Part I. Tortuguita Vive, La Lucha Sigue. Stop Cop City

ATLANTA IN THE UPRISINGS

After the George Floyd Uprisings, as the nation slowly simmered and we witnessed the fallout of the attempted coup d'état at the Capitols on January 6th; Atlanta continued to burn.

In the Pacific Northwest, the protests had come to a standstill, after the events of February 22nd, 2022. At Normandale Park in Northeast Portland, a white supremacist unleashed a hail of bullets into a crowd of corkers and those keeping protesters safe. While several were injured, one died. Her name was June Knightly, known as T-Rex. This horrible act of violence shook many activists to their core, and subsequently, the movement for Black Lives reached its end.

However, while Seattle and Portland returned to normality; Atlanta’s activism only ramped up. For theirs was a battle of life and death, against the police state that only expanded in cities after the Uprisings. As a majority black and democratic city, Atlanta faced an existential threat. They were a center of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, and so the work against systemic racism only continued.

This was the COP CITY project that threatened Atlanta’s residents with a militaristic Atlanta Police Department. This project, a massive mock city for cops to play in and imagine that they could should shoot protesters, ignited a wave of activism that in many ways was the last true flame that carried forward the Movement for Black Lives.

Atlanta garnered national attention in that long hot summer of 2020. After every city in the states took to the streets, against the police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville; Atlanta Police murdered another unarmed black man, on June the 12th of that year.

His name was Rayshard Brooks.

The crime that the man committed that warranted police brutality? He had fallen asleep in his car, in a Wendy’s drive-through. Officers from APD arrived to speak to the man, who offered multiple times to go ahead and walk home and walk it off. No doubt fearing for his life, after many of us saw the high-profile murders that summer, especially the killing of George Floyd in broad daylight, a struggle ensued where Brooks got ahold of a taser. He ran, scared for his life as an officer pursued him. He turned to fire the taser back, in order to escape, while Officer Rolfe of APD unleashed three bullets into his back, ending his life.

The night of June 13th, erupted in flames. The Wendy’s location who called the police and where Brooks’ life was ended, was set alight. The footage was inspiring. The blaze rose like a pillar in the night. A fire that reminded me of the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis.

This was not the only murder in Georgia, that ignited the summer of rage across the country. On February 23rd of that pivotal year, a 25-year old black man had been murdered by two white residents of a rural county in Georgia.

A runner, the man had been taking a jog in the neighborhood. He was hunted by two white men, a father and son, who followed him for blocks in their trucks, attempting to block him off using their vehicles. The young man turned to confront the old men chasing him down, wondering why he was being pursued by armed vigilantes. They got out and shot the man in cold blood.

His name was Ahmaud Arbery.

When officers arrived at the scene, from the Glynn County Police Department, Arbery was still alive. However, they did not question the men about the validity of their justification for shooting the man as an act of “self defense”. They greeted the killers on a first-name basis for their proximity to members of the police. GCPD refused to press charges, or even investigate the obvious hate crime, all the while telling those involved that the District Attorney advised them to make no arrests.

It was only after the video surfaced on local news, that members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations finally arrested Travis and Gregory McMichael, on the 7th and 21st of May. Shortly before the murder of George Floyd, Georgia had already witnessed, for years before as well, the issue of racial profiling and vigilantism that would soon cause wide-spread civil unrest across the States.

I paid attention to Atlanta, where the movement continued to ignite the rage we had not seen for generations. The murder of Brooks activated the residents of Atlanta, who were already protesting the murder of Arbery and racial inequality in the South. Especially in their home state, and against a city government and police department that, as a result of Cop City, cared nothing for the voices of their voters.

One of the most important actions they undertook during the summer garnered national attention on May 29th, 2020. After days of the network attempting to stifle dissent through refusing to condemn the brutal murder of George Floyd, protesters stormed the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. It was due to their coverage of the Uprisings, and their part in enforcing the status quo.

The big red letters were vandalized, and windows smashed. Outside of the now-defaced news station, multiple police vehicles were lit on fire. And all the while, the protests only erupted further after the murder of Rayshard Brooks, two weeks later.

The people of Atlanta understood their part in the protest movement across the country. That institutionalized racism and voter suppression were rampant in their state and the South. And even the elected leaders that represented them, did not care about their concerns.

Remember that Georgia swung blue for Biden in 2020, the first time in many generations. The state government in Georgia was deeply red. Brian Kemp was the governor, after a hotly contested election in 2018, against a black woman named Stacy Abrams. Kemp acted as the Secretary of State during the gubernatorial race. Meaning that he oversaw his own election, and the scores of ballots thrown out due to arbitrary rules and voter suppression measures.

The Atlanta Police Foundation did more to stifle dissent than other police guilds in the country. While the murder of Rayshard Brooks caused civil unrest in the city, the foundation moved quickly to defend the officers captured committing the act of murder. While the city fired one officer, they filed a lawsuit to reinstate the man with back pay, which they won. All the while they condemned the protests, demanding silence from the thousands of Atlanta residents that flooded the streets every night.

Nothing was more evident of this sheer disregard for democracy than the proposed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

COP CITY

The site was to be built on the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, an abandoned farm that produced food through prison slave labor starting in the 1920s. Little records exist to verify the exact years of its operation, for it was so shrouded in secrecy. It is also within a stone’s throw of a number of old slave plantations. Not to mention that its name was the “Weelaunee Forest’’, and was a vital living space for the Muscogee Creek natives, until they were forced out in the Trail of Tears. Cop City is a continuation of the environmental and ecological racism that had been enshrined in the prison farm, and since the founding of the colony in the South.

The project was first announced towards the end of 2017. It wouldn’t be pushed forward until the end of 2020. Citing the calls to defund the police, the Atlanta Police Foundation complained about dwindling morale throughout the force. While national crime rates actually fell, following the global pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, police used the rise in homicides in one year to paint a picture of “rampant crime”, as did many police foundations and guilds across the States.

As a part of that, in conjunction with the City of Atlanta, in early 2021 they revealed the location of 85 acres to be built on the site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, which nature had now reclaimed and enveloped the tortured site into a thriving forest.

Atlanta has the largest tree canopy of any major city in the United States. Often called the “City in the Forest”, the green spaces were clearly saved among affluent neighborhoods, majority white. The level of greenery throughout certain parts of the cities and the lack thereof in others was a clear instance of environmental racism. The new site, in the “Weelaunee Forest”, was also to be built along a majority-Black and lower-class neighborhood.

85 acres of the trees were to be cut down. In that space, the police will build a replica of a city, with a school, mock village, and a shooting range. There will be a shell of an apartment building, a burn house, and a bar and nightclub. The location is also within the vicinity of a local elementary school, and residential homes.

While they swore Cop City would allow the police to train on how to protect people in these places, we know this is not the case. In Colorado Springs and Orlando, gay bars and nightclubs have had to defend themselves. In Uvalde, Texas at Robb Elementary School, an army of police cowered outside the hallway where a mass shooter was able to murder children with impunity. Instead the residents understood what it was for…

There, no doubt with Israeli trainers, the Atlanta Police and Georgia State Police would train on counter-insurgency. Fueled by the rage of that long hot summer, they wanted a place to practice stifling protest movements and how to enact brutality on unarmed civilians. The city would allow them to be trained on how to shut down uprisings, and crack down on protests. They would run exercises on executing no-knock warrants, which often end in the execution of the suspect, like the deadly and unjustified raid that murdered Breonna Taylor and Amir Locke.

According to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the site will be built with the City of Atlanta bearing a third of the 90 million cost. Each meeting that we have watched has only ballooned the cost to catastrophic proportions, which the city council condones. While they are covering a “third” this number is arbitrary, and most likely, as the budget grows so too will the burden on Atlanta and DeKalb County taxpayers. The other appropriations will be put up through the police charity and corporate sponsors.

The APF claims the project provides “the necessary facilities required to effectively train 21st-century law enforcement agencies responsible for public safety in a major urban city.” In this phrasing, public safety means militaristic crackdowns and enforcement. The Atlanta Police, much like other police departments in this country, are currently expanding their arsenal and creating a police state.

From the beginning, the project garnered wide-scale condemnation, both from the residents who this would affect, and various institutions that understood what this meant for the people of Atlanta. Community centers, schools, churches, and environmental groups spoke out when the development was to move forward.

Cop City came to a city council vote in September of 2021, after the paperwork and costs were finalized by the Atlanta Police Foundation and the city — pay attention to the fact that each year and council meeting, the costs only seem to expand. The proposal was met with immediate backlash.

The council meeting saw 17 hours of public comments, in which 70 percent of those that spoke, and the majority of residents, condemned Cop City, citing environmental racism, police brutality and militarization, and squandering of public funds on the Cop City in the forest. Another issue existed in its design, as the APF placed a shooting range within the vicinity of schools and homes, not even moving the range to shoot into empty spaces in a suburb of Atlanta.

And yet, despite the majority dissent, the council voted overwhelmingly to greenlight the project.

Residents complained that the process for approving the police project was entirely undemocratic. The costs, designs, and details were kept quiet throughout, with no civilian input. No comments from the neighborhoods that Cop City would be placed were heard.

To counter these claims of silencing the dissent of residents, the City of Atlanta created an advisory committee. The Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens announced the board, adding that “there is a lot of room for input”. Yet the civilian advisory committee had none of the civilian groups who spoke up against Cop City from environmental groups to churches and organizations advocating against the project. Instead representatives from the police foundations, various police and fire departments, and the Dickens administration were the only people allowed on the board.

The sole person that spoke out against the project on the board was removed from their post. Any criticism wouldn’t be allowed by civilians, as the police foundations ran the entire system. The project is deeply unpopular, yet it continues despite international condemnation.

DEFEND THE FOREST

As organizations attempted to block Cop City through “democratic” means (here democratic is pejorative as the city council of Democrats, ignored the majority’s disapproval); activists took matters into their own hands.

The Defend the Forest or Stop Cop City movement began in earnest towards the end of 2021. As the city council gave the police foundation their blessing in training to murder their own residents; activists moved from the streets, into the trees.

It was a natural move for the protesters, to move from advocating to Defund the Police, to continuing to call for police abolition while defending the forest that the cops now threatened to destroy. The police denied their part in the destruction of the remaining green space in a majority poor and black neighborhood, telling the residents and forest defenders that there was no “forest” on the site of the Weelaunee Forest, a bold-faced lie.

At the end of 2021, the forest became the site of a number of public gatherings to protest the project. Activists called for events in the forest, to use it as a public space. These included art shows, musical performances, guided hikes to identify the local flora and fauna. Altogether, their creativity was brilliant, and they sought to normalize the presence of the public in the green space, to alter it from a site of police training to public discussion and space.

Workshops were planned, which ranged from anything like political action to resist the project, to how to carry on the movement at a national level. Numerous skill shares and other teach-ins were put together. If these activists were going to defend the trees, they needed to learn the survival skills to see it through.

And so the activists went from protesters, to Forest Defenders. They viewed their task as similar to the Water Defenders and Forest Defenders. They were inspired by the actions of indigenous communities, especially in Canada, that challenged corporate and police attempts to encroach upon their land and trees, often with a physical blockade.

The actions began in earnest in early 2022. By then, construction equipment arrived in order to raze the trees of the forest to the dirt. The contested forest was occupied by anarchists and land defenders, who lived within the confines of the canopy. Their goal was to wait out this whole-sale destruction of the woods, and to resist any attempts to cut down the old-growth trees.

They copied many of the same tactics that were used in other environmental actions. Namely the art of the tree-sit. Because the old-growth forest had so many trees that towered together to create a skyline, individual trees were labeled for chopping. Defenders of the trees, then climbed to the highest point in the branches and set up make-shift tents. They stayed for days, partially due to threats from the right-wing and police forces, and partially to thwart attempts to bulldoze the forest.

If they were going to cut down the forest, they would fall with it. This often works to stop the destruction in its tracks, as the risk of a person’s death outweighs their job of clearing out the canopy.

`They created barricades, to prevent the flowing in of large construction equipment and vehicles. Ranging from abandoned vehicles to physical bodies holding the line, the actions saw them in direct conflict with state police. Scores of arrests were made month by month. While equipment was eventually moved into the site, it faced other resistance.

Often, some hiding in the trees would bring bottles of substances, to rain down upon the invading police force. State Police collected the pieces of trash tossed at their heavily-armed officers as evidence of some conspiracy to attack them. This included chunks of wood, bottles filled with piss, even random trash that they would collect and lie that it had been used to counter their advances.

Inside the forest, where the defenders continued to dwell in the trees, a series of acts of arson and revenge ignited the woods in fear. Of the construction equipment that was able to begin destroying the 85 acres of arable land, many were set ablaze in the night, or vandalized to the point of uselessness. The burned out carcasses and vandalized vehicles were a warning of what was to come should the police continue to escalate.

The movement to Stop Cop City was beginning to garner national attention. STOP COP CITY EVERYWHERE became a national call to action. Activists understood the clear and present danger that the project represented in the militarization and expansion of the police state.

The movement is leaderless and autonomous. Those who engaged in actions against those enabling the mock-city in the forest, acted on their own accord, and studied the actions of various environmental and police abolition movements. This is something that the Georgia State Police and Bureau of Investigation failed to understand.

In cities across the states, rallies, marches, and direct actions were called to support the forest defenders. The Pacific Northwest in particular had a series of fundraisers and benefits for the activists in the trees, sending funds to the cause. There were also a number of trainings on how to support the actions to Stop Cop City everywhere. Some went to Georgia and joined in on the camps and forest defense.

Mostly, direct actions focused on the corporations and businesses that were not only building the site to practice police brutality but also those providing monetary support to the organization pushing the project, the Atlanta Police Foundation.

The APF and Police Department had many sponsors, from banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, to major national chains like McDonald’s and Arby’s. Activists organized against these targets, with a series of actions. Some places were vandalized, and their windows broken out, with spray-paint messages that made the reason clear. Usually with words like “STOP COP CITY” and “DEFEND THE FOREST”. Others held pickets and demonstrations at corporate headquarters, to urge them to drop their support of Cop City.

The national movement against Cop City called for a diversity of tactics.

Then there were those putting their equipment and workers into the struggle against the activists, many organized under Blackhall Studios. Brasfield and Gorrie became the target of direct action, to deface and denounce the construction firm for their contract to erect Cop City.

While multiple construction firms were chosen, Brasfield and Gorrie represented the largest private interest in the project, which was responsible for a number of federal government buildings and stadiums. In May 2022, their corporate headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama, were vandalized, and a large banner was dropped over the entrance bearing the warning; “DROP COP CITY… OR ELSE!”.

This was a warning of what was to come. What began as petty vandalism, would only escalate into arson and militant direct action, as the concerns of the community and the activists were wholly ignored. As we witnessed in the 2020 Uprisings, and what would soon occur in Atlanta, the people’s tactics escalated as the police escalated their violence, brutality, and repression of the decentralized movement against Cop City.

While other activists engaged in more militant actions to burn the equipment, this was not all nor even most of the resistance. By now the movement had truly reached every corner of the country and even other countries, as the businesses and corporations building Cop City were picketed, vandalized, or otherwise held to account. In Atlanta, peaceful protests and community actions continued to demand the city do away with the failed project that had now ballooned to well past the 90 million dollars asked of the taxpayers.

As the resistance against the police project catapulted across the country, the police began to escalate. They were there to insure their phony city, where they would play invading army, would be built without delay. Through a series of direct actions, the project had been successfully delayed to a whole year behind schedule, which had caused frustration amongst the local departments.

The Georgia security apparatus targeted anyone standing against Cop City. Already there were dozens of arrests over the course of the year. This usually involved the videos we watched from our corner of the country, where police would attempt to move construction equipment and crews into the acres of woods, On the barricades that blocked the flow of heavy machinery, activists would often chain themselves to trees or the hastily-constructed blockades. They would then be arrested while peacefully protesting.

Arson continued against the heavy machinery that continued to encroach on the forest.

Police responded to any and all community events in the area. They had gotten the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) and Georgia State Police to begin doing the dirty work of clearing the forest. This began with a series of raids into the encampments.

Activists continued to resist the project daily and weekly. Encampments were created, where activists could remain, in case the construction crews began work once again in the mornings. Some of the more hardened environmental activists and anarchists remained perched in the canopy. They had placed hammocks and tents in the treeline, partially to ensure the trees could be saved, and as a matter of safety.

The encampments were the largest source of stalling for the project, and as such became the focal point of GBI and the State Police. They raided these camps often, but in December of 2022, the situation changed drastically.

That month, in a series of raids, the police had arrested 5 protesters in the Weelaunee Forest. In December of 2022, GBI arrested their first activists under the charge of “domestic terrorism” for the act of defending the forest.

Domestic terrorism is a heavy charge that alleges a violent conspiracy against the government, and the Bureau placed such a label on 5 activists to begin their new wave of arrests, despite the lack of evidence on the persons arrested to validate such a charge. However, they did not care about the evidence and validity of such a charge.

Domestic terrorism would become the favorite word of 2023 for Georgia State Police and would end in murder by authorities in the new year.

THE MURDER OF TORTUGUITA

One of those who remained in the trees was an anarchist who went by Tortuguita, “little turtle” in Spanish. They were Venezuelan, indigenous, and nonbinary, which must not be forgotten as scores of articles have misgendered this person. Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was 26-years-old and had become a figure amongst those advocating against Cop City.

Those who knew them called them a “radiant, joyful, beloved community member” who “brought an indescribable jubilance to each and every moment of their life,” and “fought tirelessly to honor and protect the sacred land of the Weelaunee Forest. They took great joy in caring for each and every person that they came across.”

Tortuguita was known for their practice of radical love and their fierce commitment to building a better world. They coordinated fundraising efforts and mutual aid projects, and welcomed those that traveled to the Weelaunee Forest. In many ways, they called for people to join the struggle, “Cop City can and must be stopped,” they declared. “But we need more people on the frontlines.” As trained medic, Tortuguita traveled often to queer and trans gatherings to help support fellow queer people and other organizations using their training and knowledge.

They had chosen the name “Tortuguita” not simply for the nickname honoring Turtle Island (the indigenous name for the Americas) and a calm animal at that. They had also read about an indigenous military commander who had led a major victory in the Colonial-era against the US Military in 1791. According to the interview, they hesitated at giving their chosen name, due to the view “that does not make us look like peaceful protesters. We are very peaceful people, I promise”.

While the State of Georgia sought to paint activists in a militant and violent light, pointing to arson and property destruction against empty buildings and equipment — property damage is not violence; Tortuguita had always advocated for nonviolence. “The right kind of resistance is peaceful, because that’s where we win,” they had told writer David Peisner, who had interviewed them for the news site The Bitter Southerner.

“We’re not going to beat them at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not. We win through nonviolence. That’s really the only way we can win. We don’t want more people to die. We don’t want Atlanta to turn into a war zone.”

In the words of Tortuguita: “They could come in and completely destroy the place, raze it, arrest everybody that they find, kill anybody who resists arrest — they could do that, and then days later, there would be a shitload of people back here. For every head they cut off, there would be more who would come back to avenge the arrested, to avenge the …” they stopped for a moment to choose their words carefully. “What I’m saying is, if they do a huge crackdown and completely try to crush the movement, they’ll succeed at hurting some people, they’ll succeed at destroying some infrastructure, but they’re not going to succeed at stopping the movement. That’s just going to strengthen the movement. It will draw a lot of attention to the movement. If enough people decide to do this with nonviolent action, you can overwhelm the infrastructure [of the state]. That’s something they fear more than violence in the streets. Because violence in the streets, they’ll win. They have the guns for it. We don’t”.

“I’m not an adrenaline junkie,” they told Peisner. “I don’t crave conflict. I’m out here because I love the forest. I love living in the woods. Being a forest hobo is pretty chill. Some folks probably have flashpoint moments where it’s like, ‘Oh, yes, the truck is being lit on fire!’ But not me. I love it when everything is calm”.

They had been a vocal advocate against the project, as well as for continued defense of the forest. Their words and interviews had inspired thousands across the country to demand that Cop City never be built. From a series of interviews beforehand, one can see that Tortuguita had always stood for nonviolent direct action as an environmental activist and that they had no intention to engage in a gunfight with Georgia authorities. They recognized the risks and so called for nonviolent civil disobedience to disrupt the destruction of the sacred space.

In their diary, found after the fateful events of the new year 2023, they wrote their private thoughts on the matter at hand. “If cops kill me,” they scrawled. “I want you to riot. Burn down their stations and set their cars alight. Know that I went out fighting, and wish we all could just have peace and be free. We cannot have peace until the empire falls. Even then peace takes work and freedom is a constant struggle. If cops kill me, I want you to riot to kill as many of them as you can”.

They fell asleep that night amongst their comrades in the forest.

On the morning of January 18th 2023, GBI, in conjunction with Georgia State Police and the Atlanta Police Department, began a raid of the encampments once more in the early morning hours.

They advanced slowly, and every single officer was armed to the teeth with long rifles and pistols. They had heard that some of the activists were armed, as they had to defend themselves from right-wing actors that sought them harm. As a part of that, they used the excuse to begin a militarized raid in the forest.

At first, the multi-agency task force claimed that none of their officers wore body cameras, which was true for the state troopers. However, three months later, and trying to cover up their actions, the footage from an Atlanta officer was released to the public. It reveals the atrocity they committed that day.

The first part of the video shows officers joking about the planned raid. They approached a group of tents and slashed them open to find no-one inside. They laughed, and patted themselves on the back for making the tent now “unlivable”.

18 minutes later, four shots rang out in the wooded area. “Oh shit,” an officer remarked. They stopped in their tracks and listened to a barrage of bullets, 16 rounds.

“Is this target practice?” one officer asked aloud, to which another officer turned to tell him they were real shots.

After a few minutes, the line of officers began to move forward. The commanding officer warned them about crossfire.

“What are they shooting at us?” one officer whispered in fear.

“Nah, that sounded like suppressed gunfire,” one of the men said aloud. Suppressed gunfire in this case meant the shots came from the long rifles that they had been equipped with, as Georgia State Police had suppressors at the end of the barrel.

The task force announced over the radio that an officer was injured. To which an officer commented, shaking his head, “Man, you fucked your own officer up”.

The police force then spotted Tortuguita, who had camped in a tent with the others defending the forest. A gunshot rang out, and one officer was hit — the wound was nowhere near fatal, considering the body armor the officers wore.

Out of nowhere and without warning, and from several officers in the line, a hail of bullets was unleashed directly towards the police’s target. Tortuguita was killed immediately.

The cops claimed that Tortuguita had legally purchased a pistol long before the raid, which the officers used to justify the murder. Then there is the question of the pistol under their possession; many challenge the validity of evidence presented by police. The document that they released as the legal receipt had the gun store’s address redacted, which raised suspicion. The handgun also appeared to have been used and buried in dirt. Many wondered the obvious, did the Georgia police place the pistol on their person after the murder?

They claimed that they fired at State Police, despite no video evidence to prove such a claim, and that they recovered the pistol “at the scene”, refusing to even claim it was on their person. Footage also counters the claim that they had fired a single shot, considering the officers themselves admitting it was friendly fire. One can see that the line of officers was nowhere near close enough to spot a handgun in their palm.

An autopsy was later called for by the family of Terán, that showed the sheer lies the task force had spread. The Bureau of Investigations (GBI) filed a report, in which they claimed they had found traces of gun primer. Scores of reports contradict this bold-faced lie and note that the primer could have easily come from the number of gunshots from Georgia authorities, or the cross contamination of the murderers that fired their rifles at the unarmed individual.

They had received 57 gunshots, and 14 bullets remained lodged in their body. The autopsy revealed no gunpowder residue on their hands, which proves that they did not fire a pistol at police.

On January 18th, 2023, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, the little turtle that had inspired so many of us across the nation, was murdered by the State of Georgia for defending the Atlanta Forest.

STOP COP CITY EVERYWHERE

Nationwide, vigils were called to honor the forest defender, murdered in cold blood. While the national movement to Stop Cop City continued to grow, their death was an explosion in activism. All across the country, people understood what their death meant, after the domestic terror charges the month before. In Portland, I attended the vigil a few nights after their murder at the start of the new year, 2023.

It was a late winter night, in Northeast Portland. I showed up a bit late at Alberta Park, having drank the night before when I heard the news. Like many, I understood the dark turn this meant for the nation, and the Biden administration, alongside State governments, targeting anarchists. Those who carried on the call for police abolition and the end to the prison-industrial complex, were announced as violent extremists under the new presidency. They would attempt to jail and murder us with impunity, as they had to the defenders of the Atlanta forest.

We gathered under the gazebo. The vigil was stunning, with the amount of candles, flowers, and artwork dedicated to Tortuguita. There were also trinkets and symbols commemorating the comrade we had lost in Portland, the year before, T-Rex. We mourned T-Rex and now Tortuguita, two comrades that taught us so much, taken too soon.

All around the playground and park, banners hung with powerful messaging. They bore such words as “DEFEND THE FOREST” and the names of the dead. One was dedicated to Tortuguita. Overall, it was extremely somber and stunning.

Towards the end, activists brought out their cans of spray paint. We took turns tagging the walls of the gazebo with words to honor our dead comrades. Things like “Avenge Tortuguita” and “RIP T-REX”. Some tags noted the tie between the fascistic police here, to Atlanta, to Israel.

The vigil was small, mostly the anarchists and antifascists that carried on the cause from the Uprisings. There truly weren’t too many of us left. It was also a weekday night in winter. However, one could see that many of those who had joined us to resist police brutality, had returned to their lives under the Biden administration. And each day, the police murdered more and more people.

Once it wrapped up, we waited for the last of the mourners to leave the vigil safely. Then we walked to a local bar to drink and relax after a tense week. Instead of a simple walk, the police were already sitting idly in their vehicles around the Alberta neighborhood. For a police force dealing with “record crime” that they used to beg for more money from our municipality, they sure had nothing to do but follow and threaten people going to grieve in a public park.

We tried to shake the police. Each block we took, they’d shine their blaring lights for a short minute, then shut them off again. They slowly rolled behind. This was purely police intimidation by a police force so cruel and pathetic, that they couldn’t let people mourn in peace.

While we knew that the police here were the same as in Atlanta, the public had chosen to forget their part in rising up against police in 2020. Portland had returned to normalcy, and as such accepted the bloated police force that engaged in racist behavior and shooting unarmed civilians. It would take another murder to galvanize some action.

11 days before the murder of Tortuguita, Memphis, Tennessee had garnered the national spotlight for another police murder.

On the 7th of January 2023, a 29-year-old black man named Tyre Nichols was driving to his mother’s house less than a mile away. He was pulled over by officers from the infamous SCORPION Unit, a task force of the Memphis Police Department that was known for their sheer violence, corruption, and unleashing extreme brutality on those that it interacted with. They claimed that he had been stopped for “reckless driving”, despite evidence to the contrary.

It was a targeted stop in a majority black community. The officers, all men of color, proceeded to pull Nichols out of the car. For no reason, they sprayed him down with mace and hit him with a taser. Tyre stumbled up and tried to run for his life to his mother’s house.

Officers chased him down, and proceeded to beat the man on the street, over and over and over. The video, released later, depicted a cruel and unwarranted beatdown of an unarmed man. They struck him with batons in the face, continued to mace him, and used their tasers repeatedly. As he screamed for help, they circled around him and attacked him gang style, kicking his broken frame again and again.

When the paramedics arrived, they didn’t administer aid for a solid 16 minutes. Instead they sat around and admired the police’s work, Tyre bloody and beaten, with broken bones. He was taken to the hospital, where he died from his wounds three days later.

While he had died in Memphis, the incident did not attract too much media attention for some time. The MPD worked to answer for what they had done behind the scenes, trying to cover up the incident. At the same time, the Georgia State Police murdered Tortuguita and tried to stifle the movement to Stop Cop City. Because all of our eyes turned to Atlanta, it took some time for the story to break.

But break it did. At first, the local District Attorney assembled a grand jury and investigations into the incident began. As we waited for the jury’s verdict, people knew it was time to act. No one wanted to see what happened in Louisville, in September of 2020, when the grand jury refused to indict the cops that murdered Breonna Taylor.

The latter half of 2022, the Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland, announced charges against four of the officers. In this case, we knew we had to take to the streets. While it was fellow black officers that beat him, we knew that this was the trend of policing and the nation called for charges to be pressed against them for the heinous murder.

Slowly, cities across the country and the Pacific Northwest called for protests in the wake of the police murder. In Portland, a few small protests took place, despite the national call to protest police brutality.

As we mourned Tortuguita, we paid attention to the news from Memphis. On the 26th of January, the grand jury chose to indict these officers for ending the life of Tyre Nichols. They were all fired from MPD, and taken into custody. The charges ranged from aggravated kidnapping, to second-degree murder. Four officers pled not guilty, while one former officer pled guilty to federal charges of violating Nichols’ rights and conspiracy.

The next day, a protest that had been planned in the week prior, as we waited for the verdict, took place on the 27rh of January. One protest was called to gather at the Oregon Convention Center.

By the time I arrived on my bicycle, dark had fully fallen, the early darkness of winter in the Pacific Northwest. We gathered in the night, many in bloc. The crowd was over 100, mostly the anarchists.

Another vigil and rally was called for at the Burnside Skate Park. As a blossoming photographer, Tyre Nichols loved skating and skate culture. Most of his videos shared on social media featured himself and friends practicing various tricks. Because he was a skater, the skater community in Portland rallied behind his death and called for people to meet-up at the park, underneath the Burnside Bridge.

By the time we marched to meet the other group, the crowd had grown to about 200 people gathered in memory of Tyre. Speakers sat on the edge of the large skate park. A vigil was assembled underneath the large that read Burnside Skate Park. The speeches were powerful, despite some leftist infighting, and the candles illuminated the speakers above.

Eventually, we were called to march once again. I sprung onto my bike, and joined the corkers. We led the crowd of over 300 onto the Burnside Bridge. There we held space for about an hour, and proceeded to march around downtown. Once we returned to the park, we dispersed into the dark, ready to see whether the protests would carry on.

They didn’t. Having protested for Tyre Nichols, and with the officers charged, things returned to normal once again in Portland. It was a precursor to what was to come, however, as a true protest movement would return in the latter half of 2023, as students returned to school, and the year drew to a close.

***

In Atlanta, the murder of Tortuguita ignited a rage, not seen since the long hot summer of 2020.

The people of Atlanta were angry. For two years they worked to demand the city council drop the dangerous project. Now, at the scene of where police would train to murder citizens, they had murdered an environmental activist.

The death of Tortuguita gave them new energy, to return to the streets and the City Hall. Now they demanded that the officers who murdered Terán be fired and arrested for the murder in cold blood. They waited for the footage from the body cameras, and when the videos revealed the planned execution, they waited no longer.

On January 21st, protesters gathered at Underground Atlanta, a busy shopping and entertainment district in the heart of the city. The protests were immediately militant, as the activists directed their rage at those enabling the murder and Cop City project.

They chanted their name, Tortuguita roared through the streets. The march proceeded down Peachtree Street, a busy thoroughfare. Anarchists in the bloc broke away from the protest to deface the businesses and corporations funding the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Cop City project.

The McDonalds was vandalized en masse, its windows broken out, with words like “AVENGE TORT” painted onto the walls. The Bank of America was another target. In nationwide marches on the 20th-22nd, multiple cities saw their Bank of America chains defaced and targeted, as one of the largest backers of the APF and the training facility.

The activists had come equipped with rocks and fireworks, which they used to blast directly at the corporations and police. The fireworks specifically were shot up at the skyscraper that hosted the officers of the Police Foundation.

Then, later in the night, a police cruiser from APD was set ablaze. The fire, from the streams I watched, was large, a welcome warmth in winter. Other vehicles around the march were damaged badly, windows smashed out as they drove through and past the crowd.

The police had escalated into violence, and despite all their attempts to stifle the insurgency, the night of January 21 would end in a riot for Tortuguita and against those who were the reason for their murder. This was not the end, as Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency, to mobilize the National Guard.

In all, 6 protesters were arrested that night. Immediately, and again with flimsy evidence on their persons, the Georgia authorities charged them all with domestic terror. They joined the list that had been started in December of 2022. Domestic terror became the go-to charge for the police, despite condemnations by civil rights groups that challenged the validity of these claims.

Two months later, another large event had been scheduled for months at the South River Forest. A music festival would be held on the grounds that enveloped the Weelaunee Forest. This was also a part of a Week of Action to Block Cop City. Multiple rallies, protests, performances, workshops, hikes, and other forms of creative dissent were announced.

For weeks before, fueled by the murder of Tortuguita, activists had fully embraced the arson and destruction of the abandoned construction equipment. The police were growing desperate as every attempt to raze and demolish the forest was being met with militant resistance.

Meanwhile, the South River Festival took place in the first week of March 2023. It was a multi-day event, with scores of artists and musicians performing. Police were already in the area, no doubt in fear of what the activists would do next.

Earlier in the evening, a march of 150 people descended upon a power line clearing near Intrenchment Creek. They moved in stealthily from the tree line, and their crowd surrounded the police placed at a surveillance outpost. Footage revealed how the few Georgia police tasked with defending the tower, were threatening to shoot people with live rounds.

The crowd set off fireworks and threw other projectiles over the barbed wire fence of the outpost, causing the police to retreat. The line of officers scrambled to run back towards their watchtower. Some had police shields, which they used to lock together and create a line. One video showed three officers running back, falling, and together trying to lock the gate. How many police does it take to close a gate? Three apparently and several minutes.

Barricades of tires and other debris were set up at the outpost entrance. They flipped over one utility vehicle, and the two at the site were set on fire. A Front End Loader, office trailer, and mobile surveillance tower were destroyed and went up in flames Several port-a-potties were tipped and barbed wire fences bent, twisted and rendered insecure.

The videos were inspiring. Above the forest, an enormous pillar of smoke and fire roared over the Georgia police, who by now had fully abandoned their posts.

With that, the large mob returned into the treeline, like shadows in the night.

That day marked the second full set of performances at the campground on the South River. It was powerful, as over 1,000 people filled the forest with songs and celebration. They sought to make this a public festival that could gather residents to retake the woods as a green space.

It was halfway through the day, and during a jazz performance, that the atmosphere suddenly shifted. 30 plus police cruisers, sirens blaring, drove onto the site of the music festival. They parked on the outskirts, and an army of over 100 officers in riot gear, got out to surround the crowd of peaceful attendees, simply listening to performers.

Hours prior, the police were attacked at their outpost, and their equipment burned. They claimed that they had seen the militant mob cross a creek towards the festival, to debloc and change into civilian clothes. They tried to assert that the 150 anarchists had placed themselves in the crowd to avoid arrest.

As they swarmed the area, some protesters held them at bay by throwing cans of soup and fireworks at the police cruisers trying to set up a mustering ground. The police sought revenge. While some approached the line to inquire as to why they were disrupting the festival, police pulled loaded weapons on the peaceful protesters. Videos show almost several officers pulling their side-arms, threatening to shoot civilians with live rounds.

According to a report from one attendee; a person jumped on the festival stage and yelled that the police were attacking their friend and everyone needed to help. At the sound of this, panic spread throughout the crowd and people began to rush to the exits.

Police blocked exits and arrested, detained, or harassed those trying to leave. Festival goers quickly rallied to keep everyone together. They could be heard chanting “Stop Cop City!”, “GSP, murderers!”, and “The show must go on!” together as they returned to the stage.

Among those that remained at the music festival were elderly couples, toddlers and children, punk rockers, and college students. Festival organizers urged people to stay calm and to stick together.

As the police held the exits and organized their plan to further disperse the crowd, they got their Bearcat stuck in the mud in the process. After roughly two hours, dozens of police in riot gear and military vehicles slowly moved in toward the stage. The crowd linked arms and chanted “Let us go home!” and “We have children!”

Police told festival goers they had three minutes to leave the festival under threat of arrest for domestic terrorism, to which festival goers shouted “No!”. After a brief negotiation with a handful of music festival attendees, the police agreed to give people 10 minutes to leave. All of the music festival attendees still present by that point in the night left safely together.

In all, 35 arrests were made that day. Of those, 23 people were charged with domestic terror, facing 5 to 35 years if the charges hold. None were released on bail, outside of a legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild, who was ordered to a 5,000 dollar bond. This brought the number of defendants charged with the terror statute to 42.

The evidence the police presented? That some among the concert-goers had mud on their shoes, in a forest that had seen rain in the days before. Those they arrested had scrawled the number for bail support on their arms in case they faced arrests, which was most likely everyone in attendance. Not a single warrant lists damage to people or property, as police were unable to find proof that those they arrested were at the outpost.

It was a blatant abuse of the label of domestic terror, meant only to stifle dissent and resistance against Cop City. With 42 people charged, and arrests at the forests continuing by the months, human rights groups and legal experts spoke out against the charges, alleging what we all knew, that the police didn’t care about the legality of their suppression. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations then turned their effort to stamp out the national movement to Stop Cop City.

As the police continued to escalate their brutal repression of the protest movement, the residents of Atlanta sought to work once again with the city, to stop the training facility from being built. The clearing of the forest continued in earnest in the months after, and the taxpayers were stunned at the Atlanta Police Foundation not only engaging in state violence, but also increasing the cost day by day due to the delays.

Activists organized against the City of Atlanta. At a city council meeting in May, the APF asked the city to appropriate double what they asked for initially, citing the delays and destruction of equipment. Residents refused to bear the now 31 million dollar request. They showed up at the meeting, having signed up for the weeks before, to ensure their voices could be heard. The several hundred speakers shared their opposition. It was ignored.

For two weeks, residents attended every meeting of the city council to protest the project. June 6th saw the largest amount of organizing public opposition. I watched the live stream of the council meeting. Over 1,000 people gathered at City Hall. Several hundred people had been able to sign up to share their public testimony. The others did not meet the deadline or declined to speak, and showed up in solidarity to demand Cop City never be built. Several hundred who had signed up properly, and followed procedure, were barred from entering the building by police.

The meeting went on for over 16 hours. Almost every single resident spoke against the training facility. They chastised the city council for lying to their constituents about the cost that only seemed to grow at the behest of the police foundation. They called out the police’s part in silencing dissent, and repeated the name of Tortuguita over and over. They wouldn’t willingly fund the murderers, to continue to train in a mock city, on how to shut down protest movements, and to raid homes, businesses, and schools that they couldn’t even protect.

Despite the hours of testimony against the appropriations, the city council voted unanimously to give the police foundation everything they asked for. This only caused more chaos, as the protest movement against Cop City gained international and national support.

Two weeks after the meeting, no doubt livid at the legions of citizens that condemned Cop City, the police moved to shut down their support. On the morning of May 31st, 2023, a SWAT Team entered an Atlanta neighborhood. In a massive bearcat, in full tactical gear and armed to the teeth, the SWAT team broke down the home door and moved in to arrest three people.

The targets were three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provided bail support and legal defense to the forest defenders and those protesting the training facility. All three were arrested on charges of “charity fraud” and “money laundering”. Again, there was no evidence to suggest that the bail fund was committing such acts. Instead they were targeted by the State of Georgia for providing support to those that the police had deemed as “terrorists”.

After the meeting and the city council’s sheer disregard for democracy, the activists announced that they would force a referendum on the training facility. Under the Georgia constitution, residents are legally able to force a vote on any decisions by local governments. They only needed to gather the signatures of 15 percent of registered voters in the area.

In Atlanta, they would need sixty to seventy thousand signatures on the petition, to place it on the ballot. The measure would cancel the lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which the city tried to claim was illegal. The city council cared nothing for the rule of law in the state and city.

The campaign successfully met the requirement with 116,000 votes. Despite the majority support of the citizens of Atlanta, the city council tossed out the referendum. They alleged that the organizers had missed the deadline and some city officials insisted, with no evidence, that the signatures were forged. A federal judge had extended the deadline on the measure. Instead, the city appealed the decision to another circuit court, where it remains in deadlock.

What should be noted is that as a majority liberal city, Atlanta’s representatives are all Democrats. In the 2020 election, the state had shocked the nation, as they voted for Democrats in the federal elections. They voted for Biden, providing the electoral votes for him to win, and had voted for Democrat Raphael Warnock the year after, showing the trend towards liberal politics in a state that had for years repressed black voters.

As such, Atlanta became the focal point as the center of debate over the 2020 election for years. Then President Trump had made an infamous call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to ask him to “find” the exact number of votes needed to flip the state in his favor. On January 6th of 2021, it culminated in the attempted coup d’etat across the country.

By then, Fulton County, where Atlanta was located, had once again garnered the national spotlight. A years-long investigation into then-President Donald Trump had come to an end. The State announced charges against the ex-president, underneath the RICO act. The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act had been created in the 70s, to go after the mafia. Now it was alleged that the former president and his associates engaged in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election in Georgia.

The case is ongoing, and is the source of national chaos. The grand jury that was assembled, announced their charges in August of 2023. Trump surrendered to authorities the next week, to be arraigned. While liberals and Democrats around the country cheered on the State of Georgia for charging Trump and his associates, we anarchists understood what would happen next.

RICO alleges an organized conspiracy to encourage unlawful action, and is often used to cross state lines with state charges. The federal law that was used to take down the mob requires a continued trend of criminal behavior. The Georgia statute was broader. It only required one individual to constitute a criminal enterprise, and only needed two acts of interrelated crime towards a common goal to be charged. It also allowed for a broader net of crimes, while the federal law required felony behavior.

A few weeks later, after letting the news around the indictments settle and with some pleading guilty quickly, the State of Georgia once again revived the RICO Act. This time a grand jury unsealed RICO charges on September 5th, against 61 people in conjunction with the national movement to Stop Cop City.

Using the same law they used to charge the fascist President Trump, they created a broad conspiracy against those advocating against Cop City. Only this time, the evidence, just like that presented to allege domestic terror, was nonexistent.

The indictments against activists and one legal observer, tied in the previous arrestees into a constructed “criminal conspiracy”. The movement to Stop Cop City is a decentralized, autonomous, and anarchist movement. The State worked to counter that by painting the movement as an organized entity or single organization, which is wholly untrue.

I read the indictment shortly after the charges were announced. RICO was meant to go after organized criminal gangs, such as that of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Now the State sought to use the act to stifle dissent, end the legal right to protest, and intimidate anyone that would speak out or organize against the proposed training facility. Its charges speak for themselves:

“The beginnings of the anarchist Defend the Atlanta Forest movement formed in 2020 following the high-profile killing ofGeorge Floyd by Minneapolis Police Officers. In the weeks following Floyd’s murder, Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by Atlanta police in a Wendy’s parking lot after Brooks violently concussed a police officer, stole the officer’s Taser, and pointed the Taser at another police officer while fleeing. While the Brooks shooting was justified, it caused anti-police violence tensions to boil over, and it further flamed political tensions surrounding policing. As a result, nationwide demonstrations and protests increased, including in the Atlanta area. Nearly all of the demonstrations centered around a message of anti-police violence that arose from a spate of high-profile nationwide police shootings.”

“Defend the Atlanta Forest is an unofficial, Atlanta-based organization that frames itself as a broad, decentralized, autonomous movement that uses advocacy and direct action to stop the ‘forest [from being] bulldozed in favor of police and sold out to Hollywood.’ Defend the Atlanta Forest does not recruit from a single location, nor do all Defend the Atlanta Forest members have a history of working together as a group in a single location. Nevertheless, the group shares a unified opposition to the construction of the Atlanta Police Department Training Facility, construction companies associated with the project, and companies associated with construction properties in the area surrounding the forest. As the group has grown and recruited, it has evolved into a broader anti-government, anti-police, and anti-corporate extremist organization.”

The State acknowledged that the protest movement had its root in the long hot summer of 2020, as they tried to justify the murder of Rayshard Brooks and other black victims of police brutality. They noted that the movement was decentralized and did not coordinate with others in a single location. Activists simply used the label of Stop Cop City Everywhere, to organize their own support of the forest defenders, and direct actions against the entities that enabled the massive mock city in the woods.

The document discussed in detail the use of fireworks and molotov cocktails against construction equipment and police, yet the only charge of property damage listed against any defendants is a single act of arson.

The 61 people charged were all around the country. The indictment reveals that two people in the northern part of the state were charged simply for releasing the names of the officers that murdered Tortuguita. They printed their own flyers to doxx the officers home addresses, and as such were tied to a “violent conspiracy” despite no coordination with residents of Atlanta. One person was charged simply for tagging “ACAB” a “anti-police” message.

The state’s domestic terror law had been revamped in 2017, following the protests against the advent of the fascist Trump administration. Specifically they moved to allow charges of up to 35 years for property damage committed towards a cause. Georgia, like scores of other states, also revamped protest laws following the George Floyd Uprisings. The updates allowed members of the public to drive through protests and attack activists in their vehicles for blocking a road. They also allowed the state the powers of counter-insurgency.

The intent was clear. Georgia would use their enhanced racketeering laws and domestic terror statutes, to go after anyone who opposed the Atlanta Police Training Facility. Acts like flyering mailboxes with the names of the murderers were acts of free speech. Using spray paint is a simple misdemeanor. However, this did not matter, and the State of Georgia would target and threaten any dissent. All the while, they build Cop City to train themselves on how to shut down against protest movements.

Democrats feigned concern when scores of states across the country passed new measures to criminalize what was protected under the first amendment, namely “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Some had protested the murder of George Floyd and claimed they also sought fundamental change. However, they did nothing to change it. And in the case of Atlanta, the Dems were the main source of suppressing the national movement to Stop Cop City.

STOP COP CITY EVERYWHERE has become a national rallying cry. Those of us who study protest movements understand that this is not the end. Scores of cities across the country are already seeking to build similar training facilities. They follow the example of the Atlanta Police Foundation, and the city council, that has decided to do away with democratic processes, in order to train their police in counter-insurgency.

President Biden and his administration had entered in an era where they worked to counter the uprisings, by advocating for police reform. Yet as a part of that, they sought to expand and invest in police departments across the country. At the start of his presidency, Biden swore to go after violent domestic extremists after the storming of the capitol. This, as has always been the case, was merely an excuse to go after leftists who opposed the status quo.

In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a list of anti-government extremists as part of a report on counterterrorism. The administration would make “no distinction based on political views,” name-checking, among others, hypothetical terrorists motivated by animal rights, the environment, and “anarchist violent extremists, who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions.”

Towards the end of the year, public records requests revealed what we knew all along. The Biden administration, and DHS, were in contact with Georgia authorities the entire time. Atlanta officials met twice with members of the administration, expressing their frustration at the movement that had worked well to delay construction.

After the murder of Tortuguita and the broad application of charges of domestic terror, and before the clearing for the project began in earnest, the administration signaled their support for the project. They stated that Cop City was “exemplary of what President Biden would like to see other municipalities emulate”.

The Biden Administration worked in concert with the city to crack down on dissent. The Department of Homeland Security engaged in counter-insurgency tactics by creating the label “Anarchist Violent Extremist”, against anyone that had anti-government leftist beliefs. They created new policies to ensure that acts that could actually challenge the status quo, would be met with severe suppression from authorities. While feigning democratic and liberal values, the President embraced state repression.

Nothing was more evident of this than the downfall of protected abortion access and the overturning of Roe v Wade the year before.