On the Ground at Defend the Atlanta Forest: Part Two

project near the end of last summer. I went over a lot of historical background between the land itself and the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the movement pulled the veil off the secretive plans for Cops City and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of individuals and positions of power. Basically, I did a lot of a lot of talking, maybe maybe too much talking.

This episode will be more led by the discussions with force defenders that I had during my week long excursion to woods. We'll learn about how the movement evolved in the wake of the city council vote up until the current state of affairs. One thing that makes to defend the Atlanta forest movement very different from previous eco defense projects in recent memory is that it's right in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest

is an Amazon facility. Downtown Atlanta is just a ten minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later on in the episode, but just the simple nature of doing a forest eco defense project while still inside the city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities. You have to selectively use some of the older, more rule eco defensive strategies while having the backing of a city

based mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response popular mobilization that city based protests can have but are more challenging for EQO defense stuff that's like three hours into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in the forest, they can easily get supplies or switch out who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city. The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the crucial experimentation and innovation that's been badly needed in eco

defense projects and protests for the past decade. There's a lot of trams to go by here. It's definitally pretty morvy. So it's definitely the most urban forest defense I've ever been a party of. But it's really beautiful and unique to see a lot of urban folks people live in the city be able to be involved in like urban tactics kind of mixing with you more traditional what a how that means any more earth firsty forest tactics. It's kind of like the rule book and a lot of

people say this, but like it's all repeated. The quote unquote rule book for how to engage with the multiple enemies in this area has been like chewed up, spit out, shadow, and burnt over because it we're kind of doing something that doesn't really happen a lot. Something similar I can think of is the Sacred Oak Groove that was being protected in Minneapolis in the nineties, and that was another

kind of anarchist and genous alliance the first presence. But that's kind of one of the more urban in this part of Turtle Island struggles I can think of this. But I think another interesting part is like a lot of force defense stuff is focused on like old growth, being like we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah, this is not an old growth. This is like a messy, dirty um confusing. I've gotten lost so many times. It's yeah, there's tires, there's barrels, or it was built on the

prison farm. You'll find like old portions of the prison which is incredibly funked up and haunted. Right, Like in terms of like haunting is like there's the specter of what used to be there. Police are trying to build over it with their more like a bomb range, right, It's like that's very much like they're just building over the thing. Um. But it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending. And that's an idea that

I think people need to understand more. Is like it has value even if it's not like five hundred years old, Like it has value despite not despite being one hundred year old old forest, and it's because it is in one forest. Like it has value because it is a forest in a city, and that's something that's worth like emphasizing. Yeah,

I also think that's cool. And like people talk a lot about like invasive plants and there's like I think the Branford pairs in this forest are a really interesting example. There are these trees that are like feral they used to be part like planted here when it was a um the farm plantation or whatever. And um, those trees are fucking spiky, fine trees. They're spiking and ship well but you know, the good news is they're awful, and

the bad news is they're awful. Like I know where there are when I haul ass in the forest, I usually don't get Bradford pair in my eye, but um, but someone chasing me, well yeah, and and so it's just it's cool to kind of interact with all these things and get to choose how you want to interact and like, yeah, is a um, you know, I think it's interesting. It's not yeah, like a traditional forest or

like whatever forest that people would value in that way. Um, but for me, I connect to it, I think even more than that, because it's not this like held up is this thing of like purity, like they fucking buildoz and like a month later that ship was overgrown you couldn't see it again. And that was all quote unquote invasive plants like whatever funk that means, which is often that's the whole thing. They're often racialized plants. You know.

It's it's almost like a punk forest. It's like we're surrounded by enemies and that is the problem is um they see this as a cess pool. And something I talked to a lot of liberals about, like when they're taught, we're talking them about defend the forest, like, oh, is it a pristine wilderness with large old growth trees, and like,

you know what, that would be cool. The problem is this forest needs to be allowed to return to that because there's been so much abuse and part of like whether I don't know what it insta quote, but there's a lot of little winds and a lot of winds. There is some big they're legally supposed to leave all the big trees by the creek from what historical um, president, do we trust the cops to quote unquote be accountable to anyone? I don't know where we're thinking that will happen.

I've had a lot of people be like, oh, some of these tree houses are strategic in the spots they can't get friends. I've looked at the map and it looks like this whole motherfucking play is Society for clear Cutting. Exactly one month after the city Council voted to approve the land Ley's Ordinance for cops city that defend the force slogan was put to the test. On October, contractors and land survey workers showed up around the forest and appeared to be clearing land to take reference photos and

collect soil samples. Two dozen Force defenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers people hired to destroy the forest, fled the work site and act they left. Police surveillance tower in the area was toppled and the force defenders were able to disperse with no arrests. Ten days later, a similar turn of events took place. A group of

survey workers and construction teams were on site. Again a small group of rapid response Force defenders who disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at the old Atlanta Prison Farm. Simply the mere threat of an on site protest shut down construction for the whole day. Key access points for machinery were blocked using available materials like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving freely through the destruction site.

No construction occurred, despite the attempts of the Decab County Police and the Atlanta Police Department, who mobilized twenty vehicles in the vicinity of the forest in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants. By the end of the day, no one was arrested, and yet again select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were toppled and dismantled. A statement released online from anonymous force defenders read quote, this war will be one, one battle at a time.

Pressure must continue in a variety of ways to halt all construction. It became clear that for the next phase of the struggle to defend the force, people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting companies hired to decimate the woods and build the facilities. Today we know of at least three companies that have been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work on the old

prison farm land. Some of the surveying work appears to be done by Long Engineering, and two companies, Reaves Young Construction and Brass Fielding Gorri, were hired to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land in Entrenchment Creek Park, where Black Hole Studios hopes to expand their sound stage. Again quoting the Crime Think article, the City in the Forest,

reinventing resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization. Quote. The information that is known to date was hard won by diligent activists on the ground. Shortly after the city council voted in September, surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near two key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the Cops City project a chance to

initiate a struggle on their own terms. Had the force defenders utilized only virtual or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do the actual destruction until it was publicly announced much later. The ability to break news to the public before the city government has been a consistent advantage in trying to keep the momentum of the movement going. Post the city council vote, a second Week of Action

was planned for November, albeit with some new twists. From November tenth through, various groups organized a wide range of cultural events, info nites, bonfires, and meetings for this week of action. Many of these events occurred in or near a publicly advertised encampment on the Entrenchment Creek Park side

of the forest. Days after the second week of action, thirty people converged on the Reeves Young Construction headquarters in sugar Hill, Georgia, forty miles outside of Atlanta, holding banners and demanding that the company severed their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The group was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a board meeting involving company president

Dean Reeves and CEO Eric Young. Initially, the executives tried to keep their cool, but in short time the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violence towards the protest. There was a protest that like plus at the Reeves Young office, went into the office and disrupted a board member meeting that happened to have a lot of the people who were like seers and chairman there and um, from what I gather as a brawl. Yeah, I know.

There's reports of the the Reeves CEO guy like punching punching protesters. There's a joke that a worker puts someone in the guillotine, and I love the version of these workers doing like wwfer Love, We'll love for more cop fights fights with cops to just be w w E style match. Disrupting the board of meeting was another successful step in the goal of applying direct confrontational pressure to

the Atlanta Police foundations contracted construction service providers. Days later, two more bulldozers were lit on fire read entertaining aounts of ulic road and we got to construct vehicles fall involved in the quat and simpedia my location as well. There this equipment was located on the land swap parcel by Black Hall Studios, the planned future location of quote

Michelle Obama Park unquote. These were the eleventh and twelve pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged, and I think now we're at like around twenty five, which is a lot um. The anonymous communicate this time was short and to the point, quote we burnt to bulldozers in the South Atlanta forest. No cops city, no Hollywood dystopia, defend the Atlanta Forest. On top of the more publicly advertised

encampment at Entrenchman Creek Park. Around the second week of action, a small cluster force defenders set up a secondary, more secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old Atlanta prison Farm. Again quoting the crimes article quote, a few dozen people pitched tents, erected tarps and makeshift kitchens, hung banners, and constructed a bonafid protest camp in the woods. Establishing a semi permanent presence in the forest was a way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to

provide an immediate deterrent to developers. So I was involved in the original occupation of the forest. There was a group of autnomous individuals who many of whom were housing and secure, and we're like, we need fucking housing, and like, there's this struggle and we believe in it and want to fight in it. And so we moved to the fucking woods. And we've lived in these woods. Believe the six the official time is six weeks that we were

in the woods. And we had a higher quality of life than like many people who like lived in houses and apartments. We had the nicest kitchen of anyone we knew. Yeah, we had armchairs and couches and fire pits, and we you know, we had more food than we knew what to do with. And so we just started feeding people, and like we created a social space that allowed the movement to drow simply because we're like, oh, we need these needs man in our lives. Don't we go do that?

And like evolved over time. A little over a month after the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters, some bearing witch hats, marched to the gate of Black Hole Studios on Constitution Road and blocked the main entrance. A communicate posted online read quote iconic spells for destruction were loudly chanted at black Halls general direction as the witch block held hands, cackled and skipped in a sunwise direction,

blocking Black Hole Studios as main entrance. Smoke torches were lit approximately one our post, which block antics the Cab County Police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios saying that they quote followed the protesters into the woods and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to the apparent witches unquote, which is quite the sentence. Shortly after, a large contingent of police raided the forest,

evicting the protest camp established there. There was at one point group and help a demonstration outside of Black Holes UM outside of Black Holes site near the woods, and they expressed their discontent at the yeah, peaceful, entirely peaceful protests at Black Haws Studios that was like just kind of standing in like the front gate where employees leaving them or um and generally doing stuff like bringing American flags, holding signs like um and just like taking up space

and making the like actual interns and leaving of the facility like less doable. And their response was for a Black Hall to lie and so like the camp and camp and wasn't trespassing on their property which was actually in place in of like a public park, um and orchestrated with the police to evict um. And they orchestraed with the police to do like a pretty like intense eviction for like what it was. Essentially we were what amounted to a homeless camp living there, and they had

two helicopters circling, more police than I could count. They were throwing our ship into dump trucks and like actively like pursuing people through the woods. It was like an absolutely I mean, it was like like very like visible show of force against us. Quoting the crime Thing article again quote at the urging of Black Hall the Cab County police entered the forest on mass mobilizing police cruisers and the parking lot officers on foot, helicopters and drones overhead,

and unmarked vehicles in the streets. The officers were likely intimidated by the low visibility to rain. In any event, all of the force defenders based in the encampment escaped without being detained. This was the first time a concerted effort was made by law enforcement to engage protesters in

the South River Forest. And be honest, it was a fucking pain in the ass and it was a traumatizing and like that is all true, but it's also even we learned from and like we got a pretty good idea of like apd s and like the Cab Counties the capabilities, and like how they are like surveilling thing protests and how they're surveilling camps, and like how they figured out where we were and like what triggered them to act against us, and like that's allowed us to

move in far more confident ways that are also far more subversive. It's really interesting that you know, just like when they make it, you know, illegal to do n v d A whenever they attack, like that and do these really violent raids that put people in like awful positions and like traumatize the ship out of people. They

are teaching us how to fight back. They are showing us their weaknesses, and in a really ironic way, the next time they come in and they funk it up, because people know what to expect, it'll be a monster of their own making. Because like for every one step of aggression that they take, that's two steps further we can take towards them with everything that we learned from the struggle. And obviously this forest is really beautiful and the more time I spend here, the more I feel

connected to it and driven to like protect it. But also a big part of it for a lot of us, is for me, is like, um, you know, they're doing this for their own morale, and so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy. And so yeah, even if I uh yeah, even if they win, as long as we come back and we learn from that and we keep pushing back, you know, it is a lay of attrition, and um, it is about their morale. And like it doesn't matter if they build the police facility.

What matters is that every single time that the police moved to recuperate that their losses, which they just took a big one, they are faced with just unyielding hostility. Um And I think that, like that's something that's really important, is that we don't expect to not take a lot of hells. Like in the forest occupation, we understand the nature of this thing. We're in a static position, completely moving around it. But like it's a it's about making

them fight for every inch the best we can. The encampment was just one part of a large ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks, hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp, enjoying meals and performances, making arts together, and spending time around campfires, building and

sharing a life in the woods. After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by the Cab County Police, land offenders and Atlanta residents mobilized quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings and continued on with efforts to defend

the forest. A great thing about these types of free autonomous zones is that they can directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside the confines of in a society can look like and what it can feel like it's not just like we want to save the words and we want to go back to our regular asse lives. A lot of us are realizing that we're living in the apocalypse and we're just gonna we want to keep

living like this. It's not just this words, it's not just this police facility, and we want them to not have any more space or platform to organize this police. But we want a lot of us want to be free. We want other people that like during the idea of like whatever the funk it is, hitchhiking train happening living in the woods, the fact that it's a fucking crime or considered crazy to be the people living in the woods is insane. And that's kind of the vibe we

got from the muscoge for Access today. They're like our whole world, like we're here trying to reclaim our culture because there's a lot of hope for saving the land from like an indigenous perspective, if people would respect them.

And the whole point is the US government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually respect them, and as a ations, I literally have prisoner of war numbers because they're hoping by blood quantum if they kill these people off, they can take their land back, So the whole land back idea of fucking freaks and not anyway. We want to save this for us, but it's not just about this

forest for kind of endangered species. We've talked about ourselves feeling like deer Like how deer like they'll be chilling. They'll be like all around being a deer and mating food, and we're like, I was on guard, you know, to do something else if there's an enemy around. It kind of feels that way, like it will be chilling. Nothing's going on. Also, there's caps. But the whole point is if it can happen here, ha ha, did it, it

can happen somewhere else. And we help to spread the vibe that people not like Occupy would a varriable name for a movement. But it's cool that that happened at the time that we had made sense. We all have nobody knew any better. We know better now, that's great, but get the vibe. We're getting this vib to like continue this kind of stuff. And obviously there's people in all kinds of places, a squad buildings and do all

sorts of ship. But the more territory that we occupy and control and can help remake treat to indigenous grassroots comrades, not IRA and Reorganization Act, government sanctioned Indigenous groups right if they can't. Not everyone's air. Ally, these have to be ally. Ships that make sense. The Muscogee commrads that we're close to, obviously not all of them, that some romanticized, generalized bullshit. They said the same ship that when we talk to them, they're like even our own people betray

it sometimes because we're not all the same. It's some homogeneous bullshit. And I've seen that play out poorly in other places. And like the garity of the land back to the neightives and like which natives like people were all on the spectrum of conversation and be conization. And sadly some of us are further along the lines and others. And it's very much on the colonizer's fault for doing that.

But where we're at is the people, the people that feel the call the anarchy, the people that feel the call to the some kind of radical left orientation. They can find it in their hearts and in their patients to tolerate each other, need to band together to come up with better plans because we're all we got and it doesn't get better, it's getting worse. So hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to do other ship.

I'm inspired. I'm not from anyway freaking her here, but I've been here for a year now and i don't want to leave because I'm tired at the same old tactics. And I have been a part of stuff that has been successful before and I had nothing to do with non valid direct action and I had to do time for it, and I know people that have done time for it also. And if there's any message I can give to the young generation is there's no future and

it's worth it. And like if your future is just like working at nine to five and like watching the earth, so they're like shriveling and nothingness, I would argue it's not really a life. Might as all well might as well be dead. So I'm happy to live. I'm hope

you choose to live. I think it's a really like interesting thing that psychological aspects of this, because the first time you do the way we're surcialized in the society is to be obedient and fearful, and the first time you do something illegals, the first time you do something that you know is against the world, the first time you steal some food, the first time you smash the window, the first time you do any of that, you're scared.

But then you get away with it. You realize that this is a thing you can do, and I think that the state can't stop you from doing and you realize, oh, I can do so much more. And once you get over that initial fear, once you've smashed that window and you've gotten home and you're like, oh, I didn't go to jail for this. But when when you like get home and you're like, I have all this food now that I didn't have to pay for it, you start to realize maybe I don't need to work a job.

Maybe I don't need to work nine to five or you know, five to midnight every day to get a job and pay for You realize, wait, maybe I can just steal the food. Yeah. I've been wanting to talk about that for a while. For I want to make another Hyper Objects episode UM and talk about the anarchist properties of client bottles UM and I described this type of freedom is like it's like how a client bottle

works or like a fourth dimensional object. It's like you need in order for there's like this extra degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't think it's possible, but it is actually there if you know how to interact with it. UM And Yeah, it's like we're domesticated in so many ways to view here's what's possible, here's what's impossible. I have to exist within this framework UM and only doing these things which are seen as correct.

And there's actually more degrees of freedom than that. We just don't often like acknowledge them. But you can totally phase through things and you can totally find that extra degree of freedom, and once you do, that's a super interesting feeling. UM. As opposed to like waiting for gay luxury space communism, you can instead do like fourth dimensional like hyper anarchism, which gives you so much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for the communism that

will never come and the relationship you build. The relationships you build that are based on a trust that is, I trust you to have my back, I trust you to work with me and do this thing is so much deeper than the trust of I guess I trust my coworker, but like I really trust them not to sttion my boss. Like the trust that comes from a relationship where you're like, yeah, let's like we need food, that's going to steal it together. That kind of trust

is not something that can be recuperated. And that kind of like relationship where it's like our relationship is built on the fundamental we will do it we have to

to survive. It creates an intimacy that you can't find anywhere else, and a criminal INTERNNA say, you might say, um, yeah, and that that was the point as somebody else think, yeah, yeah, just to double down't know too, Like I think it's um, it's cool too because uh, when you also come through a space like this, Like you can live like that on your on your own or with your friends, but

then there's something wild when you come to this space. Um, and then all of a sudden, it's like when you start attacking something that a lot of other people want to see attacked, All of a sudden, all you have to do is attack that thing and foods there, yeah, and like you know like that and and like yeah, I'm like you have all these resources and you can focus on that and so like it's like yes, I'm like it's like a joke to some degree, but like if you want to be a lifestyle and because like

if you want to actually be an anarchist right now and do anarchist ship, you can come to Atlanta and do and like it's not easy. It's fucking scary, it's sketchy, it's hard, there's freaky as bugs, but like, yeah, you don't have to wait, and like, yeah, it I think that that's something that like, for me, is really magic.

Is that like actually the more you attack and the more you like position yourself to be antagonistic towards the world, the more of it's like fourth dimensional like winn shoot, don't you know, like which imediately understand like starts to kind of like self actualize. And yeah, I think it's cool. And like it freaks me out to think that there's not people who are probably probably pretty cool like waiting for some opportunity like waiting, just teachers waiting, and we

don't have that much time. Yeah, you can live anarchy now. You don't need to wait for the collapse TM because turns out that party it's already happening and that already happened. We're just waiting in the liminal space until the climate change catches up with the admissions are already there. We're already living in it. We just don't realize it yet, or some of us are in denial of it yet. But the collapses like now, we it's already the thing. We don't need to wait for the one big collapse,

because that's a myth. But you can live anarchy and do stuff. You don't need to wait for the next communist president who's going to run and fail. There's no coming social there's no coming collapse. There's nothing to wait

for to keep on waiting madness aside. I think a really interesting aspect of this movement about like we are attacking a popular target, and how in attacking the popular target we've built this thing is we are ye, We're not just here and attacking this thing that doesn't exist

in isolation. We're here and we've built a movement and we've built u We've through attack, we've built a built this like popular idea that like actually, you know, like if you want something to not be there, instead of like talk to a politician, you can send it on vote harder, vote harder, just just just just one more vote, I swear I'm different. Sorry, Now I like to talk

more about tactics. Since the City Council about on the ground tactics have gained a much more integral role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits, although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping the movement going. Different ways of preventing physical construction, surveying of land and destruction of the forest made up most of the on

the ground direct action efforts inside the forest. I think a really interesting aspect of the way that the struggle has happened here is that because it's so decentralized, there are people and no one really knows who, there are people who will just to show up and like, you know, it's like there were people who are like getting the crops called on them in the woods and ships, and then like a bunch of anonymous people have showed up and like toppled all the camera powers and people stopped

getting the crops called on them in the woods for really a long time. And like that kind of decentralized thing, especially where it's like, you know, regardless of even like if the people in the Woods were like, you know, like into doing ship. It's like, it's really useful when people who have more skills and people have more knowledge and more ability to do things and more ability to

take risks. It's really awesome when those kinds of people can come and make things safe for a larger massive people. And I feel like that is like a strategy and like the interactionary space that can be truly like expanded on where people who know their ship can make things

safe for large groups of people. To generalize revolt, yeah, I regret like a lot of hard a struggle and struggle has been framed from the very beginning as it like there was no call to action do x y Z. There was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual desires and what they saw as a forward facing like a reprojection of their own ideas into the future and

made that happen. And it was underneath this framework where there was no limit, there were no boundaries um, and there was no idea of like us all having to be on the same page about that. Yeah, you don't need to like attend a march to be to do effective things. In fact, it turns out doing things that are not attending a march can often be way more materially effective, and to double down on that, like, um, so many times there's just like a script other people follow,

this is how we do it. And then there's there's like this action that's applied to everything that people don't like and holy ship, that's a crazy book. That was a wild fire u um, things like that. But yeah, but there's these like things that applied to everything, and this struggle very much has no script, which is really exciting. And but but what's even cooler about that is that it's not it's awesome not reinventing the wheel. And so there's people who are taking from you know, like kind

of like classic insurrectionary anarchists like approaches. There's people looking at ego defense stuff from all over the world thinking about um, there's people looking at some successful like non

violent direct action. There's people looking at alf struggles and like how like those campaigns, target campaigns, secondary targeting, how things like that worth The contracting and subcontracting companies hired by the Atlanta Police Foundation made up the new targets of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods that threatened physical and Social Capital bringing back the house visits mentioned

in the previous episode. In late December, banners that read Reeves Young out of the Atlanta Forest were hung in the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suani, Georgia. Dean Raeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction and was among the board members present at the November action, and he personally allegedly shoved and assaulted protesters inside the brawl.

After the backyard banners were hung, an anonymous online statement read quote, we hope this action gives but a miniscule dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta forest you want to bulldoz might feel unsafe in the place they call home. A month later, on January, Reeves Young Construction and representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation entered the forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to complete more surveying work and determine the construction supplies needed

for a laying of building foundation force. Destruction was halted when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers in Atlanta Police Foundation representative Alan Williams and demanded that they leave. Workers were safely escorted out of the woods, and the bulldozer was left at the scene and was subsequently taken out of commission. In my interviews with some force defenders, I believe one of them referred to this as the

bulldozer tripping and falling, so that's fun. The day after autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well built treehouses up in the canopy near the site of the previous day's confrontation, people climbed up into treehouses and announced their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction,

ripping off the old tree sit and bipod tactics. From October twenty one to this point in the struggle, just like mid January, work was consistently able to be stopped by small, dedicated groups of people without resorting to force. Throughout the next week, attempts at land surveying in the area of the old Atlanta Prison Farm continued, but now with workers being accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta

Police officers, and a cab County police. With the backing of cops, workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks, including tree felling and soil boring per Crime Thing quote. In some instances, only handful of activists were on the scene behind makeshift barricades. Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to assist those on the ground. Unquote Reportedly, undercover cops surrounded the forest, intimidating those who would park nearby. As such,

some outside support did show up, but not in mass. Meanwhile, in the forest, it was a game of cat mouse between the workers, forest offenders, and cops. Police went so far as to start chasing people on forest trails while writing on a t V. S. Barricades and the tactical remove of land survey markers did slow down work on some days, but ultimately efforts were unsuccessful in halting the destruction process entirely. This week of land destruction and caton

mouse culminated on January. Around sixty people, the largest crowd in months, gathered to march into the south of a forest and on to the old Atlanta Prison farm to directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the ground doing soil sample collection. The cab County police attacked the protesters, tackling multiple people and arresting four, the first arrests inside the forest. Within the context of the movement

quoting crime thing again quote. Police attacked the march, tackling several people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional response to this aggression, despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some of the tactics popular during the rebellion, such as the mass use of umbrellas or makeshift shields, could have equipped the participants to feel more capable of decisive action. Allen Williams of the Atlanta Police Foundation was filling protesters, looking

a little anxious as he did so. A statement on the Defend the Forest scenes dot no blogs dot org site concluded their report back with this sentiment quote, at this point, we are in need of two main things. More people to help support tree sets and defend the force from destruction, and legal attempts to delay construction. Yeah. Always, you want more people to be on the ground in the woods, in the city. Cass wed cass like the

cast like um. You want to wear out the enemy and a lot of different ways, and the enemy has a lot of different people. Of the enemies. Enemies are subcontractors and enemy as a police enemies. George a power powers quote unquote the power that divides both in Trenchman Creek and said, there's a lot of different people. So if there's a lot of and we also have a lot of different people involve in a lot of different ways, people living in the worlds, people living in town, so

people already know anything that it's already happening. We should be visiting the offices, we should be visiting at home, at the goddamn church, we should be visiting there. In the forest, there should be there should be no peace. And I believe that's how we can win, because we need to make it unpopular and savory and hopefully next to impossible for them to make these choices, because even this as a small part of the forest, they're just

going to continue on the next thing. I want to briefly go into some details about a method of protests that combines pressure to both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material changes from businesses, corporations, or people in power. It features many of the actual tactics we've in fact already discussed. Will refer to it as the

Shack method. For reasons that will be shortly explained. House visits, targeted vandalism, phone calls, and hanging banners and backyards all have a place in this method adology, it's a focused drive to dissolve that safe political or corporate astral space that I talked about in the last episode. The cred of the article contains a really good summary of the

Shack method. So instead of just like regurgitating their explainer, I'm gonna I'm just gonna narrate certain sections of it because that will make my job easier and I'm I'm a hacking of fraud blah blah blah blah blah quote. The goal is to hold those responsible for these projects personally liable for their decisions and the decisions of the

companies they own. Because the entire system of rules and norms we live under dictates that exploiters, warlords, math murderers, and those that destroy ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence of the decisions that they make at work. This strategy is bound to be controversial. It rejects the entire logic of limited liability that forms the

basis of corporate rule in our society. At the beginning of the twenty first century, animal rights activists in the UK and the US set out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on the planet Huntington's Life Sciences. The campaign to stop Huntington's Life Sciences was called Stop Huntington's Animal Cruelty or SHACK. It formally disbanded, and it's best known for its period of ambitious international participation in

the early two thousands. The methodology of this movement, which encompassed direct actions, symbolic protests, cultural events, sabotage, pranks, and more, included many features that have been since used in a wide range of campaigns. The overall strategy of SHACK involved mobilizing a few hundred people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by focusing only on their ability to

function economically. The SHACK model is centered around tertiary targeting I isolating service providers from third party contracts in order to limit their ability to provide services to the client, which is the actual target. Okay, now I'm just gonna pause here because if that sounds confusing, let me let me briefly provide an example. So the actual target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation, since they're the ones

with plans to build a cops city. The Police Foundation has contracted a few companies of Brassfield and Gory for one and Reeves Young, So these companies are the service provider. The shack model attempts to isolate the service provider, so Reeves Young from all of their third party clients and contracts, which will in the end go back to hurt the actual target, which is the Atlanta Police Foundation back to crime think the service provider. So in this case Heves

Young Uh. The service provider depends on many third parties. Third parties provide the service provider with insurance, materials, equipment, security, catering, cleaning, mail, service, data, maintenance, and more. All of those third parties can be pressured to drop the service provider. Furthermore, the service provider is likely a company with more than one client, and those other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider.

Any company or contractor that is able to move their money away from the service provider because they have other economic opportunities can be pressured to do so. Essentially, this strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any of the third party companies. It only isolates and demoralizes the service provider and therefore the end target. Today, it still remains unclear who is the service provider for the Black Hall Studios development, although that information will come out

sooner than later. In considering the limits of the shack strategy in actions outside of the forest, it might be more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency. Targeting individuals at their offices and homes will chiefly bring out those who are excited about such confrontational methods, rather than those who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter, to build treehouses, to or to clean campsites, to cook for others, to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that

is needed to transform society. Also, if people fail to do proper research or mapping, activists could waste their time targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable to drop their contracts. They could spend months facing down insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors. Oh sorry, that was a lot. That was a big info dump, but

I think it is useful information. So the goal isn't to sway companies with moralizing arguments, but to frame their association with militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure

future clients. Combined with economic consentives inflicted on the service provider like access sabotage, the resulting targeted campaign attacking physical and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties to influence the decision of the service provider on whether or not to stay on the project. Methodologies can put to the test through practice and be judged by the outcome.

The proposal to employ the shock strategy to defend the Forest is just built on the simple hypothesis that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the contract with Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Police Foundation investors will then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate replacement and the project could stumble or fail. The same goes for

the Black Hall project. If activists defeat Reeves Young by means of direct action and self organization, even if the project of finds a new contractor, sophistication and confidence in the movement will have developed in the process will likely

help it evolve once again. Also that people have figured out because like for the first to after the first to arsons, you could literally just walk up to during daylight up to the area of Michelle Opa Park and touch take pictures of like uh have sex around, like make out with the construction equipment I've been burned, and you could see the stickers of where they had rented these like construction equipment, UM destruction equipment, and like after

the first one it changed, there was no longer rented from the same company, and after the second one it changed again. And there is reason to believe that with every arson or attack that they are changing construction equipment companies because rental companies tend to not like it whenever their equipment is destroyed to cost them a lot of money, and oftentimes they cannot afford hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain be to support a pot project

that is highly unpopular. And the other thing what we're talking about with the modified like a police and modifying itself as it's interesting because where at this point where policing is highly unpopular, and so it's kind of padging its bets and it's doing two things. First, it's calling itself like the Social Peace and Justice cute Bunny Rabbits Center for your racist if you don't like us or whatever.

And then it's also just like mask off, doubling down buying mad guns like like yet just becoming increasingly more militarized, increasingly more violent and like moving mask off like an occupying force. So there's this split where there's no and people are well aware of this. There's there's no like public chance of convincing um a lot of companies that this is wrong. Right, there's it's it's it's well, it's very divided. So the people who are committed are very committed.

There are fucking enemies and where their enemies and that's it. But then there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons and kind of understand that policing is not cute, right, and then it's at least unpopular, going out of fashion to some degree, and can make money in other ways.

So yeah, it's this interesting thing where like being able to like fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work, and all you have to do is um kind of trying to cut away the people who are supporting people who are ideologically committed to our destruction, and we are, you know, field reciprocal. If you look at the photos of what was happening with Michelle Obama park, the land swap site they were trying to build on. You can

tell that heavy yellow equipment. LLC of Marietta, Georgia stopped providing them equipment after like the first or the second time that their machines got lit on fire. And now it's alf A l I f of I don't know where Georgia. So you know, these are photos that you can see, like you can look at these communities and just tell like like if there's a photo attached, like there is a traceable like trend of companies are dropping the funk out because they, for whatever reason, just cannot

take the heat. On June twelve, while fully in the throes of nationwide revolt against police after the murder of George Floyd, two Atlanta police officers killed Ray Schard Brooks, a black man who had been sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Wendy's. Not long after, the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds.

In the time period between June to the end of the year, more than two hundred Atlanta police officers left their jobs, including the a chief of police, local sheriff's deputies, state patrolmen, and transit cops also resigned during the year of the uprising at a higher than average rate, as the entire system of policing and capitalism faced a crisis

of legitimacy. Corporations, business owners, landlords, business associations, and international real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance of a future with stable consumerism. Profit incentive and police need each other in a symbia like relationship. I'll do one of my last crime thing quotes here. Quote. Forces in local and federal government, business associations, police departments, and our militias have continuously worked to make sure a popular

uprising does not reoccur. A large part of the institutional reaction to the popular uprising has focused on managing public perception. Industrial interests and private investment companies have conducted influence campaigns using local news outlets which are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group of a right wing news organization between Sinclair, Next Star, Gray Tega, and Tribune. This coordinated reframing of events has damaged the way many sectors of the television viewing public

perceive the revolt and its consequences. In the wake of the uprising, a false narrative circulated to the effect that police, while demoralized and underfunded, cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping the country. This orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of suburban whites, small business owners, and many urban progressives.

The crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed, and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise. In reality, the vast majority of police departments received an

annual increase in their budgets as they normally do. If anything, they accrued more power following the events of So it's no coincidence that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Atlanta Police Department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare training center in the wake of the uprisings by le virging that crime wave narrative and the fears of future social unrest, they want to have the tools to bring

down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial, environmental and economic justice, and now more than ever, including reproductive justice. Cops cities leading the charge is a part of a new effort to adapt American policing strategies to our new era of societal decay and the ever crumbling that will define this century as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and

climate change. I think another really important thing to look at this is like when you look at the Greg Floyd uprising in the crisis of private policing and they realize that, oh, holy sh it, people are so angry about this that they will pose a threat to the sovereg the state, which is the first time that has happened in an extremely long time. When that finally happened the state, the morale of police departments around the country

was broken. Cops everywhere, We're like, it was a demoralizing thing. And when you think about cops as an occupying force, as an occupying military force, it thinking about the fact that we broke their morale is really important. And then thinking about this place as they intend to build a training facility to increase morale, which is a classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to train your soldiers to do a murder. Is like, that is a

classic military tactic. And when you think begin to think about this as social or when you begin to think about this as not just a struggle against cops city that like as a struggle for like disabling and destroying the police. When you think about this as a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police, this becomes like way more contextual. In fact, I feel like

that is the best way to contextualize this movement. So one interesting thing is that after Ray Schard Brooks is murdered and the UM two cops involved were UM, they substitquently charged UM what was it, six hundred props went on second hundreds of hundreds UM, and their morale is broken. A land police has always been understaffed for like as long as I've known, UM and not understaffed by any

media propaganda spend standard there standards. But like every single day they're facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot answer calls. And that's a good thing. This is a war patriction where their current training facilities have broken. Tottchney

pipes have have have undeniably miserable conditions. Their cars are out, their cars are like continually on their last legs, and we that's that is a path through abolition is making it so it is so undesirable to be a cop in this city or any city that no one would

dare do it. It is crucial that police are not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics for a new era and moving beyond the kind of non violent action that's become so common during protests during the Trump era and the post Green Scare, and even like post occupy, there is this looking for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance. Really emphasized the learning things here is that this struggle took all the different rulebooks, tore them up, set them on fire, and use the

ashes for their shutter. Like everyone here is learning things. People who have been who have been doing things along fucking time are here and learning new things. We're we're not just like tearing up and like destroying the rule books.

We're like we're like largest were weird. Yeah, yeah, like put them like it, like tore all of them up and make collogious out of them, and like is trying to create this like weird paper mache mesh of a experimental path into the future, And and like we wouldn't when we say we are experimenting with new forms of revolt, new new tactics, new strategies, We truly mean, there aren't

existing model to do what we're doing. We are writing the book as we could do it, and yeah, we sunk up sometimes, but we've also got some really cool ship happening. Ship that hasn't happened in twenty years is happening, and ship that hasn't happened ever is happening here. And I think that's like a really it's a really important

thing to touch on. Is that, like much of the yeah, much of the like eco defense ship that's happened in North America that for quite a while has like not done, you know, or at least not released, communicates about like ship that happens here seemingly every couple of weeks. Now, like the ship here is crazy and wild under dreams is also scary and hard and traumatizing, and it's beautiful

and terrifying and like, yeah, that sounds great, you should come. Yeah, this is a such a way from us actually evolving out of a I look at this as like a huge step in what land offense looks like after we have after we have faced green Scare repression, and now we are moving past the post green Scare repression movements and figuring out how to move forward and regardless of it for this like uh lands and are really repressive like bootstounded throats like situation. I don't think anyone should

ever stop experimenting. I don't think people should go back to the old ways. I don't think that we should be resigned to not experiment. I think that everyone, like we are in a situation where there is nor future. They're like the collapses now, We're probably not going to avoid one point five degrees warming. Our police are only further mails rising. And the like reality of resistance is

that we that we guess what we need experimentation. Yeah, if there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective, then it would have it would have been effective in therapy, we would have a winning strategy. There's a popular name in the forest, which is the are your name instead of are you? Are you experiencing the joy of attacks on UM? And I think that is an important line the same way Cops City is a

part of the new evolution of American policing. Defend the Atlanta Forest can be seen as kind of trailblazing for future movements, a look at how they might develop post the George Floyd protests for my last final I think quote quote. This campaign represents a crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, linking the defense of the land that sustains us with

the struggle against police. The movement opposed these developments, mobilizing around the watchwords defend the Forest and stop Coops City, have passed through several phases of experimentation, using a wide array of tactics and strategies to keep pace with the current course of events. It represents an important effort to revitalize eco defense and police abolition strategies in the wake

of the George Floyd rebellion. So, considering the possible wide ranging impacts of both the evolution of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics that defend the Atlanta Force movement is extremely relevant to all people who want to improve the world, whether or not they live in Atlanta. Atlanta as a testing ground for new surveillance and like in

like experimenting with new forms of struggle. Here in Atlanta, there are things that not only are we in many ways on the front lines of experimenting with new tactics,

and integrating new strategies and how they work. That we're also on the front lines of like different kinds of both like like in person and digital forms of oppression that don't have to be worried about other places, and like it also provides approving ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of surveillance and understanding the different ways that sometimes the most effective thing in protecting yourself

from repression isn't some super high tech ship. It's a ski mask of paragloves and not bringing your phone, and like people don't seem to like think about that that I don't need to go to that part. But yet, so speaking of surveillance, we actually have like not we

I don't claim that, UM. The police here and the state here has like the video Video re Integration System, which I believe is like one of our re integration video integration center where they take where businesses and homeowners are like rain cameras can call into here their video surveillance equipment to be plugged into a network UM that can be monitored and pulled up at any time by the police UM in a downtown location and they and that is like one of the largest surveillance network systems

in the world, I believe, um and it was actually leading the charge in like new forms of surveillance, and other cities are looking at this as a model of how to how to better survey all their own cities, which obviously makes lend police defindation trying to create their own little mini city a very interesting prospect in terms of like establishing new you know, this means this is mentioned before, which was like establishing new ideas and how

to take policing forward into thirties after we've had these wave of social justice like uprising and uprisings for Black liss Matter, um with you know. I mean not many places actually got defunded, but the propaganda has to be different, and like the way the police optics work definitely could need to be changed from their perspective, or they're trying

to have them be changed. One of the strongest things I feel like came out of this movement really pass ahead was our ability to don't have the game on, like the narrative and then never being able to recuperate that narrative is their plan was this answertude for sexual justice. There is a new way of training police to quote be better or like not murder people as much and like more refined. Um, And I don't want more refined like police that like murder quote the right people or

be the right people or cage the right people. That's not my desire I went into policing. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of projects happening in the forest, and you know, I also just want to emphasize, like I'm not from Atlanta, but I feel like it's really important for me to be here. You know. I think a lot of people who felt inspired by the George Fluid uprising, like, um, this is an attempt to recuperate.

Like I've said this a million times, it's a time for the police to recuperate from that, and I'm trying to finish what we started. I also think that we need to understand that this isn't just about Atlanta. Like one of the buildings that they're trying to build, and like one of the points of this training facility is that it is like a hub in the same way Atlanta with a with a movie theater, the same way

they're trying to make Atlanta this hub. Right, It's there's an infrastructure for being a hub from shipping and stuff like that. And so now they're trying to make it this this economic habit on my white collar way. And so they're trying to make it a hub for police in Atlanta, but also to train police to do fucked ship and to mutate like nationally. And I know that the police from the you know, whatever city I live in are probably going to come here and go back

and funk that up. So I'm trying to make sure that they can't come here, and that you know, police are demoralized in every city and they're having trouble on every city. And this isn't just about the ap D. If you live pretty much anywhere on the East Coast, there's a high chance that your police are going to come here and then go back to your house and fuck you up. So come here and make sure they can't.

And the other thing I want to say is like, um, yeah, they want to make this a training facility for police. Right now, it is a training facility for anarchists. If you come here, I promise you you will leave with more courage and with more skills and knowing a lot of fun people who are really fucking down all over the country. Um, and I think it's worth it. I

wanted to jump in and say, like, this is about you. Um. An hour or two hours south of here is the School of the America's you might have heard of it. It's here in Georgia. It's where a lot of awful fucking dictators and their henchmen learned how to do really

awful ship a bunch of war crimes. And here in the city of Atlanta, a local school, the largest, the largest university in the state, Georgia State University, hears something called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange or GILLY, which is where they and the i DF get together to train local police forces here in Atlanta and around the country. And if you don't think that Cops City is going to play a huge role in your police department learning from the i d F how to beat you up,

you have another thing. You should come here to Atlanta. What's going on? Because this is about everyone here, like it's about the whole country. They're coming to Atlanta to learn how to brutalize people, and it's going to take all of us to stop it. A funny thing about this project is that there's these sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms. On one side, there is the intersection

of policing, gentrification, racism, ecological destruction, and climate change. And on the other side there's the intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rule eco defense. But there's also this dual microcosm. On the side of the state, they're trying to construct this police facility with a mock city to train in microcosm for protest suppression and practice

urban combat against people who live in American cities. And on the people's side, there's this microcosm not only for how resistance movements can evolve post but more importantly for the people in up in the struggle, a microcosm for how you can live a life free of the oppressive

societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose. I think another really interesting thing about this being like such an ungovernable space is that because it's ungeferable, because it's impossible to control, it allows us to create these new ways of relating to be traveled there that can't happen to other places.

Like where else are like people in their everyday lives just gonna be able to walk around as gender funded as they want, and like just it's fine, like you know if they're if a clear basher comes into these fucking woods, like it's gonna be a bad time because

literally everyone here is queer, like we don't. That's the thing is like when we exist in these spaces in this ungovernable way, we like are like eating many versions of Yeah, this thing I want to talk to, something I wanted to talk about in terms of like the microcos of macrocosm idea of after uprising looking for new paths forward, the depending on a forest thing can be viewed as this microcost, like this micro causum of how we can approach different struggles going into going into twentyties

and stuff um, because yeah, like it is like this small version of what we want. There's also the whole idea of like what I've seen here in the forest more closely resembles like an actual temporary autonomous zone than like the chads ever did in terms of like people actually like actually living free, actually living like not relying on like city water, like not like not living in

like the in a downtown metro area. It's like it's an actual free space where people can be queer and be all of the things and climb trees and talk with the deer and like that's people are actually allowed to do that, Like there's there's not all of the stigma that even I think, like Chazz had like so many problems, right, like extremely extremely hashtag problematic in terms of how that resulted. Um, And yeah, this is such a microcosm of like like an autonomous area where people

are able to do those things. I also kind of want to talk about like the like idea, our ideas of safety and security don't reside and like the ideas of say a safety or security for us, it doesn't really resides in our trust in ourselves and each other. It resides and like we actually keep each other safe. We have each other's backs, we will fight for each other, and any threat to any one of us is like

taken seriously. We have this like intimacy, criminal intimacy like allows us to build more check nuan relationships with high highs and low lows than anything ever could. And like the deafening that society puts on us, this like chemically induced regulated median of gray and terrible is that's not what we live. Yes, some days here it sucks to wake up and everything you ownly wet and you gotta

go ship in a hole that it's fled. But also some days things here are fucking awesome, and I get to wake up to the birds calling and go like, have a party with my friends. I don't like exist here in a way it is like comprehensible or legible to like a wider like society. I don't exist in a way that people look at this and be like, ah, that's what you need. But I have never been happier than when I've been in the woods with people I

trust and care about and don't have my back. People people don't have to worry about working to pay their water bill because you can go just get the things you need from places you don't have to pay for it, And like, you don't have to worry about all of these things, all of these societal pressures. There's not this constant threat of oh I lose my job. Oh all those things, all those things, all these mental constructs that

control us aren't there anymore. Because we've built a world it doesn't it doesn't rely on that in the slightest And I think that's like a really powerful thing that like, we've already met our own needs and so we can fight back in these beautiful and fiery ways. Pun intended that like allow us to just experience things that like I've been stolen from us generations. Yeah, I was gonna say,

we're not safe, but we're free. And I think that anyone who makes that decision as an active decision to not be safe but to be free, I may not like, but by definition I'll ride for them, because I can't say. We're now nearing the end of the episode, but before I finish, I need to go back to talking about tactics for a bit and end with some actual good news. From January to present time of recording, there's been an increase in solidarity attacks in cities across the country, some

targeting Reeves Young and Long engineering equipment. In other states, a third party service providers of contracted construction companies or locations and offices of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation. This past March, X machines owned by Reeves Young, including two large excavators and a bulldozer, were destroyed in Flowery Branch, Georgia.

The online communicate reads quote, so long as you continue to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction of the South Atlanta forest and the construction of a Cops City in its place. Know that your equipment is not safe, your offices are not safe, Your homes are not safe. Unless your company chooses to pull out of the Atlanta Police Foundation's Cops City project of its own volition, we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have

no choice but to drop the contract unquote. Subsequent solidarity attacks have happened in Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, and Highland, Michigan, to name a few. Many of these attacks were targeted at Atlas Technical consultants, who own many smaller companies such as Long Engineering, which has done work with Reeves Young and brass Field and Gorri for the Cops City project. The vein of shack style methods. This past April, on the ninth website called stop Reeves Young

dot Com launched onto the interwebs. The site listed some of the various third party clients and subcontractors under Reeves Young Construction and ways to contact them to voice concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban warfare construction project. As well as including the names and addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates.

On the day I was set to leave Atlanta and say goodbye to the forest for the time being, activists got word that Reeves Young Construction might be dropping out of the project. This would obviously be a big, big win and an indication of the possible effectiveness of the shack method combined with sabotage and the forest encampment tactics.

At a stakeholders meeting for the copsity of project the next day, it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will not get tinue work on the new police training center. In the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement, the Atlanta Police Foundation tried to frame the situation as Reeves Young simply have quote finished their role in the project. This is a laughable deception, as Reeves Young is one of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive

quote unquote public safety facilities in the past. They do not merely do preliminary sub contracting survey work. They work on projects from start to finish, taking lead contracting roles. It was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been the main subcontractor hired to do complete construction of Cops City by brass Field and Gory, who have more established

ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting from the Stop for Reeves Young website quote, the Atlanta Police Foundation would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire a bulldozer and walk alongside long engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes

and did some soil testing. Police and their corporate backers don't want to let it be known that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the Cops City construction, while the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to say face, we are celebrating a major victory pressuring a main contractor out of the project. We are pleased that the movement has built up so much momentum and that the Cops City development continues to face setbacks because of

the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues. Brass Field and Gory, another large general contractor, remains with the project. A Georgia Open records request from April confirmed via Paper Trail that the Atlanta Police Foundation has been working on the Cop City project with brass Field and Gory, another major general contractor in the Southeast region of the

United States. Brass Field and Gory is an LLC and a multibillion dollar general contractor, ranked as a top contractor in the Southeast by Engineer News Record. Based on recent Atlanta Police Foundation emails required through public records, we can now assume that brass Field and Gory act as the sole contractor for Cops City. Quoting again from the Stop Reeves Young website quote, brass Field and Gory are dependent

on subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire a new entire set of subcontractors in order to build a Cops City. We believe it is in their best interests for brass Field and Gory to follow the lead of Reeves Young and drop Atlanta Police Foundation as a client, rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest. It is up to all of us to make that clear to them. We can pressure brass Field and Gory out of Cops City by complicating their ability to do business.

This does not have to be limited to the Cops City project. Their various construction projects and third party service providers are numerous. If brass Field and Gore begin to feel like they must choose between all of their contracts and their Cops City con tract, we are confident that they will choose the former, but we working to convince the subcontractors, consulting firms, surveyors, architects, etcetera around the country that brass Field and Gory are not a good business investment.

We can make it easier for the construction company to do the right thing and dump the Atlanta Police Foundation for good. This has been an incredible period of momentum and research, but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made a decisive victory, it is important to remain

more focused than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with the project to create economic consentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors. The Stop Reeves Young website will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign. End quote. On top of confirming that Reeves Young was dropping out of the project, a few other interesting pieces of information came

out at the recent stakeholders meeting held on April. Allegedly, there will be a bid for the next contractors or subcontractors UH in the coming weeks and that will be publicly announced. It was also announced during the meeting that the cops city planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround the construction site and future facility with an

unwanted fence. In response to the quote law breaking protesters, Atlanta Assistant Police Chief and Site Security Chief Darren sheer Bomb said quote, we are working with decav County to address any criminal acts related to trespassing and vandalism unquote. He also stated that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who work on the project at other locations.

Here's an interesting note from our force defender pals on how the Atlanta Police Department function and are allowed to operate while inside the old Atlanta Prison Farm and Entrenchment Creek Park. This is something that's true police departments in Channel. But as soon as a cop is you know, out of like streets and things like that, that cop is uncomfortable and like cops here are carrying twenty pounds of

gear on them at all times. And not only are they carrying that much gear, but they spend most all day sit running around and sitting in a car, and like you know, that cop not only doesn't want to chase you through the woods, but they also probably aren't capable of it. And aside from the obvious, like you know, their infrastructure issues, them being away from their cars, not being on the streets having all of their gear. We're also not in the City of Atlanta in this forest.

We're an unincorporated the Cab County, which means Atlanta Police Department doesn't have legal jurisdiction as police here. They only have legal jurisdiction as agents of the City of Atlanta because the City of Atlanta owns this property which is outside of the city. So at any time when they're conducting and arrest they have to have the Cab County

Police Department officers present with them. There. There can be an Atlanta Police Department and has been major like one of their huge like high ranks, who has no legal authority here except to represent the city. And that relationship is kind of like tenuous at best. They hate each pals. They hate each other, and you know, so if you're if you're headed in the town, like bear in minds that is a huge place to drive a wedge because

they fucking hate each other. Yeah, I know there's like um and there is like one thing one time where like Atlant Police officers were inside the forest um with like a specific goal in mind in the Cab County Police cruisers. Not only good, the Cab police not want to gather the cruisers and go into the forest because they have they didn't care, they didn't want to do this. So the Atlant Police, uh, We're screaming into their radio saying, get this person. They're walking out of the forest, get

this person. They're walking out of the forest, and it would just be like fib er ten minutes before the Cab police like preserves to just roll down the road and like you know, they're like people who like ran into the woods and like ran from the age Cat police. Like we're like, I'm not going in this world these words. And I'm also not calling to let the Atlant Police to let them know that this person just ran from me into the woods, because then they'll have to actually

go in after them. Also, during the April stakeholder meeting, Security Chief shear Bomb announced that the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agreed to an assistance request in mid April from Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant, and we'll

be assigned to the site. While attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups, he noted that quote, we look word to working with those agencies to ensure that this is a safe project that is occurring here and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on site to try

to stop the project from proceeding unquote. The co chair of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee, Sharon Williams, invoked the term eco terrorism as relating to the forced defense, marking the first time that word has been used by the government officials to refer to this batch of protests. She also thanked the cop City planners for quote transparency in explaining

why they cannot be transparent on the construction timeline. Emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta, obtained via public records requests do give a possible look into the future of the development. In a January two email, Police Foundation representative Allen Williams said that we quote plan on enabling work possibly in the Mayo and June time frame.

Our project will last until the last order, and our contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and safety plan unquote, although at the time their contractors still included Reeves Young, so there's no telling how accurate that timeline is now. Other emails detailed plans for Homeland Security to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor quote criminal activity

at the new Academy footprint unquote. In general, when involved in any level of protest, no matter of the alleged legality, security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities, especially with more eyes being directed to the defend the Atlanta Forced project. Each person should be responsible for themselves and might I think that that type of action you're interested in taking should severely inform the type of personal

security precautions that you're taking. Um. I think that's that's been a recurring theme as the movement builds. There are folks that come in to not having heard the term security culture up set or whatever you want to call it, and so that can be really jarring for folks that are just first trying to get involved, but people pick it up surprisingly quick once you have built as a community like norms and customs around is this a phone's on,

our phones off meeting. Are we talking about this on signal? Is the call for this action going out on social media? Are we just sharing this amongst friends where that hadn't really been a thing and where frankly, a lot of people face significant repression here in Atlanta during the uprisings because of security culture decisions that were made. I think that a security culture is being built here that where it didn't really exist before, or at least wasn't widespread before,

is going to survive long past this movement. I think like one of the biggest aspects of these things is like the social aspects of it, and like like the generalizing of the norm of if someone answers you vaguely and seems uninterested in to meet, in continuing the conversation, just understanding that they have your best interests in heart when they don't want you to know, and like, quite frankly,

you just can't accidentally share information you don't have. And so like, you know, when we sit here in these woods and people say, you know, like you say, like, so you know you're where have you been? Blah blah blah, and I'm just like, oh, you know, hey, our places or something like that, I just don't ask questions, and I understand that I don't just not only do I not need to, but I probably don't want to know.

And like, you know, when it comes to like more like material technical things, those are important, but like the social aspects of security culture are so so much more

important than the technical aspects. It's like I don't know as everybody talks about security culture as like take your phone out of the room, but like you know, if you take the phone out of the room and talk about doing crazy ship with complete strangers, you don't you know and have a reason to trust them, And like coming here to Atlanta, like if you want to do crazy ship, don't you know if you want to do if you're coming to Atlanta, let me reef is that

you're If you're coming to Atlanta and you want to do crazy ship, like you to think about like how to do that in a safe way or as safely as possible. You know, don't don't come to us and be like, hey, I haven't met you before, but like do you want to go do some federal felonies? Because no, I don't and I don't want to know that you're doing that either like we have do you want to do crazy ship? That's cool, just like I don't want

to know you did it. And like if you're like coming here with the intention of creating, like with the intention of like doing ship because it's like cool and fun. If you're coming here with the intention of, like I want to gain social capital because I did crazy things, like maybe you rethink that like if you if you want and find your closest friends, plan a road trip,

and don't help anyone. In a recent interview, Atlanta Police Foundation President and CEO Dave Wilkinson estimates that defend the forest quote unquote group members have done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans to add defense around the entirety of the site as construction begins, saying, and anyone on the site will be arrested and as we move forward, the enforcement will become stricter and stricter unquote. Also stated in an

interview is that quote. The Police Foundation also hopes to build separate museums on site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that was once located there. So that's that's what the kids call maskoff moment of building a dedicated museum two cops and labor prison a k A.

Slave labor prison. Anyway, the first phase of the project had the initial ninety million price take attached, with taxpayers being forced to pay thirty million dollars of that, and it's still unclear what the final cost of the facility is slated to be, or what the estimated operating costs are, or really how many phases of construction they really plan

on doing. The past few weeks, the site of Cops in the Woods has become a more and more common occurrence, whether to do scouting or just apparently detonating explosives for funzies at their current makeshift shooting range, like they did a few days ago. One morning when I was there, I woke up to people yelling Cops in the Woods, which, by the way, is a very effective substitute for caffeine in terms of making you very awake and alert quite

early in the morning. Um. And then while running through the forest, I saw a beautiful deer and a hopping rabbit. So nice clash of of feelings and sensations there. In terms of closing sentiments based on conversations and observations I had from my brief time in the woods. It's this play to your strengths, don't play by the enemy's rules, utilize the intersection of urban city based tactics and resources

while taking inspiration from classic forest based eco defense. Attacking from the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help by time for rapid response popular mobilization from people living in the city. If and when that time comes, I'll be careful coming down a key road. They throwing bottles at the police, and the bottles a smoke ball, so be careful. They in the woods um throwing at

the police cars and stuff like. Appreciate it. Yeah, And despite the defensive nature of the ending the forest, there still is a large amount of making sure that as often as possible you can do the prep work to set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on your terms. You're not always complying to theirs, which is

can be useful for defensive stuff. Obviously, the whole aspect of defending a forest like this that you I think the defenders can have this almost like spectral quality of like cops don't know where people are, what they've built, what's in the forest, what's in the woods, and that's like spooky, like you like you don't know who's who's up in a treehouse, you don't know who's behind what tree, you don't know what things are in the woods, and

that spectral quality of the forest offense is a really interesting aspect of it that you don't see. And you don't see that. And then like pipeline protests as much, you don't really see that for like protests in a city, um because the city very much as like a more of like a cop story. Um So I really do like that aspect of like cops are kind of scared

to go in the woods because they're spooky. They have openly testified, like in court testimony that said that when this forest defender was arrested, the police officer that gave his statement to the judge was shaking, physically shaking because he was so afraid from being yelled at, Like that was all that had happened, is a bunch of protesters were yelling at them and he was shaking. The police are really dependent on their infrastructure. They are dependent on

all of that kid that they carry around. They are not mobile. They are meant to be attached to that squad car, and every further step they take away from that, they are more and more uncomfortable. And when they look around they realized they were in the middle of the fucking woods. That's terrifying for them and that needs to be like taking advantage of. And it is. What's that like? They their drones in their these helicopters have problem even

with their thermal tracking of seeing through the canopy. What's that like? And I want to say, like, it was really funny to me that in that like it was said that the purposes were screaming, we know where you live, we know where you live. We're coming, We're coming, which is the whole, the whole ghost thing, um, because I mean, I mean in terms of in terms of thermal stuff. I brought a thermal camera of mine here and the woods are very hard to see through. With my thermal camera.

I cannot see more than twenty ft away. I've I've tested it on people. It's that's the super interesting aspect. And yeah, like it's the whole like Fern Gully, Princes, Princess mononoke thing of like when people come out of the woods wearing ski basks, like that's freaking Like it's like we are you, Like you can be the thing that goes boo in the night like that, Actually that is you, um, and that's something that should be taken advantage of when there's people invading the forest and trying

to destroy it. I think this is a really important to touch on. Is that for a lot of us, even though like may us have been like socialized to think of the dark and the night and the woods as this scary thing, this is where I feel the most safe. This is if you give me a bunch of camel and like send me off into the woods, there's nowhere I'm going to feel more safe and more capable both of safety and attack. When I'm out here,

I feel like I can do anything. You give me a bunch of woods, a bunch of hills, Like, there's so much we can do because we're not in this position of you know, entering hostile territory to you know, do things. This is territory that we control, and this is territory that we are using to fight that and we're weaponizing not just you know the cops fear, but

we're recognizing the terrain itself. We're weaponizing the trees, were recognizing the hills, were recognizing the ruins, and we're recognizing everything here as like literally a thing to use to attack the state. If you give me a ridgeline, I can hide from the cops better than any fucking you know, high tech thermal scattering delly suit is ever gonna give me. You know, out here, you don't need a bunch of fancy ship to like engage in conflict with the state.

You don't need thermal cameras and all that. You can walk into a military surplus store and buy, you know, for fifty bucks. You can buy everything you need to like do just about whatever you want out here. And that's like, that's like a really important and beautiful thing. Is It's not it's not hard to do what we're doing. You just have to break down the mental barriers and do it. Um. Yeah, we we do our best to

protect the trees, and the trees protected us too. It's it's cool living here, and it's like obviously something ever on most people probably like think about is yet how important wild spaces are. But it's cool to really fucking feel it. And it's like like, yeah, this this place is super important because of how it interacts with the ecosystem and how it filters the water and that it's a safe haven for a lot of really beautiful animals

and plants. But also this place is important because wild spaces are sucking uncontrollable and I want to live in an uncontrollable way and like you need those things, and um, it is it's really cool, like this is a wild space. It's also for in a city, which is cool. It's fucking weird, Like there's there's city people who come here

who are fucking weird and do weird ship and it's sick. Um, and like it is an uncontrolled space and like sometimes that means that there's like fucking ship chemicals that are like fucking plants up. But also sometimes that means there's people who like are doing things that are free and doing things they couldn't do in the city. And um, and it doesn't matter if I like it or not. It makes me, Yeah, it makes me happy. They just know that those people can act on their desires. Um.

And yeah, it's not always fucking convenient or good. And sometimes I intend to antagonistic relationships or that because it conflicts with my desire. But there's no mediation and there's there's there's no one getting in between. And yeah, it's just it's really important. And I think like the the slogan that people say of not what is there, not one tree, not one blade of grass, like is like an inspirational thing, but it's also like a strategy, Like

it's like a tactical assertion that is important for us. Like, yeah, if like this forest and these wild spaces are essential, not just for us to physically stop the police, but like essential to be an anarchist. Like if there are not wild spaces, spaces that they can't put security cameras up here because they there's no electricity and the trees are two dens for solar panels and they get smashed anyway,

you know, like it's important to have those things. If there's not places like that, there's not places where you you know, like and and so that for itself is cool. And the other thing is just living here with the fucking animals, Like, um, it's cool. The deer. If you want to find a get a hiding spot in the forest, pay attention to where the fucking deer sleep. They sleep in different places most nice. You won't suck them up as long as don't get the exact same one day're

sleeping and they're really freaking hard to find. Something with the coylds, like sathing with the snakes, and like it's just very cool to get to observe and live with all these animals. And um, you know there's an owl such screaming five o'clock every day. It's like a nice little marker. And that's for me. That's better than you know,

looking at my watch. It's pretty cool. This leads us up to our present day and the upcoming week of Action in Atlanta, Georgia, happening from Sunday May eight to Sunday May If you are anywhere near the Atlanta area, you have no reason to not check it out. It's a week's worth of events spanning from early in the morning till late into the evening every day for seven days. You can find the calendar of events on defend the

Atlanta Forest dot com. And if you are not near Atlanta, I would still recommend you make your way there post taste if you are able to. Whether that's during the Week of Action or later on down the line. More boots on the ground is almost always a plus. Here's the more info on the upcoming Week of Action from

May eight through May fifteen. So generally in the past, the past few week of actions have been like really above ground, really like giving people comfortable forest, getting people into a forest, like the immunity events are like UM and just like public gatherings, inform nights, skill shares, other stuff like that. And I believe that this one, like well,

like we had a lot of those events. But I also believe that like due to the nature of what's going on UM, that it's much more urgent than people, uh come and creator bring their own ideas being known in science, their own desires, and yeah, we get action. It's odd, it's gonna be d it's gonna be crazy, it's gonna be add the things. I think there's gonna be a family family were lack hug and trees kind

of ship, and I'm excited for that. And I think there's gonna be something like the funk is going on in the woods kind of shore is a bunch of cops kind of ship. Obviously, we don't know what's really going to happen. But anyone that has been reading stuff like oh man, I want to go throw down with the crazies, you should come and do that. And we have some stuff to share and hopefully there'll be so many people here that don't know how to deal with it.

The problem going here is the Atlanta Police Force. Um, they there is a lot of them, but honestly they're also they're stressed out and they are run um what's it can run dry? Respect then they really they don't know how to deal with all this wood ship from ship that we've heard them talking about. They don't know what to do. They're not totally prepared. I think it's gonna be a really fun and crazy ship show and we want you all the Condor Chip show in a

good way. And now they're like, oh, you shouldn't use those words, but in reality, nobody actually knows what's going to happen. We know what we're gonna do. We have plans that people can plug into, some stuff you can bring your kids to, and some stuf of you should

not bring kids to, and there will be more. To be honest with, you really got to just be there in person, because there's something you can't put everything on Instagram and doing our best to communicate to folks what's going on down here, but there's just some things you gotta come two. Whatever the Week of Action, it's always a week of action, but this is like we're helping people get really turned up for this week of action and maybe we all just become a roving nomadic war

machine together. That would be the dream. So you have a thing in your hometown, is going on in your territory, and we nomadic war machine over to your spot and we just keep doing that. A few resources that some of the force defenders wanted people to know about is first, obviously, Defend the Atlanta Forest dot com, which has the Week of Action calendar. To keep up on news regarding the movement. You can follow them on Twitter and Instagram at Defend

the Atlanta Forest or Defend a t L Forest. There is the Forest Justice Defense Fund at Open Collective dot com slash Forest Hyphen Justice Hyphened Defense hyphen Fund, where people can donate to support the work of the Broad Coalition dedicated to saving the forest. There's of course stop Reeves Young dot com, which has information on subcontractors and third party service providers relating to the cops city construction.

Very useful even just for simple calling campaigns. The website scenes dot no blogs dot org hosts other news relating to the movement, anonymous community, case and stuff like maps of the area and random other useful information resources for info and guides relating to direct action. There's a website titled Warrior Up dot no blogs dot org and people can go there or to a warrior up dot no

blogs dot org slash guides for various interesting information. I'll say, um, and that last one is really best viewed on tour with via the tour browser just as a heads up. Also probably with like a VPN. And I don't know anyway, be careful with that last one. But all of these, all of these sites will be linked in the show notes. The future lies in your hands. You have more freedom than you know if you can find the unconventional ways

of expressing it. See you on the other side. And I'll end with a word from our forced defender friend. There's yeah, hopefully we're gonna stop the police training facility. I think we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people sticking around for the Week of Action because we're hoping that it doesn't die down too much to the point where smaller and to achieve them that was here for a reko action gets attacked and stay away exactly that if they can get happen here. I wasn't

thinking about that. This funny enough it its It could happen where you live, and maybe we can just keep the idea. As we share enough skills, we make ourselves. Absolutely no one should be integral enough to the movement that you can't go off or leave and it can't continue. People should be reading manual, sharing skills, telling stories, having

at the moons. We're doing all this stuff to make each other just a weird of the different things that are possible for us to run because maybe we don't have all the you know, the guns and the steel and the gold. But if we have enough people like being creative and doing some grilla ship, we can get a lot done. And at the end of the day, if you can do you have to be careful about how many hats to ring. If you don't know about the r n c AD, that's a long time ago.

Now look that up. They were wearing. They are really great community organizers, but they were wearing too many hats. It was the first time that Patriot Act kind of new laws after not eleven was you lie down people, and a lot of it didn't stick. But if you what we really need is more faceless saboteuries because honestly, I'm saying that's what we need. We need people to be there's just in reality, there's not enough people willing

to do nightwork. It looks like there's an uptick in the behavior, which is great, but be safe, be smart, act to interact with a little and that's that's what we need more than any saying. There's a lot of people that um are willing to do above ground stuff. There's a lot of people that want to be known, and that's great, but we have enough for that. We need something else. It Could Happen Here is a production

of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.