentiality for how we view how to keep one another
Speaker 8: safe and how to reinvest in ourselves and our people
Speaker 8: throughout this country in a huge way. I think that
Speaker 8: we are at the precipice of not only winning cup City,
Speaker 8: but pushing back the tide of the cult of death
Speaker 8: that this country has become.
Speaker 2: The clear cuts in the Malaani forest at this stage
Speaker 2: serve a threefold purpose. One, it obviously gets them closer
Speaker 2: to construction and the mass of land grading that is
Speaker 2: scheduled to start on May twenty third two, It's a
Speaker 2: ployee by the APF to secure additional needed funds from
Speaker 2: cop City investors. And finally, it to demoralize the people
Speaker 2: who spent years of their life working to stop this project.
Speaker 9: Everything that police have done is essentially always a reprisal, right,
Speaker 9: the movement does something and the police clamp down in
Speaker 9: a reprisal to try to repress the movement.
Speaker 2: Police always escalate, but they have always been like in
Speaker 2: response to something.
Speaker 9: And their goal, of course is to quiet and chill
Speaker 9: free speech and end the movement. But every time this happens,
Speaker 9: the opposite effect is what comes out of it. And
Speaker 9: from the domestic terrorism rest in December, like really, that's
Speaker 9: when this even larger groundswell of national support happened and
Speaker 9: people started to take notice because this was an extreme measure.
Speaker 2: And then with the killing of Tortighita in January, that
Speaker 2: changed so much about the movement, including people's personal connection
Speaker 2: to this struggle, where no longer are people doing this
Speaker 2: simply because they believe it is what's right. They are
Speaker 2: doing this because they have to, because the state cannot
Speaker 2: get away with this, This death cannot be in vain.
Speaker 2: And now people believe that they have to succeed or
Speaker 2: at the very least make this state pay for every inch,
Speaker 2: and that may mean looking beyond the binary of a
Speaker 2: victory and defeat. According to a construction timeline from this
Speaker 2: past April, the Atlanta Police Foundation plans to start construction
Speaker 2: on August twenty ninth, twenty twenty three, in order for
Speaker 2: a quote unquote soft opening of the facility in December
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four. One hiccup that the APF has
Speaker 2: run into is that it seems they have yet to
Speaker 2: secure enough money to finish the project and have been
Speaker 2: forced to ask their investors and the city for more
Speaker 2: additional money despite scaling back their plans for the project.
Speaker 2: As a short clip put together by the Atlanta Community
Speaker 2: Press Collective explains.
Speaker 32: The city Council will in fact have to vote on
Speaker 32: whether or not to allocate thirty three million taxpayer dollars
Speaker 32: to the construction of Cop City in the very near future. Additionally,
Speaker 32: the Atlanta Police Foundation budget documents show that current construction
Speaker 32: plans have been scaled back from what was originally promised.
Speaker 32: This indicates a failure by the Foundation to raise the
Speaker 32: promise sixty million dollars in private funds. Should the city
Speaker 32: vote down this funding package of thirty three million, it
Speaker 32: is difficult to see a path forward for the Atlanta
Speaker 32: Police Foundation's effort to begin construction on Cop City anytime
Speaker 32: in the near future.
Speaker 2: The City Council has actually not yet voted to approve
Speaker 2: the allocation of millions of dollars in city funds to
Speaker 2: the Cop City project.
Speaker 32: Through an open records request, we were able to get
Speaker 32: our hands on emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and
Speaker 32: Atlanta's Deputy Chief Operating Officer L. Chandra Berks. In this
Speaker 32: email exchange, the Police Foundation expressed a need for the
Speaker 32: city to provide thirty three point five million dollars in
Speaker 32: funding for the project. Berts responded by mentioning the need
Speaker 32: for legislative action to secure the funds. The emails state
Speaker 32: that the Police Foundation wants to pass this legislation before
Speaker 32: June thirtieth because they need the City of Atlanta's money
Speaker 32: to secure their construction loan.
Speaker 2: It's expected that as soon as May fifteenth, a member
Speaker 2: of the City Council will introduce legislation to allocate public
Speaker 2: funds to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build cop City,
Speaker 2: and a final vote could happen as soon as June fifth.
Speaker 2: One thing that the movement to stop cop City has
Speaker 2: shown us is that no matter what police do, people
Speaker 2: continue to show up despite what happens, and the movement
Speaker 2: keeps expanding. As the unnamed forest defender told.
Speaker 30: Me, infrastructure wise, this Week of Action was the biggest
Speaker 30: infrastructure I've seen doing a week of action. I thought
Speaker 30: that the infrastructure we put together for Week one was
Speaker 30: pretty big, but I mean it doesn't even compare. It's
Speaker 30: not the same ballpark as what happened for Week five.
Speaker 30: Just from how the medics were set up and how
Speaker 30: food was handled. There was a shuttle bus program, there
Speaker 30: was a welcome table at a church at one point,
Speaker 30: there was like twenty four to seven clinic spaces, there
Speaker 30: was twenty four to seven ride programs, and medics on standby,
Speaker 30: and like all these things that were ready to support
Speaker 30: everybody like there was all this infrastructure set up to
Speaker 30: make sure that people were as supported as possible and
Speaker 30: to make it as easy as possible and lower the
Speaker 30: barrier of entry to the movement as much as possible,
Speaker 30: more than there has been in any other week of
Speaker 30: action so far. I feel like the way that we
Speaker 30: continue that is to take lessons, learn from what's happened
Speaker 30: this week, from the problems with the infrastructure, the issues
Speaker 30: that it had, expand on it, and then fucking do
Speaker 30: it for way longer, like we could do this for
Speaker 30: an entire summer. I am fully of the belief that
Speaker 30: the infrastructure I saw on display during the fifth week
Speaker 30: of Action we could do that for a summer. I
Speaker 30: believe in the kind of people who put it together,
Speaker 30: and I believe in the people.
Speaker 14: Who did it.
Speaker 30: To do that, we just have to kind of look
Speaker 30: at what went wrong, what went right, and fix it.
Speaker 30: All the things that existed in this week of action,
Speaker 30: as far as they're being food rides, medics and like
Speaker 30: group supplies. All these things existed during weeks of Action
Speaker 30: one through four.
Speaker 10: It's just grown.
Speaker 30: It's gotten more logistically intense. There are more and more
Speaker 30: people filling those roles there's more and more stuff coming in,
Speaker 30: Like the amount of supplies that we just got sent
Speaker 30: in or people brought with them from o A State
Speaker 30: has just so vastly expanded since the first Week of Action.
Speaker 30: It's just gotten more i don't know, like not professional,
Speaker 30: but more polished. It's become a much more polished setup
Speaker 30: system as time went on, from the first camp that
Speaker 30: we had during the first Week of Action to now,
Speaker 30: you know, almost two years later. And that's a huge
Speaker 30: part of why I think we've outgrown the Week of Action.
Speaker 30: We have these types of thought processes and logistics to
Speaker 30: do this for a summer, for a month. We just
Speaker 30: need people and resources. We need more people to be willing,
Speaker 30: because I don't want people to get tired.
Speaker 2: Just last month, another Week of Action was called for
Speaker 2: June twenty fourth to July first, directly leading into what's
Speaker 2: being called the Wollawnie Summer, with locals in Atlanta calling
Speaker 2: on supporters and forced defenders everywhere to come to Atlanta
Speaker 2: for the week and stay for the summer. With Entrenchment
Speaker 2: Creek Park still closed and they're being ongoing efforts to
Speaker 2: have it be reopened what the week and following summer
Speaker 2: will look like. Is it still very unknown?
Speaker 30: We always are going to need more people. People are
Speaker 30: a most important resource.
Speaker 1: Always.
Speaker 30: The way that we limit burnout is by having more
Speaker 30: and more people so that the burden falls less and
Speaker 30: less heavy on small groups of people, and so that
Speaker 30: people can take breaks. And that's another problem I have
Speaker 30: with like the Week of Action as a strategy, is
Speaker 30: you're just going non fucking stop for a week. If
Speaker 30: you had three months, you're like, ah, I'm going to
Speaker 30: chill for a couple of weeks. I'll be back, you know,
Speaker 30: because I have all this time, and it frees up
Speaker 30: people from out of state to come in, have times
Speaker 30: to work it out in their schedule more.
Speaker 2: There will be more information put out in the coming weeks.
Speaker 2: You can keep up to date by following stop coop
Speaker 2: City on Instagram, Defend atl Forest on Twitter, or by
Speaker 2: checking out stopcopsitysolidarity dot org, ideally with a VPN and
Speaker 2: tour slash Brave browser.
Speaker 30: If you were at the music festival and you're just
Speaker 30: a normal person, you weren't involved with the movement before this,
Speaker 30: and you were at the music festival and you kind
Speaker 30: of saw why we're fighting for this, You saw that space,
Speaker 30: and then you saw the type of violence that the
Speaker 30: police were willing to output to do it. Let that
Speaker 30: move you to get involved further. You don't have to
Speaker 30: join an organization. You know, I don't want to speak
Speaker 30: for other people. I'm a hard anarchist. Fuck organizations to
Speaker 30: a large degree. But have an affinity group. Get your
Speaker 30: friends together. If you guys want to be helping out
Speaker 30: with the food people, help out with the food.
Speaker 14: People.
Speaker 30: You want to be medics, go join a medic collective,
Speaker 30: like find what everything calls to you and just go
Speaker 30: and do it. Because we need people and there's no
Speaker 30: barrier of entry to join the movement. There's no test
Speaker 30: you have to take. You just have to show up.
Speaker 2: I will end this Week of Action retrospective with a
Speaker 2: promise from the Forest Defenders. See you on the other side.
Speaker 13: We well, we well, well.
Speaker 2: Well. Music Festival audio courtesy of Unicorn Riot.
Speaker 1: A welcome to it could happen here. This is Robert
Speaker 1: Evans Uh and it could happen here is a podcast
Speaker 1: about things falling apart, uh and you know, sometimes about
Speaker 1: making them better. Today we're talking both about something that
Speaker 1: is implicated in a number of you know, aspects of
Speaker 1: what we call the crumbles here in the United States,
Speaker 1: which is the police. And we're also talking about the
Speaker 1: the tremendous difficulty that people encounter whenever they try to
Speaker 1: improve this particular aspect of American society, the near impossibility
Speaker 1: of reform within the police. And to talk with me
Speaker 1: about that and to talk with me about their incredible
Speaker 1: new book, Writers Come Out at Night is Ali Winston.
Speaker 1: Ali co wrote this book with Darwin bond Gram and
Speaker 1: it covers particularly the Oakland Police and a scandal that
Speaker 1: kind of happened at around the same time as the
Speaker 1: Rampart scandal in Los Angeles, focused around a group of
Speaker 1: Oakland police officers called the Writers who Well, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: let Ali tell you about that. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: pretty pretty shocking and bleak story. Though, Ali, welcome to
Speaker 1: the show, either doing, I'm doing good. How are you today? Lovely, Lovely, Ali.
Speaker 1: This is a great book. It's it's very deeply reported.
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit about kind of
Speaker 1: the the what sort of brought you into this story,
Speaker 1: because this is something that kind of happened around the
Speaker 1: turn of the last century, and it's kind of adjacent
Speaker 1: to a lot of issues that are still very much
Speaker 1: relevant in kind of the problems we have with policing,
Speaker 1: both kind of the thin blue line code of silence,
Speaker 1: the way in which police departments act in a very
Speaker 1: gang like fashion to protect bad actors, the way in
Speaker 1: which kind of ill thought out reform policies targeted at
Speaker 1: kind of assuaging the fears of business owners lead to
Speaker 1: policies of tremendous violence. A lot of things that are
Speaker 1: still very much kind of at play all around the country.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 33: So we came at this book both kind of independently.
Speaker 33: We came out this as to reporters who'd worked kind
Speaker 33: of handing glove together for about ten well since twenty twelve.
Speaker 33: When we signed our contract, it was twenty twenty. But
Speaker 33: I'd started reporting on the Oakland Police Department in two
Speaker 33: thousand and eight when I moved to the Bay Area
Speaker 33: for graduate school at cal Gobert's, and I'd kind of
Speaker 33: dove right into the topic of police and police conduct
Speaker 33: in Oakland because i'd wanted to. I'd been messing around
Speaker 33: with criminal justice reporting when I was back east in
Speaker 33: New York and north of New Jersey, where I was working.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 14: There really was.
Speaker 33: There were some really egregious shootings at that point in
Speaker 33: time in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, late
Speaker 33: two thousands, OPD about average, I think eight to fourteen
Speaker 33: officer involved shootings police shootings a year. Invariably there would
Speaker 33: be one or two or three or four depending on
Speaker 33: the years, maybe more that involves someone who's unarmed fleeing
Speaker 33: it was an awful but lawful shoot or maybe just
Speaker 33: an awful shoot that the DA didn't charge or didn't
Speaker 33: properly investigate. And at that time it was really tough
Speaker 33: to get information about police shootings in California because of
Speaker 33: a combination of laws and Supreme Court California Supreme Court
Speaker 33: decisions that intersected and kind of shut the door on
Speaker 33: any sort of record you could get from about police
Speaker 33: disciplinary action or their past histories. So you kind of
Speaker 33: had to mine the civil courts and look for back
Speaker 33: doors and through the DA's offices and just kind of
Speaker 33: or source up really well to try and report out
Speaker 33: these incidents. And Darwin and I met about around twenty twelve.
Speaker 33: We started interrogating questions about power and the political economy
Speaker 33: of law enforcement. We started to raise questions about the
Speaker 33: percentage of budgetary allocation that OPD receives.
Speaker 14: It's about forty percent of the city's billion.
Speaker 33: Dollar budget give or takes, so we're talking three hundred
Speaker 33: and fifty four hundred million.
Speaker 14: Dollars every year.
Speaker 33: The result, the net result for public safety is questionable.
Speaker 14: At best.
Speaker 33: Doesn't really tie into increase in police funding, increase in menpower,
Speaker 33: decreasing crime. Oakland's a very violent city, often ranks in
Speaker 33: the top ten or top five nationally in per ca
Speaker 33: at a crime per one hundred thousand residents. And it's
Speaker 33: also been under this reform program forever. And this is
Speaker 33: the backdrop to all our reporting. There was always this
Speaker 33: backdrop of court ordered reforms. There's external oversight. The external
Speaker 33: oversight is oftentimes how the public and the press became
Speaker 33: aware of some very deep seated issues in the department
Speaker 33: and how they would get addressed because the politicians here
Speaker 33: are feckless, were inexperienced, or complicit, or.
Speaker 14: All the above.
Speaker 33: So we, over the course of our reporting together kind
Speaker 33: of yoked together. Around a decade eight years or so,
Speaker 33: we kind of realized, Okay, we have a paragraph in
Speaker 33: each one of our stories that explains the backdrop, or
Speaker 33: maybe a little bit more, depending on how legalistic appease
Speaker 33: it was.
Speaker 14: We need to peel all this back.
Speaker 33: We need to explain to people because this is the
Speaker 33: longest running oversight regime in the country, right, two decades now,
Speaker 33: over two decades since the consent Degree, the negotiated settlement
Speaker 33: Agreement was signed, and we just needed to explain to
Speaker 33: people why this city had gone so far, why it
Speaker 33: was an edge case, why it.
Speaker 14: Was an outlier.
Speaker 33: And in order to do that, we couldn't We couldn't
Speaker 33: use five thousand words. We needed one hundred and two
Speaker 33: hundred and sixty thousand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a dense book in a way that's
Speaker 1: still intensely readable, and I think part of what makes
Speaker 1: it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: effort laying out things that people kind of know in
Speaker 1: broad and a good example of this would be people
Speaker 1: talk a lot about, you know, the kind of concept
Speaker 1: of you know, the bad apples that you know there's
Speaker 1: that's both on the side of people defending police departments
Speaker 1: that it's a few bad apples, and then kind of
Speaker 1: and you find this more on sort of people on
Speaker 1: the left criticizing police as an institution, the idea that, like, well,
Speaker 1: the fact that those bad apples are supported and defended
Speaker 1: by the rest of the department kind of means that
Speaker 1: they're all but bad. You get this these kind of
Speaker 1: like broad you know, discussions of that phenomenon. What you
Speaker 1: do in this in this book is kind of get
Speaker 1: very granular with the way in which that actually functions
Speaker 1: on the ground. I'm thinking about a specific point where
Speaker 1: you've got one of the characters, you know, one of
Speaker 1: the people that is a major source kind of for
Speaker 1: this book, and a major source for this scandal was
Speaker 1: a police officer who effectively turned on his fellow officers
Speaker 1: and reported all of this illegal violence being done by
Speaker 1: this this gang. And there's a point where this guy,
Speaker 1: after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusioned by what,
Speaker 1: you know, he's the guys that he's writing with are doing,
Speaker 1: goes to other people in the department who are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: those guys are like messed up, and it's it's bad,
Speaker 1: and you just kind of have to you should just
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, try to try to move on,
Speaker 1: but don't make waves about it, right, And it's this
Speaker 1: it's this the the kind of the fact, the degree
Speaker 1: to which other people cannot just know in the department
Speaker 1: what's happening but be disgusted by it, and still when
Speaker 1: I'm kind of if the shit hits the fan, fundamentally
Speaker 1: defend the officers doing it right, Like the fact that
Speaker 1: they're able to warn other officers away from you know,
Speaker 1: being around those guys doesn't mean that they won't like
Speaker 1: absolutely throw down to defend them, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: something I think people are kind of broadly aware of.
Speaker 1: But the kind of going into the actual personal dynamics
Speaker 1: is I think really valuable, and you do a very
Speaker 1: good job of capturing that at the ground level.
Speaker 33: Well, what we wanted to do is explain how so
Speaker 33: it's a bad apple theory I think is Yeah, Honestly,
Speaker 33: it's a distraction, and frankly it's an excuse. What you're
Speaker 33: dealing with is culture, right, and culture eats politics and
Speaker 33: policy for lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the meals
Speaker 33: in between every single time. You can't change culture unless
Speaker 33: you understand it. So what we wanted to do, and
Speaker 33: we were able to do this because because we had
Speaker 33: very good sourcing, not only inside and around the department,
Speaker 33: current former officers.
Speaker 14: We had reams of records.
Speaker 33: I mean we sued for I want to say, hundreds
Speaker 33: of thousands of record pages of records, videos, audio files,
Speaker 33: got old court transcripts, cassette tapes of old internal affairs interviews,
Speaker 33: backstop those by talking to the people there and involved,
Speaker 33: and we were really able to we were able to
Speaker 33: kind of reconstruct, not just the initial scandal of the
Speaker 33: writers of which stem from this young officer, Keith Batt,
Speaker 33: who is from a city from Sebastopol, which is a
Speaker 33: bit north of Oakland, very different place, rural, a bit crunchy,
Speaker 33: quite crunchy, not nearly the real rough and tumble grit
Speaker 33: of Oakland.
Speaker 14: Around the turn of the millennium, and Keith comes in.
Speaker 33: He's a criminal justice major in college, really idealistic, wanted
Speaker 33: to join an active police department. Applied to dozens of apartments,
Speaker 33: to several departments around the area, and the first one
Speaker 33: that took him was Oakland, and Oakland had a good
Speaker 33: reputation among police culture.
Speaker 14: It was an active department.
Speaker 33: The cops worked hard, they were well trained, they were
Speaker 33: decently paid, and it wasn't a.
Speaker 14: You know, in the Bay Area like the two.
Speaker 33: Departments that people look to are like are the Oakland
Speaker 33: Police Department in SFPD, and SFPD is a closed shop.
Speaker 14: It is a legacy.
Speaker 33: Department is run by an intense old boy network of
Speaker 33: Italian and Irish folks, some Chinese, some Asian immigrants that
Speaker 33: are kind of led into that now, but it is
Speaker 33: just it's such an insular place. OPD is actually typically
Speaker 33: more welcoming of recruits from outside, and they really like
Speaker 33: people who are hard chargers, active, willing to learn. And
Speaker 33: Keith finished the top of his near the top of
Speaker 33: his academy, excellent shot, really sharp on the uptake. His
Speaker 33: instructors liked him, and right when he was about to
Speaker 33: go on the street, they one of his instructors pulled
Speaker 33: him aside and said, hey, I hear you got a
Speaker 33: side uh to chuck To Clarence Mabanang, who was his
Speaker 33: field training officer, he said, okay, listen, you need to
Speaker 33: keep your mouth shut and you need to keep your
Speaker 33: eyes open. You're gonna see some crazy shit, but just
Speaker 33: go along to get along, you know, just keep.
Speaker 14: Your head down. Yeah, And Keith was like, wait, what
Speaker 14: are you talking about?
Speaker 33: Like that's that's some wild that's a wild ship, like,
Speaker 33: that's not what I'm expecting.
Speaker 14: It's a little bit odd. And these are older officers
Speaker 14: who you respected. He goes out and.
Speaker 33: Gets in the car with Chuck, and Chuck is this little,
Speaker 33: you know, very very intense buzz cut Filipino dude, and
Speaker 33: he's like, all right, I'm gonna teach you. I'm gonna
Speaker 33: take take you out and toughen you up, like this
Speaker 33: is not the academy anymore. I'm gonna teach you how
Speaker 33: to be in the streets. We're gonna get a fight,
Speaker 33: and we're gonna get in a fight tonight. This is
Speaker 33: beast first shot night on the job, first time stepping
Speaker 33: into a Crown Victoria patrol car with with his FTO
Speaker 33: and he's like what And sure enough, Chuck gets in
Speaker 33: a confrontation that very night, someone drunk in front of
Speaker 33: his own house, just drunk in front of his own house,
Speaker 33: threatens to shoot the guy's dog, takes the guy in
Speaker 33: after beating him up.
Speaker 14: And Keith is like, wait what you shoot dogs? And yeah,
Speaker 14: they told him that.
Speaker 33: You know, every now and then they would encounter somebody
Speaker 33: with the dog and they would shoot the dog and
Speaker 33: then cut the leash. In order to make it seem
Speaker 33: like the dog was going to attack them. And that
Speaker 33: was just his introduction to it. And over the two
Speaker 33: weeks that he worked with several officers on shift, there
Speaker 33: were three other officers who kind of made up this
Speaker 33: little click of of free wheeling cops that they called
Speaker 33: themselves the Riders, and they were Jude Siapno, Frank Vasquez,
Speaker 33: and Matt Hornung. And those three were kind of at
Speaker 33: the center of it, and they would they basically took
Speaker 33: it on themselves.
Speaker 14: They were not a task force. They were just patrol officers.
Speaker 33: They would kind of roam around West Oakland going out
Speaker 33: and looking for people to arrest, just jumping out a
Speaker 33: random folks.
Speaker 14: They were pro not reactive, they were proactive.
Speaker 33: So they essentially ended up kidnapping people, planning drugs on
Speaker 33: them when they didn't find drugs, beating the tar out
Speaker 33: of them, torturing them. Sap who's nickname was the foot
Speaker 33: Doctor because he had a habit of taking his asps
Speaker 33: retractable but time and beating detainees on the soles of
Speaker 33: their feet till they couldn't walk. Yeah, their bruises were
Speaker 33: so painful.
Speaker 1: For some reference, that's that was called bastinado by the
Speaker 1: Spanish Inquisition who loved to do the exact same thing.
Speaker 33: Yeah, No, it's it's really it's grim, it's really really grim.
Speaker 12: Shit.
Speaker 14: So Keith sees all.
Speaker 33: This stuff, it's just like two weeks of like training
Speaker 33: day of that film, it's two weeks of that, it's
Speaker 33: not just one week. And he's like, I can't do this.
Speaker 33: This can't be the way policing is. And he keeps going,
Speaker 33: you know, kind of casting around for help and the
Speaker 33: cash twenty two that he's in and is that anybody
Speaker 33: who he tells about this behavior is obligated by OPDS
Speaker 33: regulations to then report said misconduct and if they don't,
Speaker 33: then they're guilty of failing to report misconduct. So he
Speaker 33: has to kind of hedge his words and you know,
Speaker 33: talk around these issues. And his friends who work in OPD,
Speaker 33: who work in CHP, California Higway Patrol he tells about
Speaker 33: this stuff in this roundabout way, are all giving him
Speaker 33: the same advice.
Speaker 14: You know, I don't know, do you want to write
Speaker 14: out your career? Like can you do this?
Speaker 33: Is there a way you can switch out? Is there
Speaker 33: a way that you can thread the needle? And it
Speaker 33: gets to be too much, and so one day, after
Speaker 33: two weeks, he decides, I can't do this anymore. I
Speaker 33: can't put more I can't put in this in people
Speaker 33: in jail. I can't forge paperwork for my supervisors. I
Speaker 33: can't forge their overtime. You know, I can't help them
Speaker 33: steal money from the taxpayers like this. So he goes
Speaker 33: into the you know, he confronts them in a parking
Speaker 33: garage in front of a church in right north of
Speaker 33: downtown Oakland that these guys called the light Cave that
Speaker 33: they would hang out at. And he's telling Chuck, listen,
Speaker 33: you know, I can't do this. This isn't the right way.
Speaker 33: And Mabnag's as well, you know you have a problem. No, no,
Speaker 33: I don't think you're really getting this. He's trying to
Speaker 33: like talk him past it, and then Keith keeps bringing
Speaker 33: up Frank Fasquez and Frank he'd seen Frank choke people.
Speaker 33: He'd see Frank empty cant of pepper spray into somebody's mouth,
Speaker 33: put his fingers into their eyes like a bowling ball.
Speaker 14: He said, oh, well, if you have a problem with Frank,
Speaker 14: you can talk to him.
Speaker 33: Fasquez comes over and you know drives over there that
Speaker 33: have a conversation about that.
Speaker 14: And Keith at this point is so wired up and
Speaker 14: so terrified.
Speaker 33: He's looking at Mabadag and looking at Fasquez and thinking
Speaker 33: to himself, Okay, can I get to my pistol before
Speaker 33: they get to theirs if they.
Speaker 14: Want to hurt me?
Speaker 33: And if we have a shootout, how's it going to
Speaker 33: look if three Oakland cops are bucking led at each
Speaker 33: other in uniform on shift. He's running this calculus in
Speaker 33: his head, doesn't come to that. In the end, Mabini
Speaker 33: con vises him to go in and sign a resignation letter,
Speaker 33: and when he does that at OPD headquarters, one of
Speaker 33: his supervisors from the academy gets hold of him, gets
Speaker 33: a hold of him, says, no, no, no, this isn't what's
Speaker 33: this is not you what he's going on? And they
Speaker 33: convince him to go upstairs and talk to internal affairs,
Speaker 33: and then he spills the beans on the what he's
Speaker 33: seen the past two weeks, and that blows the lid
Speaker 33: Office scandal.
Speaker 1: There had been a number of people who had attempted
Speaker 1: to kind of like victims of this particular gang of
Speaker 1: guys who had that's right, like, attempted to complain, attempted
Speaker 1: to come forward. But yeah, it's not really until this
Speaker 1: officer on the inside, with a very good record is
Speaker 1: willing to say something that anything starts to happen.
Speaker 33: So you have to remember the context here. I'm sorry
Speaker 33: for cutting in, but he no, no, I was remiss
Speaker 33: on this. So the context of Oakland in late nineteen
Speaker 33: nineties early two thousands is that it's in the middle
Speaker 33: of New York style urban renewal. Jerry Brown, who later
Speaker 33: became governor of California, was kind of on his way
Speaker 33: back up the political rung, and Oakland was his first stop.
Speaker 14: He was re elected mayor in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 33: I believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he
Speaker 33: was going to turn Oakland into this socialist, you know,
Speaker 33: environmental friendly metropolis. But he gets into office, he starts
Speaker 33: going to community meetings, and he realizes public safety is
Speaker 33: the number one concerns. So he becomes Rudy Giuliani West,
Speaker 33: as one of his former employees put it to us,
Speaker 33: pushes a massive building program in downtown Oakland for new
Speaker 33: residential market rate housing, and enlists his police department to
Speaker 33: go on a clean up the streets spree by any
Speaker 33: means necessary, and he would go into the lineup and
Speaker 33: cheer them on route them on, say listen, you know,
Speaker 33: I got your back, all back your play, you know,
Speaker 33: just take back those corners from these dealers. That's what
Speaker 33: those officers, that's what Mabinang Hornogs, Siapno Vasquez were responding to.
Speaker 33: They were responding to the instructions from their supervisors, from
Speaker 33: their chief, from their mayor that came down the command
Speaker 33: chain to clean up the streets and do this sort
Speaker 33: of stuff. And they were actually, you know, mamdig and
Speaker 33: Vasquez in particular, were very highly valued officers. They were proactive,
Speaker 33: They made their supervisors look good.
Speaker 14: It was this kind of one hand washes the other bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I one of the things that I found
Speaker 1: particularly kind of impactful is the way in which you
Speaker 1: describe both the violence, the absolute like horrifying cruelty of
Speaker 1: what these guys are getting up to, and how that
Speaker 1: intersects with Jerry Brown's political career, with the kind of
Speaker 1: promises he's making to clean up the city and the
Speaker 1: kind of metrics that are established, you know, to provide
Speaker 1: basically evidence that this plan is succeeding. You know, it's
Speaker 1: it really like kind of gives on their ground context
Speaker 1: to what this kind of can windows style policing, what
Speaker 1: it actually means in terms of a human cost, and
Speaker 1: it's it's devastating. And equally devastating is the lawsuit that
Speaker 1: kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed. One
Speaker 1: of the things that was most shocking to me because
Speaker 1: I was I was only kind of broadly aware of
Speaker 1: this case at all, is when when these guys, the
Speaker 1: officers in this in this gang get you know, go
Speaker 1: on trial or sort of when that process starts, one
Speaker 1: of them, this guy Vasquez, like goes on the run,
Speaker 1: steals an AR fifteen from his department and fucking disappears
Speaker 1: and he's still in the wind. No one's ever found
Speaker 1: this guy. Yeah, he was most likely in Mexico.
Speaker 33: He's from Mexico, He's born down there and has family
Speaker 33: around media. The theory is that he, I mean, you know,
Speaker 33: he was stopped by a cop. That's when, yeah, the
Speaker 33: people realized that he had been that he'd stolen a
Speaker 33: gun from the department. But he kind of badges his
Speaker 33: way out of this encounter with a cop in Slus city,
Speaker 33: which is a Delta town near where he lived and
Speaker 33: are near his house, and that was the last anybody
Speaker 33: had seen of him, has seen of him.
Speaker 14: The theory, the theory that's rattled.
Speaker 33: Around quite often, and there's more often than there's probably
Speaker 33: some hef to it is that somebody from the either
Speaker 33: the department or the police union helped him down to
Speaker 33: the border in Chula Vista and he walked across. So
Speaker 33: the odds are that he's in Mexico. Estensibly the FBI
Speaker 33: are still looking for him. He's a fugitive, but he's
Speaker 33: never never been found.
Speaker 1: No, and he when this happens, because his buddies in
Speaker 1: the writers are all all do in fact, go on trial,
Speaker 1: and you know, you might think the fact that one
Speaker 1: of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing
Speaker 1: a gun would have an impact on things, but no, no,
Speaker 1: in court, they're not. You know, the prosecutors aren't allowed
Speaker 1: to tell the jury what happened with Fasquez because it's
Speaker 1: worried that it might prejudice them, which is wild to me.
Speaker 33: Well, in the first trial, so there were two trials,
Speaker 33: fast forward a little bit. All three cops in their
Speaker 33: first trial, there's hung juries in them. I think there
Speaker 33: were one or two holdouts maybe, And from the reporting
Speaker 33: that we did, the interview that we did with the
Speaker 33: ADA on the case, Dave Holliser, it seemed that these
Speaker 33: were people who were convinced that these were good cops
Speaker 33: and the ends justified the means or therefore, you know,
Speaker 33: this kind of noble noble cause corruption actually has an
Speaker 33: audience among some segments of the population around here. I
Speaker 33: mean it, I'm sure you see this across the bay
Speaker 33: now in San Francisco. There's all these people who were,
Speaker 33: you know, kind of advocating the sort of vigilante violence
Speaker 33: that former fire commissioner was committed any and so against
Speaker 33: homeless folks on house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for folks who aren't aware, the fire commissioner of
Speaker 1: San Francisco. This was a couple of months ago, right
Speaker 1: around the time that there was a big wave of
Speaker 1: San Francisco was collapsed into anarchy sort of stories.
Speaker 14: Which happened every ten years, which.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and have been. You know, it happened at
Speaker 1: the same time that that tech CEO was stabbed to death.
Speaker 1: Turns out by another tech founder. Well, but yeah, this
Speaker 1: story that the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's
Speaker 1: this video of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man.
Speaker 1: It turns out he had been going around at night
Speaker 1: and macing homeless people at random. One of the Yeah,
Speaker 1: hairspray was crazy, it was awful ship.
Speaker 33: Yeah, and then someone attacked him with the homeless with
Speaker 33: a with a crowbar. But all that those facts were
Speaker 33: emitted anyway. So the bottom line is with the with
Speaker 33: Horning of Horning, Vasquez and sap they're they're hung on
Speaker 33: the first trial, and then the second trial they're acquitted.
Speaker 18: Uh.
Speaker 14: There, Horning is acquitted.
Speaker 33: Of some charges and there's hung juries in the rest
Speaker 33: of his charges and those first sapno and mabenang. But
Speaker 33: in the second trial. First trial, the defense was, well,
Speaker 33: they didn't do what Keith did. Keith's bad as lying.
Speaker 33: The second trial was well, the defense turned to a
Speaker 33: strategy of well, actually, Frank Ifasquez was the leader, so
Speaker 33: it's all Frank's fault.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's easy to throw that guy under the bus
Speaker 1: because he's gone.
Speaker 14: Exactly, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 33: And you know, to say he was a ringleader is
Speaker 33: absurd because everyone knew in OPD and outside OPD that
Speaker 33: Mabadang was the shot caller in that little gang. What's
Speaker 33: interesting is the lawsuit, So there's a little vegary here
Speaker 33: about the criminal investigation into the riders. The police department
Speaker 33: and the police department's internal affairs investigators and the police
Speaker 33: chief made a decision from day one from on high
Speaker 33: that the investigation would only be limited to what Keith
Speaker 33: Bat saw, that it would not expand out beyond his
Speaker 33: two weeks on the job and the incidents that he
Speaker 33: witnessed personally, and that they were able to corroborate with
Speaker 33: other people. And there was another cop, Scott Huson, who
Speaker 33: did corroborate some of this stuff. Once it came out
Speaker 33: that he'd falsified some reports, he decided to save his
Speaker 33: own skin. So he also caught some of the flak
Speaker 33: that Bat did, but not nearly the same sort of
Speaker 33: death threat type shit that Keith caught. So with regard
Speaker 33: to the broader, the broader lay of the land, the
Speaker 33: criminal the investigation didn't go into a broader pattern of
Speaker 33: what else was happening on these shifts?
Speaker 14: What are their cops were involved?
Speaker 33: Because the writers, you know, there's a ball that they
Speaker 33: actually signed for each other, and there's several names on
Speaker 33: that ball.
Speaker 14: It's not just those four cops.
Speaker 33: So the civil suit there was a civil suit brought
Speaker 33: by two civil rights two attorneys in the area, John
Speaker 33: Burris and Jim Channon, who had been suing the department
Speaker 33: for years. They'd actually received walkins the victims that you'd
Speaker 33: mentioned earlier over the years, alleging that they'd been arrested,
Speaker 33: beaten up, framed up, tortured by these cops in West Oakland.
Speaker 33: And when the news of Keith bat blowing the whistle
Speaker 33: on the writers hit the newspapers, it clicked for them
Speaker 33: and they realized they been seeing this pattern. So they
Speaker 33: opened up their own pattern and practice investigation and did
Speaker 33: their own investigation of complaints in canvassed neighborhoods and got
Speaker 33: names from people who had filed complaints and alleged similar
Speaker 33: patterns of misconduct, and came up with one hundred and
Speaker 33: nineteen plaintiffs who who laid out a pattern of abuses
Speaker 33: that spanned much more of the city, the downtown area,
Speaker 33: other parts of West Oakland, even as far as East Oakland,
Speaker 33: and a much broader time frame stretching back almost basically
Speaker 33: to nineteen ninety five, five years prior, so the reality
Speaker 33: of opd's abuses and their kind of deep corruption in
Speaker 33: that period of time was far larger than the criminal
Speaker 33: case against those four riders would have it. And I
Speaker 33: should say that these civil attorneys took up the challenge
Speaker 33: where both the state of Attorney General and the federal authorities,
Speaker 33: both the local U United States Attorney and federal and
Speaker 33: civil rights in main justice dropped the ball. They did
Speaker 33: not open pattern and practice investigations into OPD. And we
Speaker 33: have it from the ADA himself, who's in the room
Speaker 33: when he presented their case, because they were cross designated
Speaker 33: as as their cross editor, as designated as US attorneys
Speaker 33: during their whole investigation, and vice versa. He presented the
Speaker 33: case to the city United States Attorney at the time,
Speaker 33: one Robert Mueller, who should be familiar to your listeners
Speaker 33: as the former head of the FBI.
Speaker 1: Twice over swinging Bob Miller, that's right.
Speaker 33: And you know Miller flipped through the pages and was looking,
Speaker 33: you know, trying to see if any connections to Russia
Speaker 33: and Alpha Bank and so on. But no, actually, I
Speaker 33: mean he's flipping through and he pulls out these files
Speaker 33: and he looks at the long rap sheet of some
Speaker 33: of these witnesses.
Speaker 14: And these were people in the street.
Speaker 33: These are people who had been arrested before, had been
Speaker 33: involved in narcotic sales, petty assaults, that robbery's, burglaries, what
Speaker 33: have you like. They were people who were not They
Speaker 33: were not kids, they were not clean sheets. And he
Speaker 33: handed the file back to Hollister, to the ADA and said,
Speaker 33: I wish you the best of luck. It's important to
Speaker 33: note that this was a different era. A CoP's word
Speaker 33: was very, very very hard to impeach on the stand.
Speaker 33: There was no body camera video, There were no cell
Speaker 33: phoned videos at the time. You would maybe have a
Speaker 33: rough camcorder every now and then if somebody shooting like
Speaker 33: a little video on the street, kind of grainy digital cameras,
Speaker 33: and they were The sound wasn't great, but there wasn't
Speaker 33: much beyond eyewitness testimony. And that's why Keith's words were
Speaker 33: so important, Why his testimony was so critical, is that
Speaker 33: you had a cop coming out and blowing the whistle
Speaker 33: on his department and saying, no, this is not right,
Speaker 33: this is what they're doing.
Speaker 14: They should be punished for it.
Speaker 1: You know, I can't help but thinking about the the
Speaker 1: story that's kind of blown up right now about there's
Speaker 1: a man on the subway recently in New York City
Speaker 1: who was, you know, acting kind of erradically yelling and stuff,
Speaker 1: but had not done any violence to anyone, and a
Speaker 1: bystander straphanger restrained him, put him in a headlock for
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes, and he died. And kind of the response
Speaker 1: that I'm seeing from guys like Matt Walsh, the Daily
Speaker 1: Wire crew, you know, particularly in right wing media, is well,
Speaker 1: this guy had been arrested, you know, forty times or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, that's not germane to anything.
Speaker 14: That's doesn't give you the right to lynch someone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly like that, Like, the penalty for having been
Speaker 1: arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death.
Speaker 1: That's not the way the system is. That's not the
Speaker 1: way any of this is supposed to work. And it's
Speaker 1: it's interesting. There's a degree to which I guess it
Speaker 1: hasn't changed, and there's a degree to which I'm kind
Speaker 1: of worried that the sort of nature of social media
Speaker 1: means that we're a lot more open about the kind
Speaker 1: of violence we're willing to accept for.
Speaker 14: People who, yeah, agree with that entirely.
Speaker 33: I mean, that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of
Speaker 33: to both Black Lives Matter cycles in twenty fourteen, fifteen,
Speaker 33: and the current cycle.
Speaker 14: Is a lot more virulent.
Speaker 33: Then you'd have it if you just watched kind of
Speaker 33: the soft focus PBS frontline documentary versions of it. There's
Speaker 33: a lot of really naked justification and support for extra
Speaker 33: legal violence, and that is part of the issue with
Speaker 33: law enforcement and holding them accountable. There is always going
Speaker 33: to be a segment, small, sometimes vocal, sometimes not, of
Speaker 33: the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law,
Speaker 33: beyond the constraints of our system. And that's why oversight,
Speaker 33: why running the rule over law enforcement and making sure
Speaker 33: that they according to the laws and that they are
Speaker 33: operating within the bounds of their limits in so far
Speaker 33: as we have set them out for them, and in
Speaker 33: so far as like it look. This book is not
Speaker 33: a book questioning whether or not police should exist. It's
Speaker 33: a history. They do exist, They have existed. This is
Speaker 33: what it has looked like to date. Right if other
Speaker 33: people want to make those cases and look at you know,
Speaker 33: hypotheticals or envisioned a different future, that's totally fine. What
Speaker 33: we're trying to do is lay out the ways in
Speaker 33: which people have pushed back on one of the most
Speaker 33: egregious departments in the country consistently for over a century
Speaker 33: and actually had some sort of lasting impact on it.
Speaker 33: And there have been some impacts that have really changed
Speaker 33: because of Look, they don't there are there's no more
Speaker 33: public strip searching of people in the streets that happen
Speaker 33: in Oakland on the regular every day. As late as
Speaker 33: twenty nine and ten, it was common that the cops
Speaker 33: would say, look, I'm going in your ass for rocks.
Speaker 33: You'd better not have anything there, right in the middle
Speaker 33: of the morning, on a crowded street, in front of
Speaker 33: people driving by on the way to work. That sort
Speaker 33: of civil rights violation would happen all the time. The
Speaker 33: department no longer shoots, shoots maybe about three or four
Speaker 33: people a year. That's way down from fourteen to fifteen
Speaker 33: a year a decade twelve years ago. That's because they've
Speaker 33: changed their chase policy, their pursuit policy. They used to
Speaker 33: pursue people with an intent to catch them at all costs.
Speaker 33: That ended up resulting in cops chasing people down blind
Speaker 33: alleys or ending up way too close to a suspect
Speaker 33: and pulling out their weapon and opening up fire, regardless
Speaker 33: of whether or not they actually had the suspect had
Speaker 33: a firearm or another weapon, or whether the cops were
Speaker 33: under threat. The change in the pursuit policy has led
Speaker 33: to more of the instruction now is to contain, don't
Speaker 33: pursue close call for backup, set a perimeter, preserve life.
Speaker 33: That's not been that change was not something to it's
Speaker 33: submitted to voluntarily. They are brought. They are kicking and screaming.
Speaker 33: But because there has been this outside and position of
Speaker 33: court oversight for so long, because it hasn't gone away,
Speaker 33: because it's not overseen by the Justice Department or the
Speaker 33: state attorney general, so you know, some of the political
Speaker 33: figure can't like they can't there can't be a deal
Speaker 33: cut in the back room between a senator's staffer and
Speaker 33: the federal Department of Justice, or the mayor and the
Speaker 33: state attorney general and their wife or whatever.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 33: That sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's
Speaker 33: attorneys aren't beholding to anybody other than themselves, and when
Speaker 33: the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation
Speaker 33: play out as it will and whole and both judges
Speaker 33: on this case have actually been very by the book
Speaker 33: and very stringent on how the oversight has gone. So
Speaker 33: that's why it's gone on for twenty years, and it
Speaker 33: actually has resulted in good changes. There are a lot
Speaker 33: of people who bitch about it, who cry that, oh, well,
Speaker 33: we need to be out from this oversight. It's hampering
Speaker 33: the police, they can't do their job as they will. Well,
Speaker 33: do you want to go back to twenty years ago?
Speaker 33: Do you really want that? Do you want that sort
Speaker 33: of abuse?
Speaker 14: No?
Speaker 33: And that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that
Speaker 33: did manage to change a lot of things around. There's
Speaker 33: a police commission here that now oversees the department. It's
Speaker 33: not perfect, it's very much in the infancy, but that's
Speaker 33: a body that existed to take control away from the
Speaker 33: mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a
Speaker 33: police department. And this is yeah, it's a long arc,
Speaker 33: but the bottom line is that it's not about a
Speaker 33: one or a zero. There's no linear progress here. It's
Speaker 33: kind of goes in ways. But there has been progress,
Speaker 33: which is a crazy thing to say when you look
Speaker 33: at the the shit that's in the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but it is, like it's important both, you know.
Speaker 1: I think our our audience is definitely much more of
Speaker 1: our audiences in the constituency of, you know, get rid
Speaker 1: of the police entirely, even if you're coming at it
Speaker 1: from that, I mean, especially if you're coming at from
Speaker 1: that standpoint. Actually, I think kind of one of the
Speaker 1: mistakes that a lot of people who are are on
Speaker 1: that side of things, which is generally where I find myself,
Speaker 1: is using that as an excuse to not actually understand
Speaker 1: how the police function, using their sort of distaste for
Speaker 1: the institution as an excuse to not understand how the
Speaker 1: institution works, why it's resilient, and the ways in which
Speaker 1: you know, both harms can to an extent be mitigated,
Speaker 1: but also kind of just on its strategic level, how
Speaker 1: it functions to defend itself. And I think that this
Speaker 1: book does an exceptional job of going through that in
Speaker 1: a way that's nuanced and detailed but also compelling and readable,
Speaker 1: Like you're not going to have to I do really
Speaker 1: recommend your book. People are not going to have like
Speaker 1: trouble getting into it. Like I was drawn in from
Speaker 1: the first page. So I really do think this is
Speaker 1: something folks should look into. No matter where you live
Speaker 1: in the United States, even if you've never been to Oakland,
Speaker 1: you will get a lot out of this.
Speaker 33: I would say that we didn't make an explicit attempt
Speaker 33: to make the city the main character, so to draw
Speaker 33: people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the
Speaker 33: same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles and City
Speaker 33: of Courts.
Speaker 14: May he rest in peace. It was a great inspiration
Speaker 14: for us.
Speaker 33: But more than anything else, there are tons of parallels
Speaker 33: in Oakland to other places.
Speaker 14: It's not a unique place. I mean, it is a
Speaker 14: unique place, but it's.
Speaker 33: Also very typical for an American city, like Los Angeles
Speaker 33: and New York and Chicago are completely atypical. They're huge,
Speaker 33: they don't most American cities are like four hundred to
Speaker 33: six hundred thousand people large. Oakland's racial balance is almost
Speaker 33: thirty thirty thirty white, Latino Black, ten percent Asian, and
Speaker 33: roughly eight to ten percent Asian.
Speaker 14: Then everyone else thrown in there.
Speaker 33: It's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative,
Speaker 33: and it's also you know, rust belt city in certain respects,
Speaker 33: although that's changed a lot with the tech boom.
Speaker 14: We could be going back the other way.
Speaker 33: But it really there are echoes in stuff that's happened
Speaker 33: in New York and Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in New Orleans,
Speaker 33: in Portland and Seattle. It's the experience that we've had here,
Speaker 33: particularly with police oversight in and reform. I mean Portland
Speaker 33: and Seattle are two other cities that have actually undergone
Speaker 33: very similar programs with departments that.
Speaker 14: Are more alike to OPD than not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Allie, is there anything else you wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure to get into in this conversation or Yeah.
Speaker 33: I think your point about I just wanted to touch
Speaker 33: on your point about where people come out for the institution.
Speaker 14: I think it's really important.
Speaker 33: Even regardless of what you believe about where we should
Speaker 33: and shouldn't be with law enforcement, you've got to understand it. Yeah,
Speaker 33: because it's such a huge institution in our society. It
Speaker 33: is basically the main point of contact most people have
Speaker 33: with the state now in many Americans cities. Because we've
Speaker 33: stripped down so many other aspects of our societies.
Speaker 14: Mental hospitals are gone, our schools are.
Speaker 33: Failing, public housing barely exists, our healthcare system is decimated,
Speaker 33: and cops essentially catch a lot of the end product
Speaker 33: of those problems. It's one of the reasons why I
Speaker 33: started reporting on criminal justice because you can look at
Speaker 33: so many other issues of American society through that system.
Speaker 33: And also you can see ways in which like political agendas,
Speaker 33: the way that police departments lobby, and the messaging that
Speaker 33: they push out. They don't do it in isolated fashion.
Speaker 33: It's coordinated, like there are these big swings that happen
Speaker 33: on the national political stage, if you will. Like we
Speaker 33: were at one moment with police reform and abolishing the police,
Speaker 33: defunding them with Black Lives matters. The immediate pushback within
Speaker 33: six months was there's a crime wave. There's a crime wave.
Speaker 33: There's a crime wave. We need to support our cops.
Speaker 33: And now we're at the point where people are taking
Speaker 33: act or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they
Speaker 33: have it in their head that things.
Speaker 14: Are so out of control.
Speaker 33: In New York, homemlest man's choked to death because he's
Speaker 33: he's having an episode on the train.
Speaker 14: San Francisco.
Speaker 33: This fire commissioner is going around bare spring people who
Speaker 33: are camping out on in the streets. This is the
Speaker 33: sort of the back and forth swing that oftentimes starts
Speaker 33: with people who are trying to protect their budget line,
Speaker 33: who are trying to protect their political power, and it
Speaker 33: ends up with consequences like that where people take it
Speaker 33: to that level. And I think that looking at law
Speaker 33: enforcement as a political actor is really important for understanding
Speaker 33: how we are where we are in this society and
Speaker 33: also understanding the ways in which you can try and
Speaker 33: rain them back in and keep your boot on their neck,
Speaker 33: because realistically they will if you let if there's no oversight,
Speaker 33: if oversight is pulled back. There is a reactionary core
Speaker 33: at the heart of American law enforcement. It's always been there.
Speaker 33: We document it back basically to the turn of the
Speaker 33: century in Oakland in Justice One City, which is a
Speaker 33: newer city in the States. And if you don't, if
Speaker 33: you let that go, that core will rise up and
Speaker 33: basically take over the department. That's what happened with the writers,
Speaker 33: That's what they were. They were a representation of a
Speaker 33: hardcore that existed in Oakland for decades.
Speaker 14: And I think that that's.
Speaker 33: Really a really I think that's a critical takeaway for
Speaker 33: readers from this book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would absolutely agree. Well, folks, the book is
Speaker 1: called The Writers Come Out at Night. Brutality, Corruption and
Speaker 1: Cover Up in Oakland. It's by Ali Winston, who you've
Speaker 1: just been listening to, and Darwin Bond Graham. I can't
Speaker 1: recommend it enough. Ali, thank you so much for being
Speaker 1: on the show.
Speaker 14: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Robert, Oh my goodness, it could happen here. A podcast
Speaker 1: about things falling apart, putting them back together, and the
Speaker 1: Sissifician task of occasionally trying to stop them from crumbling
Speaker 1: as fast as they otherwise would. I'm Robert Evans, who
Speaker 1: is not great at introducing this podcast, and I'm joined
Speaker 1: with James, who is better at introducing this podcast. But
Speaker 1: I strong harmed him out of it. Not true. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll let the audience decide. So James, today, you and
Speaker 1: I are here to talk to a journalist that we
Speaker 1: both like quite a lot, Amy Westervelt. Amy is the
Speaker 1: host of a podcast called Drilled, which focuses on shady
Speaker 1: stuff done by the oil and gas industry, and particularly
Speaker 1: we're talking about season eight of Drilled, which is focused
Speaker 1: on what Exxon is doing in a South American country
Speaker 1: call Guyana, and it's a really fascinating story. There's a
Speaker 1: lot here, including kind of the way in which oil
Speaker 1: and gas companies move in and in a kind of
Speaker 1: predatory way, create contracts with smaller countries that don't maybe
Speaker 1: have the legal resources to set themselves up as well
Speaker 1: as they otherwise would, that don't have kind of the
Speaker 1: long basis of environmental law rulings, that like areas that
Speaker 1: have been you know, used for by the oil and
Speaker 1: gas industry for longer periods of time have and kind
Speaker 1: of the fight by activists in that country to rest
Speaker 1: control back from Exon, and a bunch of other stuff
Speaker 1: besides Amy, welcome to the show. I think that's that's
Speaker 1: enough of an intro from me.
Speaker 13: Hi, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Amy, I'm curious kind of what got you started
Speaker 1: thinking about and focusing on and really digging into what's
Speaker 1: been happening in Guyana, because obviously this is you know, uh,
Speaker 1: the oil and gas industry is a topic of concern
Speaker 1: for most progressives, but people tend to focus on, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the Permian basin, the Gulf of Mexico, obviously,
Speaker 1: the Middle East, these places that are kind of seen
Speaker 1: as traditionally more the bread basket of the oil and
Speaker 1: gas industry.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I started looking at Guyana because I follow a
Speaker 13: lot of Exxon's shareholder briefings and reports like that, and
Speaker 13: I kept seeing them talking about about the project in
Speaker 13: Guyana and just how like the projections kept increasing so quickly,
Speaker 13: And it got to a point where I was like,
Speaker 13: hold on a second, they are projecting that this is
Speaker 13: going to be producing more than the Permian Basin by
Speaker 13: twenty twenty five. And this is a country that shipped
Speaker 13: its first barrel of oil in twenty nineteen. That's incredible,
Speaker 13: kind of unheard of that something would happen that fast.
Speaker 13: So and I happened, like just so happened to have
Speaker 13: had a friend years and years and years ago in
Speaker 13: San Francisco who who like helped do I don't know,
Speaker 13: like marketing for the tourism board in Guyana, and was
Speaker 13: constantly telling me about how Guyana was this amazing eco
Speaker 13: tourism destination. So I had this So I had this like,
Speaker 13: this idea of Guyana in my head is like ecotourism central,
Speaker 13: and then I kept seeing all of these updates around
Speaker 13: around drilling there. So that's kind of what initially got
Speaker 13: me interested. And then I got a press release about
Speaker 13: a lawsuit being filed there by an attorney who was
Speaker 13: trying to kind of stop the oil drilling.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, and this attorney has a has a
Speaker 1: pretty interesting backstory herself, right, she does.
Speaker 13: And that was also very interesting because she actually was
Speaker 13: in house council for BP. Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 13: she grew up in Guyana, her family lap. When she
Speaker 13: was around twelve or thirteen, there was quite a bit
Speaker 13: of political unrest in Guyana, spurred like so many places
Speaker 13: by Daa and oh gosh, like the history of Gana
Speaker 13: is really interesting. But anyway, so there was a lot
Speaker 13: of political unrest. I really felt it unsafe. They left.
Speaker 13: They went to Zambia and then Trinidad, and then you
Speaker 13: end up going to school in England, went to Oxford,
Speaker 13: you know, has this like very posh enge accent now.
Speaker 13: And then at one point decided, you know, she was
Speaker 13: working for BP and traveling all over and and just
Speaker 13: kind of got that up with it and wanted to
Speaker 13: move back to So she moved back started working for
Speaker 13: a corporate law firm there to get very interested in
Speaker 13: environmental laws because at the time the country he was
Speaker 13: just starting to write its first environmental laws. This is
Speaker 13: like mid nineties ish.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And one of the things you make a point
Speaker 1: on in the podcast that is really is interesting is,
Speaker 1: you know, I grew up in Texas and I had
Speaker 1: a lot of friends from the Permian basin, and you
Speaker 1: don't think of it, and you don't think of the
Speaker 1: Gulf as like an area of strong environmental regulations. And
Speaker 1: if you've spent any time speaking in the Gulf of Mexico,
Speaker 1: you certainly don't feel that way. But it actually, I mean,
Speaker 1: it is, which is not to say that they're strong enough,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not to say that they are sufficient,
Speaker 1: but it's I mean, and it's not just that there's
Speaker 1: stronger regulations there, and the regulations are largely a product
Speaker 1: of how long people have been taking gas out of
Speaker 1: oil out of the ground, but it's also that because
Speaker 1: it's got a century, you know, or so of being
Speaker 1: utilized by the industry, there's kind of a there's a
Speaker 1: level of institutional knowledge built up about how to do
Speaker 1: it relatively, which Number one speaks to how inherently dangerous
Speaker 1: it is. Because the Deep Water Horizon disaster happens right
Speaker 1: in the heart of this area. But it also means
Speaker 1: that when you've got a company like x On starting
Speaker 1: work in a place like Guyana, they don't have any
Speaker 1: of that, any of that build up, built up kind
Speaker 1: of competence or expertise in sort of dealing with these problems.
Speaker 13: Yeah, that's right, they don't have. You don't have kind
Speaker 13: of the heavy benchful of you know, experts just hanging
Speaker 13: out looking for jobs. You don't have the disaster response
Speaker 13: to expertise in case of the spill, for example. And
Speaker 13: you also don't have the regulatory oversight expertise, which has
Speaker 13: been a huge problem in Guyana. They got they got
Speaker 13: a grant from the World Bank at one point. This
Speaker 13: was also super controversial.
Speaker 14: That's really interesting to me. Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it was like it was right like right before
Speaker 13: the World Bank issued its whole you know, we're not
Speaker 13: gonna recommend fossil fuel as much anymore kind of pronouncement.
Speaker 13: They sort of fast tracked this grant to Guyana to
Speaker 13: create and grow like a petroleum regulatory department in its
Speaker 13: EPA because they didn't have, like it didn't exist before,
Speaker 13: so they started to build that out. And but you know,
Speaker 13: it's almost like they're building the regulatory apparatus as they're
Speaker 13: starting to drill, so you can imagine like how well
Speaker 13: that's I think.
Speaker 34: So I think you said in your podcast they dropped
Speaker 34: this hundreds of pages, like environmental risk report, and it
Speaker 34: got to prove the same day that they received it, right,
Speaker 34: that's right.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's like stamped, like the date of receipt and
Speaker 13: the date of approval are stamped on the report and
Speaker 13: it's the same day. So there's not a lot of
Speaker 13: oversight happening.
Speaker 1: Hey, some people are speed readers, amy, you know, they.
Speaker 34: Spent all that well banked mine on speed reading courses. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 34: really really moving it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a lot of all I'm going.
Speaker 13: To guess they're very focused over there, yes, yeah, so
Speaker 13: you know, I mean they I actually talked to I
Speaker 13: actually talked to this guy who ran the EPA in Dayana,
Speaker 13: like the first couple of years that they were producing oil,
Speaker 13: and he had formerly worked for the Department of Energy
Speaker 13: in the US and was trying to set up like
Speaker 13: real oversight and like his recommendation was that they have
Speaker 13: an EPA staff member actually physically on the production Bethel
Speaker 13: at all times, which like, uh yeah, no one was into.
Speaker 13: So that guy got fired.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 34: Great, So maybe I'm talking about like the legal panser
Speaker 34: of Texas and the different system in Guyana would be
Speaker 34: a good way to segue into talking about this this
Speaker 34: like right space approach that they used to I guess
Speaker 34: ultimately try and ensure some kind of responsibility was taken
Speaker 34: by the oil companies can Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you want to explain that for people.
Speaker 13: In terms of like the right to a healthy environment?
Speaker 26: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think it's very interesting.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's super interesting. So Melinda Jinki,
Speaker 13: this lawyer who us worked for BP from Guyana, moved
Speaker 13: home starts working on these laws. She helped to write
Speaker 13: the country's first kind of environmental protection Act, which established
Speaker 13: its EPA, and then in nineteen eighty six and again
Speaker 13: in two thousand and three, there were some revisions to
Speaker 13: the constitution. So in early two thousand's she worked on
Speaker 13: getting a right to a healthy environment integrated into the constitution,
Speaker 13: which basically just says, you know, every has the right
Speaker 13: to a livable environment for you know, themselves and for
Speaker 13: future generations. So that actually opened up the ability for
Speaker 13: citizens to sue the government over this oil drilling project.
Speaker 13: So there's a couple of people who are doing that,
Speaker 13: and they are arguing that the government is violating their
Speaker 13: right to a healthy environment by not just permitting this
Speaker 13: offshore drilling, but doing it in this really kind of
Speaker 13: reckless way where either sort of rubber stamping permits, they're
Speaker 13: not really providing any oversight excellon, like brags constantly about
Speaker 13: how this project is, like, you know, we've done in
Speaker 13: five years, what usually takes ten? I asked them. I
Speaker 13: was like, oh, is there like a new technology or
Speaker 13: like a new drilling approach or something like. The answer is,
Speaker 13: you know, more or less boils down to a very
Speaker 13: quote unquote collaborative government it so.
Speaker 1: You know, oh boy, that's good. Faster you need to
Speaker 1: dig into that aproach break things.
Speaker 13: Not totally exactly, And and the guyes government has this
Speaker 13: idea I think that, well they've they've actually said this
Speaker 13: out loud a few times that like net zero is uh,
Speaker 13: you know, commitments to net zero is sort of like
Speaker 13: their timeline, you know, where they're like, okay, well, you
Speaker 13: know everyone wants to get to net zero by such
Speaker 13: and such dates, So we need to get oil out
Speaker 13: of the ground as fast as possible and sell it
Speaker 13: so that we can meet that zero and so, and
Speaker 13: because of how really crappy the contract is for Anna,
Speaker 13: they are kind of incentivized to that as well, because
Speaker 13: the faster they can get oil out of the ground
Speaker 13: and sold, the faster they might be able to kind
Speaker 13: of get to a place where actually getting sort of
Speaker 13: their promised share of the oil money. So they they're
Speaker 13: incentivized to move fast and kind of look the way
Speaker 13: on stuff. I mean, there's the first two years of
Speaker 13: that project. Exon talked publicly about the fact that a
Speaker 13: pretty key piece of equipment on the boat was broken
Speaker 13: for two years.
Speaker 5: Two years.
Speaker 13: That's cool. Yeah, And again it's like it's an offshore
Speaker 13: deep water drilling project. This is like the most risky
Speaker 13: type of oil drem there is. There's an enormous amount
Speaker 13: of pressure at that level of depth of the ocean.
Speaker 13: It's exactly the sort of situation that deep water spill
Speaker 13: happened in, and a lot of like similar kind of
Speaker 13: approaches to maintenance and safety happening. So yeah, not great.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk a little bit one of the
Speaker 1: things that you you kind of open up the series
Speaker 1: with that I found very very intriguing and it's something
Speaker 1: i've heard from other journalists in the same beat as you,
Speaker 1: is that when you start work on a project that
Speaker 1: focuses on Exon, some peculiar things start to happen, just
Speaker 1: like and nothing nothing, nothing we can say for certain
Speaker 1: is like tied to Exxon Mobile. That's right, y, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you do notice some like weird things. I wanted to
Speaker 1: chat a little bit about that because it's it does
Speaker 1: scan with other things I've heard from from other folks.
Speaker 13: True, it's true. And I you know, I report on
Speaker 13: all of the oil comp and none of them particularly
Speaker 13: like journalists, especially journalists, and they, you know, will kind
Speaker 13: of do the usual thing of sending you nasty emails
Speaker 13: or refusing to have their executives talk to you. It's
Speaker 13: like that, but Exon and it's like every every time
Speaker 13: I'm working on an Excellon story, it's just like, you know,
Speaker 13: if I'm traveling, all my travel plans get canceled. There's
Speaker 13: always just there's always just weird stuff that happens, like
Speaker 13: you know, you start to feel like being watched and
Speaker 13: followed a lot, and and yeah, it's super not just
Speaker 13: me then that experience. I know that everyone I know
Speaker 13: that has reported on them has said that's definitely like
Speaker 13: there's you know, just a kind of an intimation thing
Speaker 13: that they like to do. I actually was surprised that
Speaker 13: Steve call who wrote the book Private Empire about Exon,
Speaker 13: said to me, and I have this in the podcast too,
Speaker 13: that he has, you know, reported on al Qaeda and
Speaker 13: reported on the CIA, and if he's ever like disappeared,
Speaker 13: he hold everyone he knows that it's probably Exon. So
Speaker 13: so yeah, yeah then, and that definitely happened on this
Speaker 13: project too, Like we my hotel room got canceled. The
Speaker 13: hotel room also got broken into. Yeah, and it was
Speaker 13: one of those where it's like I had cash on
Speaker 13: the nightstand was still there, but like my computer was
Speaker 13: open with like certain files open, things like that, and
Speaker 13: I don't keep like you know, sensitive files on my
Speaker 13: laptop and even in my hotel room. But it was
Speaker 13: definitely like, Okay, this seems very pointed, and you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's intimidation.
Speaker 34: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, normal and good
Speaker 34: And I know, no.
Speaker 13: People always ask me, they're like, are you afraid of
Speaker 13: getting sued by Exxon? And I was like, well, I
Speaker 13: guess if I had assets, I would be afraid.
Speaker 33: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Thing yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 34: Yeah, but like I wonder I was really interested in
Speaker 34: I get this legal approach which is very successful in Guyana, Right,
Speaker 34: and if we compare that, like if we come back
Speaker 34: to the United States and I know there's a court
Speaker 34: case I think it was, like it was I'm pretty
Speaker 34: sure it's Boulder, Colorado. I might be wrong, but it
Speaker 34: was somewhere like that where they they tried to sue
Speaker 34: oil companies for causing fires.
Speaker 13: Right, Yes, there's a climate liability case there and it's
Speaker 13: still going. Actually it's still it's still alive. They just
Speaker 13: got like a move in their favor at the Supreme Court.
Speaker 34: Because yeah, isn't the case in the US is a
Speaker 34: bit different, right, where we don't have this constitutional right
Speaker 34: to like a healthy environment and we don't.
Speaker 13: Yeah, let me tell you, although actually, guess who does
Speaker 13: have that in the US the Montana, the state of Montana. Yes,
Speaker 13: and so there's like there's a case there actually that's
Speaker 13: invoking their state constitutional right, which is very's.
Speaker 1: There's this A lot of people don't know this about
Speaker 1: kind of the northern western part of the country, you know,
Speaker 1: Montana is it's not really the PNW, but it's the
Speaker 1: Mountain West, which is that they had especially kind of
Speaker 1: in like the seventies and eighties, this weird history of
Speaker 1: like Republican governors, I think into the nineties of the
Speaker 1: early nineties too, like Republican state leaders who were also
Speaker 1: because I guess our national discourse wasn't so inherently toxic,
Speaker 1: really progressive in bizarre ways. It's one of like probably
Speaker 1: the best governor Oregon ever had was a Republican who's
Speaker 1: like one of his chief accomplishments was he made all
Speaker 1: of the coastline in Oregon, both like Lake and River
Speaker 1: coastline and the Ocean coastline public property. He like set
Speaker 1: it up so that it's regulated like highways, basically so
Speaker 1: that no one can own private beach. Now, there's some
Speaker 1: little janky ways kind of around aspects of that, but
Speaker 1: like as a general rule, it's a really positive thing,
Speaker 1: and it's like not what you would expect from a Republican.
Speaker 1: I think the same thing is true of that law
Speaker 1: in Montana, where it's just like you used to be
Speaker 1: able to have republic I mean, like Nixon created the
Speaker 1: e p A right, it just didn't used to be
Speaker 1: the same kind of partisan that it is today.
Speaker 5: Even like.
Speaker 34: In the early Trump era, there were a decent number
Speaker 34: of Republican folks who like specifically opposed drilling in bears
Speaker 34: ears or like d.
Speaker 1: Was interesting wherever they went hunting or something.
Speaker 35: Yeah, was like yeah, yeah because we I was like
Speaker 35: the outdoor industry had to stop doing tradeios in Utah
Speaker 35: because Utah was gonna The governor of Utah supported de
Speaker 35: monumentizing it.
Speaker 34: A lot of their like quote unquote hook, hook and
Speaker 34: bullet people were like, yeah, fuck this, it's bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's the same I think that's the
Speaker 1: same category as like John McCain having a good take
Speaker 1: on torture right where it's like, yeah, I mean they
Speaker 1: live right there. Of course they don't want it destroyed,
Speaker 1: but everybody's okay with, you know, poisoning the Gulf or
Speaker 1: you know the stuff that the that the coke industries
Speaker 1: was guilty of having like a fucking pipelines full of
Speaker 1: holes running under towns but then explode.
Speaker 13: Yeah, exactly, exactly, And that is actually like the number
Speaker 13: It's like the number one thing that gets people on
Speaker 13: and on board with environmental regulation is like having something
Speaker 13: happen and there in the community where they were like,
Speaker 13: wait a minute, this doesn't seem fair. Same with Pennsylvania,
Speaker 13: Like people were really into frecking until it became like wait,
Speaker 13: so if my neighbor has a lease and that lease
Speaker 13: ends up poisoning my well, I have no recourds. Yes,
Speaker 13: that's how it works. Welcome to America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 13: So no, I mean they're all like, actually, there's there's
Speaker 13: towns and now that are act speing of the right
Speaker 13: space thing that are invoking home rule and baking rights
Speaker 13: of nature into their charters. And these are like pretty
Speaker 13: conservative districts too, and the whole reason they're doing it
Speaker 13: have more local control over land use decision.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is probably I'm sure a mixed bag to
Speaker 1: some degree.
Speaker 13: Exactly, because you could imagine that going in a bunch
Speaker 13: of different ways.
Speaker 34: Yes, yeah, yeah, school board levels exactly.
Speaker 13: Yeah, right now, it's like to get rid of fracking
Speaker 13: waste sites, but it could easily be yeah, we don't
Speaker 13: want any I don't know, in degraded schools here, for example, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 34: I wonder it's different in the US in the sense that,
Speaker 34: like I underd right, this this case in Guyana went
Speaker 34: to the Supreme Court of Guyana right, and.
Speaker 19: Is that right?
Speaker 13: Several so, so Melinda has now filed seven different cases.
Speaker 13: She's very busy, and most of them have wound up
Speaker 13: at at the High Court of Guyana, which is their
Speaker 13: supreme court. They just had a big verdict in another
Speaker 13: case that she filed, which is really interesting and potentially
Speaker 13: huge game changer for oil drilling kind of around the globe.
Speaker 13: They so in the environmental permit that Exon had to
Speaker 13: get in order to start drilling offshore, it is laid
Speaker 13: out as a requirement of that permit that they have
Speaker 13: to have insurance policy from an independent insurer. So they
Speaker 13: can't self insure, which is what oil companies usually do.
Speaker 13: They all have like their own insurance companies to ensure
Speaker 13: their projects. It's bizarre, but anyway, so it really it
Speaker 13: stipulates an independent insurance company and an unlimited parent company guarantee.
Speaker 13: That's really really huge because basically in Guyana, as in
Speaker 13: most other places that they're operating outside of the US,
Speaker 13: they use like a local subsidiary that has very few assets.
Speaker 13: So they have so Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, which
Speaker 13: is worth you know, maybe two billion dollars on paper,
Speaker 13: and so you know, it's very handy for them to
Speaker 13: you know, something bad happens and subsidiary might get drained,
Speaker 13: but the parent company is protected. It was actually written
Speaker 13: into their permits. They had to have this unlimited guarantee
Speaker 13: that they will cover whatever damage is, which is important
Speaker 13: because in all of the environmental impact assessments, you know
Speaker 13: Exxon's own environmental impact assessments, they're saying if there were
Speaker 13: a well blowout, which is like what happened with deep water,
Speaker 13: it would hit up to fourteen different Caribbean islands plus
Speaker 13: various countries in like the northern coast of South America,
Speaker 13: so like a really big problem. And these are mostly
Speaker 13: countries that ran tourism and for their economies. So the
Speaker 13: argument that Melinda Baide was, look, because the government has
Speaker 13: been lacked in regulation and now they haven't required this guarantee,
Speaker 13: you're opening up the citizens of this country to risk
Speaker 13: because if there's a spill like this, these countries could
Speaker 13: come to Guyana asking to be paid for damages and
Speaker 13: we're not able to ut And now you've taken, you know,
Speaker 13: exoning for it off the table. So anyway, the judge
Speaker 13: in their favor and said, yeah, you're right, Exon you
Speaker 13: need to have this in writing within thirty days. Yeah,
Speaker 13: it's incredible. I mean that could really make It would
Speaker 13: change the math considerably for this project, and I would
Speaker 13: say most other projects that they're working on. The ep
Speaker 13: is it's the e p A m exon or sort
Speaker 13: of like co defendants. In this case, the e p
Speaker 13: A is appealing. Also like just by way, when your
Speaker 13: EPA is a co defendant with an oil company, there's
Speaker 13: something very wrong.
Speaker 1: Might it might not be doing the p part.
Speaker 13: Exactly xactly. So they're appealing, and you know, there's a
Speaker 13: lot of government corruption and stuff going on, so we'll see,
Speaker 13: we'll see what happens. But this judge, everyone was like,
Speaker 13: I was talking to a journalist that we've been working
Speaker 13: with there and she was like, yes, everyone's very worried
Speaker 13: for his safety because like this this was a big deal.
Speaker 13: And he really, I mean in like the most prim
Speaker 13: and proper legally is possible. He repeatedly was like, e PA,
Speaker 13: why are you just being ex all's bitch here?
Speaker 1: What's going on?
Speaker 13: It was like a real like whoa bomb of a ruling.
Speaker 13: So so yeah, that's a big win. The constitutional case
Speaker 13: is still they're still waiting for a ruling in that case.
Speaker 13: But that's also the Supreme Court that will be ruling
Speaker 13: on it because it's a constitutional argument.
Speaker 34: Yeah, talking of being people's bait, it's probably time for
Speaker 34: us to hate from our advertisers.
Speaker 1: Ah, yes, great, great, great great.
Speaker 34: Yeah, you laid off and I disduncted.
Speaker 1: These advertisers, none of whom are in any way involved
Speaker 1: in the oil and gas industry.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Actually can't promise that, but you know, pretend we can.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ah, We're back and continue to be blameless. All right,
Speaker 1: let's uh should we move on to talking about We
Speaker 1: chatted a little before this started, and one of the
Speaker 1: things that kind of is perennially on or perpetually on
Speaker 1: our beat is different laws and rules and attempts around
Speaker 1: the world to crack down on the ability of people
Speaker 1: to protest and exercise dissent, which you have some some
Speaker 1: some thoughts on, and also some some information on kind
Speaker 1: of the way in which the oil and gas industry
Speaker 1: is tied to a lot of these legal kind of assaults.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, they are very into cracking down on protests,
Speaker 13: and that I think is really interesting right now is
Speaker 13: that you have the fossil fuel industry on the one hand,
Speaker 13: working behind the scenes to you know, the American Fuel
Speaker 13: and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which is the lobbying group for like
Speaker 13: coke industries and a bunch of oil companies and all
Speaker 13: of that. They helped to write sample legislation in the
Speaker 13: way of Standing Rock to pass around to all of
Speaker 13: these Republicans that would increase science associated with protests and
Speaker 13: jail time. And they also did a lot to try
Speaker 13: to broaden it out to include organizations, so you know,
Speaker 13: any anyone, any organization thing to organize or plan protests
Speaker 13: can also be fined. In Kansas, they included a reco
Speaker 13: charge in that, so you know, they're trying to make
Speaker 13: protest organized crime. But at the same time that they're
Speaker 13: doing all of that stuff, the number one argument that
Speaker 13: the fossil fuel industry is making in all of the
Speaker 13: climate cases against it in the US is corporate free
Speaker 13: speech argument, and that is like it's terrifying. So actually,
Speaker 13: and you mentioned Boulder before, there's been there's like twenty
Speaker 13: four should these cases where towns or cities or states
Speaker 13: are saying, hey, it's really expensive for us to adapt
Speaker 13: to all of these climate risks, and it would be
Speaker 13: less expensive if the oil and gas companies had kept
Speaker 13: everyone from doing anything about this for the last forty years,
Speaker 13: therefore they should pay some portion of the cost. That's
Speaker 13: like the basic argument. And the oil companies for the
Speaker 13: last three or four years have been saying, you know, oh,
Speaker 13: you're trying to get around federal law by bringing these
Speaker 13: in state court, and these cases belong in still court.
Speaker 13: The Supreme Court finally declined to hear that argument. That
Speaker 13: Department of Justice was like, they can stay in state court,
Speaker 13: it's fine. So that argument is sort of dead in
Speaker 13: the water. But they've already started with like their next
Speaker 13: attempt to get these cases to the Supreme Court, and
Speaker 13: it's this free speech argument that they've been making, which
Speaker 13: basically says, look, anything we've ever said about climate change
Speaker 13: was in the interest of shaping policy. That makes it
Speaker 13: political speech or in like legal words, petitioning speech, and
Speaker 13: therefore protected by the First Amendment. Now they're saying, in
Speaker 13: these cases, our First Amendment argument is foundational to our arguments. Therefore, uh,
Speaker 13: these can't be in state court. State courts can't rule
Speaker 13: on on like key First Amendment issues. So I'm like
Speaker 13: convinced that one of these cases is going to be
Speaker 13: the next Citizens United and this Supreme Court. That's very
Speaker 13: very scary because you know, they're talking about blurring that,
Speaker 13: like they're basically saying, like lying can be free, can
Speaker 13: be protected if it's in the interest of shaping policy
Speaker 13: a particular way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fine if we're okay with lying for us,
Speaker 1: which is is enity. I'm pulled over by the police,
Speaker 1: but probably probably oil and gas company should be helped
Speaker 1: you so you can see.
Speaker 13: It's like bad, but like really for everything, very bad
Speaker 13: if that gets that. Yeah, So yeah, they're doing that
Speaker 13: at the same time that they're trying to limit individual
Speaker 13: free speech. And I think that parallel is well a
Speaker 13: not accidental, but very very gross and disturbing.
Speaker 34: Yeah, very much, sir. Like I think it's interesting yet
Speaker 34: that try like that. They very clearly see this Supreme
Speaker 34: Court it's like the one to go for, right, not
Speaker 34: that it's going anywhere anytime soon. I guess didn't Amy
Speaker 34: County parrots like like dad, wasn't her dad like a shell?
Speaker 13: Yeah, he worked for like twenty years.
Speaker 34: He sure did, of course, because yeah, there's a plus
Speaker 34: thing happening and.
Speaker 13: She never recuses herself on any of these cases ever,
Speaker 13: also Elito, I think it's Alito has stock in coniccophillas.
Speaker 13: That cool, that's cool. Yeah, it was gifted to him
Speaker 13: by someone.
Speaker 5: Statue.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think it's it's and and
Speaker 13: I mean they they have said out loud in multiple
Speaker 13: places that the whole push to criminalize protests was one
Speaker 13: hundred percent a reaction to Standing Rock. They were very
Speaker 13: freaked out by that. I think they always have like
Speaker 13: a an ozed reaction to anything that Indigenous people are doing. Period.
Speaker 13: It's like that whole gross extra layer to it. And
Speaker 13: then actually elsewhere too, like in in Canada this like
Speaker 13: we're working with a reporter who's been looking into this
Speaker 13: in Canada for a while. His name is Jeff Dembicky,
Speaker 13: and he's found that there's the oil and gas companies
Speaker 13: there like wrote down in strategies. I don't know why
Speaker 13: these guys write this stuff down all the time, but
Speaker 13: they wrote down, we're going to make First Nations people
Speaker 13: the face of climate protests because that'll make it vilified
Speaker 13: climate protest in the press.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 34: Yeah, Jesus Christ, sorry that one fully sent me.
Speaker 13: Yeah. Yeah, so a very similar thing there too, where
Speaker 13: it's like increasing fines and jail time, and you know, yeah,
Speaker 13: it's interesting.
Speaker 34: How Yeah, it's like in the US anyway, Like if
Speaker 34: you look at the bleeding edge of settler colonialism, it's
Speaker 34: it's nearly always fossil fuel extraction, right, Like if like
Speaker 34: Oak Flat, the proposed extraction of lithium on tribal lands,
Speaker 34: like a lot of these the nexus of like protesting
Speaker 34: and yet like colonialism will be these I guess, not
Speaker 34: with them of fossil fuel, but these extractive projects on
Speaker 34: tribal land.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yes, yes, which is why actually the the rights
Speaker 13: of nature stuff is becoming really interesting in tribal courts.
Speaker 13: So I don't know you guys followed this, but like
Speaker 13: with the Line three protests, the the tribe there, they
Speaker 13: they actually filed a case against the Minnesota I don't know,
Speaker 13: a Department of Public Works or something like that, and
Speaker 13: they they they were like, uh, we have a in
Speaker 13: their case. It's monomen the rights of monomen So monomen is.
Speaker 13: Oh god, I just went out of my mind entirely.
Speaker 13: It's uh wild rice all right, Okay, monoman is the
Speaker 13: word is the Indigenous for wild rice, and they have
Speaker 13: rights for this rice written into their tribal laws and
Speaker 13: so they're saying, look, based on our treaties, you are
Speaker 13: actually violating this law, and therefore we can we can
Speaker 13: take you to court in tribal court to stop this pipelint.
Speaker 13: It didn't work to stop line three, but actually the
Speaker 13: case is still making its way through the courts because
Speaker 13: the Minnesota DPW tried to say, look, tibal court has
Speaker 13: action over us and the state court. It was like, uh,
Speaker 13: yeah they do actually, because treaties exist. So it's really
Speaker 13: interesting because now it's the same tribe that is potentially
Speaker 13: impacted by line five in Michigan and they are looking
Speaker 13: at using the same argument and it could end up
Speaker 13: actually working there because there's now been enough time that
Speaker 13: you know, could it could make its way to the
Speaker 13: courts and set a president. But anyway, yeah, it's really
Speaker 13: really really interesting.
Speaker 34: Yeah, that's very that's really weirdly similar to the Kumii
Speaker 34: people here in San Diego who are challenging the construction
Speaker 34: or quote unquote repair, which is not what's happening of
Speaker 34: bottle wall.
Speaker 18: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, that's what they all say about the pipelines too.
Speaker 13: It's always repairing an old pipeline. But you look at
Speaker 13: the plan and it's like, that's a whole new ass pipeline. Yeah,
Speaker 13: in a different place than it was before.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 34: Yeah, yeah, they were repairing a three foot fence with
Speaker 34: a thirty foot steel barrier. But yeah, they it cuts
Speaker 34: directly through burial grounds here, and they're repairing it by
Speaker 34: destroying the burial grounds, which again they they've opposed with
Speaker 34: mixed results, I guess, but it's yeah, I guess if
Speaker 34: folks are listening and they're interested, there are a lot
Speaker 34: of places where they can they can help those struggles,
Speaker 34: like different ways to do that, but that there might
Speaker 34: be more effective here than going to the Supreme Court,
Speaker 34: given the Supreme Court's composition.
Speaker 13: I guess, exactly, yeah, exactly, that's why. Yeah, with the
Speaker 13: the tribal court stuff, I think will be interesting to
Speaker 13: watch in the next couple of years to see if
Speaker 13: they're able to to do anything. But you know, tribal
Speaker 13: solompties all under attack by the Supreme Yes.
Speaker 34: Yeah, yeah, yeah, They're likelihood of this resulting in like
Speaker 34: Indigenous nations getting ever more fucked by the US is
Speaker 34: equally high as I could have Ember having success, I guess.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, anyway, sorry, I got really far Afield there the
Speaker 13: counter protest stuff is very very very much being driven
Speaker 13: by oil and gas, and there's it just keeps going too.
Speaker 13: I mean every year there's like, you know, multiple more
Speaker 13: of these laws being proposed and passed. I think we're
Speaker 13: at twenty eights now have passed them, fourteen or fifteen
Speaker 13: have actually implemented them. And yeah, it's not not great.
Speaker 19: No.
Speaker 13: I also think, like, you know, you're seeing the expansion
Speaker 13: of the whole eco terrorist and really like come back
Speaker 13: with a vengeance too. I feel like that was something
Speaker 13: that happened in like early posts nine to eleven days
Speaker 13: and is now happening again where it's it's like, I
Speaker 13: don't know, let's expand the definition of terrorism to include
Speaker 13: environmental activists and then we can you know, go after
Speaker 13: them with those charges too. That happened in cop City too, right,
Speaker 13: weren't they using.
Speaker 1: Yes, they are in the process, so still doing that.
Speaker 1: Yeah great, Yeah, well, Amy, this is all really important.
Speaker 1: You have a bit depressive, so no, we are. This
Speaker 1: is a this is a real meeting of the people
Speaker 1: who are fun at parties, sit down and you know
Speaker 1: that descent has been criminalized. Yeah, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: I guess I'll have a Manhattan like, what do you
Speaker 1: what do you want?
Speaker 34: The last party Robot and I attended together, we we
Speaker 34: saw a car bomb happened, so at least that we.
Speaker 1: Didn't see a car bomb happen. Yeah, bring positive vibes.
Speaker 1: Just a demonstrative car bomb you know people?
Speaker 34: Yeah, no, no, no, it was an Irish car who
Speaker 34: would have gotten more people.
Speaker 1: That's a little bit of a little bit of I r
Speaker 1: a humor for the audience. Okay, we should probably go.
Speaker 1: I'm making the next slash motion. Yeah all right, well, Amy,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on today, and thank
Speaker 1: you for continuing to put out a podcast that is
Speaker 1: keep that can, at least if people you know, listen,
Speaker 1: keep them very updated on some of the most important
Speaker 1: climate related news going on today and some of the
Speaker 1: real like fuckery being carried out by the oil and
Speaker 1: gas industry. Again, the podcast is Drilled. Season eight right
Speaker 1: now is about exon in Guiana. Amy, do you have
Speaker 1: anything else you wanted to say before we roll out?
Speaker 13: No, that's it. Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you so much. Amy, really appreciate it. And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, this has been Robert and James. We should
Speaker 1: probably do something on the Thames at some point, James,
Speaker 1: it'll rhyme. I know it's not pronounced that way. I
Speaker 1: know this was just me.
Speaker 5: Let's do it anyway.
Speaker 1: We could call it Robert and Jim's on the Thames.
Speaker 1: You know, there we go.
Speaker 34: Absolutely, no.
Speaker 1: Podcast is over. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 1: episodes every week from now until the heat death of
Speaker 1: the Universe. It could happen here as a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media.
Speaker 29: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 29: coolzonemedia dot com.
Speaker 15: Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 15: or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 29: You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 29: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 15: Thanks for listening.