Crackdown on Stop Cop City

beyond the referendum and the occasional night time sabotage. Forest encampments were essentially impossible, and the weeks of action seemed to expunge their usefulness. A small group of people began organizing what would become known as block cop City. The idea was that on Monday, November thirteenth, a mass mobilization would descend upon the cop City construction site in an act of non violent protest, and perhaps plant tree saplings

where the forest once stood. This marks the first time that the framing of quote unquote strategic nonviolence and nonviolent direct action were embraced for a mass action like this, hoping that it may attract NGOs and activist groups to co sign onto the action. Historically, throughout this struggle, such quote unquote nonviolent framing was at least avoided, if not explicitly rejected, as a limiting restriction toward achieving measurable victories

against the Atlanta Police Foundation and Cop City contractors. Throughout the end of summer and the start of fall, a speaking tour for Block cup City traveled to over eighty cities around the country to promote the action and recruit

people to travel to Atlanta come November. Block cup City started as a very vertical top down plan the central Conceit was decided upon by a small number of individuals, many of whom were not from Atlanta, and the finer details would be worked out in a series of public

meetings in the days before the action. Whether or not local force defenders liked or disliked the proposal, block up City acted as a gravity well, sucking nearly all of the energy, time, and attention into its orbit for the entirety of a fall in Atlanta throughout the nationwide block cop City. Speaking to her, a small subset of attendees voiced objections and disagreements with the proposed strategy and its

use of time and resources. Those opposed to block cop City thought the idea of a large public march to the worksite was going to put people in unnecessary harm without doing much to achieve a measurable blow against cop City. I'm going to quote from a report back that was

published online shortly after the action. Quote. Something that tends to happen in autonomous action is that there ends up being an inner circle at the core, which can limit the scope of who is able to meaningfully contribute to the direction of an action, because it creates a hierarchy at Spokes Council. It felt like this at times because it was primarily a small group of speakers who were

directing the entire Block cop City movement. This led to dismissal of certain concerns which were brought up by affinity

groups unquote. In the planning stages, organizers pushed back on the notion that getting arrested was part of the plan, but on the day before the November thirteenth action, a Block Up City organizer told press and media in a private meeting to have your cameras ready because there will be arrests at noon, demonstrating some form of intent to use people's safety and freedom as a way to generate online buzz with the hope of inspiring people to once

again take action in the forest. The possibility of arrest was obviously mentioned at the spokes Council meetings, but was framed as far from a certainty, with rallying cries insisting that the march will be able to all leave together. During the two days of Spokes Council meetings, the route and formation of the march to the construction site was decided upon, and quote unquote, direct action trainings took place

to prepare people for the march on Monday morning. The march was to be split into three distinct clusters, a frontline, middle, and rear. Before the march, there was limited communication between clusters, making it difficult to have informed expectations of how a confrontation with police will happen. Part of the quote unquote strategic nonviolence stipulation meant that throne objects and projectiles were

explicitly disallowed. On the morning of the march, words started to spread around that what was left of the frontline cluster decided that only bullets will make the frontline fall back, and that they would withstand all other forms of police violence, mostly les, lethal rounds, tear gas, batons, etc. Now, this whole thing about live rounds was not widely communicated to

people who just showed up for the action. On Monday morning, during the spokes councils, it was learned that a vast majority of attendees had never before been to Atlanta or the forest, and a great many of whom had never attended a protest or engaged in a clash with police before. Some local force defenders took issue with the perceived strategy of primiery recruiting young people from across the country with

little to no experience going up against police. Come Monday morning, the number of people gathered to march on cop City was far fewer than what was initially hoped. It's impossible to say for sure whether the limiting of acceptable tactics and the non violent framing hurt or helped the final number of attendees. Regardless, the four hundred or so brave people that departed Gresham Park was not the mass action initially envisioned by organizers.

the middle of the crowd. Police paused to put on their own gas masks, but instead of using this moment to advance further, the bulk of the crowd held their position, with large sections of the middle cluster subsequently entering into the tree line of Entrenchment Creek Park as continuing volleys of tear gas were fired by police. This caused the front line to retreat back, effectively ending the offensive portion

of the action. As the group that entered into the forest was later escorted out by police, rejoined the march and eventually returned to Gresham Park. Everyone knew that it was a near certainty that police would confront a mobile crowd, and out maneuvering police all the way to the construction site would be highly unlikely. The only way a mass of people would be able to get to the work site is if police allowed it. Still, there's much to learn from Block cop City, and even just the brief

skirmish with police. So forgive me for engaging in some tactical analysis based on the good portion of my life spent in riot jousts and input from others with more on the ground experience. We first have to think about what will cause a mass of people to break up, scatter, and retreat. Both on the protester side and on the

police side. The front lines are meant to act semi fluid. Typically, projectile launchers are behind the front line and are designed to scatter the opposing front line and middle sections of the enemy side to disrupt an offensive formation so that it loses its capacity for for momentum, or to stagger a defensive line enough to force retreat, as was the case on November thirteenth. When a layered defensive police line is backed up with vehicles like a bearcat, the on

foot line will most likely not retreat back behind their vehicles. Frustratingly, these massive police vehicles occupy a sort of paradoxical role as a ten ton roadblock that would force a center advancing line to break apart in order to pass, putting the advancing line in a less strategic position, even though if the vehicle was threatened by being overrun, police would probably attempt to pull the vehicle back, signifying retreat. So

how has this paradox been solved before? Well with ranged attacks like bottles, fireworks and what the State of Ukraine was teaching its civilians to make in the early days of the Russian invasion. This is why projectiles are of such a strategic importance. One cannot break through a police

line without employing violence. Utilizing projectiles is necessary to force rear police vehicles to retreat, along with the CoP's own projectile launchers placed behind their riot line, which are used to break up the opposing front line, and police have

no such tactical non violence scruples against using projectiles. Some Atlanta anarchists have also noted that the resources put towards acquiring a great number of plants that ended up just being abandoned could also have been used to acquire gas masks for the middle cluster, reinforced shields, and ancillary materials put towards prioritizing the crowd's efficacy and safety against the

use of crowd controlled munitions. Thankfully there were no arrests made in direct connection to the march, but I don't believe this can be accredited to any comprehensive organizing. When the day prior, media was told that arrests would be taking place by lunchtime, for whatever reason, the police let

a kettled crowd of people go free. We can only speculate on why, between the logistical hassles, the stretching of prosecutor resources, and the bomb squad that was actively sweeping the area of Entrenchment Creek Park and checking all of the bags and backpacks that were dropped in the area where the splinter of the march was escorted out by police. When talking with Force defenders in Atlanta who've spent years now engaging in militant struggle against police, they offered a

more fundamental critique of this action. If the choice to employ a strategy of nonviolence is in response to grossly inflated charges and repression the movement is facing, as some block op City organizers have stated, that means that you're a allowing the state to determine your rules of engagement. The entire idea of announcing your plan to walk onto one of the most policed areas in the country, did in fact prevent people with more on the ground experience

from participating On the day of the action. Risk requires reward. A small core of organizers were so steadfast in one particular version of how this event would take shape, branding people with disagreements as all overly online disaffected nihilists no longer involved in the struggle in Atlanta. Not only were online critiques discarded, but opportunities for in person conversations and input from people with more on the ground experience in

Atlanta were also turned down. And I think it is important to state hats off to the many young people that traveled from around the country to participate in this action. One can hope that block cop City broadly and going up against this line of armed riot police was a useful learning experience for whatever happens next in these people's lives as we approach the twenty twenty four election and

who knows what is to come. The night after Block Cop City, six vehicles owned by the company Ernst Concrete were set on fire in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Earlier that fall, Ernst Concrete trucks were seen working on the cop City construction site. After the arson, Ernst Concrete released a statement saying that they were not going to work on the

cop City project. In an Atlanta Police Department press conference from December twenty twenty three, Chief Darren Sheerbaum discussed a wave of recent arsons Gonda.

well as April this year. We see that the same group takes credit each and every time on their source of giving information out and so it is likely to be that same group, very small in number, moving from.

set on fire. Next door in a neighboring state of South Carolina, we had a construction company that had a loose connection to the project here that was targeted by an individual that used one of the tools of violence sphere and intimidation that has been used mainly by this group, which is arson, set equipment on fire, going after concrete trucks, and so soon the individuals that have been in the dark of night, impacting everyone of our neighborhoods will be

held responsible as we bring these individuals to justice.

life and safety. If they fire bombed police precincts. Their go is to a road, proper public safety infrastructure, and to row the government.

by stop cop city activity. In a Georgia State Senate committee meeting near the end of January, State Senator Debra Silcox said that APD Chief Administrative Officer Peter Amman told her earlier that day that the estimated cost of nationwide property damage made in protest of cop City exceeds one

hundred million dollars. That beats the ELF numbers. Now four days later, the Atlanta Police Department tried to backtrack that number to New York Times reporter Sean Keenan, now saying that it was ten million dollars in property damage, a one thousand percent difference, which either way is a massive amount of money. And we do know for sure that the city has spent at least one point three million dollars just in the legal fees related to cop City.

We know at least some of that one point three million dollars was used to combat the cop City referendum campaign, an initiative started last summer to collect petition signatures to put cop city on an upcoming ballot. I talked with Sam Barnes of the Atlantic Community Press Collective to get an update on the current state of the referendum.

in signatures. The city then appealed that injunction. That whole situation is currently before the US Court of Appeals, who heard arguments from the city's lawyers and the vote campaign's lawyers in January and who have not yet issued a ruling on that appeal.

of twenty twenty four. Now, I don't personally have a lot of faith in that at one point it was going to open in August twenty twenty three, just the simple fact of every construction project runs into delays. But I think it is pretty clear, especially given the clear cutting and the concrete pouring that has already happened on the site, that it will make significant progress by by November.

It's pretty obvious that the city strategy here is to just delay and delay and delay the referendum until the thing gets built, effectively just making the refere random dead in the water.

the last few months. As investigators went to those locations, they were armed with an arrest.

was directly targeting police infrastructure. An unexploded plastic andcendiary device was left at the scene and the police training building that was singed, the city now claims was occupied by a police officer.

The next day, police claimed that they track the movements of two alleged arsonists via ring, doorbell and street cameras to a house in Lakewood and conducted a raid that afternoon. Nothing was found and no arrests were made. The FBI and the ATF viewed the vehicle arsen outside of the home of Atlanta police officer as a significant escalation and made their first on camera speaking appearance on Channel two

to discuss the possibility of introducing federal charges. The house raids threats, doing all these press conferences, it's all part of this media frenzy to elicit fear. Earlier this year, Chief Sheerbomb unveiled plans to put four hundred and fifty billboards all across the country offering reward money for information, specifically placed in cities they believe anarchists are traveling from to set fires in Atlanta. Every single press conference the

police do. They are desperately begging for members of the public to snitch, saying the only way this case will be solved is if anonymous tipsters come forward with information, offering increasingly comical amounts of money if information leads to a conviction. Fear is one of the greatest tools this state has to bear. But through this sequence of events, police and investigators are also kind of showing their hand here,

demonstrating the current limit of their actionable evidence. It has now been well over a month since these raids, and as of now, no subsequent arrests have been made. The timing of these house raids also seemed intended to disrupt an event planned for later that month called the Nationwide Summit to Stop Coop City, a convergence located in Tucson, Arizona, on Amazonia that was planned for February twenty third to

the twenty sixth. I was not able to attend, but I spoke with Sam from the Atlantic Community Press Collective, who covered the summit in person.

direct actions that occurred during the week. The hub for the summit was a park kind of on what i'd call the north end of Tucson called Mansfield Park, and there was a small camp space set up and organized by locals.

surveilled using wait for it, Israeli military technology. The sort of official name of the summit was the Nationwide Summit to Stop cup City, which was a sort of wink wink, nudge nudge at Nationwide Insurance, which is the main underwriter of the insurance policies that ensure what would be cop City. Nationwide has a major corporate office in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is in between Tucson and Phoenix.

that happened during the summit. The first was a black block march on the night of February twenty fifth in downtown Tucson, Arizona, tousann Azugnia as a crowd of a little under one hundred people moved through downtown stop Coop City. Graffiti filled the plaza and a P and C bank as well as they recently closed Wells Fargo branch had their windows a smashed. Wells Fargo is affiliated with the Atlanta Police Foundation and PNC is a financial backer of

the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the Appalachians. Police were able to arrest at least three people suspected of participating in the march. Oddly, they were charged with arson of an occupied building, I believe due to fireworks being thrown in or near one of the banks. Given the name of the Nationwide Summit, it was expected that there would be a public action targeting nationwide insurance.

a life behind Bars personalized painted bicycle bell. It was Teal and said a Life behind Bars, And when when we asked him about it, he just said, I just thought it was funny because you know, I'm a cop and I'm behind bicycle bars.

end streets with fabulously expensive homes. One of these homes is owned by a nationwide insurance executive. So the activists that locked down placed their bodies in front of two entrances to this enclave with the intention of disrupting the evening of this nationwide executive and their neighbors. There were six activists in total that locked down, three at each entrance.

They used a device that has been ascribed to me as being called a cupcake, meaning it was a bag of concrete placed on the inside of a car tire set with some rebar and a kind of pipe sticking out of it, where I assumed there was some sort of like handcuff locking on the inside of the pipe. The gates were also locked shut with like bicycle locks.

The summit in Tucson, to my knowledge, is the first major convergence that has been organized out side of Atlanta with a call for folks to come from the nation over.

It was a very keen or a very sharp feeling of grief that this was not happening in Atlanta, that it could not happen in Atlanta, both because the forest has had a huge chunk of it bulldozed, but also due to the police occupation of the forest, that this could not happen in Atlanta right now in the Willani Forest, And I think, especially given recent events in Atlanta, in anywhere in Atlanta in Georgia.

to be pretty resilient against this sort of thing. But as the stakes are quite high, I would hate to see something similar happen, as the cop city struggle here in Atlanta seems to be entering its latter stages. First, I'd like to say it's always a worrying ticking clock once people start getting treated as disposable or as political

props to be sacrificed in the service of spectacle. But primarily I've been thinking about at a certain point far enough within a struggle, it becomes easier to fight each other than it is to fight police. Which is not to say all conflict is bad. Conflict can often be good. Tension can result in a new innovative action that otherwise might not materialize. But when said actionable conflict starts to materialize more frequently against each other rather than against the state,

that signals impending doom. Being able to consistently put your beliefs into practice with a like minded group of people, to directly engage against systems of oppression like the police or the state, especially in your own city, is a life affirming process, almost intoxicating it's very easy to become addicted to high intensity conflict. Unfortunately, the state is a resilient bastard. Even if you can land a few sizeable blows.

Over time, this state can gather a lot of resources to push back, and it take a few days, weeks, months, or even years. Only in our minds may the glorious first spark of uprising last forever, the burning of the Third Precinct, or the first year or so of defend the Atlanta Forest. But nostalgia is a trap, and eventually the empire does in fact strike back. But as it becomes harder, more dangerous, more frightening to engage against the state,

the desire for that rush of conflict stays. It lingers. So what is one to do? The walls are closing in, but you have this need to fight, so you take out your anxiety, PTSD and frustration on those around you. It is much more scary to fight the police. This, by comparison, is easy while still feeding that conflictual drive.

We must keep on fighting. And since it's harder and more scary to continually fight the cops or the state, we instead are looking for ways to fight each other, to find scapegoats to purge, often in service of some unrelated personal grievance or in group self preservation constant attack,

constant strength, constant purity. These conflicts can take form as blame as to why desired outcome is not being achieved, intensified a stratification of in group out group dynamics, as in, these are the bad people in the movement, whereas we are the enlightened definity group with the only successful strategy or conspiratorial co intel pro like actions such as cop jacketing, snitch jacketing, and more general bad jacketing against people who

you have simple organizational disagreements with. This can also manifest as a deep unwillingness to hear preemptive critical commentary and the assumption that all criticism comes from a place of

bad faith. A recent article in a popular anarchist publication roped in genuine critique and disagreement as somehow being in alignment with the state's motivations against the movement and is this not just a form of cop jacketing, saying that if you disagree with a particular strategy, that means you are in alignment with police because they also dislike a particular strategy, but the police dislike the strategy for a completely different reason,

because they dislike any form of resistance. Claiming that critique from anarchists and criticism from the state come from the same fundamental place is simply laughable. It is in moments such as this, when repression is increasing, that justified frustration and fear leading to paranoia, can be turned into a weapon by the state. At these moments, people must be the most vigilant against their own fear, resulting in retreat from battle against the state and turning to intra conflict

as a desperate form of alternative struggle. Solidarity, love and care are paramount, including harsh love, including well meaning critical commentary, debate, and constructive conversation. Well, that's enough of that. Finally, I'd like to give an update on the Copcity construction timeline. The past few months, city officials and the Atlanta Police Foundation have made a series of statements claiming construction is very much on schedule and quickly approaching completion.

development construction. On that timeline, they were about seventy percent done with the development, and they were also about seventy percent done with the whole process, ranging from permitting to cutting the red ribbon. What Again, as a lay person, I would also call the construction process, meaning the whole you know, roof, walls, doors, thing on. That particular document was zero percent complete, or like, I shouldn't say zero

percent because they have like concrete paths and stuff. I don't remember exactly what the date on this document was but it was zero to a very small percentage of complete. So yes on the grand construction timeline of filing the first document to again literal walls. Yeah, sure, they're seventy percent complete by any measure of construction to the average season. No, they are not seventy percent complete.

in jail without bond. Trials and court cases related to the Georgia Copcity recoindittment have all been delayed till at least this summer. Follow the Atlantic Community Press Collective for updates on that as they happen. See you on the other side.