It Could Happen Here Weekly 83

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

Come Monday morning, basically no one was in the forest. The police raid the night prior pushed out most of the people gathered for the music festival and week of action, and it was still unclear how the rest of the week would now proceed. This Monday happened to be the Jewish holiday Porum. Initially there were plans to have a perum celebration in the forest that evening, but it was unknown if people would feel comfortable returning to the woods.

We are the faith coalition against cop City, and we are here to again raise our voices so that Mayor Andre Dickens and the members of the City Council of Atlanta know that we will not stand for the atrocities that have been occurring. We will not stand for cop City to go forward. The community came out and made public comment for over seventeen hours when given an opportunity, and said emphatically, no, we don't want your cop City.

Reverend Jones gave her own perspective as a local Atlanta with deep ties to the city.

So we are here as faith leaders today and we are here to say, Mayor Dickens, if you didn't hear us the first time, we are here once again to let you know that we don't want cop City. This is our community, this is our land. I am a daughter of East Atlanta. I still live in East Atlanta. I don't want cop City. My granny owns a home that she's been in for almost fifty years in the heart of East Atlanta village. She does not want cop City. My neighbor across the street does not want cop City.

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

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

Reverend Leoshe addressed to other faith leaders and ask them to join in their calls to stop the Cop City project.

We local Atlanta clergy and religious leaders representing diverse communities call on clergy, religious leaders and people of faith in moral conscience across this nation and in solidarity with local Atlanta leaders to stop Cop City, stop the swap, and defend the Atlanta forests. Wilani People's part Today, we're gathered for this press conference and we will be delivering a

At the press conference, the coalition presented a letter to the city council, signed by over two hundred clergy members. Reverend Leoshe also read it aloud.

Despite a record breaking amount of public comment opposing the facility, Atlanta City councils still pass legislation to build cop City. We are troubled by leadership that stops acting on the will of the people and aligns itself instead with corporate

Yes, and may I.

Add that in the face of the violent raid that took place last night, as city residents gathered in solidarity to defend this forest that is an example of the militarization that we are calling out through violence and greed. These lands have been subjected to centuries of abuse, from the forced removal of indigenous communities, to serving as a plantation for enslaved African labor, to the site of the old Atlanta Prison Honor Farm in the twentieth century that

We are troubled.

By the commodification of community, land, water, and air on which all.

Of us depend.

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

We say no more, No more.

We declare with faith, commitment and hope that this land will be a part of healing and repair. We Atlanta clergy, religious leaders, and all of those across the nation and world who are in agreement, join our voices with calling for the following, a complete stop of the cop City project and cancelation of the Atlanta Police Foundation's lease dropping all charges against forest defenders and protesters. We demand an

We speak their name for which.

Recently released video footage of the event suggests there was lying and deceit surrounding the incident on part of law enforcement in their initial reporting of the incident.

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

Our ancestors lived here for over thirteen thousand years, and if you're to do the math correctly, this country that we now call the United States is somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred and forty just over nearly two years ago. I came here to the Lawni Forest. I came here with my own family, my own children, with some of my elders, to just share a little bit about how this territory in this land feels to us as Muskogee people, because let it be known today, it

This is our homeland.

My ancestors for generation upon generation, for millennia are buried on the very ground that you walk on every day. And I think we have a say in how we should live as a society in this day and time. And so in this moment, our hope is to be able to come back to rematriate, to take our lives back and to the intimacy that we once had with everything that grows here in what you now i'll call

Our hope is that.

This earth is not destroyed before we even have a chance to come back, that lives aren't destroyed before we have a chance to come back. So today, in whatever way, I come here to join the choruses of voices that you hear all around you saying, what is going on now is a violence against all of creation. What is going on now bringing death and harm and hurt is a violence against all of creation. And we stand in

That's the prayer that I carry today.

Reverend Darcy Jarrett joined in the call for a stewardship of the Wallani Forest to be returned to the Muskogee people.

City Schools of Decatur has a statement of solidarity an acknowledgment of harms to cab County and the City of Atlanta. We call on you to make good on these words, to give the land back to our indigenous siblings, so that they, as they have stated and will do and always have done, work in collaboration with the black and brown community. Right there near where the site is, outside of the Wee Lawni Forest, The City of Atlanta is ready to lease this land at just ten dollars an acre. Instead,

Finally, Matthew Johnson spoke about the worrying amount of police repression and violence the movement has already seen.

We're projecting by the end of the day, there will be forty people that have domestic terrorism charges, many of which just for being in a parking lot. I don't know how anybody can accept this when you have a projected forty people that are committed of domestic terrorism, not one dead body. Meanwhile, we can't even show the bruise on the police officer that was allegedly shut at but our friend's ashes. We have the ashes of a friend that we will spread. We can no longer accept this

Self and Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective were at the press conference, and we met up after to discuss the events of the day. During the press conference, some of the media's line of questioning was very much like aligned with the types of narratives being put out by police in relation to the events that previous night,

Yeah, and we've seen that all throughout the week. Every every chance that the media is trying to throw somebody to like cause dissension or divide amongst the movement has been really handily deflected by anyone who's come across it. And the Clergy did not just a good job of like not falling into that trap, but of actually pointing out how that line of thinking was like missing the point and where the true violence was coming from.

Jams.

This is how we in the lab And so why are there.

A targets people engaging in violence coming from other states.

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

If I could just say, I'd like to just bring up a story. Initially, the colonizers that came onto this land attempted to use the indigenous folks as their slaves. However, the indigenous folks knew the land so they could get away. Now, when you ask me about why is it that you keep catching people that aren't from here that might not reflect the people that are actually involved in the resistance, God bless.

You, thank you.

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

We shall not be moved.

Fighting for readA, we shall not be mole just like a street colandic by walls.

We shall not.

Move.

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

Lookout.

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

After an unexpectedly long Awards and proclamations ceremony, the public comment section of the City Council meeting finally began.

I'm standing here today with the Faith Coalition. We are clergy and faith leaders, we are citizens, and we are protectors of the land that doesn't belong to us, but belongs to God. We are deeply concerned for our community members, for ourselves, and the implications for the future of public safety in the United States if this cop city development

We want holistic community.

Safety, clean water, tree canopies, a future for every single one of our children. May it be so.

Someone from the Muskogee Creek Reservation in Oklahoma spoke about the design to return to their homeland.

The Miko of our Hellbi Ceremonial Grounds back home in Oklahoma has come here where our original fire was started, and then it was taken all the way to Oklahoma, and now we want to bring it back to our land and we want to start those fires again. Well, when we come back, we need a land to come back to. This is my first time coming back to visit my homelands. I wanted to visit here where my ancestors are, as a spiritual and personal journey. I didn't want to come here to try to fight the violence

Thank you, moto Chi Chadi's.

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

And if you hard in your heart, be.

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

There are a couple like things to note about how City council public comment works. City Council doesn't tend to pay attention to them. Essensibly the only one who pays attention is City Council President Doug Shipman, because it is his job to call time and to call up the next person. But you know, city councilors will like step in and out of the room, get something to eat during the seventeen hours of public comment for cop city, like one of them held a press conference.

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

Were there any firefighter or police city employee entries yesterday's event.

At Kelsmer hillis there was not. We're very fortunate that that was the outcome. We're fortunate that there was no injuries.

If this continues, do we have the ability to deploy even greater force to quill this? You know, the millions of damage, millions of dollars of damage to public and private properties.

We will make adjustments as those that used various tactics.

Yesterday was an escalation.

We had not seen this large number of individuals engaged in this activity, and the aggressive manner in which.

The officers were attacked.

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

Throughout to Sheerbaum's testimony, it was interesting the degree to which the Chief framed Sunday's direct action as primarily being targeted against officers and not the destruction of equipment and

People return to the forest.

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

And that is in keeping with sort of how this movement has always responded to what we I guess could call a loss, right.

Like, twenty three people getting arrested in charge is a is a great loss.

Yeah, and the bounce back period is pretty quick like the resiliency is is continual and always strengthening. Every time that you know, the repression grows, like it does seem like the resiliency grows with it.

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

With another defender, with another defendant.

And like so you know that it is it is fundamentally a risky place to be, but people think the potential cost is worth it, Like they will they continue to be here because they know this is a winnable fight and they know it that it is worth it to defend these woods. Early Tuesday morning, a few stop

They entered the lobby and it's a very small group, but like I think half of it was.

It was like five people and another five like press people.

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

Out of the lobby.

Leave, You're you're being criminally trust or you're being trespassed.

You have to leave.

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

They got very close to me and during the Norfolk Southern building, please.

Please let.

It's playing a horrible row in the city, where.

Can you.

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

While people were ins the headquarters, security called ns Police, which is the Norfolk Southern Police who are legally allowed to arrest people.

Anyone you can see.

For your building.

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

Eye out on things.

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

We roll up and I think at that point they were like twenty is protesters.

It was.

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

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

Mayor Dickens, we want you to cancel this lace. We know that you had the authority.

To do so.

They finished up that george Pacific, they set up a little vigil for Torti Guita.

And from Georgia Pacific they began their trek to the AT and T Building.

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

Police eight to ten.

Police officers are directly behind them, and their whole bunch of police cars are blocking Peachtree along the path to at and D was the APF's headquarters just across the street, And as the crowd approached this intersection, the amount of police ballooned massively. In the block around the Atlantic Police

The number keeps growing.

As we start walking down different sidewalks and different streets, you just see more officers that are already stationed.

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

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

Got to be about one hundred officers in this area right now.

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

Driving wrong way up one way, like just you know, doing police things.

Yeah, a Geordia State University canine unit this blocking off the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle. They're trying to make it impossible for people to actually

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

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

With a small line of officers in front of GSU, they gave their their last round of speeches and sort of dispersed for.

The day before we wrap today and gave these clouds something else that got do.

We will be out here.

We will be out here for the rest of the week, for the rest of the month, for the year.

We won't fight. Got here.

We wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Clark, what.

Is suspected of going down here?

So the one thing that police don't understand and probably will never understand, is humor. Now they become the butt of the joke often, but they don't understand comedy. So at seven o'clock that evening was scheduled comedy in the forest, and from what we've gathered, the police thought that the Comedy in the Forest event was going to be a cover for another Sunday night like action.

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

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

So, with the Forest camp still intact, the week of action continued on as planned, with another downtown nonviolent direct action that next morning.

So Wednesday noon is a lot smaller of direct action than the day before.

It starts with like a dozen people. It slowly grows like a few dozen, but yeah, it started extremely, extremely small. So this was one difference from Tuesday is that when we arrived, police already had a visible presence in downtown, stationed around Woodriff Park. So a group of people just launch from Woodriff Park. They kind of split off in different different little sub subgroups. Lots of people are just sationed outside of Marta stops handing out flyers, and that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, can I read the dispersal order?

All right?

So I'm a Lieutenant Neil Welch, Police Officer, City of Atlanta, I hereby declare that being on this sidewalk, you are obstructing or repeating the normal and reasonable movement of pedestrian traffic in violation of Atlanta City Ordinance. Okay, in the name of the people is Saya, Georgia. I hereby command that all present in the sidewalk, All present here in the sidewalk, immediately exit the street or the roadway or sidewalk. If you do not do so, you may be detained

Cops threatened arrest and detainment.

They claimed that people were blocking the sidewalk, which they absolutely were not. I was walking freely, as was all of like downtown pedestrian traffic. They were not blocking anything.

This is this is.

Pretty silly, utterly, utterly ridiculous response to people handing out flyers. So they were told they cannot be on the sidewalk. Obviously they can't be on the street. Where where are you allowed to protest if not the sidewalk or the street. Seemed like very like flimsy legal footing. But obviously they police can arrest anyone they want to at any time

Yeah, right in front of the mall. So it's it's it's meant to like have a bunch of people passed by it.

So people continue to hand out flyers while this is happening.

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

Mall as one does.

So the mayor is having a meeting in the mall.

The office spaces, you know, sort of above the mall.

And this group of people from the Muscogie Nation enter and try to meet up with the mayor to hand off a letter.

Objection.

Objection, We have a letter being delivered from the Muscoge Creek Nation on behalf of Muscogee Creek spiritual leadership and opposition to COMS.

I came all the way on the trail of tears to deliver this letter to you, folks. We want you to know that the contemporary Muscogee people are now making their journey back to our home lands. And hereby give notice to Mayor Andrew Dickens, the Atlanta City Council, the Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Police Foundation, the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office, and so called copp City that you must immediately vacate Muscogee homelands and cease violence and policing of

The Muskogee Creek.

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

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

The big event Thursday night was a six o'clock rally that met at the Martin Luther King National Historic Site.

There was police stationed at King Center before anyone got there. We saw like dozens and dozens of police cars going by.

All around the site are various quick response forces and riot cops just ready.

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

We are currently surrounded on every side by groups of police officers in riodegear. The crowd started off like actually fairly decently sized, maybe like fifty people, and then continued as swell as the speeches progressed to I would say like two hundred two hundred fifty, maybe even a little bit more. They were passing out signs, so like anyone who came, like they had a sign ready for you. Andre Dickins is a sellout of course, as a very

Defend the forest signs and banners and being handed out throughout the crowd. Other people are passing around the Jail Support number and Jill Support contact information.

People are starting to get ready.

So it meets it at six o'clock and for about an hour and a half we listened to a series of speeches as the crowd begins to swell.

So we are here in solidarity together today to make it clear to the mayor.

That he's not gonna keep lying on our names.

They'll literally be filling the last of Atlanta have to repressed life and kill. We find it ridiculous, we find it disgusting, We find it embarrassing. Tickets would fix his mouth to say that black people want to be killed by the police, that black people walk Crop City. The man must have forgotten that our ancestors were literally fighting

That's right.

Resistance to police, resistance to stay violence is literally in our blood as black people.

It is in our DNA.

They're lying on our name because they want money from the same white corporations that are funding Cop City, Home Depot, Chick fil A, Coca Cola, Norfolk, Southern and Cops enterprises who own to ajac And this is a fight that we will win, that we are committed to winning. And so when we talk about winning, it's important to say what do we mean when we say that we'll win. We mean no Cops City anywhere, not in South Atlanta, not in the cab not in North Atlanta, nowhere.

When we say that.

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

All of us, that's right.

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

Fight's a call. As the rain picked up, Tortillita's mother, Belquise Taran, spoke next on the cards.

The friend that I called them, I caned them to come here to support us.

On from different religions, come here and help us.

This is a.

Matter of the earth.

We're talking about Earth that.

Is dying right needs our love. That earth needs our attention, and we are we have conscience. We know that this is not right.

Don't go by yourself when we go.

To activities and stay together, don't go outside by yourself.

Don't We need to make understand that this is the right thing to do.

We are the correct people.

We are right because we are driving by.

Love, by carry by concerns, and we love all the I love you you.

A speaker from Black Votes Matter addressed to the crowd next, starting off by talking about the importance of mass action.

I just want to explain something because sometimes people get confused, they get it twisted.

They say, oh, y'all, look like vote.

It's better all y'all do is talk about voting.

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

So we are very clear that what we have got to be.

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

They had to fight for it. They had to march for it.

In some cases, they bled for it, they had to resist for it, they had to take to the streets for it.

It's a that tradition that.

We are out here today.

So yes, not believe.

I believe in the power of the vote, but house to believe in the power of mass action.

He then talked about the intersection of cop City and efforts to further restrict the democratic process in Georgia.

The same corporations that are that are funding cop City are the same ones that are funding the.

Bonus Questions, the same ones we've did.

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

You need a police force to enforce the fact that you don't have a government that reflects the people.

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

We've got to make that happen.

Students from the Atlanta University Center consortium of four black colleges in Atlanta, were some of the last people to give speeches before the march.

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

The victims have received no justice.

And when we say no justice, what do we say?

No justice, no justice, no justice.

The building of the Atlanta Public Training Center is an insult and an act of the utmost disrespect from our city leaders.

We have a duty to fight for the change that we seek.

As an active member of this community, I refuse to sit by and.

Be idle and just let things happen.

This city has been my home ever since I was born.

I've been to various events here.

I have seen the sights and have lived through some of the most important events right here in this city.

This is my home. This is your home. This is our home. This is the home of Black excellence. This is the home of doctor Martin Luther King Junior. This is the home of John Lewis. This is the home of Joseph Evelyn and Joseph E.

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

My Afro pessimist friends and revolutionaries both agree we are at war. The police in the city have said as much loudly with their words and their actions. It feels obvious to me that we need warriors weapons, and I know that that fact may give some of us trepidation, But I want to assure you that we need so much more than soldiers to win this fight. Whatever it is that you do, whatever skill you bring, I just ask that.

You make it a weapon.

If we are ever going to experience democracy, we need your tools to be repurposed in this fight against Cop City. If you're a writer like me, child that Patty better look like a threat to cop City. If you do mutual aid, caring for community ain't gonna get any easier. Please show us the way. If you're an artist, where are my artists at?

You got a lot of.

Them out here.

Let every painting room feel the truth, including the joy and freedom that abolition calls us to. Let us make songs that inspire revolution. If you're a healer, get ready. We need you. Much will be lost in this struggle. Let us not forget. If you're a teacher, well, we got a lot to learn about this war we're fighting and how police practice urban warfare. If you're a lawyer, guide us when they say that any fighter is a criminal. If you're a digital organizer and keep your finger on

If we plan to build one cop city, is.

The police and the establishment of preparing for domestic war right here in the.

City of Atlanta's that's right.

Any further training of the police is training against our existence.

That shit cannot be built.

It will best.

We all must fight for the democracy we've never seen before. What are you willing to do? Thank you?

So, after about an hour of speeches, people are now foundly getting ready to move.

They announced on the.

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

That is a banner being carried across that says.

What you water grows, fund our future, Stop cop city, defend the forest. People with the stop cop city signs in the Coca Cola font signs that read Atlanta versus cop City, No cop city on stolen land. The Thursday march definitely had the most amount of signs out of all of the individual marches or actions that I want to both small handheld signs and also signs with really

Visuals is definitely a strength of the movement.

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

We have like twelve regular police.

Cars, the two two white vans full of riot cops and.

Lots of them cops is stage in places I cannot currently see.

All right, We're marching north along Peachtree Street.

Heading heading to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Got the two the two bus Max rented buses full of full of riot cops right the side, right beside the march. Cops really out of it about not letting anybody march in the street. It's funny because a few days ago they wouldn't let people stand on the sidewalk either. Most of the cops that are surrounding the march right now are still in their vehicles, at least from this current vantage point. I was opposed to the non violent

Yeah, the police were ready to mass rest the entire time.

This is this is kind of a wild sighte.

We have hundreds of people staring down about three dozen officers from the Atlanta Police Department on their fifteen's, obviously all of their handguns. For hundreds of hundred of people holding signs staring down the police. You can you can feel the kind of you can feel the temperature rising a little bit here. The cops look very nervous as one. Hundreds of people who are chanting at them.

And I'm not very happy are facing them down.

They're so they're so close together, We're they're just sandwiched in. This is such a tense situation right now. No one in the crowd has any visible weapons of any kind. Of course, they're holding big signs. Cops have some zip cuffs ready, cops have all their guns ready. I was able to see inside the building via a small slit in the Plywood. There were tons of riot cops inside with shields, and all the cops on the inside of

Chanting and giving speeches.

If you look, there's a small section of the APF building where there's still a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of glass by one of the doors, and you can see lots of cops stationed inside with riot shields. But I do not believe this crowd's going to be busting down any doors. Camu Franklin, the founder of Community Movement Builders, was the last person to speak in front of the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Really know cop city.

It is nothing but a strategy for over policing our communities.

We know that cop city is.

Nothing but a strategy to stop our movements.

And what movements are those?

The movements against police follans and terrorism in our community. It is in twenty twenty one that they introduced this idea to stop, to put cop city out here to stop our movements. When people were talking about to fund the police, abolish the police, find alternatives of public safety, they said, hell no, we want more police, and they put that idea out there and the movement was born to stop cop City. This moment is two years old and it doesn't look like it's going to stop.

To me.

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

The reason we did a march like this today was to say to all the nice saves. Black folks don't want cop citycaudn't this.

People don't want cop City. White folks don't want cop City. At lanteds don't want cop City.

Folks from outside Atlanta don't want cop City.

Nobody in the United States wants cop City. So Morones, Citians don't work cops City. The people in America I don't want cop City.

Don't mean in this world don't we work cop City.

We wanted to make sure that we.

Came in safety and welieve in safety.

We wanted to make sure that we.

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

It's not like we gotta give them an excuse.

When you are around the cop, the same way when you're around the wild animal.

What do you gotta do.

You gotta be cautious, you gotta be careful, you gotta move a certain way, you gotta know which way to go because you're looking to protect your safety and right now looking to protect our safety. So as we depart here today, we are departing in unity, We are departing together. We are gonna walk back in close quarters together where our cars work.

If you're going to Martyr, you're gonna walk close.

Together with other people as you go to Martyr man and pick you up. If you can't take murder two blutch this way by deposit.

So we want you to be safe, secure, because you want to be out here again to fight out.

There was this sense that the people there wanted to show that if they wanted to do things, they could have, but they knew that this was not this was not the right time, nor the right.

Place, restraint and and understanding of what like practice I would say in that situation is.

And I mean in the speeches that happened beforehand, there was people from community movement builders, from Black Votes Matter, a whole bunch of other black led groups in the city. And similarly, like like like what happened at the clergy event, there was not a single whiff of condemnation of militant tactics, of of of property, destruction, of actions that people take this They people there who gave speeches recognized that such

The week of Action.

All right, so the Atlant police have executed a warrant on the LEAF meet up spot in southeast Atlanta that people have been using as a welcome center as like a medic station and just enough spot to hang out. It was set up after the raid Sunday night, and it is now Saturday morning. The police have executed this warrant to search Parmasis Id everyone who's there. We got a group of people it's being able to leave right now. There has been a prison transport vehicle called in and

And yeah, the group that got released is just walking up now. Maybe like two dozen people have been able to walk up.

We just got through their police lines and we're gonna, yeah, huddle up and get to a safe place. We were woken up by helicopters. There had been helicopters doing rounds all evening and I don't even know what time, seven something, we heard loud speakers saying that they had a warrant to search the property private property.

And.

That was very disorienting. Obviously, I was in the middle of sleeping. We came out with our hands open, our hands up. We had more than twenty guns pointed at us. Some people have their fingers on triggers. Certainly they were screaming at me. And as I was waking up, we came through the line. They said that they had a warrant to search the property. We know that Homeland Security was one of the departments that was arrested, that was part of the arrest crew or extraction crew or whatever.

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

We thought that it was important for us to not only amplify the wonderful children's march that happened here today. The community in East Atlanta, this community where they are proposing to build COP City, came out this morning overwhelmingly

During the raid up to forty officers swarmed the property, ransacking the infrastructure set up at the Leaf Encampment site. Cops slashed departs, two medical supply tents, disrupting metal operations, broke windows of a camper van parked on the site, and ripped apart a greenhouse. Police took pictures of the people detained at Leaf and collected their ideas, but after being held for several hours, the police let all but

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Marlon Katz.

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

Early this morning.

Police executed a search warrant and performed a raid against the Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation, which is a community space in Lakewood, Atlanta that exists primarily to serve artists and musicians. It's clear that it was part of a political strategy to repress and intimidate protesters who are associated with the Stop Pop City movement, a movement to defend the forest.

Matter that they had every right to conduct.

The other thing that police are likely to claim is that they made an arrest on scene, and our understanding is that they did make an arrest due to somebody who was there having an old traffic ticket from a long time ago. So it's important to clarify that the arrest was because of a traffic ticket, not because of any alleged crime related to the movement or any other serious criminal activity. So it's important that we understand this raid as part of a series of ongoing abuses of

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

They raided that place.

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

About a week after the raid, the Guardian obtained evidence of the search warrant. The warrant stated that there was probable cause for believing that evidence of quote conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism unquote could be found at the Lakewood location listed in the warrant where objects officers sought, which included quote, cameras, radios, boxes of nails, lighters, tents, camping equipment, spray paint, black clothing, and literature related to defend the forest.

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

Throughout this time, police have been watching or monitoring one of the off site locations in the forest. They've parked in front of this site and kept up surveillance on it. And then leading all the way up into Friday, there was a journalist pulled over leaving the final non violent direct action from Woodriff Park. They were pulled over with two other people in the car and detained briefly, ostensibly to you know, continue to identify and connect people.

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

We should highlight that. That is the apparent goal of these protests was to show that even when they are doing things the right way, this is how the state reacts to dissent.

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

It's like to.

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

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

When I spoke with Matthew Johnson, he brought up a similar point.

With the resources that the police had to respond in the way that they did. The assertion that the they need more training in a militarized facility or they need more resources is crazy because you had them literally outnumbering

This Week of Action has shown a lot about how the police are operating post the twenty twenty uprising, how they will respond to people exercising their First Amendment right, and the indiscriminate way that police will respond to any active protest. One of the main takeaways from this week is that their response to protest is deployed against people without target or focus. They care very little if you are breaking a window or if you're marching on the sidewalk,

The police presence has been pretty unprecedented. I haven't seen shit like that here since twenty twenty, not downtown at least, I mean shit, I don't think we had seen gas in Atlanta in a minute. And then they gassed the forest. It'd been a while, but yeah, I mean they're punching out, especially like Tuesday, they were putting out one hundred and

The twenty three people arrested on Sunday, March fifth were not arrested as anyone was torching equipment. They were not arrested at the power line cut. It was people who were attending a music festival. Arrests were not widely targeted against people who police knew were engaged in property destruction. They were targeted against anyone the cops could grab. Same was the case at the January twenty first action, where people were marching downtown the saturday after Tortugita was killed.

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

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

The morale has never been fully crushed, and like the participatory acts of the Week of Action, are continuing like none of that has been quashed.

An example of the joyful continuous resistance during the Week of Action can be found at the youth rally that happened on Saturday the eleventh.

All right, so I'm at.

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

This is the first time we've had a large march like this take to.

The streets because every action that was in downtown or midtown Atlanta was just so heavily surveilled by police who were not letting anyone get near the street at all.

But there's no police here.

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

Just walked by the march like on there, just you know, off shift workout routine, wearing Fulden County gear.

That's pretty funny.

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

Hear kids playing in the park.

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

And I think that that is kind of why the non violent direct actions have become like that have moved to the foe.

Right.

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

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

And now we can have lots of questions about tactics and cost benefit analysis about that action, which I did not think it would be wise, especially being so visible for me to have to be anywhere near on that day. We can have questions about that. But what was for certain was that the way in which the police responded was absurd and predictably so. Now with the destruction that I saw, etc. Cost them less than a million dollars and maybe like two weeks actually of construction that they

In the lead up to the Week of Action, nighttime sabotage actions decreased around Atlanta in favor of these big public demos during daylight. That seems to result in more people getting arrested. And what are the results of Sunday's action happening in such close proximity to the festival and the encampments, is that the people at the festival and in the woods who did not consent to participating in a high pro file direct action got disproportionately hit with

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

To riot, so they retaliated at a music festival that was happening nearby.

Yes, and that's the fault of nobody but the police. That's not the fault of the people who went and

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

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

In the aftermath of the police killing forest defender Tortigita, law enforcement agencies tried to claim that Tortighita shot at them first, leaving one officer injured, but recently released findings from multiple autopsies have cast more doubt on the state's version of events. On the afternoon of Friday, March tenth, towards the end of the week of action, the family of Tortighita released the findings of an independent autopsy done

I think that we have to hold space for very real grief. We lost a friend, and at the same time, just two days ago, on a Friday, what we always knew to be true was found to clearly true. Torte Ghita was murdered and we have to bear the brunner of that pain. And all the people in power lied and even gave their condolences to a state trooper that seemed as if he was shot by a state trooper and did not say a mumbling word to even acknowledge our friend's existence and the value of their life. And

I just.

And like that like got me through the first week after their passing. Yeah, but I've grown a great appreciation for that family because in so many ways, Tortigita is their hero, and just to learn how consistent they were as like such a welcoming and loving and caring person just meant so much. I mean to know that this wasn't something new that they had stumbled upon. They had lived this whole life of caring and making space for others.

Some of Towards friends have raised concerns that a side effect of Toward unwittingly becoming the face of the movement is that the details around their death have eclipsed some of what they died fighting for in doing so, stripping toward of their individuality and removing their own agency to turn them into this perfect liberal friendly avatar of the movement to simply be used as a political tool and add to a list of demands.

There's a thing that's been happening more and more recently that I've been bothered by, which is when organizations, specifically more liberal organizations, are invoking Towards Name actions, they're misgendering the hell out of them, and it's alienating a lot of people. And I understand that Sunday's action alienated a lot of liberal orgs. This is a problem with the week of Action type strategy, with the diversity of tactics all being forced under one roof. But we cannot stand

That will wrap up our day to day coverage of the entire week of action, But much has happened in the intervening two months, So in the next episode we'll cover where the movement is now, discuss the future of the fight to Stop Cop City, and offer a more critical retrospective on the fifth Week of action. See You on the other Side Music festival audio courtesy of Unicorn Riot. Welcome back to It could Happen Here. This is a bonus fifth episode following my coverage of the Stopcop City

The domestic terrorism charges go back to the middle of December, that's when the first of them happened, and up until the week of Action, there have been a total of nineteen arrest or individuals who have been charged with domestic terrorism. And then of those people, anyone who did not have either a Georgia license or could not prove like Georgia residency, they were all initially denied bond, but everyone who lives

That's the most people that have been like arrested and held in one day. It really is in relation to the movement so far.

Yeah, this is the largest mass arrest of the movement, So it's kind of inconceivable for twenty three people to be held without bond. So we get to the bail hearing,

Yeah, this is this isn't this isn't a real this isn't a real bond.

Here.

At the press conference after the leaf raid, Comeal Franklin from the Community Movement Builders spoke about it the years of state repression against people fighting to stop cop City.

This movement has been repressed by the states, by the city since its very beginnings, where we first started organizing in twenty twenty one, where we had rallies in demonstration, we would have police break them up, throw people to the grounds, pepper stray them, and arrest them. We had over twenty arrest in our first years of rallying and demonstrating against cop City. At the time, those folks were

And so now we're coming to a.

Point where they're raiding houses, where they're telling organizers and activists that they can't stand on corners and legally give out leaflet.

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

Yeah, they're problematic.

Yeah.

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

When you and I were coming in on Saturday and along with the march, we passed by a bunch of shields, right and they were kind of placed near the end of the path, like in anticipation that there might be police presence. And I took pictures of the shields and they are evidently plastic shields. There's no way of mistaking them for anything other than plastic.

The plastic five gallon shields that you see at almost every protest in every city across the country. The cops know what these things are. That the fact that they claimed that people were arrested carrying metal shields is so ludicrous because there was not There was not a single metal shield at this festival. And there's a lot of footage of these arrests. I don't there's I've not seen evidence that every that any person was arrested that was carrying a shield, let alone a metal one.

There's this weird thing where so typically when you do these these bail hearings, the defense attorneys waive the reading of the warrant, typically because they have already gone over that with their client and you know, everybody's aware, and it just kind of speeds up the process. And it was like really notable that these attorneys weren't doing it, and once you started to listen to them, you notice

For like every single person all the way down line. During the first hearing, only one person was let out on bail and they were an NLG legal observer and lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center. After the week of action, on March twenty third, there were a second set of bail hearings for ten of the people arrested on March fifth at the South River Music Festival. In a rare move, the second in command of the State of Georgia's Attorney General's Office, John Fowler, was deployed to

During the game.

And even if we may not know they carried the football, we do know that they were on the field, which I don't even want to get into, but it is still a fact that the majority of people were denied bond because some had black clothing, mud on their shoes and ran from police. This is what made them a quote unquote threat to our community, and this is the evidence being used against people who were allegedly engaged in

And yeah, so if you've ever been to a music festival, standing around for a very long period of time, really annoying, people like to sit down. So I like, my feet were caked in mud, and I sat down a few times. I'm I'm my docker partments are still caked in mud. Not to mention, the parking lot completely torn up, covered in mud, and as I mentioned earlier, the you know the person having like fill in mud all along the

At the time of the bail hearings, they've very clearly had no evidence linking individuals to crimes. So the best they could come up with was metal shields and mud, two things, two things that are completely nonsense. There was no there was no metal shields. And oh wow, you have mud on your you have mud on your clothing.

Of the twenty three who were charged, only two had the Georgia licenses, the person from Athens and the legal observer. The rest were out of state and two were out

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

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

This could not be further.

From the truth.

This is like a clear misrepresentation of a broad movement that encompasses all of society. But this is the narrative that prosecutors are trying to promulgate to make it easier to target activists.

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

One of the.

Hearings was for the indigenous person who was tased at the music festival, who was specifically witnessed to be there during the duration of the direct action. Under questioning from the defense, special Agent Long said that the defendant was

I'm going to start by.

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

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

You just start to.

See smoke occurring as fires are set, maltav cocktails are thrown, and fireworks are discharged from our air unit that is deployed in the area. You will see individuals that have started to move against the officers. They will have start throwings fireworks as they are pushing the officers in the area where we see individuals as another group is engaging the officers with rocks, Malotov cocktails and bottles are moving to set fire to the various equipments that in the area.

There will be generators.

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

I spoke with the unnamed Forest defender about the surveillance capabilities of the state on full display during the week of action.

I find that thermal helicopter video fascinating for a variety of reasons. One, it's interesting to look at the surveillance capacity of the state. It's to my memory, the first time the EAT has ever posted their own thermal chopper footage. It's a very similar camera to the type you would see on a birector on some kind of armed unmanned

My bad.

Don't want to lean into the explosives narratives. Honestly, they're fucking weird about fireworks. But you know, those surveillance capacities are one of the hardest things to counter.

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

And like, as soon as you overcome that paralyzing fear, the cops become really afraid of you. That's why we say that like the biggest that the state has his fear, because like the cops go from these big, fucking tough guys to like whining cowards. The second you just become not afraid, you don't even have to beat them, you don't have to overcome the actual physical weapons. But once you get out of that headspace, that paralyzing fear, once you let it pass over you and through you, they're

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

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

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

Atlanta activists are on the front lines of the abolitionist movement, at its crucial intersection with movements to save our forests, indeed, to save our planet. The attempt to build a massive militarized police training facility is a dangerous and ominous development that we have to oppose with all our might. And so I want to join those who are standing strong in defense of the forest against the construction of this

After Angeliae Davis's announcement, the Walter Rodney Foundation released a statement supporting Davis's decision and against the construction of Cop City.

It's interesting to see their more mainline sort of center or center left like organizations that have begun to come on board. Even with what happened Sunday and especially the Thursday march and rally, had it necessitated a response from the city. So Friday morning there was actually an organization Concerned Black Clergy who had a press conference like calling out Cop City protesters, and so you had this like very state run. One of the city council members, Antonio Lewis,

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

Quote.

A few days after the announcement to CAB police led a joint task force in a raid of the Wallani Forest and Entrenchment Creek Park. The land was effectively of all force defenders, with one person being arrested. During the raid, The memorial for Tortigito was destroyed by the police, and cement barricades were set up around the entrances and exits to the park. Days later, police and contractors began cutting trees in the Willanne Forest, with no one around to

People are angry, you know, like their friend, our friend was murdered. You can just feel however you want about this, but like a lot of people, and I guess myself included, are just really angry. There's this kind of blinding rage that comes with it of just like eye for an eye,

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

I think that we have to be very clear and assessing what has worked installing the project and what will work to stop the project, because those aren't necessarily the same things. I think there are nuances in particular strategies. There is a difference between, especially in our particular context. That's similar between the difference between gorilla warfare and urban

Through talking with forced defenders, I've heard a variety of internal critiques of the week of Action format because it is such a concentrated time period. The week of Action can give police a very concentrated time to over police and over surveil, and for activists it can open up an expenditure of energy during the week, which then can lead to a lack of energy leading up to what's

So the week of repression is always the week that comes after the Week of Action where the cops are like, Okay, the bulk of your reserves, you're out of state supporter is gone. We're going to come fuck you up. Now they are less of you. Now you're less ready to

Ultimately, it's up to the autonomous actors that makeup this is so moment and how their choices will determine how the fight to stop Cop City will grow and evolve. As I'm writing this, just thirty minutes ago we found out that the clear cutting at the Cop City construction site has essentially been completed. The overhead photos are devastating. Where there were young, growing trees just weeks ago is now a flattened mound of red clay and dirt, as

I think it'd be worth thinking of this movement as an almost two year old movement that's outgrown the.

Week of action.

You know, why limit ourselves to seven days?

Fuck it?

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

Is where you live.

And yeah, you should come to Atlanta and you should come see the space, and you should be in the forest and you should feel like the love and community that's there. We win by fighting on enough fronts that they can't fight us back on all of them. The state dies by a thousand cuts, not by all of us being in one place where they can kettle our asses. Like,

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

When Chief A.

Sheerbaum gave testimony at City Council even he mentioned the far reaching manifestations of the fight to stop cop City.

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

So that is the next.

Is where the Federal Pure of Investigation has been assisting in this administigation.

Like I said in the second episode, the stakes of the movement may soon exceed the bounds of the forest and cop City, and in fact that process may have already begun. We are seeing stop Coop City turn into a new mode of insurgency and resistance to modern policing in general, not simply limited to the construction of this

At Atlanta once again, because of the Atlanta Police Foundation is the most surveiled city in the country, because of twenty seventeen's Operation Shield program where they put tons of cameras all throughout the city and essentially made it a surveillance state. Once again, crime has continued to go up during this time, and that would have significantly more to do with the disparity of wealth than opportunities of Black

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

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

The level of repression the movement is facing is a sign that the state feels like this movement is a threat, and the state feels like this movement has the possibility of actually succeeding, So in response, they're increasing repression. And on the flip side of that, during this past week of action, I saw a lot of affirmation that this is going to be successful and that people believe that they will stop cop City. A common refrain during the past week of action is that cop City will never

So we can get everything we want for this city. We can stop cop city. We don't got the power, but we just got the believe the last There's gonna be a lot of.

People telling us about what we can't do, about.

What these organizers are here can't do.

Tell me what it tells us about what we what we can't do?

Well to tell you all of a sudden here we're organizers, no business.

I've taken that.

With all the papers. Impossible, way you make it possible? You say, will we believe that we will win?

This is interesting to me because in my experience, a lot of leftists and anarchists approach much of their praxis with the concept of them expecting to not succeed, but they're going to do it anyway, which there is a kind of fated beauty to that in a certain way. And part of that is taking action even if you don't think it will lead to a decisive victory. But also I feel that being in that mindset might set

If you're being prepared to fail, you won't take the radical action that it takes to win. Winning's hard, and winning means doing things that are scary and uncomfortable and doing things that put you in danger, and doing things that are new and unknown and different, and taking new strategies and doing new things. And we in the US and a lot of other places, but this is US

Do you believe that cop city will be actually stopped.

We got to.

And here's what I mean by that. This is the line. Right we have environmental racism, police militarization and brutality, and police and racism, and it's all coming to a head

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

Everything that police have done is essentially always a reprisal, right, the movement does something and the police clamp down in a reprisal to try to repress the movement.

Police always escalate, but they have always been like in response to something.

And their goal, of course is to quiet and chill free speech and end the movement. But every time this happens, the opposite effect is what comes out of it. And from the domestic terrorism rest in December, like really, that's when this even larger groundswell of national support happened and people started to take notice because this was an extreme measure.

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

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

The City Council has actually not yet voted to approve the allocation of millions of dollars in city funds to the Cop City project.

Through an open records request, we were able to get our hands on emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and Atlanta's Deputy Chief Operating Officer L. Chandra Berks. In this email exchange, the Police Foundation expressed a need for the city to provide thirty three point five million dollars in funding for the project. Berts responded by mentioning the need

It's expected that as soon as May fifteenth, a member of the City Council will introduce legislation to allocate public funds to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build cop City, and a final vote could happen as soon as June fifth. One thing that the movement to stop cop City has shown us is that no matter what police do, people continue to show up despite what happens, and the movement keeps expanding. As the unnamed forest defender told.

Me, infrastructure wise, this Week of Action was the biggest infrastructure I've seen doing a week of action. I thought that the infrastructure we put together for Week one was pretty big, but I mean it doesn't even compare. It's not the same ballpark as what happened for Week five. Just from how the medics were set up and how

Who did it.

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

It's just grown.

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

Just last month, another Week of Action was called for June twenty fourth to July first, directly leading into what's being called the Wollawnie Summer, with locals in Atlanta calling on supporters and forced defenders everywhere to come to Atlanta for the week and stay for the summer. With Entrenchment Creek Park still closed and they're being ongoing efforts to have it be reopened what the week and following summer will look like. Is it still very unknown?

We always are going to need more people. People are a most important resource.

Always.

The way that we limit burnout is by having more and more people so that the burden falls less and less heavy on small groups of people, and so that people can take breaks. And that's another problem I have with like the Week of Action as a strategy, is you're just going non fucking stop for a week. If you had three months, you're like, ah, I'm going to

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

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

People.

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

I will end this Week of Action retrospective with a promise from the Forest Defenders. See you on the other side.

We well, we well, well.

Well. Music Festival audio courtesy of Unicorn Riot.

A welcome to it could happen here. This is Robert Evans Uh and it could happen here is a podcast about things falling apart, uh and you know, sometimes about making them better. Today we're talking both about something that is implicated in a number of you know, aspects of what we call the crumbles here in the United States,

So we came at this book both kind of independently. We came out this as to reporters who'd worked kind of handing glove together for about ten well since twenty twelve. When we signed our contract, it was twenty twenty. But I'd started reporting on the Oakland Police Department in two thousand and eight when I moved to the Bay Area for graduate school at cal Gobert's, and I'd kind of dove right into the topic of police and police conduct

And.

There really was.

There were some really egregious shootings at that point in time in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, late two thousands, OPD about average, I think eight to fourteen officer involved shootings police shootings a year. Invariably there would be one or two or three or four depending on the years, maybe more that involves someone who's unarmed fleeing it was an awful but lawful shoot or maybe just an awful shoot that the DA didn't charge or didn't

It's about forty percent of the city's billion.

Dollar budget give or takes, so we're talking three hundred and fifty four hundred million.

Dollars every year.

The result, the net result for public safety is questionable.

At best.

Doesn't really tie into increase in police funding, increase in menpower, decreasing crime. Oakland's a very violent city, often ranks in the top ten or top five nationally in per ca at a crime per one hundred thousand residents. And it's also been under this reform program forever. And this is the backdrop to all our reporting. There was always this

All the above.

So we, over the course of our reporting together kind of yoked together. Around a decade eight years or so, we kind of realized, Okay, we have a paragraph in each one of our stories that explains the backdrop, or maybe a little bit more, depending on how legalistic appease it was.

We need to peel all this back.

We need to explain to people because this is the longest running oversight regime in the country, right, two decades now, over two decades since the consent Degree, the negotiated settlement Agreement was signed, and we just needed to explain to people why this city had gone so far, why it was an edge case, why it.

Was an outlier.

And in order to do that, we couldn't We couldn't use five thousand words. We needed one hundred and two hundred and sixty thousand.

Yeah, this is a dense book in a way that's still intensely readable, and I think part of what makes it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of effort laying out things that people kind of know in broad and a good example of this would be people talk a lot about, you know, the kind of concept of you know, the bad apples that you know there's that's both on the side of people defending police departments that it's a few bad apples, and then kind of and you find this more on sort of people on

Well, what we wanted to do is explain how so it's a bad apple theory I think is Yeah, Honestly, it's a distraction, and frankly it's an excuse. What you're dealing with is culture, right, and culture eats politics and policy for lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the meals in between every single time. You can't change culture unless

We had reams of records.

I mean we sued for I want to say, hundreds of thousands of record pages of records, videos, audio files, got old court transcripts, cassette tapes of old internal affairs interviews, backstop those by talking to the people there and involved, and we were really able to we were able to kind of reconstruct, not just the initial scandal of the writers of which stem from this young officer, Keith Batt, who is from a city from Sebastopol, which is a

Around the turn of the millennium, and Keith comes in.

He's a criminal justice major in college, really idealistic, wanted to join an active police department. Applied to dozens of apartments, to several departments around the area, and the first one that took him was Oakland, and Oakland had a good reputation among police culture.

It was an active department.

The cops worked hard, they were well trained, they were decently paid, and it wasn't a.

You know, in the Bay Area like the two.

Departments that people look to are like are the Oakland Police Department in SFPD, and SFPD is a closed shop.

It is a legacy.

Department is run by an intense old boy network of Italian and Irish folks, some Chinese, some Asian immigrants that are kind of led into that now, but it is just it's such an insular place. OPD is actually typically more welcoming of recruits from outside, and they really like people who are hard chargers, active, willing to learn. And Keith finished the top of his near the top of

Your head down. Yeah, And Keith was like, wait, what are you talking about?

Like that's that's some wild that's a wild ship, like, that's not what I'm expecting.

It's a little bit odd. And these are older officers who you respected. He goes out and.

Gets in the car with Chuck, and Chuck is this little, you know, very very intense buzz cut Filipino dude, and he's like, all right, I'm gonna teach you. I'm gonna take take you out and toughen you up, like this is not the academy anymore. I'm gonna teach you how to be in the streets. We're gonna get a fight,

And Keith is like, wait what you shoot dogs? And yeah, they told him that.

You know, every now and then they would encounter somebody with the dog and they would shoot the dog and then cut the leash. In order to make it seem like the dog was going to attack them. And that was just his introduction to it. And over the two weeks that he worked with several officers on shift, there were three other officers who kind of made up this little click of of free wheeling cops that they called themselves the Riders, and they were Jude Siapno, Frank Vasquez,

They were not a task force. They were just patrol officers.

They would kind of roam around West Oakland going out and looking for people to arrest, just jumping out a random folks.

They were pro not reactive, they were proactive.

So they essentially ended up kidnapping people, planning drugs on them when they didn't find drugs, beating the tar out of them, torturing them. Sap who's nickname was the foot Doctor because he had a habit of taking his asps retractable but time and beating detainees on the soles of their feet till they couldn't walk. Yeah, their bruises were so painful.

For some reference, that's that was called bastinado by the Spanish Inquisition who loved to do the exact same thing.

Yeah, No, it's it's really it's grim, it's really really grim.

Shit.

So Keith sees all.

This stuff, it's just like two weeks of like training day of that film, it's two weeks of that, it's not just one week. And he's like, I can't do this. This can't be the way policing is. And he keeps going, you know, kind of casting around for help and the cash twenty two that he's in and is that anybody who he tells about this behavior is obligated by OPDS regulations to then report said misconduct and if they don't,

You know, I don't know, do you want to write out your career? Like can you do this?

Is there a way you can switch out? Is there a way that you can thread the needle? And it gets to be too much, and so one day, after two weeks, he decides, I can't do this anymore. I can't put more I can't put in this in people in jail. I can't forge paperwork for my supervisors. I can't forge their overtime. You know, I can't help them

He said, oh, well, if you have a problem with Frank, you can talk to him.

Fasquez comes over and you know drives over there that have a conversation about that.

And Keith at this point is so wired up and so terrified.

He's looking at Mabadag and looking at Fasquez and thinking to himself, Okay, can I get to my pistol before they get to theirs if they.

Want to hurt me?

And if we have a shootout, how's it going to look if three Oakland cops are bucking led at each other in uniform on shift. He's running this calculus in his head, doesn't come to that. In the end, Mabini con vises him to go in and sign a resignation letter, and when he does that at OPD headquarters, one of his supervisors from the academy gets hold of him, gets a hold of him, says, no, no, no, this isn't what's

There had been a number of people who had attempted to kind of like victims of this particular gang of guys who had that's right, like, attempted to complain, attempted to come forward. But yeah, it's not really until this officer on the inside, with a very good record is willing to say something that anything starts to happen.

So you have to remember the context here. I'm sorry for cutting in, but he no, no, I was remiss on this. So the context of Oakland in late nineteen nineties early two thousands is that it's in the middle of New York style urban renewal. Jerry Brown, who later became governor of California, was kind of on his way back up the political rung, and Oakland was his first stop.

He was re elected mayor in nineteen ninety eight.

I believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he was going to turn Oakland into this socialist, you know, environmental friendly metropolis. But he gets into office, he starts going to community meetings, and he realizes public safety is

It was this kind of one hand washes the other bit.

Yeah, and I one of the things that I found particularly kind of impactful is the way in which you describe both the violence, the absolute like horrifying cruelty of what these guys are getting up to, and how that intersects with Jerry Brown's political career, with the kind of promises he's making to clean up the city and the kind of metrics that are established, you know, to provide

He's from Mexico, He's born down there and has family around media. The theory is that he, I mean, you know, he was stopped by a cop. That's when, yeah, the people realized that he had been that he'd stolen a gun from the department. But he kind of badges his way out of this encounter with a cop in Slus city, which is a Delta town near where he lived and are near his house, and that was the last anybody had seen of him, has seen of him.

The theory, the theory that's rattled.

Around quite often, and there's more often than there's probably some hef to it is that somebody from the either the department or the police union helped him down to the border in Chula Vista and he walked across. So the odds are that he's in Mexico. Estensibly the FBI are still looking for him. He's a fugitive, but he's never never been found.

No, and he when this happens, because his buddies in the writers are all all do in fact, go on trial, and you know, you might think the fact that one of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing a gun would have an impact on things, but no, no, in court, they're not. You know, the prosecutors aren't allowed to tell the jury what happened with Fasquez because it's worried that it might prejudice them, which is wild to me.

Well, in the first trial, so there were two trials, fast forward a little bit. All three cops in their first trial, there's hung juries in them. I think there were one or two holdouts maybe, And from the reporting that we did, the interview that we did with the ADA on the case, Dave Holliser, it seemed that these were people who were convinced that these were good cops and the ends justified the means or therefore, you know, this kind of noble noble cause corruption actually has an

Yeah, for folks who aren't aware, the fire commissioner of San Francisco. This was a couple of months ago, right around the time that there was a big wave of San Francisco was collapsed into anarchy sort of stories.

Which happened every ten years, which.

Yeah, yeah, and have been. You know, it happened at the same time that that tech CEO was stabbed to death. Turns out by another tech founder. Well, but yeah, this story that the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's this video of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man. It turns out he had been going around at night and macing homeless people at random. One of the Yeah, hairspray was crazy, it was awful ship.

Yeah, and then someone attacked him with the homeless with a with a crowbar. But all that those facts were emitted anyway. So the bottom line is with the with Horning of Horning, Vasquez and sap they're they're hung on the first trial, and then the second trial they're acquitted.

Uh.

There, Horning is acquitted.

Of some charges and there's hung juries in the rest of his charges and those first sapno and mabenang. But in the second trial. First trial, the defense was, well, they didn't do what Keith did. Keith's bad as lying. The second trial was well, the defense turned to a strategy of well, actually, Frank Ifasquez was the leader, so it's all Frank's fault.

Yeah, it's easy to throw that guy under the bus because he's gone.

Exactly, yeah, exactly.

And you know, to say he was a ringleader is absurd because everyone knew in OPD and outside OPD that Mabadang was the shot caller in that little gang. What's interesting is the lawsuit, So there's a little vegary here

What are their cops were involved?

Because the writers, you know, there's a ball that they actually signed for each other, and there's several names on that ball.

It's not just those four cops.

So the civil suit there was a civil suit brought by two civil rights two attorneys in the area, John Burris and Jim Channon, who had been suing the department for years. They'd actually received walkins the victims that you'd mentioned earlier over the years, alleging that they'd been arrested, beaten up, framed up, tortured by these cops in West Oakland. And when the news of Keith bat blowing the whistle on the writers hit the newspapers, it clicked for them

Twice over swinging Bob Miller, that's right.

And you know Miller flipped through the pages and was looking, you know, trying to see if any connections to Russia and Alpha Bank and so on. But no, actually, I mean he's flipping through and he pulls out these files and he looks at the long rap sheet of some of these witnesses.

And these were people in the street.

These are people who had been arrested before, had been involved in narcotic sales, petty assaults, that robbery's, burglaries, what have you like. They were people who were not They were not kids, they were not clean sheets. And he handed the file back to Hollister, to the ADA and said, I wish you the best of luck. It's important to note that this was a different era. A CoP's word was very, very very hard to impeach on the stand. There was no body camera video, There were no cell

They should be punished for it.

You know, I can't help but thinking about the the story that's kind of blown up right now about there's a man on the subway recently in New York City who was, you know, acting kind of erradically yelling and stuff, but had not done any violence to anyone, and a bystander straphanger restrained him, put him in a headlock for

That's doesn't give you the right to lynch someone.

Yeah, exactly like that, Like, the penalty for having been arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death. That's not the way the system is. That's not the way any of this is supposed to work. And it's it's interesting. There's a degree to which I guess it hasn't changed, and there's a degree to which I'm kind of worried that the sort of nature of social media means that we're a lot more open about the kind of violence we're willing to accept for.

People who, yeah, agree with that entirely.

I mean, that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of to both Black Lives Matter cycles in twenty fourteen, fifteen, and the current cycle.

Is a lot more virulent.

Then you'd have it if you just watched kind of the soft focus PBS frontline documentary versions of it. There's a lot of really naked justification and support for extra legal violence, and that is part of the issue with law enforcement and holding them accountable. There is always going to be a segment, small, sometimes vocal, sometimes not, of the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law,

Like.

That sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's attorneys aren't beholding to anybody other than themselves, and when the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation play out as it will and whole and both judges on this case have actually been very by the book and very stringent on how the oversight has gone. So that's why it's gone on for twenty years, and it actually has resulted in good changes. There are a lot of people who bitch about it, who cry that, oh, well,

No?

And that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that did manage to change a lot of things around. There's a police commission here that now oversees the department. It's not perfect, it's very much in the infancy, but that's a body that existed to take control away from the mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a police department. And this is yeah, it's a long arc, but the bottom line is that it's not about a one or a zero. There's no linear progress here. It's

Yeah, yeah, but it is, like it's important both, you know. I think our our audience is definitely much more of our audiences in the constituency of, you know, get rid of the police entirely, even if you're coming at it from that, I mean, especially if you're coming at from

I would say that we didn't make an explicit attempt to make the city the main character, so to draw people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles and City of Courts.

May he rest in peace. It was a great inspiration for us.

But more than anything else, there are tons of parallels in Oakland to other places.

It's not a unique place. I mean, it is a unique place, but it's.

Also very typical for an American city, like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago are completely atypical. They're huge, they don't most American cities are like four hundred to six hundred thousand people large. Oakland's racial balance is almost thirty thirty thirty white, Latino Black, ten percent Asian, and roughly eight to ten percent Asian.

Then everyone else thrown in there.

It's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative, and it's also you know, rust belt city in certain respects, although that's changed a lot with the tech boom.

We could be going back the other way.

But it really there are echoes in stuff that's happened in New York and Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in New Orleans, in Portland and Seattle. It's the experience that we've had here, particularly with police oversight in and reform. I mean Portland and Seattle are two other cities that have actually undergone very similar programs with departments that.

Are more alike to OPD than not.

Yeah, well, Allie, is there anything else you wanted to make sure to get into in this conversation or Yeah.

I think your point about I just wanted to touch on your point about where people come out for the institution.

I think it's really important.

Even regardless of what you believe about where we should and shouldn't be with law enforcement, you've got to understand it. Yeah, because it's such a huge institution in our society. It is basically the main point of contact most people have with the state now in many Americans cities. Because we've stripped down so many other aspects of our societies.

Mental hospitals are gone, our schools are.

Failing, public housing barely exists, our healthcare system is decimated, and cops essentially catch a lot of the end product of those problems. It's one of the reasons why I started reporting on criminal justice because you can look at so many other issues of American society through that system. And also you can see ways in which like political agendas, the way that police departments lobby, and the messaging that they push out. They don't do it in isolated fashion.

Are so out of control.

In New York, homemlest man's choked to death because he's he's having an episode on the train.

San Francisco.

This fire commissioner is going around bare spring people who are camping out on in the streets. This is the sort of the back and forth swing that oftentimes starts with people who are trying to protect their budget line, who are trying to protect their political power, and it ends up with consequences like that where people take it

And I think that that's.

Really a really I think that's a critical takeaway for readers from this book.

Yeah, I would absolutely agree. Well, folks, the book is called The Writers Come Out at Night. Brutality, Corruption and Cover Up in Oakland. It's by Ali Winston, who you've just been listening to, and Darwin Bond Graham. I can't recommend it enough. Ali, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much.

Robert, Oh my goodness, it could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart, putting them back together, and the Sissifician task of occasionally trying to stop them from crumbling as fast as they otherwise would. I'm Robert Evans, who is not great at introducing this podcast, and I'm joined with James, who is better at introducing this podcast. But I strong harmed him out of it. Not true. Well,

Hi, thank you, thanks for having me.

Yeah, Amy, I'm curious kind of what got you started thinking about and focusing on and really digging into what's been happening in Guyana, because obviously this is you know, uh, the oil and gas industry is a topic of concern for most progressives, but people tend to focus on, you know, kind of the Permian basin, the Gulf of Mexico, obviously, the Middle East, these places that are kind of seen as traditionally more the bread basket of the oil and gas industry.

Yeah, I started looking at Guyana because I follow a lot of Exxon's shareholder briefings and reports like that, and I kept seeing them talking about about the project in Guyana and just how like the projections kept increasing so quickly, And it got to a point where I was like, hold on a second, they are projecting that this is going to be producing more than the Permian Basin by twenty twenty five. And this is a country that shipped

So yeah, yeah, and this attorney has a has a pretty interesting backstory herself, right, she does.

And that was also very interesting because she actually was in house council for BP. Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly. So she grew up in Guyana, her family lap. When she was around twelve or thirteen, there was quite a bit of political unrest in Guyana, spurred like so many places by Daa and oh gosh, like the history of Gana is really interesting. But anyway, so there was a lot of political unrest. I really felt it unsafe. They left.

Yeah. And one of the things you make a point on in the podcast that is really is interesting is, you know, I grew up in Texas and I had a lot of friends from the Permian basin, and you don't think of it, and you don't think of the Gulf as like an area of strong environmental regulations. And if you've spent any time speaking in the Gulf of Mexico,

Yeah, that's right, they don't have. You don't have kind of the heavy benchful of you know, experts just hanging out looking for jobs. You don't have the disaster response to expertise in case of the spill, for example. And you also don't have the regulatory oversight expertise, which has been a huge problem in Guyana. They got they got a grant from the World Bank at one point. This was also super controversial.

That's really interesting to me. Yeah.

Yeah, it was like it was right like right before the World Bank issued its whole you know, we're not gonna recommend fossil fuel as much anymore kind of pronouncement. They sort of fast tracked this grant to Guyana to create and grow like a petroleum regulatory department in its EPA because they didn't have, like it didn't exist before,

So I think you said in your podcast they dropped this hundreds of pages, like environmental risk report, and it got to prove the same day that they received it, right, that's right.

Yeah, it's like stamped, like the date of receipt and the date of approval are stamped on the report and it's the same day. So there's not a lot of oversight happening.

Hey, some people are speed readers, amy, you know, they.

Spent all that well banked mine on speed reading courses. Yeah, yeah, really really moving it up.

Yeah, and a lot of all I'm going.

To guess they're very focused over there, yes, yeah, so you know, I mean they I actually talked to I actually talked to this guy who ran the EPA in Dayana, like the first couple of years that they were producing oil, and he had formerly worked for the Department of Energy in the US and was trying to set up like real oversight and like his recommendation was that they have an EPA staff member actually physically on the production Bethel at all times, which like, uh yeah, no one was into.

Yeah.

Great, So maybe I'm talking about like the legal panser of Texas and the different system in Guyana would be a good way to segue into talking about this this like right space approach that they used to I guess ultimately try and ensure some kind of responsibility was taken by the oil companies can Yeah.

Yeah, do you want to explain that for people.

In terms of like the right to a healthy environment?

Yeah?

I think it's very interesting.

Yeah, it's really interesting. It's super interesting. So Melinda Jinki, this lawyer who us worked for BP from Guyana, moved home starts working on these laws. She helped to write the country's first kind of environmental protection Act, which established its EPA, and then in nineteen eighty six and again in two thousand and three, there were some revisions to

You know, oh boy, that's good. Faster you need to dig into that aproach break things.

Not totally exactly, And and the guyes government has this idea I think that, well they've they've actually said this out loud a few times that like net zero is uh, you know, commitments to net zero is sort of like their timeline, you know, where they're like, okay, well, you know everyone wants to get to net zero by such and such dates, So we need to get oil out of the ground as fast as possible and sell it so that we can meet that zero and so, and

Two years.

That's cool. Yeah, And again it's like it's an offshore deep water drilling project. This is like the most risky type of oil drem there is. There's an enormous amount of pressure at that level of depth of the ocean. It's exactly the sort of situation that deep water spill happened in, and a lot of like similar kind of approaches to maintenance and safety happening. So yeah, not great.

I wanted to talk a little bit one of the things that you you kind of open up the series with that I found very very intriguing and it's something i've heard from other journalists in the same beat as you, is that when you start work on a project that focuses on Exon, some peculiar things start to happen, just like and nothing nothing, nothing we can say for certain is like tied to Exxon Mobile. That's right, y, Yeah,

True, it's true. And I you know, I report on all of the oil comp and none of them particularly like journalists, especially journalists, and they, you know, will kind of do the usual thing of sending you nasty emails or refusing to have their executives talk to you. It's like that, but Exon and it's like every every time I'm working on an Excellon story, it's just like, you know,

Yeah, it's intimidation.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, normal and good And I know, no.

People always ask me, they're like, are you afraid of getting sued by Exxon? And I was like, well, I guess if I had assets, I would be afraid.

Yeah.

Thing yeah, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, but like I wonder I was really interested in I get this legal approach which is very successful in Guyana, Right, and if we compare that, like if we come back to the United States and I know there's a court case I think it was, like it was I'm pretty sure it's Boulder, Colorado. I might be wrong, but it was somewhere like that where they they tried to sue oil companies for causing fires.

Right, Yes, there's a climate liability case there and it's still going. Actually it's still it's still alive. They just got like a move in their favor at the Supreme Court.

Because yeah, isn't the case in the US is a bit different, right, where we don't have this constitutional right to like a healthy environment and we don't.

Yeah, let me tell you, although actually, guess who does have that in the US the Montana, the state of Montana. Yes, and so there's like there's a case there actually that's invoking their state constitutional right, which is very's.

There's this A lot of people don't know this about kind of the northern western part of the country, you know, Montana is it's not really the PNW, but it's the Mountain West, which is that they had especially kind of in like the seventies and eighties, this weird history of like Republican governors, I think into the nineties of the early nineties too, like Republican state leaders who were also because I guess our national discourse wasn't so inherently toxic,

Even like.

In the early Trump era, there were a decent number of Republican folks who like specifically opposed drilling in bears ears or like d.

Was interesting wherever they went hunting or something.

Yeah, was like yeah, yeah because we I was like the outdoor industry had to stop doing tradeios in Utah because Utah was gonna The governor of Utah supported de monumentizing it.

A lot of their like quote unquote hook, hook and bullet people were like, yeah, fuck this, it's bad.

Yeah, I mean it's the same I think that's the same category as like John McCain having a good take on torture right where it's like, yeah, I mean they live right there. Of course they don't want it destroyed, but everybody's okay with, you know, poisoning the Gulf or you know the stuff that the that the coke industries was guilty of having like a fucking pipelines full of holes running under towns but then explode.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, And that is actually like the number It's like the number one thing that gets people on and on board with environmental regulation is like having something happen and there in the community where they were like, wait a minute, this doesn't seem fair. Same with Pennsylvania, Like people were really into frecking until it became like wait, so if my neighbor has a lease and that lease ends up poisoning my well, I have no recourds. Yes,

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So no, I mean they're all like, actually, there's there's towns and now that are act speing of the right space thing that are invoking home rule and baking rights of nature into their charters. And these are like pretty conservative districts too, and the whole reason they're doing it have more local control over land use decision.

Yeah, which is probably I'm sure a mixed bag to some degree.

Exactly, because you could imagine that going in a bunch of different ways.

Yes, yeah, yeah, school board levels exactly.

Yeah, right now, it's like to get rid of fracking waste sites, but it could easily be yeah, we don't want any I don't know, in degraded schools here, for example, Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I wonder it's different in the US in the sense that, like I underd right, this this case in Guyana went to the Supreme Court of Guyana right, and.

Is that right?

Several so, so Melinda has now filed seven different cases. She's very busy, and most of them have wound up at at the High Court of Guyana, which is their supreme court. They just had a big verdict in another case that she filed, which is really interesting and potentially huge game changer for oil drilling kind of around the globe. They so in the environmental permit that Exon had to get in order to start drilling offshore, it is laid out as a requirement of that permit that they have

Might it might not be doing the p part.

Exactly xactly. So they're appealing, and you know, there's a lot of government corruption and stuff going on, so we'll see, we'll see what happens. But this judge, everyone was like, I was talking to a journalist that we've been working with there and she was like, yes, everyone's very worried for his safety because like this this was a big deal. And he really, I mean in like the most prim and proper legally is possible. He repeatedly was like, e PA, why are you just being ex all's bitch here?

What's going on?

It was like a real like whoa bomb of a ruling. So so yeah, that's a big win. The constitutional case is still they're still waiting for a ruling in that case. But that's also the Supreme Court that will be ruling on it because it's a constitutional argument.

Yeah, talking of being people's bait, it's probably time for us to hate from our advertisers.

Ah, yes, great, great, great great.

Yeah, you laid off and I disduncted.

These advertisers, none of whom are in any way involved in the oil and gas industry.

Uh.

Actually can't promise that, but you know, pretend we can.

Yeah.

Ah, We're back and continue to be blameless. All right, let's uh should we move on to talking about We chatted a little before this started, and one of the things that kind of is perennially on or perpetually on our beat is different laws and rules and attempts around the world to crack down on the ability of people to protest and exercise dissent, which you have some some some thoughts on, and also some some information on kind of the way in which the oil and gas industry

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, they are very into cracking down on protests, and that I think is really interesting right now is that you have the fossil fuel industry on the one hand, working behind the scenes to you know, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which is the lobbying group for like coke industries and a bunch of oil companies and all

Yeah, it's fine if we're okay with lying for us, which is is enity. I'm pulled over by the police, but probably probably oil and gas company should be helped you so you can see.

It's like bad, but like really for everything, very bad if that gets that. Yeah, So yeah, they're doing that at the same time that they're trying to limit individual free speech. And I think that parallel is well a not accidental, but very very gross and disturbing.

Yeah, very much, sir. Like I think it's interesting yet that try like that. They very clearly see this Supreme Court it's like the one to go for, right, not that it's going anywhere anytime soon. I guess didn't Amy County parrots like like dad, wasn't her dad like a shell?

Yeah, he worked for like twenty years.

He sure did, of course, because yeah, there's a plus thing happening and.

She never recuses herself on any of these cases ever, also Elito, I think it's Alito has stock in coniccophillas. That cool, that's cool. Yeah, it was gifted to him by someone.

Statue.

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think it's it's and and I mean they they have said out loud in multiple places that the whole push to criminalize protests was one hundred percent a reaction to Standing Rock. They were very freaked out by that. I think they always have like a an ozed reaction to anything that Indigenous people are doing. Period.

Wow.

Yeah, Jesus Christ, sorry that one fully sent me.

Yeah. Yeah, so a very similar thing there too, where it's like increasing fines and jail time, and you know, yeah, it's interesting.

How Yeah, it's like in the US anyway, Like if you look at the bleeding edge of settler colonialism, it's it's nearly always fossil fuel extraction, right, Like if like Oak Flat, the proposed extraction of lithium on tribal lands, like a lot of these the nexus of like protesting and yet like colonialism will be these I guess, not with them of fossil fuel, but these extractive projects on tribal land.

Yeah, yes, yes, which is why actually the the rights of nature stuff is becoming really interesting in tribal courts. So I don't know you guys followed this, but like with the Line three protests, the the tribe there, they they actually filed a case against the Minnesota I don't know, a Department of Public Works or something like that, and they they they were like, uh, we have a in their case. It's monomen the rights of monomen So monomen is. Oh god, I just went out of my mind entirely.

Yeah, that's very that's really weirdly similar to the Kumii people here in San Diego who are challenging the construction or quote unquote repair, which is not what's happening of bottle wall.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what they all say about the pipelines too. It's always repairing an old pipeline. But you look at the plan and it's like, that's a whole new ass pipeline. Yeah, in a different place than it was before.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, they were repairing a three foot fence with

I guess, exactly, yeah, exactly, that's why. Yeah, with the the tribal court stuff, I think will be interesting to watch in the next couple of years to see if they're able to to do anything. But you know, tribal solompties all under attack by the Supreme Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, They're likelihood of this resulting in like Indigenous nations getting ever more fucked by the US is equally high as I could have Ember having success, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah, anyway, sorry, I got really far Afield there the counter protest stuff is very very very much being driven by oil and gas, and there's it just keeps going too. I mean every year there's like, you know, multiple more of these laws being proposed and passed. I think we're at twenty eights now have passed them, fourteen or fifteen have actually implemented them. And yeah, it's not not great.

No.

I also think, like, you know, you're seeing the expansion of the whole eco terrorist and really like come back with a vengeance too. I feel like that was something that happened in like early posts nine to eleven days and is now happening again where it's it's like, I don't know, let's expand the definition of terrorism to include environmental activists and then we can you know, go after them with those charges too. That happened in cop City too, right, weren't they using.

Yes, they are in the process, so still doing that. Yeah great, Yeah, well, Amy, this is all really important. You have a bit depressive, so no, we are. This is a this is a real meeting of the people who are fun at parties, sit down and you know that descent has been criminalized. Yeah, I don't know, man, I guess I'll have a Manhattan like, what do you what do you want?

The last party Robot and I attended together, we we saw a car bomb happened, so at least that we.

Didn't see a car bomb happen. Yeah, bring positive vibes. Just a demonstrative car bomb you know people?

Yeah, no, no, no, it was an Irish car who would have gotten more people.

That's a little bit of a little bit of I r a humor for the audience. Okay, we should probably go. I'm making the next slash motion. Yeah all right, well, Amy, thank you so much for coming on today, and thank you for continuing to put out a podcast that is keep that can, at least if people you know, listen, keep them very updated on some of the most important climate related news going on today and some of the real like fuckery being carried out by the oil and

No, that's it. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Yeah, thank you so much. Amy, really appreciate it. And uh yeah, this has been Robert and James. We should probably do something on the Thames at some point, James, it'll rhyme. I know it's not pronounced that way. I know this was just me.

Let's do it anyway.

We could call it Robert and Jim's on the Thames. You know, there we go.

Absolutely, no.

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