Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 83

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large fileSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, DC. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch me, if you can, sign Freeway Phantom.

Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if you had the chance to change the past? September 27th, 1996. And create the future you've always dreamed of. Einhorn's Epic Productions and iHeartRadio bring you a new 12-part scripted audio time travel adventure. Join Nikki and her friends as they travel back to the 90s

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then join the hundreds of thousands who have listened to my podcast. Listen to Daily Dad Jokes podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Come Monday morning, basically no one was in the forest. The police raid the night prior pushed out most of the people gathered for the music festival and week of action. And it was still unclear how the rest of the week would now proceed. This Monday happened to be the Jewish holiday Purim.

Initially, there were plans to have a Purim celebration in the forest that evening, but it was unknown if people would feel comfortable returning to the woods. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. This is episode three of my mini-series covering the March 2023 week of action to defend the Atlanta forest. Monday, March 6th also happened to be the day of an Atlanta City Council meeting. And the Stop Cop City Clergy Coalition held a well-attended press conference at noon outside City Hall.

Reverend Keanna Jones opened up the press conference by making the clergy's position clear. We are the faith coalition against Cop City. And we are here to again raise our voices so that Mayor Andre Dickens and the members of the City Council of Atlanta know that we will not stand for the atrocities that have been occurring. We will not stand for Cop City to go forward. The community came out and made public comment for over 17 hours when given an opportunity and said emphatically, no, we don't want your Cop City.

We don't want more repression of black people. We don't want more polluted air. We don't want less green space in our community. We don't want more policing and terrorizing of black, brown, indigenous bodies in our community. Reverend Jones gave her own perspective as a local Atlanta with deep ties to the city. So we are here as faith leaders today. And we are here to say, Mayor Dickens, if you didn't hear us the first time, we are here once again to let you know that we don't want Cop City.

This is our community. This is our land. I am a daughter of East Atlanta. I still live in East Atlanta. I don't want Cop City. My granny owns a home that she's been in for almost 50 years in the heart of East Atlanta Village. She does not want Cop City. My neighbor across the street does not want Cop City.

The teachers at my daughter's school do not want Cop City. She also addressed the outside agitators narrative that police and media have continued to craft against force defenders, including by only arresting and charging people thought to be from out of town at the music festival that previous night. So we're here today to make sure that we ring the alarm and dispel the false narrative that is outside agitators who don't want this. We know that this is the rhetoric that's been going on ever since abolition began, that it's outside agitators. They said slaves didn't want to be free, but it was white people from the North who wanted it. That's a lie. They said that black people in the South didn't want civil rights, but it was white people from the North.

That's a lie. Today, they are claiming that the black people love Cop City. It's outside agitators from elsewhere. And that, again, is a lie. Simply because the police have chosen to systematically arrest people from out of state doesn't mean that what they're saying is the truth. Reverend Leo Shea addressed other faith leaders and asked them to join in their calls to stop the Cop City project. We, local Atlanta clergy and religious leaders representing diverse communities, call on clergy, religious leaders, and people of faith and moral conscience across this nation and in solidarity with local Atlanta leaders

to stop Cop City, stop the swap, and defend the Atlanta Forest, Willani People's Park. Today, we're gathered for this press conference, and we will be delivering a letter to Atlanta City Council. But we invite you to continue in this faithful work that we are doing and contribute wherever you find your space in this growing movement. We call on clergy, religious leaders, who are a moral authority in our society to use your power in support of the Forest Protectors. We are deeply concerned for the greater Atlanta community and the implications for the future of public safety in the United States if Cop City moves forward. At the press conference, the coalition presented a letter to the City Council signed by over 200 clergy members. Reverend Leo Shea also read it aloud. Despite a record-breaking amount of public comment opposing the facility, Atlanta City Council still passed legislation to build Cop City.

We are troubled by leadership that stops acting on the will of the people and aligns itself instead with corporate money and the dominant power structure. Urged on by the message of peace and compassion in all our faiths, we deplore escalating militarization by city and state government. Most recently, since the police killing of Rayshard Brooks here in 2020 by the Atlanta Police Department and Tortuguita January 18th of this year by Georgia Patrol. We applaud the rising consciousness and the need to protect humans and the more than human by resisting police violence everywhere. And may I add that in the face of the violent raid that took place last night as city residents gathered in solidarity to defend this forest, that is an example of the militarization that we are calling out through violence and greed these lands have been subjected to centuries of abuse, from the forced removal of indigenous communities, to serving as a plantation for enslaved African labor, to the site of the old Atlanta prison honor farm in the 20th century that produced immense profits for the prison system.

Today, the sounds of Bergsong from the forest canopy live alongside the sound of gunfire and the adjacent APD firing range. We are troubled by the commodification of community land, water and air on which all of us depend. We are profoundly troubled by the use of military tactics and escalated legal charges on members of our community, suppressing legitimate resistance while at the same time clear cutting the forest trees despite not having the appropriate permits. The lands and the people of Atlanta have suffered violence for too long. We say no more. We declare with faith, commitment and hope that this land will be a part of healing and repair. We Atlanta clergy, religious leaders and all of those across the nation and world who are in agreement join our voices with calling for the following.

A complete stop of the cop city project and cancellation of the Atlanta police foundation's lease, dropping all charges against forest defenders and protesters. We demand an independent investigation into the uses of domestic terrorism charges. We demand an independent investigation into the killing of Manuel Tehran, Tortuguita. We speak their name for which recently released video footage of the event suggests there was lying and deceit surrounding the incident on part of law enforcement and their initial reporting of the incident. The Muscogee Elder, Miko Shaban-Kernel, spoke at the press conference and called for land back. And for the Muscogee people to return and remaint treat the Wulani Forest in community with the Black and Brown residents of the area.

Our ancestors lived here for over 13,000 years and if you're to do the math correctly, this country that we now call the United States is somewhere in the neighborhood of 240. Just over nearly two years ago, I came here to the Wulani Forest. I came here with my own family, my own children, with some of my elders to just share a little bit about how this territory and this land feels to us as Muscogee people. Because let it be known today it was not our choice to leave here. We did go to war to protect these areas. We did go through much burden to protect these areas only to be forced to leave here under military occupation.

But also to be forced to leave here after treachery, after illegally lands were taken from us. This is our homeland. My ancestors for generation upon generation for millennia are buried on the very ground that you walk on every day. And I think we have a say in how we should live as a society in this day and time. And so in this moment our hope is to be able to come back to rematriate, to take our lives back and to the intimacy that we once had with everything that grows here in what you now call the state of Georgia. Because no matter who we are and where we come from, we have to have air, we have to have water, we have to have the elements of this earth to take care of us regardless of what we think. We're dependent on this earth mother and she has been faithful in taking care of us.

It's us that has not been faithful in respecting her. Our hope is that this earth is not destroyed before we even have a chance to come back. That lives aren't destroyed before we have a chance to come back. So today in whatever way I come here to join the choruses of voices that you hear all around you saying, what is going on now is a violence against all of creation. What is going on now bringing death and harm and hurt is a violence against all of creation. And we stand in solidarity as Muscogee people, I stand in solidarity with the voices that we hear of those tenants, those persons who live in the land now.

But my hope is now at this moment in time that somehow we can change the trajectory of our species and go into a direction where we can value each other and we can stop the criminalizing of descent. We should be able to say no. The increasing of the militarized forces out there does not ever create peace. It only creates harm and it only harms those that are most vulnerable. That's the prayer that I carry today. Reverend Darcy Jarrett joined in the call for stewardship of the Wallani Forest to be returned to the Muscogee people.

City Schools of Decatur has a statement of solidarity, an acknowledgement of harms. DeKalb County and the City of Atlanta, we call on you to make good on these words, to give the land back to our Indigenous siblings so that they, as they have stated and will do and always have done, work in collaboration with the Black and Brown community right there near where the site is, outside of the Wallani Forest. The City of Atlanta is ready to lease this land at just $10 an acre. Instead, give this land to the Native inhabitants. Repatriate this land to the people to whom is their sacred call to defend

and work in community with the Black and Brown communities that are there. We call on you, Atlanta City Council, to be the moral compass and to not just halt the building of this structure, but to repatriate the land to the sovereign Muscogee Nation, the sacred keepers of this land. May it be so. Amen. Finally, Matthew Johnson spoke about the worrying amount of police repression and violence the movement has already seen. We're projecting by the end of the day, there will be 40 people

that have domestic terrorism charges, many of which just for being in a parking lot. I don't know how anybody can accept this when you have a projected 40 people that are committed of domestic terrorism, not one dead body. Meanwhile, we can't even show the bruise on the police officer that was allegedly shot at. But our friends ashes, we have the ashes of a friend that we will spread. We can no longer accept this as a people as Atlantans. If we can't figure out a way to fix public safety without locking tons of Black kids up in the Blackest City in America, every person in that building needs to step down. If we can't do it here, we can't do it anyway.

Both myself and Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective were at the press conference and we met up after to discuss the events of the day. During the press conference, some of the media's line of questioning was very much like aligned with the types of narratives being put out by police in relation to the events that previous night, the Sunday Direct Action and Music Festival. I think it's also worth noting that the people at the clergy event did not openly demonize the actions that people chose to take on Sunday. The media definitely gave them opportunities to try to throw people under the bus and that did not happen. We've seen that all throughout the week. Every chance that the

media is trying to throw somebody to cause dissension or a divide amongst the movement has been really handily deflected by anyone who's come across it. The clergy did not just a good job of not falling into that trap, but of actually pointing out how that line of thinking was missing the point and where the true violence was coming from. The reality of it is that the ones who are engaging in violence are the police and they're from right here in Atlanta, Georgia. You got APD, you got Georgia State Police, you got GBI, you got Georgia State Troopers, you got everybody except the martyr police who are engaging in violence and terrorism against the people who are standing against this illegal land swap. So I would suggest

that the next time you decide that you are going to bring up your police rhetoric that you get from whichever police source, you go ahead and discuss that with them because we don't know what they're doing but what we do know is what we're doing and what we see from them that we know. I know when I get hit by an officer. I know when I see a mother with a child begging to be let up off the ground because her children are with her. I know when I see officers pointing a rifle inside a bouncy house. If I could just say, I'd like to just bring up a story. Initially, the colonizers that came onto this land attempted to use the indigenous folks as their slaves. However, the indigenous folks knew the land so they could get away. Now, when you ask me about why is it that you keep catching

people that aren't from here that might not reflect the people that are actually involved in the resistance, God bless you. After the press conference, people from the clergy coalition marched to the front door and entered City Hall before making it upstairs to sign up for public comment during the City Council meeting. We shall not be moved. Fighting for our freedom. We shall not be moved just like a stream. Lives it by the waters. We shall not be moved. The large group of the clergy and the people gathered for the Interfaith Coalition are now moving through City Hall. There's a whole bunch of cops here that look relatively nervous about

the decently sized group of people. The scary Christians are now invading City Hall to look out. So usually in City Hall, there are several APD officers who just hang out. But while the clergy are walking up to City Hall, you can look out and there is APD on every corner. And then you enter into City Hall and there are clusters of APD. There are I think four floors to City Hall. There are clusters of APD on three sides of every floor of City Hall. After an unexpectedly long awards and proclamations ceremony, the public comment section of the City Council meeting finally began. I'm standing here today with the Faith Coalition. We are clergy and faith leaders. We are citizens and we are protectors of the land that doesn't belong to us

but belongs to God. We are deeply concerned for our community members, for ourselves and the implications for the future of public safety in the United States if this cop city development goes forward. We are asking for all people of faith, those of you who sit on Council, regardless of your tradition or background, and those who stand with moral conscience to stop the cop city project. My faith convicts me and tells all of us that there is a better way. We have a prophetic moral imagination and opportunity here to do something different in Atlanta, to do something different for the South. Finally, we're asking for a community process, a community process. Let us come together with moral imagination to envision

how the Wilani River Forest can be the heart and lungs of community wellness and healing, not more militarization of police. We want a process that centers the voice and needs of muskogee leaders and community members, our indigenous siblings, incarcerated folks and surrounding prisons, families and neighbors who live in cross proximity to the firing range and under police surveillance. We want holistic community safety, clean water, tree canopies, a future for every single one of our children. May it be so. Someone from the Muskogee Creek Reservation in Oklahoma spoke about the desire to return to their homeland. The Miko of our Halebi ceremonial grounds back home in Oklahoma has come here,

where our original fire was started and then it was taken all the way to Oklahoma. Now we want to bring it back to our land and we want to start those fires again. Well, when we come back, we need a land to come back to. This is my first time coming back to visit my homelands. I wanted to visit here where my ancestors are as a spiritual and personal journey. I didn't want to come here to try to fight the violence that I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is from the residents is they need investment in housing and public spaces and not investment in further militarized policing. They want investment in the well-being of incarcerated and not further violent incarceration, but the well-being of the community members.

Thank you, Mado. Chi chari. I turned 70 last week and I've lived in Atlanta my whole life. I'm not an outsider and I am here to say to you that I find cop city to be an abomination. My husband is a pastor of a church a couple of miles from here and he could not be here today. He's out of town, but he stands with me with these comments. The people who have spoken before me have said the things I would say, but I would like to say that I pretty much agree with every single thing they have said about this insanity that you all are calling a police safety training facility. So I think you need to just cancel it. Start having some real conversations with the people of this city to solve the real problems in a way that will actually be effective and this

facility is not going to be it. And the mayor's proposed task force is just one more way to try to propagandize us to believe that this is good for us when we're not stupid and we know it's just lipstick on a pig. And if you harden your heart be reminded of the story of another Pharaoh who had a very hard heart who would not free the people of God who would not leave them to their land. You know what happened in that story. Don't think that you will not suffer the same fate. Don't think that the infrastructure of this so-called black mecca will not come toppling over because it will. There are a couple like things to note about how city council public comment works. City council doesn't tend to pay attention to them. Ostensibly the only one who pays attention

is city council president Doug Shipman because it is his job to call time and to call up the next person. But you know city counselors will like step in and out of the room get something to eat during the 17 hours of public comment for cop city like one of them held a press conference. There are two council members notoriously bad at paying attention to public comment. Dustin Hillis who is the committee chair for the public safety legal administration committee basically he's in charge of police and the other is Mary Norwood who represents Buckhead and has what I would describe as ontologically evil vibes. Buckhead is the northern primarily white neighborhood in Atlanta that is wanted to secede from the city which in Atlanta has

very uncomfortable segregation and redlining parallels. But despite not paying attention during public comment these two in particular both paid extra attention after public comment when police chief Darren Sheerbaum gave testimony on what happened the night previous. Whether any firefighter or police city employee entries yesterday's event. Councilmember Hillis there was not we're very fortunate that that was the outcome. We're fortunate that there was no injuries. If this continues do we have the ability to deploy even greater force to to quill this you know the millions of damage millions of dollars of damage to public and private properties. We will make adjustments as those that use

various tactics. Yesterday was an escalation we had not seen this large number of individuals engaged in this activity and the aggressive manner in which the officers were attacked was a significant change from what we had seen before when it generally had been setting property on fire we'd seen police cars set on fire windows busted but this was started as an attack against individuals men and women who are employees of the city so that was an escalation councilmember Hillis said we have already made adjustments for both within our capability as well as with our partners. Throughout Sheerbaum's testimony it was interesting the degree to which the chief framed Sunday's direct action as primarily being targeted against officers and not the

destruction of equipment and machinery at the north gate. From the videos that APD themselves released of the incident it's clear that engagement with the police was limited to keeping officers at bay as construction equipment was targeted and despite the continued referring of fireworks as quote unquote mortars or explosives as the chief himself admitted no officers were harmed during the direct action. In a later episode we'll hear more of Chief Sheerbaum's explanation of Sunday night's events as it gives insight into the police's own surveillance capabilities and their ability to respond quickly to direct actions but until then back to the events of Monday March 6th. After the city council meeting I dressed up in the gayest little outfit that I had with me

and went back to the woods for the first time since Sunday night for Purim. Initially people were very cautious when entering the woods again but as the night went on more and more people started to pour into the forest with some choosing to return to their camp. Later that night I enjoyed an experimental noise show in the living room probably to the detriment of people trying to sleep in the area. I went to the Purim in the woods I got to share my my memory of the Veggie Tales ester story starring the tickle monsters. I got to bond with a few ex-vangelicals about that so that was fine then there was an experimental noise show in the forest and really I think it actually is worth talking about because this was the first time people return to the forest yeah

this was the first time that people like returned to the forest in mass since Sunday and he started to kind of feel people's energy get reinvigorated the woods became a place again that people were able to like begin and feel like they were able to to be in community in the woods again and that is in keeping with sort of how this movement has always uh responded to what we I guess could call a loss right like 23 people getting arrested and charged is a is a great loss yeah and the bounce back period is is is pretty quick like the resiliency is yeah is continual and always strengthening every time that you know the repression grows like it does seem like the resiliency grows with it people were not scared away from the woods people still still were like

no this is something I care about I am still going to be in the woods I'm still going to defend these woods and you kind of have like there's always this essence of of like fear kind of kind of underlying whenever you're like in the Wallani forest because you know people have been arrested and charged for laying in a hammock like that that with another defendant with with another defendant um and like so you you know that it is it is fundamentally a risky place to be but people think the the potential cost is worth it like it they they will they continue to be here because they know this is a winnable fight and they know that it that it is worth it to defend these woods early Tuesday morning a few stop cop city banner drops happened throughout the city

two people were detained by police during one of these banner drops but were later released with a traffic citation after being interrogated separately and extensively photographed by law enforcement officials only identified as quote Georgia police and homeland security unquote Tuesday was the start of a series of nonviolent direct actions that were being launched around downtown and midtown Tuesday morning I followed a small group that went to the headquarters of Norfolk Southern one of the Atlanta police foundation's financial contributors and noted enemy of Ohio they enter the lobby and it's a very small group but like I think half of it was it was like five people and the another five like press people yeah so they they enter and

they read aloud a letter to Alan Shaw the CEO of Norfolk Southern calling for a divestment from of Norfolk Southern from cop city and immediately they are met with a security guard screaming like go you're get out of the lobby lay if you're having you're being criminally trust or you're being trespassed you have to leave one of the other security guards runs around with cell phone camera and like shoves it in everybody's faces reaching rather rudely over you to get my face yes and they got very close to me and during the Norfolk Southern building and so the the whole thing lasts like less than five minutes maybe right about five minutes when they finish reading the letter like all they asked was that the letter go to the the CEO

yep while people were inside the headquarters security called NS police which is the Norfolk Southern police who are legally allowed to arrest people but nobody was arrested at that nonviolent direct action the whole thing was over pretty quickly and you know as we were walking out we saw like the the um a force of Norfolk Southern police like swarm kind of the exterior of the campus and like keep an eye out on things and then we moved over to Woodruff Park which was the meeting place for these nonviolent direct actions that happened about every every day at noon starting on starting on Tuesday it's Tuesday March 7th around noon there's about 50 or so people gathered in Woodruff Park who are heading out and marching to go stop by two of the Atlanta

police foundation corporate funders we roll up and I think at that point there were like 20ish protesters it was it started off very small there was no police like no real visible police presence that were like maybe a cruiser or two like kind of around um and activists start to gather and kind of talk about like what their plan is for the day which was just to march around to three different sites they wanted the AT&T building the Georgia Pacific building and GSU Georgia State University they are they're now leaving Woodruff Park they got to Georgia Pacific one of the cop city financial backers without much incident and without much in terms of visible police presence people called on Mayor Dickens who is the chair of the board of directors

for Georgia Pacific to cancel the Atlanta police foundation lease of the land that cop city is slated to be built on Mayor Dickens we want you to cancel this lease we know that you have the authority to do so they finished up at Georgia Pacific they set up a little vigil for Georgia Gita and from Georgia Pacific they began their trek to the AT&T building they left a little vigil for Georgia Gita in front of the Georgia Pacific center and the group of like more than 50 people are continuing to march north police eight to ten police officers are directly behind them and a whole bunch of police cars are blocking peach tree along the path to AT&T was the APF's headquarters just across the street and as the crowd approached this intersection the amount of

police ballooned massively in the block around the Atlanta police foundation headquarters there's got to be about 30 to 40 officers stationed blocking off the entrance to the APF and also just like following the crowd around as they're as they're marching through the through the sidewalks there's definitely over god there's I think around 75 officers deployed in this area right now the the number keeps growing as we start walking down different different sidewalks in different streets you just see more officers that are already stationed there are 50 activists and what certainly over a hundred somewhere probably between 100 and 120 police officers started marching not like behind not in front but directly beside the march sort of pinning the march to the

wall and like essentially kettling the march there was police station in front there was police station behind and police stationed on the side surrounding the surrounding like these 50 people who were who were simply walking on the sidewalk assembling upon a new group of officers got to be about 100 officers in this area right now at one point a police vehicle was just parked on the sidewalk completely blocking it during this entire time police were blocking all of the traffic in these intersections and roads driving wrong way up on one way like just you know doing doing police things yeah a door to state university canine unit this blocking off the entire sidewalk next to a folton county sheriff's vehicle they're trying to make it impossible for people to

actually move on the sidewalk but for the most part people have been able to move around the police and and keep keep their movement going instead of just stalling in one spot or like trying to physically confront the what is now like hundreds hundreds of law enforcement officers from folton county sheriffs and alana police department and even like georgia state university police so the group is split up in between two streets right now because people are trying to follow the follow the crossing signals because otherwise police are going to tackle and violently assault people no one was arrested people march to their prospective locations people very pointedly kept to laws there was a couple of times when like the crosswalk changed and the group

kind of had to split they would stay and wait until the crosswalk went back to walk and then crossover and join it's so funny that the cops are so insistent if you step on the streets you're going to get arrested um and making sure people stay on the sidewalks but the result of that is that all the cops are standing in the street and they're blocking off like miles of traffic downtown right now people just arrived at the 51 peach street center avenue at and t building in downtown atlanta police were already stationed in front of the at&t building so there wasn't much to do after a brief speech talking about at&t's contributions to the police foundation and cop city the crowd moved on now people are turning west in the uh the opposite direction from the

at&t headquarters heading back into the woodruff park area where this march began police with long guns here finally the crowd stopped at georgia state university and talked about gsu's connections to the at&t police foundation what is of note for this action and really all of the actions that happened the next few days is not what the protesters did it's the police's disproportionate response to just 50 people walking on the sidewalk chanting and giving short speeches outside of businesses tied to apf with a small line of officers in front of gsu they gave their their last round of speeches and sort of dispersed for the day before we wrap today and give these clouds something else to go do we will be out here we will be out here for the rest of the week for

the rest of the month for the rest of the year and we will fight until we win some of the police are now grouping up and opening up the sidewalk so people can actually leave it seems officers were in fact instructed to make arrests during this action but for some reason did not follow through on those orders according to scanner audio from atlanta police department's swat team extensive police activity continued later that night at around 5 30 to 6 p.m police started staging around the forest in a way that usually indicates that a raid is forthcoming word spread around the recovering encampment that police could be preparing for a raid so the initial reports were like that there were 50 police officers staged at key road and ready to go

and then the de cap county swat starts to roll up at the the fire station and i would say a fair amount of like panic starts to set in a camp multiple multiple police copters are getting are getting flown overhead multiple different swat teams are being brought in at least like three or four different agencies are are stationing officers around the woods i believe it's estimated that at least 120 police officers were were being staged in the area directly surrounding the forest and in the area by the power line cut on key road and it should be said that you know up until this point uh the police have never brought in that many resources to any protest action that i am aware of and not come in and engaged so i was with a group offsite who

like immediately began to fear like you know for they wouldn't be able to get back to their camp sites they wouldn't be able to get their their gear they wouldn't be able to get their medication and and that from what i understand was the the general vibe around but nothing happened nothing seemed to happen and and then at around seven police started to almost like express confusion on what was going on and then everyone else expressed express confusion for why the police were confused and we think we've kind of put together what may have happened so clark what what is what is suspected of of going down here so the one thing that police don't understand and probably will never understand is humor now they become the butt

of the joke often but they don't understand comedy so at seven o'clock that evening was scheduled comedy in the forest and from what we've gathered the police thought that the comedy in the forest event was going to be a cover for another sunday night like action so this event was scheduled on the public defend the atlanta forest calendar that anyone can look at online is this comedy in the woods event for people to tell jokes around a campfire and i i guess they thought it was like it was like this event that was like a red herring so that people could then go do violent militancy in around the woods so when seven o'clock came and went like police were expecting people to like arrive at the woods or something and that just didn't happen because turns out a few minutes

before seven o'clock this comedy event was canceled for like unrelated reasons the organizer had had things come up so this event just didn't happen but there still was comedy in the woods it just was that the police wasted probably over a hundred thousand dollars mobilizing over a hundred officers i mean obviously i think some people in the woods were you know know had some frustration that that that you know they experienced this fear of this possibly incoming raid that then resulted in there being nothing i think it's always important to when people are relaying information they relay information that is known without like unindue speculation so like it is a fact to say that there's over a hundred cops stationed by the woods

and they've never had that many cops there before without doing some sort of raid or some sort of of some sort of like activity in the forest and and part of what i've heard go on since then was you know some very generative conversations about how they're going to take into account like this this new paradigm that developed that night um and i i think that again speaks to sort of just how the movement continues to develop and grow and like you know handle new new challenges and and shifts so with the forest camp still intact the week of action continued on as planned with another downtown nonviolent direct action that next morning so wednesday anew is a lot smaller of direct action than than the day before it starts with like a dozen people it slowly

grows to like a few dozen but yeah it started extremely extremely small so this was one one difference from tuesday is that when we arrived police already had a visible presence in downtown stationed around woodruff park so a group of people just launched from woodruff park they kind of split off in different different little sub sub groups lots of people are just stationed outside of marta stops handing out flyers and that is what people are doing right now police seem relatively confused and are trying to like mobilize to different areas where they feel like something might happen but it's just people handing out flyers and uh they decided to split into groups and engage in like just some typical outreach activity that you would see

you know from any group like just passing out flyers and and pamphlets and and attempting from what i saw to have like one-on-one conversations with anyone who wanted to so this this group that it broke off into these smaller sub groups the group that would kind of a accompanied stationed themselves around some marta stops around i believe it was like them it was the peach tree marta station peach tree center marta station yeah so they stationed at the the like the three different exits or entrances for that just just handing out flyers handing out leaflets trying to you know talk to anybody who walks by another group of people standing outside of a public transit spot handing out flyers probably like i don't know four or five other

small small groups doing similar things throughout downtown which means police have a lot more places to be as opposed to just following one big group the group that we followed uh had its own police presence follow it and then when they split into three more groups each group had its own police presence follow it and police stuck to the protesters the entire time and of course like there's there's white transport vans that are full of cops kind of driving by big white van full of police officers just showed up across the street army green tan swat vehicle just parked a block away from the atlanta police foundation headquarters there was an atlanta swat vehicle parked outside of the hooters totally normal response totally normal response and so the

leafletting goes on for you know like 45 minutes and then all of the groups start to gather together conveniently with the group that like we had embedded with all right there's actually a pretty decent number of people gathered here for the flyering event today you know normal police responds to people handing out flyers just 50 officers in a swat team um but yeah there's probably at this point like you know two or three dozen people that have kind of all converged together they started off very small people were very very spread out this they splintered off into little little smaller groups but now they've all kind of coalesced together back again so all the little subgroups kind of meet up on andrew young and peach tree right next to the

hooters and the hard rock cafe this area is like the business district so in the middle of the day it's like really busy it's a fairly like good spot to pass out leaflets so they are passing out these leaflets at pedestrians they're still able to like walk through at the sidewalks it's pretty it's pretty chill um and then uh apd approaches the crowd like the apd has already been around this area there's the there's the swat vehicle across the street watching people hand out flyers um but then a lieutenant neal welch approaches the crowd and gives them a dispersal order okay can i read the dispersal order all right so i'm uh lieutenant neal welch of police officers city of atlanta i hereby declare that being on this sidewalk you are

obstructing or repeating the normal and reasonable movement of pedestrian traffic and violation of atlanta city ordinance okay in the name of the people of santa georgia i hereby command that all present in the sidewalk all present here in the sidewalk immediately exit the street or the roadway or sidewalk if you do not do so you may be detained or arrested should you fail to exit the sidewalk in accordance with this lawful command you shall be in violation of section 150266 obstructing pedestrian traffic which prohibits standing or being on any street roadway or sidewalk in a manner to obstruct or impede the normal or reasonable pedestrian traffic cops threatened arrest and detainment they claimed that people were blocking the sidewalk which they absolutely

were not i was walking freely as was all of the downtown pedestrian traffic they were not blocking anything this is uh this is pretty silly uh utterly utterly ridiculous response to people handing out flyers so they were told they cannot be on the sidewalk obviously they can't be on the street where where are you allowed to protest if not the sidewalk or the street um seemed like very like flimsy legal footing but obviously they police can arrest anyone they want to at any time for any reason so people decide to move they cross over the street they walk like a block north they cross the street again and they they they move onto this part of the sidewalk that is like really large like a massive massive open open section that yeah right in front of the mall

um so it's it's it's meant to like have a bunch of people pass by it so people continue to hand out flyers while this is happening uh there's another group who comes in to the side of peteri center mall and enters the mall to find mayor andre dickens there are a couple boards in atlanta that stipulate the mayor is is like the the head of the board and this is one of them and it meets uh in peteri center mall as as one does so the mayor is having a meeting in the mall and his office space is you know sort of above the mall and this group of people from the muskogee nation enter um and try to meet up with the mayor to hand off a letter objection objection we have a letter being delivered from the muskogee creek nation on behalf of muskogee creek spiritual

leadership in opposition to cop city i came all the way on the trail of tears to deliver this letter to you folks um we want you to know that the contemporary muskogee people are now making their journey back to our homelands and hereby give notice to mayor andrew dickens the atlanta city council the atlanta police department the atlanta police foundation the de cobbe county sheriff's office and so-called cop city that you must immediately vacate muskogee homelands and cease violence and policing of indigenous and black people in muskogee lands we lived as stewards and in relationship to this land for more than 13 000 years until the illegitimate state of georgia negotiated with the tyrant andrew jackson for the militarized for the militarized

force removal of muskogee and Cherokee relatives to indian territories mayor dickens can i give this letter to you oh he got one mayor we want to talk to you about our homeland muskogee creek people three indigenous activists along with camau franklin um arrive and um they find the mayor they enter the board meeting and they begin to read this letter from the muskogee nation allowed and in the letter it essentially says that atlanta is being evicted out of the woolly lawny forest and the muskogee people are going to return and reclaim their ancestral land um mayor dickens in true mayor fashion bolts away from this running through an exit door which is then like blocked by a guard

which i i think that has its own like set of legal issues um essentially just ignoring them over his shoulder he calls out i've i've got a copy of the letter and hides just completely trying to to escape what is not a good look for him the atlanta police department apex swatch team was called to the mall and right as the activists were able to exit the special police units rushed into the building finding no one by now the police repression during this week of action far exceeded police activity during any of the prior weeks of action and this trend would continue as the week entered its last few days the next episode will wrap up our coverage for the week as well as contain a bit more analysis of the police repression and the fallout of sunday's

direct action but then there will be a fifth bonus episode that gives an overview of what's happened in the woolly lawny forest in the intervening two months see you on the other side music festival audio courtesy of unicorn riot music between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom this child was laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car

it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst people i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swaying in the wind picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silenced the radio murders they left the body there for a reason it was the calling card it's like the mafia used to do and yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into a world of drugs

and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy this year they clearly gave it me in life i was velocity listen to silence the radio murders on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at the iconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlord sold the rank but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitar what's happening where are we wait look at this september 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the present

einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought you lethal lit daughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time travel adventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past to save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast welcome back to it could happen here i'm garrison davis this is episode four of my mini series detailing the march 2023 week of action to stop cop city in atlanta georgia this episode will be hearing from a lot of new people as we close out the day-to-day coverage of this week of action one of the last big organized rallies was on thursday

night and it was put on by community movement builders and other black led groups from atlanta the big event thursday night was a six o'clock rally that met at the martin luther king national historic site there was police stationed at king center before anyone got there we saw like dozens and dozens of police cars going by all around the the site are various you know quick response forces and riot cops just ready to move in large police response in the area already as has been expected for the past few days multiple multiple sandy springs police buses were driving by there was a multiple unmarked white vans full of officers the area is crawling with police cars and now there's a small detail of officers across the street from people gathering

here in the park we are currently surrounded on every side by groups of police officers in riot gear the the crowd started off like actually fairly decently size maybe like 50 people and then continued as well as as the the speeches progressed to i would say like 200 250 maybe even a little bit more they were passing out signs so like anyone who who came like they had a sign ready for you andre dickens is a sellout of course is a very popular one there were stop-cop city like banners that people could like hold atl verse 12 like you know just a bunch of like really clever sort of protest slogans and things that people could get behind the makeup of the crowd was definitely leaned like far less like white anarchists than certainly the accusations

of this movement i think i think more representative of the movement as a whole like it was a mix of a bunch of different people i would say like it probably accurately reflected atlanta demographics defend the forest signs and banners are being handed out throughout the crowd other people are passing around the jail support number and jail support contact information and people are starting to get ready so it meets at six o'clock and for about an hour and a half we listen to a series of speeches as the crowd begins to swell so we are here in solidarity together today to make it clear to the mayor that he's not going to keep lying on our names they'll literally be building a moxie of Atlanta practice how to repress realize and kill people

and so we find it ridiculous we find it disgusting we find it embarrassing that our mayor andre dickens would fix his mouth to say that black people want to be killed by the police that black people walk off stage the mayor must have forgotten that our ancestors were literally fighting abolition since they were brutally brought to this country they were fighting for freedom fighting the original police right the slave patrols that captured black bodies to take them back to their white masters he's talking to the same black people whose elders were fighting here in these same streets in the 60s and the 70s to stop police occupation of our communities that's right resistance to police resistance to state violence is literally in our blood as black people

it is in our dna they're lying on our name because they want money from the same white corporations that are funding cop city home depot chick-fil-a coca-cola no folks southern at and t cops enterprises who owns the ajc and this is a fight that we will win that we are committed to winning right and so when we talk about winning it's important to say what do we mean when we say that we'll win we mean no cop city anywhere not in south atlanta not in the cab not in north atlanta nowhere when we say that we will win we are meaning that this fight does not stop with cop city this is a fight for the liberation of all oppressed people here and abroad that's right and that's why it's disgusting that the mayor

and that these corporations will talk about outside agitators okay the reason that there are people coming from all over the world to support this fight is because this is a fight that affects all of us that's right the atlanta police foundation admitted that 43 percent of the cops being trained at that facility will not be in georgia okay so when people come from tennessee from new york from california it's because they know that their local police might learn how to kill them better here that's right and when people come from abroad they know that currently the atlanta police department trains with the israeli police so the same techniques being used to brutalize black people are being used to practice genocide on the palestinian people and the same tactics being

used to practice genocide on the palestinian people are being used to brutalize black people right here so when people come from all over the world to say stop cop city they're not outside agitators are standing in solidarity with us because this is a fight that affects us all as the rain picked up tortita's mother belkis toran spoke next all the court is the center i call them i call them to come here to support us all the people from different religions come here and help us this is a matter of the earth we're talking about the earth that is dying the earth needs our love the earth needs our attention and we are we are conscious we know that this is not right don't go by yourself when we go to activities stay together don't go outside by yourself don't we need to make

understand that this is the right thing to do we we are the correct people we are right because we are driving by love and we love all of i love you and i know that you love me a speaker from black votes matter addressed the crowd next starting off by talking about the importance of mass action i just want to explain something because sometimes people get confused they get twisted they say oh y'all look like voters matter all y'all do is talk about voting be clear we understand that the way that we get to liberation is not going to come just through a vote that's never been how it's worked for our people in this country sister harry didn't get a chance to vote for liberation she didn't get a chance to vote to take our people off the plantation

right so we are very clear that what we have got to be in fact we just celebrated commemorated the anniversary of of selma and the march to montgomery but be clear the people of selma didn't vote for a voting rights act they had to fight for it they had to march for it in some cases they bled for it they had to resist for it they had to take to the streets for it it's in their tradition that we are out here today so yes i believe i believe in the power of the vote but i also believe in the power of mass action he then talked about the intersection of cop city and efforts to further restrict the democratic process in georgia the same corporations that are funding cop city are the same ones that are funding the voters question the same ones we did a whole campaign

a couple years ago when georgia did that voter suppression bill and we called out home depot and coca cola and delta and many of the other corporations that give money to the people that are that are taking away our rights to vote and then if you don't have a government that reflects the people then what do you need you need a police force to enforce the fact that you don't have a government that reflects the people and so our message from mayor dickens our message for the city council is that if you don't respond to the people you about to lose your job you about to lose your job because we've got that power we've got the power to make that happen students from the atlanta university center a consortium of four black colleges in atlanta where some of

the last people to give speeches before the march we have attempted to reform our police force add deal escalation training add civil rights history training and give more money to our police but we continue to see black bodies across social media platforms television and other media platforms being displayed being murdered the victims have received no justice and when we say no justice what do we say no justice no justice no justice the building of the atlanta public training center is an insult and an act of the utmost disrespect from our city leaders we have a duty to fight for the change that we seek as an active member of this community i refuse to sit by and be idle and just let things happen this city has been my home ever since i was born i've been to various events

here i have seen the sights and i've lived through some of the most important events right here in this city this is my home this is your home this is our home this is a home of black excellence this is the home of dr martin luther king jr this is the home of john lewis this is the home of joseph evelyn and joseph elowey this is the home of civil rights this is the home of ct vivian this is the home of great blackness itself this is the home of every single black person here in america this city this house this place of black excellence says no to cop see my afro pessimist friends and revolutionaries both agree we are at war the police in the city have said as much loudly with their words and their actions it feels obvious to me that we need warriors

weapons and i know that that fact may give some of us trepidation but i want to assure you that we need so much more than soldiers to win this fight whatever it is that you do whatever skill you bring i just ask that you make it a weapon if we are ever going to experience democracy we need your tools to be repurposed in this fight against cop city if you're a writer like me child that better look like a threat to cop city if you do mutual aid caring for community ain't gonna get any easier please show us the way if you're an artist where my heart is at you got a lot of them out here yes let every painting reveal the truth including the joy and freedom that abolition calls us to let us make songs that inspire revolution if you're a healer get ready yes we need you

much will be lost in this struggle let us not forget if you're a teacher well we got a lot to learn about this war we're fighting and how police practice urban warfare if you're a lawyer guide us when they say that any fighter is a criminal if you're a digital organizers keep your finger on the pulse and tell our stories far and wide and if you're a community organizer we need to tend to our relationships not just use them we need real solidarity which goes beyond unity we need pluralism making space for many strategies to coexist and ultimately we need to practice democracy if we plan to build one cop city is the police in the establishment preparing for domestic war right here in the city of Atlanta that's right any further training of the police

is training against our existence that shit cannot be built it will never be built we all must fight for the democracy we've never seen before what are you willing to do thank you so after about an hour of speeches people are now finally getting ready to move they announced on the loudspeaker where we are going we are marching to the atlantic police foundation headquarters on peach tree the same location that had the front windows broken on the protest following the killing of tortuguita that saturday so people leave uh they stick onto the sidewalk because there's cops staring at them and cops had definitely had had indicated that if if people step onto the street they would be arrested the length of the march is

stretching for about two or three city blocks just because you know trying to cram 300 people onto a sidewalk makes that stretch out really long but the the cops have been pretty pretty adamant that if anyone steps onto the street they're going to get arrested that there's a banner being carried across that says what you water grows fund our future stop cop city defend the forest people with the stop cop city signs in the coca-cola font signs that read atlanta versus cop city no cop city on stolen land the thursday march definitely had the most amount of signs out of all of the individual marches or actions that i want to both small handheld signs and also signs with really tall handles to hold up above the crowd all right people are being led into the

street now after walking after walking on the sidewalk for a for a decent while people have now taken to the streets along the path of the march there's a projector was set up projecting like stop stop cop city slogans onto the side of a building all with like really really good graphic design visuals is definitely a strength of the movement there's this uh police riot helmet that is has a tree growing underneath it breaking apart the helmet it says trees give life police take it we got a police riot line set up a few blocks ahead of the people marching on the street right next to the building with these uh with these stop cop city stuff projected onto the side rather than let the police do an escalatory show of violence people opted to move back

onto the sidewalk to continue the march uninhibited people seem to be moving closer back onto the sidewalk as they're staring down this riot line and police are now heading back inside their white rent a rent a bus little vans that they've been staging their riot cops out of and they're driving off people are now in downtown atlanta outside of the georgia pacific center we have uh like 12 regular police cars the two two white vans full of riot cops and lots of cops the station places i cannot currently see all right we're marching north along peach tree street heading heading to the atlanta police foundation got the two the two bus max rent of buses full of full of riot cops right beside right beside the march cops

really adamant about not letting anybody march in the street it's funny because a few days ago they wouldn't let people stand on the sidewalk either most of the cops that are surrounding the march right now are still in their vehicles at least from this current vantage point as opposed to the nonviolent direct act to march as opposed to the nonviolent direct action marches and actions that have happened launching out of woodruff park the past week in which the police just tailed and surrounded the march on foot i think this march is just slightly i think this march is just slightly too big to use that tactic so they're surrounding them with vehicles instead as the march arrived at the atlanta police foundation the hundreds of protesters crammed onto the

sidewalk were greeted by armed apd officers riot police are standing in front of the boarded up atlanta police foundation headquarters at 191 peach tree there is a large large crowd in front of these relatively small amount of officers standing in front of the boarded up doors a few dozen cops some armed with ar-15s a lot of cops stationed outside the apf headquarters and even more stationed inside apf headquarters police blocked off traffic in the uh on this section of peach tree street um basically sandwiching everybody in they they could have mass arrested as i'm sure they wanted to yeah the police were ready to to mass arrest the entire time this is this is kind of a wild site we have hundreds of people staring down about three dozen officers from the alana

police department armed with ar-15s obviously all of their handguns but hundreds of hundreds of people holding signs staring down the police you can you can feel the kind of you can feel the temperature rising a little bit here the cops look very nervous as hundreds of people who are chanting at them and i'm not very happy or facing them down they're so they're so close together we're just sandwiched in this is such a tense situation right now no one in the crowd has any visible weapons of any kind of course they're holding big signs cops have some zip cuffs ready cops have all of their all their guns ready i was able to see inside the building via a small slit in the plywood there were tons of riot cops inside with shields and all the cops on the inside

of the building had gas masks strapped to their leg at least one riot cop on the other side of the door was wearing a unique armored suit not like the regular police suits with riot armor like on the outside this armored padding was built into the clothing he had these massive bulky leg pants with armor on the insides of them and like a massive riot helmet he was one of those cops who doesn't need a riot shield because his body is the riot shield it was very weird but for those first few minutes it was a very high stress situation in front of the apf building it felt like neither the crowd nor the police knew exactly what was about to go down as a few hundred angry protesters were pushed up against a line of armed police but as time went on you got the

impression that this crowd was probably not going to initiate conflict with the police and i feel like some of the mood is maybe kind of died down cops are starting to kind of move around the crowd a bit there's this cops being stationed to the north to the south to behind the crowd on the other side of the street we this could go so many ways right now this this could end in so many different scenarios but people have not initiated anything other than standing on the sidewalk and chanting and giving speeches if you look there's a small section of the apf building where they're still a tiny tiny tiny sliver of glass by one of the doors and you can see lots of lots of cops stationed inside with riot shields but uh i do not believe this crowd

is going to be busting down any doors camu franklin the founder of community movement builders was the last person to speak in front of the atlanta police foundation we know cop city is nothing but a strategy for overpolicing our communities we know that cop city is nothing but a strategy to stop our movements and what movements are those the movements against police violence and terrorism in our community it is in 2021 that they introduced this idea to start to put cop city out here to stop our movements when people were talking about the funding the police abolish the police find alternative to public safety they said hell no we want more police and they put that idea out there and the movement was born to stop cop city this movement is two

years old and it doesn't look like it's going to stop to me by the end you got this sense that this march did exactly what it wanted to there were 300 people standing like a foot away from two dozen cops staring them down giving speeches chanting if people wanted to other things could have happened this rally could have resulted in many ways many of them probably very ugly and carrying a very high cost the reason we did a march like this today was to say to all the naysayers black folks don't want cop city indigenous people don't want cop city white folks don't want cop city atlantis don't want cop city folks from outside Alaska don't want cop city nobody in the united states wants cop city the Palestinians don't want cop city the people in Latin America don't want

cop city no here in this world do we want cop city we wanted to make sure that we came in safety and we live in safety we wanted to make sure that we don't have any more political prisoners today that we wanted this to be a march about our unity and our safety in numbers and as we wrap up today that's what we want it's not like we got to give them an excuse when you're around the cop the same way when you're around a wild animal what do you got to do you got to be cautious you got to be careful you got to move a certain way you got to know which way to go because you're looking to protect your safety and right now looking to protect our safety so as we depart here today we are departing in unity we are departing together we are going to walk back

in close quarters together where our cars work if you're going to martyr you're going to walk close together with other people as you go to martyr if you need a band to pick you up if you can't take martyr two blocks this way by the problem so we want you to be safe secure because you want to be out here again to fight cop city there was a sense that the people there wanted to show that if they wanted to do things they could have but they knew that this was not the this was not the right time nor the right place restraint and an understanding of what like practice i would say in that situation is and i mean in the speeches that happened beforehand there was people from community movement builders from black votes matter a whole bunch of other

like a black led groups in the city and similarly like like what happened at the clergy event there was not a single width of condemnation of militant tactics of of of property destruction of actions that people take this they people there who gave speeches recognized that such tactics were a staple of the civil rights movement early saturday morning i woke up to news that police had begun another raid but instead of raiding the wallani forest the police were searching the 10 acre property of the lakewood environmental arts foundation or leaf a local nonprofit that was offering safe haven for people during the week of action all right so the land police have executed a warrant on the leaf meetup spot in southeast alanta that people have been using as a welcome

center as like a medic station and just another spot to hang out it was set up after the raid sunday night and it is now saturday morning the police have executed this warrant to search premises id everyone who's there we got a group of people is being able to leave right now there has been a prison transport vehicle called in and cops have like blocked off intersections around the area no one's allowed to get close people are not allowed to return to their cars people are not allowed to return to the private property since sunday night the land was being used as a medic hub and provided a secondary place to camp for those who didn't feel safe staying in the forest during their raid saturday morning police detained at least 22 people and refused to show anyone the

search warrant and yeah the group that got released is just walking up now maybe like two dozen people have been able to walk up um we just got through their police lines and um we're gonna yeah huddle up and and get to a safe place uh we were woken up by um helicopters there had been helicopters doing rounds all evening uh and i don't even know what time seven something we heard loud speakers saying that they had a warrant um for to search the property private property and um um that was very disorienting obviously i was in the middle of sleeping uh we came out with our hands open our hands up uh we had more than 20 guns pointed at us um some people have their fingers on triggers certainly they were screaming at me um and as i was waking up uh we came through

the line they said that they had a warrant to search the property we know that homeland security was one of the departments that was arrested that was part of the arrest through or extraction through or whatever um it's very traumatic obviously it's freezing this is the coldest day this week and so we are um you know worried about people's health because people are cold um they detained us they took identification it was yeah extremely violent situation but everyone here was really taking care of each other and remaining calm to address the raid activists scheduled a press conference for later that day after a youth rally to defend the forest was to take place in east village and i think you can hear said youths in the background so excuse their joyous young screams

we thought that it was important for us to not only amplify the wonderful children's march that happened here today the community in east atlanta this community where they are proposing to build cop city came out this morning overwhelmingly to say that they don't want cop city so we had parents we had children we had other neighbors and community stakeholders who gathered right here in brownwood park today at east atlanta to say that we are east atlanta and cop city is not a part of what we imagine and envision for this community also this morning unfortunately there is a place that was held as a commune for campers who wanted to stand in solidarity during this week of action the place is called leaf leaf that is the lakewood environmental arts

foundation a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to combating food insecurity here within the city of atlanta offered up their space to be used for people who did not feel safe camping in the forest because of the over aggression of police there and they wanted to stand in solidarity with this week of action so leaf offered up their space for those people to camp safely unfortunately this morning a gang of police officers descended upon that sacred space during the raid up to 40 officers swarmed the property ransacking the infrastructure set up at the leaf encampment site cops slashed apart two medical supply tents disrupting medic operations broke windows of a camper van parked on the site and ripped apart a greenhouse police took pictures

of the people detained at leaf and collected their ideas but after being held for several hours the police let all but one person go free to quote an article by kandace burned in truth out quote one person was arrested for an outstanding parking ticket demonstrating the state's desperation to snatch up anyone associated with the stop cop city movement uh good afternoon everybody uh my name is marlon kautz i'm an organizer with the atlanta solidarity fund um we're civil liberties and anti repression organization that exists to make sure that people who participate in social movements have the right to protest and don't suffer from repression um so the reason i'm here is because um as we've all heard previously there was an incident of political repression

early this morning police executed a search warrant and performed a raid against the lakewood environmental arts foundation which is a community space in lakewood atlanta that exists primarily to serve artists and musicians it's clear that it was part of a political strategy to repress and intimidate protesters who are associated with the stop cop city movement to defend the forest and this is very concerning um especially when taken in context um of course it's very likely that police are going to report that this was part of a routine uh investigation a law enforcement matter that they had every right to conduct the other thing that police are likely to claim is that they made an arrest on scene and our understanding is that uh they did make an arrest

due to somebody who was there having an old traffic ticket from a long time ago so it's important to to clarify that the arrest was because of a traffic ticket not because of any alleged crimes related to the movement or any other you know serious criminal activity uh so it's important that we understand this raid as part of a series of ongoing abuses of the legal process to harass and intimidate political protesters they were unable to demonstrate any criminal activity during their their raid on the lakewood environmental arts foundation but they're continuing to abuse every uh every justification that they can to to raid spaces to make arrests and to hold people in jail so before the police come out and

say we raided this place where all of these outside aggressors were and we picked up some violent offenders we want you to know that our brothers and sisters who were standing with us in solidarity just saying hey we want to camp here since we don't feel safe camping in the people's park that's been overrun with police repression and aggression they raided that place they snatched people up some people were sleeping they took pictures of people they took their IDs and they searched and searched found nothing else never produced a warrant and only one person was arrested because of an outstanding parking ticket about a week after the raid the guardian obtained evidence of the search warrant the warrant stated that there was probable cause for believing that

evidence of quote conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism unquote could be found at the lakewood location listed in the warrant were objects officers sought which included quote cameras radios boxes of nails lighters tents camping equipment spray paint black clothing and literature related to defend the forest these were the materials tied to domestic terrorism as the week progressed there were an increasing number of reports of police tailing people coming and going from a marches and especially the actions downtown basically officers would follow people suspected of participating in the movement pull them over try to ID anyone within the vehicles and then issue some nonsense traffic citation this continued on thursday after the community

movement builders march as people were heading home from the public park police stalked a few individuals and pulled over multiple vehicles a van carrying one of the speakers was targeted as well as two other cars that were pulled over as they were leaving the protest marlin from the atlanta solidarity fund talked about the various ways police have been using their power to intimidate activists and suppress protest our organization has gotten many reports of pretext stops of political protesters or people who are suspected of being political protesters because of bumper stickers on their car or the state that their license plate is from we've gotten reports of uh people being stop and frisked simply because they're profiled as looking like political activists

um and of course we've seen dozens of protesters or suspected protesters arrested and charged with domestic terrorism simply because they were found at a music festival that's associated with the stockopsity movement and so we can see that every step of the way police and prosecutors are abusing the legal process to intimidate and discourage this movement throughout this time police have been watching or monitoring one of the offsite locations in the forest um they've parked in front of this site and and uh kept up surveillance on it and then leading all the way up into friday uh there was a journalist pulled over leaving the final non-violent direct action from woodruff park um they were pulled over with two other people in the car and like detained briefly

uh ostensibly to you know continue to identify and and connect people a big part of the story for this week of action is the excess of the police response to quite typical acts of quote unquote non-violent protest the sorts that the government and even the police love to claim that they actually protect with every single action downtown this week virtually no laws were being broken not even any civil disobedience people were handing out flyers marching on sidewalks giving out letters and the police's response was to deploy swat to mobilize hundreds of officers to shut down multiple city blocks to carry ar-15s as they tail crowds of a few dozen people just walking on the sidewalk and yelling at people if they accidentally misstep off the curb and threaten

violent arrest this was the sort of extremely aggressive response to people doing protest quote unquote the right way we should highlight that that is the apparent goal of these protests was to show that even when they are doing things the right way this is how the state reacts to dissent it reacts in this militarized fashion where you like it's it's i think a big part of what's happened in these types of protests that have happened the past week is demonstrating why people are campaigning to stop cop city because the sheer amount of resources that the police already have in the city to be to be to be deploying hundreds and hundreds of officers every single day to respond to people handing out flyers uh it's like to respond to people who are walking on

the sidewalks they have they have this massive amount of of resources they are they're using tear gas in the woods they're using pepper balls they're using flash bangs they're they're having multiple different swat teams follow around people handing out pamphlets the level of police militarization in atlanta is already at this extremely high point and cop city is only going to intensify that and that is the reason they want to build cop city it's for this type of urban counter-insurgency training to quell civil unrest and to quell protest on thursday night we held a very peaceful and successful march in downtown atlanta starting at the king center we had someone who was stopped by the police and asked if he was picking up protesters taken out of the vehicle

handcuffed for no reason they couldn't find a reason to detain him any longer so they had to let him go but atlanta this is why we're standing against cop city because if cop city is built you can guarantee that you won't even be able to go to the grocery store without being harassed by the police for no reason at all when i spoke with matthew johnson he brought up a similar point with the resources that the police had to respond in the way that they did the assertion that they need more training in a militarized facility or they need more resources is crazy because you had them literally outnumbering protesters and kettling them and we have credible sources that say that there were SWAT forces who had instructed the officers to arrest nonviolent protesters

and there were actually police officers that refused to take that order which i think is another fascinating dynamic that is worth exploring and understanding more but just with the resources that they had to try to shut down protesters harass folks constantly ticket and pull over people that they saw you know creating like a logistical framework for the week of action is nuts and they're making our point for us like on friday the word came out that tortugita had bullet holes through both of their palms and that they were more than likely sitting cross leg with their hands up when they were shot by police and now we are supposed to be convinced that these people that lied about this killed somebody that was absolutely no threat to them on the same grounds

that they're trying to build this police training facility we're supposed to believe that this is going to make them less violent towards people like as you're building a militarized police training facility and like people that try to convince themselves that these is going to be a place where people are also being taught de-escalation tactics while like everything around that is militarized it's like if you had somebody build a water park and you're like oh yeah i'm just trying to stay dry i don't want to get splashed or anything like that and it's like oh no no no don't worry we have a food court right in the middle of it and it's great you're really just coming there for the food court so don't worry about it and then like you go there and then you get

splashed what were you expecting like that's obviously not what that facility is for because all the infrastructure around it is made to be a water park or a militarized police training facility so don't be surprised when maybe they might have one de-escalation program and like you know where the food court would be and then somebody gets killed right because they're actually building the infrastructure for killing so that's where we're at this week of action has shown a lot about how the police are operating post the 2020 uprising how they will respond to people exercising their first amendment right and the indiscriminate way that police will respond to any act of protest one of the main takeaways from this week is that their response to protest is deployed against

people without target or focus they care very little if you are breaking a window or if you're marching on the sidewalk they're still gonna send the SWAT team police are acting as if they are entirely incapable of differentiating between acts of dissent toward the end of the week i sat down and talked with an unnamed forest defender to get their thoughts on the week of action for security reasons we did a vocal replacement the police presence has been pretty unprecedented i haven't seen shit like that here since 2020 not downtown at least i mean shit i don't think we had seen gas in atlanta in a minute and then they gas the forest it'd been a while but yeah i mean they're punching out especially like tuesday they were putting out 150 200 cops the entirety of downtown i

mean multi-jurisdictional task forces deployed multiple different atlanta apd swat teams between like regular apd swat and apex which is like the drug and gang interdiction unit i mean a fucking whole drone unit gsp some weird unmarked cars that i won't speculate on helicopters all that shit you know the type of police response you would expect to see in like a dystopian fucking police state for some people handing out flyers that just say this is bad for the environment doesn't matter how milk toast or not and like i shouldn't say milk toast like that's not a bad thing we need people to go hand out flyers we need to inform people as far as what this is to get people involved but like as nonviolent as you can get and still they're gonna treat you like you're

fucking al-qaeda you know and it puts you in a weird position because then it's like okay cool if you're gonna treat us the exact same for being nonviolent why not do crime if the police response to an assault on an outpost that drove the police out and burned five things down the police response to 15 people handing out flyers downtown are going to be about the same then why not take more militant radical action the 23 people arrested on sunday march 5th were not arrested as anyone was torching equipment they were not arrested at the powerline cut it was people who were attending a music festival arrests were not widely targeted against people who police knew were engaged in property destruction they were targeted against anyone the cops could grab

same was the case at the january 21st action where people were marching downtown the saturday after tortugita was killed the only people arrested and subsequently charged with domestic terrorism was anyone the police could get their hands on officers went after people who were carrying banners the entire duration of the march it was not targeted against people who were engaged in militant action among all this talk of police repression and multiple raids it's easy to overlook that throughout the week people still sought opportunities for finding joy and resistance because most people wouldn't dedicate years of their life to this if it was just miserable battles with police the whole time i think one thing that's been lost in all of this

too is all of the light-hearted events that have continued to go on through the week and like the joy of the movement that was represented in in the bouncy castle rip but that joy is continuing in the woods like people are people still continue to camp in the woods people are still having dinner in the woods people are still having campfires people are still talking the woods it is still a place that people are gathering at and are enjoying each other is company in now enjoying the woods it is it is a place that the morale has never been fully crushed the morale has never been fully crushed and like the participatory acts of the week of action are continuing like none of that has been quashed an example of the joyful

continuous resistance during the week of action can be found at the youth rally that happened on saturday the 11th all right so i'm at the youth rally saturday after the uh warrant was served on the meetup spot in southeast atlanta there's around 200 people marching through east village in atlanta pretty pretty joyous group here actually and they're actually like on the streets this is the first time we've had a large march like this take to the streets because every uh every action that was in downtown or midtown atlanta was just so heavily surveilled by police who were not letting anyone get near the street at all but there's no police here uh they were busy doing the search for and so this group is actually is actually able to take to the streets it's like everyone everyone

kind of in this area of atlanta is pretty uh pretty pro pro this little protest here there's like workers from the little shops and stores nodding along folham county shares just walked by the march like on there just you know off shift workout routine wearing folham county gear that's pretty funny people dancing in the streets families walking with their kids through the streets all right i'm walking around the park that the youth rally started at and the uh press conference about the raid this morning just ended at there's as you can probably hear kids playing in the park people are handing out food massive massive amount of food just in the middle of the park with like always the table set up

overall this is kind of one of the more joyous events that we've had since the initial saturday rally at gresham park just with the amount of food the amount of kids just running around and playing all of uh all the information tables that are handing out literature and giving you know making connections with people yeah when i was down here in in january the mood was very somber the mood was very grim like coming to the vigil when there was the destroyed remains of the gazebo the torn up parking lot all of the trees in there still within their like winter state with all of the league has gone everything was very kind of barren and the first thing i noticed on saturday as we were marching is like there's new life springing in the woods there's this invigorated sense of

the the almost assurance of victory that people are carrying with them as they take action and i think that really does change what the action you take is and that does change the types of results that people will see is if they go at this with the idea that we are going to win this and i think that that is kind of why the nonviolent direct actions have become like have moved to the fore right when you think that you're going to lose and you have nothing to lose you engage in these incredibly radical actions because what else are you going to do and then when you have this belief that no we can win we just have to find that pathway and that is a part of the diversity of tactics is is using both of those and almost every ecological

movement that's been successful has demonstrated that the pathway to success is often paved with a diversity of tactics with people doing nonviolent action at you know noon which will pull a massive militarized police response as people are doing regular ass shit and then a part of diversity of tactics is also people leaving a music festival to go torch a bulldozer and both both of those things are a diversity of tactics now i stand by most of that statement however issues can arise when there is a ticking clock and during the time spent looking for this pathway the enemy meanwhile is making steady progress issues may also arise when a large diversity of tactics is shoved under just one roof i had a lot of conversations with movement participants regarding

the direct action that happened on sunday night and how it cast a shadow of repression over the whole week of action to synthesize the many conversations in general most people thought that what physically happened was good the actual actions at the north gate were successful and justified but there are other things on the periphery of that action that make it slightly more complicated and now we can have lots of questions about tactics and cost-benefit analysis about that action which i did not think it would be wise especially being so visible for me to have to be anywhere near on that day we can have questions about that but what was for certain was that the way in which the police responded was absurd and predictably so now with the

destruction that i saw etc it cost them less than a million dollars and maybe like two weeks actually of construction that they were pushed back max these are like max numbers was that worth 23 people being arrested and quoting what could have been a larger occupation and wider participation and wider buying in the movement instead by the time we got to monday the clergy was having to do cleanup rather than like cast division of what the world could be and so these are trade-offs right where even though we have to be very clear about what a diversity of tactics means and also a separation of time and space so i mean we can't just look at a diversity of tactics and everybody does what they want as if they're operating in a silo but rather we give space for one another to do different

things that may work respectful of the fact that some of our actions may affect one another in the lead-up to the week of action nighttime sabotage actions decreased around atlanta in favor of these big public demos during daylight that seemed to result in more people getting arrested and one of the results of sunday's action happening in such close proximity to the festival and the encampments is that the people at the festival and in the woods who did not consent to participating in a high-profile direct action got disproportionately hit with the immediate repression from police a lot of the people who were arrested were completely unaware of the actions that took place at the north gate even if those actions were 100% justified in the end it still creates

a dynamic with an unequal distribution of police violence now obviously the woods are an inherently dangerous place to be and people are not responsible for actions that police choose to take but there are still considerations to be had regarding the proximity of space and time when engaging in more risky actions and how the consequences of those actions may affect people who did not consent to participating in actions at other locations especially when people are lulled into a false sense of safety by claiming that police have never cracked down hard in the forest during previous weeks of action yeah in terms of the actions done sunday in reference to a group of people assaulting like police position driving them out with force and then burning their shit

that was all good and we should not denounce that or step away from it it only harms the movement to back away from radical action and act like there are definitions of good and or bad protesters because eventually the logical conclusion of that is snitching and that only furthers like the gbi's motivations to tear the movement apart what went wrong sunday is is a result of two things it's one that the police use indiscriminate violence when people beat them they were beaten they got angry and they were beaten because they got their shit rocked by like fireworks and then they use indiscriminate violence against people who they knew were on the side of like where the events were that weren't where all the militants were coming back from they didn't want to go up

against those people because they're cowards and second because of how big the movement's gotten over the past two years the strategy of the weeks of action has stagnated it's made it so work so compact in a singular week that when you have all the diversity of tactics that exist within defend the Atlanta forest and stop cop city those tactics with how big everything is now they start to step on each other's toes they can hurt each other sometimes because yeah not everyone who was at the rc field was like ready for the consequences of like a militant radical action like that and that doesn't mean that the action wasn't good or justified because the action was wildly successful there were no arrests made at that action there were arrests made when the

police got angry and used indiscriminate violence because they were pissed off and they wanted to riot so they retaliated at a music festival that was happening nearby yes and that's the fault of nobody but the police that's not the fault of the people who went and assaulted that outpost that's only the fault of the police and really the fault of a bad long-term strategy of two heavily compacting factors of you know being just like a week and where making it so this movement where people can take radical action it feels so limited to just inside the forest because yeah that puts people in harm's way and that that put people in harm's way including the people who you know went and did the thing on sunday but no it would be wrong as the movement to like bulk at a radical

action like that radical action like that is such a big part of why this movement has been as successful as it has been it's a huge part of why the police didn't do like a full sweep or a larger sweep or a series of raids in the following days because they were afraid that those 300 to 400 people who hit that outpost were lying and waiting in the forest ready to attack them because they were afraid of militant radical action on thursday when i was in front of the apf building i could like hear some of the supervisors and coordinators talking about being scared of ambushes or like being scared of splinter groups like being staged to attack officers it's it's bizarre how fearful they are of the types of people who are opposing the cop city project they're the most afraid of

the people who are willing to go do physical violence to them and not even physical violence but people who are just willing to like throw a rock at them or like a firework once they realize that they haven't paralyzed somebody with fear once they realize that they've not made you so afraid of taking action they become such cowards in the aftermath of the police killing forest defender tortugita law enforcement agencies tried to claim that tortugita shot at them first leaving one officer injured but recently released findings from multiple autopsies have cast more doubt on the state's version of events on the afternoon of friday march 10th towards the end of the week of action the family of tortugita released the findings of an independent autopsy done by former gbi

chief medical examiner dr christ spary the results suggested that tortugita was sitting cross-legged with their hands in front of their face when shot and bullet exit wounds through the palms of both of their hands the family ordered autopsy also did not find any evidence of gunshot residue from a gsr test kit and then a month later de cab county released the results of their official autopsy which found at least 57 bullet wounds across tortugita's body and according to this autopsy tort did not have any gunpowder residue on its hands then a few days later via a public records request the atlantic community press collective received the gunshot residue test kit from the georgia bureau of investigations crime lab the document contained the names of six

georgia state patrol swat members who shot and killed tortugita bryland l mires jerry a perish jonathan salseda jonathan mark lamb ronaldo kegel and roice zaw with zaw being the subject of a lawsuit after he shot a protester in the face with a less lethal round during the george floyd protests in may of 2020 the document also included the results of the gbi's crime lab report claiming that they found quote the presence of more than five particles characteristic of gunshot primer residue unquote from a test kit with the report also stating quote it should be noted that it is possible for a victim of gunshot wounds to have gsr present on their hands unquote considering that among the more than 57 gunshot wounds were entrance and exit wounds on tortugita's hands

which could be caused for gunshot residue if the crime lab findings are genuine the findings do not point to any specific interpretation of events as it's not unusual to find primer residue on the hands of a victim following the path of a bullet plus coupled with the ever-changing story from the gbi on the ground chatter from apd officers claiming that georgia state patrol quote fucked their own officer up unquote as well as reports from force defenders from the day of the shooting there is indication that georgia state patrol most likely suffered from so-called friendly fire with many people believing that the killing of tortugita was essentially an execution instant reports obtained via public records requests also revealed that gsp fired a quote

unquote a less lethal pepperball gun at tortugita's tent as a swat initially approached once again contradicting the claims made by gbi officials in the months since the killing as the week came to a close on sunday march 11th a memorial service for tortugita was held in the wilani forest where torts family spread their ashes in the forest it died to protect i attended the sunday morning memorial the sky opened up and poured down rain in south atlanta throughout the whole morning hundreds of people gathered in wilani people's park to light candles under a canopy and hear from torts family then led by tortugita's mother we walked through the forest to the site of the shooting where a banner hung that read quote on this ground gsp assassinated

forest defender comrade friend lover tortugita unquote family and friends spread tortugita's ashes throughout the woods along the path to quote kandace burned in truth out in contrast to its tumultuous start sunday's vigil and ceremony provided a somber and heartfelt close to the fifth week of action i met up with matthew johnson after the memorial to discuss the week of action and we briefly touched on the memorial in the forest i think that we have to hold space for very real grief uh we lost a friend and at the same time just two days ago on a friday what we always knew to be true was found to clearly be true tortugita was murdered and we have to bear the brunt of that pain and all the people in power lied and even gave their

condolences to a state trooper that seemed as if he he was shot by a state trooper and did not say a mumbling word to even acknowledge our friend's existence and the value of their life and this morning was beautiful i had been able to meet bill keys uh tortugita's mother previously and she really does have a beautiful spirit i've really grown appreciation for that family um and just to see just how large these gatherings were like throughout the week even in spite of the hoopla in the opening weekend it was very encouraging uh but in a lot of ways tortugita has become the face of this movement uh because they really did in light up wherever they were uh one thing that's gotten me through i'm just thinking about

when you would just see them sometime and they would just give you the biggest like cheesiest smile like out of nowhere just and like that like got me through the first week uh after their passing um yeah i but uh i've grown a great appreciation for that family because in so many ways tortugita is their hero and just to learn how consistent they were as like such a welcoming and loving and caring person just meant so much i mean to know that this wasn't something new that they had stumbled upon they had lived this whole life of caring and making space for others some of tort's friends have raised concerns that a side effect of tort unwittingly becoming the face of the movement is that the details around their death have eclipsed some of what they died

fighting for in doing so stripping tort of their individuality and removing their own agency to turn them into this perfect liberal friendly avatar of the movement to simply be used as a political tool and add to a list of demands there's a thing that's been happening more and more recently that i've been bothered by which is when organizations specifically more liberal organizations are invoking torts name at actions they're misgendering the hell out of them and it's alienating a lot of people and i understand that sunday's action alienated a lot of liberal orgs this is a problem with the weak of action type strategy with the diversity of tactics all being forced under one roof but we cannot stand to alienate each other and it's really frustrating

and really angering to see this really beautiful soul be flattened into just a murder that these liberals want them to be stripping them of so much of their life and what was a revolutionary life and a revolutionary death into just martyrdom by taking away their identity and who they were and making them nothing more than someone who was murdered when they were someone who was living such a full and beautiful life until the day they died and this movement will tear itself apart if we do not accept the fullness of torts life what it stood for and what they live for this movement has always been built on a lot of trans people in the woods fucking the cops up and if we alienate those people we're fucked there's no winning and we

can't lose we don't have a choice about this anymore we have to win by any means necessary that will wrap up our day-to-day coverage of the entire week of action but much has happened in the intervening two months so in the next episode we'll cover where the movement is now discuss the future of the fight to stop cop city and offer a more critical retrospective on the fifth week of action see you on the other side music festival audio courtesy of unicorn riot between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway fans this child was

laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst people i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swaying in the wind picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silenced the radio murders they left the body there for reasons it was the calling card it's like the

mafia used to do and yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy this year they clearly gave it me in life and was voloshen listen to silence the radio murders on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at the iconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlord sold the rank but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitar what what's happening where are we wait look at this tember 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the

present einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought the lethal lid daughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time travel adventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past to save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast welcome back to it could happen here this is a bonus fifth episode following my coverage of the stop cop city week of action in march of 2023 this will be a more critical retrospective on the week as a whole and offer a glimpse into what the movement might look like in the next few months as we are rapidly approaching summer in the last episode we talked about the

police repression of protests and demonstrations as they happen but we have yet to mention the various methods of state repression the movement is facing day to day repression for the week of action started well before the kickoff rally in gresham park emails from early february obtained via public records requests found that the atlanta police foundation and its contractors were waiting for quote indictments to the leaders unquote of the stop cop city and defend the atlanta forest movement to quote the atlantic community press collective in a february third email to apf board members the director of public affairs rob baskin calls the defend the atlanta forest and stop cop city movement a quote conspiracy of protesters against the public safety training center

investigated by a consortium of federal state and local law enforcement agencies unquote baskin promised the apf board in an email quote that the recent arrests are receipt of the land disturbance permit the mayor's announcement of the project will be moving forward and the continued investigation by law enforcement will dampen activists efforts we will likely see more indictments in the coming weeks unquote back in february breastfield and gory the general contractor for the project planned to mobilize for land clearing around april but told the atlanta police foundation that subcontractor bidding wouldn't happen quote until indictments have happened unquote and then of course a few weeks later 23 people were charged with domestic

terrorism at a music festival matt from the atlantic community press collective talked about the history of domestic terrorism charges in the movement and how they affected bail proceedings the domestic terrorism charges go back to like the middle of december that's when the first of them happened and up until the week of action there have been a total of 19 arrests or individuals who have been charged with domestic terrorism and then of those people anyone who did not have either a georgia license or could not prove like georgia residency they were all initially denied uh bond but everyone who who lives here they were able to to get bond before the bond hearing we're kind of there there are discussions that there's no way that they're going to hold

23 people without bond with on such flimsy evidence that's the most people that have been like arrested and held in one in one day it really is in in relation to the movement so far yeah the largest mass arrest of the of the movement so it's it's kind of inconceivable for 23 people to be held without bond so we get to the bail hearing the first person has their mother come on their lawyer brings their mother on who swears essentially on like every religious text ever written that her child will immediately go home with her and she will personally bring her child back back to every court hearing and her child will have no you know further contact with with the movement and all of these things and the judge denies the bond so at that point it's like okay

they're you know i guess we're going to go back to the old thing if you can't prove residency you're you're you're not getting out uh it was like person number five is from Athens georgia which is about an hour outside of Atlanta and the judge denies her bond not because the judge thinks she's a flight risk but because she is a threat to the community and that was the moment where the understanding changed it was like oh no like nobody's getting out of yeah this this isn't this isn't a real this isn't a real bond here at the press conference after the leaf raid camau franklin from the community movement builders spoke about the years of state repression against people fighting to stop cop city this movement has been repressed by the state by the

city such as very beginnings where we first started organizing in 2021 where we had rallies and demonstrations we would have police break them up throw people to the ground pepper spray them and arrest them we had over 20 arrests in our first years of rallying and demonstrating against cop city at the time those folks were charged with resisting arrests obstruction of governmental administration and then the police decided to step up their tactics and they started to to form a task force a task force that included the atlanta police the de cab county police the georgia bureau of investigation georgia state troopers the federal bureau of investigation and homeland security where they began to talk about bringing charges of domestic terrorism

against organizers and activists and so now we're coming to a point where they're raiding houses where they're telling organizers and activists that they can't stand on corners and legally get about leaflets and then the judge kept saying like i'm not here to hear anything on evidentiary claims and i'm not here to engage with the domestic terrorism statute like both of those were i think very valid things that defense attorneys kept bringing up because yeah they're problematic yeah one of the defense attorneys mentioned that the way people are being charged with domestic terrorism right now doesn't really have any legal basis in the state of georgia because the terrorism law works as like an enhancement for other felonious charges and

these people aren't being charged with anything besides domestic terrorism there's no evidence these people committed any any actual crimes so they're just being charged with terrorism this like a nebulous concept um the judge said that the legal basis of these claims will have to be decided on another day um similarly they said that in regards to like actual evidence that these people charged did any crimes she said that she had none of this evidence in front of her and that evidence is for another day one of the main reasons the judge said that defendants were denied bond was due to quote a lack of ties to community in atlanta but regarding this ties to the community aspect the judge had this weird double standard there was this one person arrested

and charged who lives with their partner in atlanta who also had ties to another state where they had previously lived so despite them having ties to the community in atlanta which was one of the main things the judge considered for this one individual they were still denied bond on the basis that this individual also has ties to a different community thus deeming them a flight risk even though they currently live in atlanta one of the reasons that the judge mentioned based on the arrest warrants that she was given for why these people were a threat to the community is that the state claims that they were in possession of metal shields as they were being arrested you know shields the the offensive weapon that that shows that you're a threat

you holding a shield and so first of all that's that's that's funny on us on that on that level when you and i were coming in um on saturday uh and along with the march we passed by a bunch of shields right and they were kind of placed um near the end of the path like in anticipation that there might be police presence and i took pictures of the shields um and it they are evidently plastic shields there's no way of mistaking them for anything other than plastic the the plastic five gallon shields that you see at almost every protest in every city across the country the cops know what these things are the fact that they claim that people were arrested carrying metal shields is so ludicrous because there was not there was not a single metal shield at this music

festival and there's a lot of footage of these arrests i don't there's i've not seen evidence that every that any person was arrested that was carrying a shield let alone a metal one there's this weird thing where um so typically when you do these these bail hearings um the the defense attorneys wave the reading of the warrant um typically because they have already gone over that with their client and you know everybody's aware and it just kind of speeds up the process and it was like really notable that these attorneys weren't doing it and once you started to listen to them you you notice this very repetitive nature of them and so about halfway through we get to a lawyer who straight up calls out the fact that these warrants seem like they were

just copy pasted for like every single person all the way down line during the first hearing only one person was let out on bail and they were an nlg legal observer and lawyer at the southern poverty law center after the week of action on march 23rd there were a second set of bail hearings for 10 of the people arrested on march 5th at the south river music festival in a rare move the second in command of the state of georgia's attorney general's office john fowler was deployed to argue against granting bond fowler along with several top county prosecutors weaved a complex narrative of a grand conspiracy of protesters dating back to 2019 saying that the quote unquote organization behind defend the forest is responsible for quote

100 incidents nationwide unquote fowler claimed that the forest defenders are a well-funded group with millions of dollars hiding behind 501c3 nonprofit organizations and at the so-called autonomous zone at the wendy's where rayshard brooks was murdered in 2020 is a part of the same organization fowler also attempted to tie the use of laser pointers in the forest to a racial justice protests in 2020 as well as a sophisticated communication network of prepaid phones telegram channels proton males and rise up accounts prosecutor landscross stated that the quote unquote leader of the defend the land of forest movement never actually goes into the forest okay so to paraphrase a friend of mine as potentially dangerous as claims like these are

it will never stop being funny that the state just simply cannot conceive of horizontal organizing as like a real thing that exists and not just a smoke screen for this shadowy cabal of protesters prosecutor landscross claimed that anyone at the music festival is a party to the crime of the direct action that took place around one and a half kilometers away at the construction site and that after the direct action individuals left to return to the other side of the woods crossing over the creek and changing out of their black block for the first defendant at this hearing prosecutor cross said that there's police helicopter video of this first person changing out of their black block but when asked by the judge if the state has any evidence that this

defendant did anything illegal not just change clothing in a forest the prosecutor was unable to provide any such evidence this defendant received a $25,000 bond with a stay away from georgia order and a no contact order with any co-defendants or anyone associated with the defend the atlanta forest movement only one other defendant was granted bond during this hearing a second year law student who was arrested as they were eating food at a food truck at the hearing they presented letters of support from tibetan monks a former mayor numerous academics and charlotte's mayor pro tem was on the call bond was also set at 25k along with having to surrender their passport to wear an ankle monitor and maintain no contact with co-defendants nor

join any future protests to paraphrase my friend again these are old green scare tactics back in action and kicked into high gear courts are being used as a meat cleaver to hack off and isolate people from their communities regardless of evidence this is the type of repression that courts were born to do much of the repression we're seeing in atlanta is a revamped version of the green scare with additional tactics and knowledge the state gained from the 2020 protests including the targeting of jail support and bail fund organizations another thread in this grand cabal of forest defenders narrative that the state was trying to weave was that prosecutors claimed that having an atlanta solidarity fund jail support number on your person is evidence of criminal

intent and that the solidarity fund is quote being investigated as a part of this whole thing unquote the majority of the eight individuals denied bond were not even found to be at the site of the direct action and none of the eight individuals had any evidence against them showing they committed any crime at that location but were still deemed a risk to the community and denied bond being held against them is the fact that they had a jail support number on their person as former communications director at the southern center of human rights hannah riley said it is a gross irony that a jail support number is being framed as evidence of intent to commit crimes where in fact it's evidence that we live in a horrifying police estate a defense attorney pointed

out that all of the warrants had the same bits of evidence copy pasted like this alleged possession of a metal shield to which the prosecution claimed this was simply a typo meaning that people were being held in jail based on typos and also the prosecutor responded by saying quote they were 30 40 50 shields out there i can't attest that he was carrying one when referring to a specific defendant for one individual denied bond prosecutors claimed that they were in anarchist based on information provided by customs and border protection and yet no evidence of criminal acts were presented extra scrutiny was put on two defendants who were foreign nationals with prosecutors wondering how someone from out of country could possibly know the solidarity fund a jail support

number a defense attorney tried to point out that jail support numbers are often passed out to everyone present at protests by volunteers and in the case of the circumstances regarding the raid of the music festival panicked concert goers were instructed to write down the jail support number as it became clear that police were indiscriminately grabbing people deputy attorney general fallor argued that wearing black clothes at a protest is akin to wearing a football uniform indicating a player was part of the team who took to the field during the game and even if we may not know they carried the football we do know that they were on the field which i i i don't even want to get into but it is still a fact that the majority of people were denied bond because some had black

clothing mud on their shoes and ran from police this is what made them a quote unquote threat to our community and this is the evidence being used against people who were allegedly engaged in domestic terrorism near the end of the hearing the judge claimed that everyone is presumed innocent and that the state does have to bear the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt at some point but not now during this bail hearing one of the claims was that the reason why people were arrested is because they had mud on their clothes the night before the festival started there was a tornado warning in atlanta i forgot about that and there was rain which makes i i don't know if the prosecutors know this but when rain mixes with dirt it creates something called that we that we refer to as mud

so when people are you know at this music festival in a field full of dirt they might get mud on their clothes and yeah so when you if you've ever been to a music festival uh standing around for a very long period of time really annoying people like to sit down uh so i like my feet were caked in mud and i sat down a few times i'm i'm my dr martins are still caked in mud not to mention the parking lot completely torn up covered in mud and as i mentioned earlier the you know the person who having like fill in mud all along the trails with gravel so there's mud everywhere and it is an inescapable fact of just being in both the forest and the festival at the time of the bail hearings they very clearly had no evidence linking individuals to crimes so the best they could come

up with was metal shields and mud two things two things that are completely nonsense there was no there was no metal shields and oh wow you have mud on your you have mud on your clothing this is why you're a terrorist during the hearing a defense lawyer alleged that the 12 people who were detained at the music festival but not arrested and were later released at Gresham Park were all from Atlanta and by releasing these 12 locals police can claim that the people arrested were from 14 different states which is obviously part of an attempt to continue accelerating the outside agitator narrative that they've been pushing out since last in December of the 23 who were charged only two had the the Georgia licenses the person from Athens and the legal observer the rest were out of state

and two were out of country so at one point during the proceedings the the the bail proceedings one of the lawyers says that from what they understand the 12 individuals who were let go Sunday night all had in-state licenses so it does appear that that APD released people to continue this this outside agitator narrative that they have been using for for months now since since uh since may since early summer prosecutor cross responded to claims that detained local atlantans were let go by saying that the people released were interviewed did not have the jail support number on their arm and quote-unquote knew little about the movement at a press conference marlin from the solidarity fund talked about how repression has taken form and concerns of what

other tactics the state may try to employ no evidence has been presented to support any of these claims of domestic terrorism including on the other 18 people who've been given this charge previously in this movement police and prosecutors are not involved in a law enforcement effort they're involved in a political campaign to suppress a political movement which they find objectionable because as the police they have a vested interest in the construction of cop city from a civil liberties perspective we find this very concerning we find it to be an abuse of power and we're committed to ensuring that all of the activists who are targeted have access to the legal resources that they need not only to defend themselves from these bogus charges but also to

pursue civil litigation against police who have abused their power and violated people's rights we are concerned about the possibility uh that prosecutors may try to use rico charges against organizers um because rico has understood as a way of suppressing organizations um and the narrative that we've seen coming from police and prosecutors is their belief that the broad and diverse stock cop city movement is in fact a criminal conspiracy whose members conspire to commit acts of terrorism this could not be further from the truth this is like a clear misrepresentation of a broad movement that encompasses all of society um but this is the narrative that prosecutors are trying to promulgate to make it easier to target activists in the intervening

month and a half five more people were let out on bond then on may 3rd a series of preliminary hearings took place for the last three people being held into cab county jail from amongst the 23 individuals arrested at the music festival and charged with domestic terrorism before the changes to the law in 2017 the state of georgia required 10 or more people to be killed for domestic terrorism charges to even be filed during a wave of anti protest bills while citing racially motivated mass shootings to get the bill passed the state of georgia removed any death threshold and essentially replaced it with references to property damage to quote a write-up by the atlantic community press collective quote the cab county magistrate judge james altman explained that he decided

whether to uphold the charges based on two criteria the first was whether prosecutors provided enough evidence to satisfy the conditions set forth in the georgia domestic terrorism statute namely the threat to critical infrastructure the second criteria prosecutors needed to meet was identification or their ability to show that the defendants were each a party to the alleged crimes committed on march 5th unquote and it's worth noting that the threshold for probable cause is much lower than the threshold needed to convict someone of a crime in opening arguments assistant da lance cross claims that defend the forest activists are well funded and quote have a pretty good propaganda arm on social media unquote and that doing direct action while chanting stop cop

city qualifies activists to be charged under the georgia domestic terrorism statute because it's using violence to advocate change of government policy judge altman found that the first criteria of the domestic terrorism charges were met for all three defendants on the basis that setting fires at the construction site in such close proximity to a power line tower was an attack on critical infrastructure even if the defendants did not themselves start any fires georgia bureau of investigation special agent ryan long testified that the entire music festival was cover for the direct action against the construction site even without evidence of defendants in black block or proof that they engaged in any destructive acts assistant da cross said that everyone at the

site was enabling the destruction of the property and as such is party to the crime due to the assertion that the alleged crimes were only possible due to the large size of the crowd one of the state's witnesses a sergeant of the apd said that he wouldn't be able to recognize anyone who was at the site and that he could not tell if the defendant was even in the crowd of people at the north gate let alone through rocks or set fires defense argued that mere presence at a location should not be automatic aiding and abetting but judge altman said there was sufficient evidence presented showing the acts of the crowd and that the defendants presence is at least sufficient for being party to the crime even by simply participating at the music festival one of the

hearings was for the indigenous person who was tased at the music festival who was specifically witnessed to be there during the duration of the direct action under questioning from the defense special agent long said that the defendant was not visible on the helicopter footage of the incident after initially suggesting that the defendant was identified by a helicopter pilot long rolled that back by saying he was unsure if the chopper was able to track the defendant and then had to leave to go make a few calls to get a more definitive answer which he failed to provide but the judge still found that the second criteria of identification was sufficient to find two of the defendants at least party to the actions at the construction site special agent

long testified that there is a quote-unquote command structure in the stop cop city movement and described the movement as a pyramid scheme created by activists with different names like stop cop city and defend the forest to act as little different subgroups to attract new subordinate members to operate under leadership long asserted that activists pretend to be ecologists one day and then anarchists the next to further their cause which once again we have to point out is on one hand a dangerous thing to claim on the other hand extremely funny social media posts were brought up by prosecutors as evidence linking defendants to criminal acts and a conspiracy of terrorism during the first hearing special agent long claimed that they knew that the defendant

was at the construction site due to street pull camera footage and social media posts allegedly made by the defendant's friend in another hearing agent long claimed that on the defendants social media there were posts of stop cop city banners and flyers demonstrating an awareness of the nature of the stop cop city movement the state also cited alleged social media posts of the defendant self-describing as anti-capitalist and anti-colonial as proof of criminal intent near the end of the last hearing judge altman said that social media posts do not count towards probable cause however the framing of social media posts by prosecutors as an indication of guilt is still cause for alarm and what gets admitted as evidence during trial is still yet to be determined when the prosecution

asked if a defendant had a jail support number on their arm the judge noted that quote the existence or non-existence of an organization doesn't really seem to me as an element of the crime unquote similar to the march 23rd hearings prosecutor johnson tried to argue that the solidarity fund and jail support is an arm of the stop cop city movement to which the judge reiterated that participation in an alleged organization is not part of the crime of domestic terrorism for one defendant the judge granted bond on the conditions of $25,000 bail with the defendant having to turn over her passport a no contact order with other co-defendants and no participation in discussion of stop cop city on social media bond for the other two defendants

was denied ultimately judge altman upheld the domestic terrorism charges against all three defendants on the low barrier of evidence sufficient for ruling probable cause judge altman said that quote whether it gets any further than that is not my problem unquote and that if the da wanted further charges brought against defendants he must use a grand jury as the judge did not find probable cause for arson or assault on an officer judge altman mentioned that he was concerned about alleged witness intimidation by members of the defend the forest movement meanwhile in the adjacent folton county there was also a preliminary hearing for one of the six people arrested at the protest in downtown atlanta on january 21st the saturday following the killing

of tortiguita judge ashley drake upheld a total of eight charges including one of domestic terrorism and the next day the defendant was released on bail one thing of note from this hearing is that deputy attorney general john fowler compared the defend the forest movement to 911 by saying quote protesters were trying to knock out the windows of 191 peach tree street that is a dangerous situation that's a twin towers unquote when talking about the various hearings i mentioned helicopter and street pole camera footage of the direct action on sunday that both prosecutors and the defense were using to support their claims and i think it's worth diving a bit deeper into specifically the police helicopter footage since i like keeping up with the methods

that police are using to surveil and suppress protest i'm going to start by letting atlanta police chief darin shearbaum walk us through what was able to be observed via helicopter mounted cameras based on his testimony during the city council meeting that took place less than 24 hours after the incident individuals were seeing changing out of the clothes that they were wearing at the concert and we're now dressing themselves in all black with backpacks with items fencing of nature approaching what we saw is this group move rather quickly to the site for the proposed public safety training center they move quickly on the group of officers that were assembled there these officers had been stationary at the site protecting the location

in the first line there are individuals with shields that are forming the officers attempted to first to deescalate by repositioning themselves thank you repositioning themselves inside of the fenced in area the officers again start to reposition because they can tell this is not a peaceful demonstration she just start to see smoke occurring as fires are set multiple cocktails are thrown and fireworks are discharged from our air unit that is deployed in the area you will see individuals that are started to move against the officers they will have start throwing rocks fireworks as they are pushing the officers in the area where we see individuals as another group is engaging the officers with rocks Molotov cocktails and bottles are moving to set fire to the various

equipment that in the area what you see in the left hand of the gentleman with the mask over his face is a Molotov cocktail it is being there will be accelerants in his hands that will be used also to attack some of the construction equipment that is in the area these individuals are masked hide their identity this is playing out across the area that had been previously been fenced in there will be generators that are be destroyed other pieces of equipment that's being destroyed there you see more accelerant being thrown onto the vehicle that is being set on fire and what you see here ladies and gentlemen is as some of the individuals that had just previously attacked the work site returned back into the woods they start changing back into the clothes that they

were just wearing moments before as they were portraying themselves to be attendees of the event that was occurring in the music so it was clear today that we saw a repeat of what we've seen in the past where events that are shown to be peaceful and to be being publicized as be peaceful are being used by individuals as cover to launch illegal and criminal attacks we had a rapid response from our partners at the decaps county police department the sheriffs of folton county as well as the george state patrol those officers entered into the woods as individuals were attempting to flee hide the weapons they had just used as well as to change their clothing and we began to make a number of arrests i spoke with the unnamed forest defender about the

surveillance capabilities of the state on full display during the week of action i find that thermal helicopter video fascinating for a variety of reasons one it's interesting to look at the surveillance capacity of the state it's to my memory the first time the apd has ever posted their own thermal chopper footage it's a very similar camera to the type you would see on a bi-reactor or on some kind of armed unmanned aerial vehicle what i found most interesting about the thermals is exactly how they were using that type of targeting software to track people and i think it's worth people knowing what they were doing with it so we have an idea how to counter it when you're using a software to track targets on an optical lens at least during a daytime event

thermals are easier because it breaks the image up into just two colors white and then like black and gray so they can track the body heat shapes of people in white and then just click the thermals off get a snapshot of the outfit they're wearing click the thermals back on and track them easier than it is to track them with just a normal camera this gives them a clear image of what they're wearing before they de-blocked and then they can go back to tracking that person follow them to where they're de-blocking wait for them to de-block get another picture with the regular camera and then arrest them so that meant that when people were leaving it was advantageous to be de-blocking under overhead cover under thick brush under thick canopy out of direct line of

sight with the chopper you know not in the open air it's definitely a really hard thing to counter the surveillance states one of the things that i find the most fearful about the police state not like individual beat cops their guns and shit are cool or whatever but man those cameras they're really something you know i think the portland police bureau just got a new spy plane a new sesna loaded up with surveillance equipment and shit like that all that stuff does so much more to fuck you up than just like a riot team does you can throw mortars at a riot team sorry i shouldn't say mortars fireworks that are called mortars my bad don't want to lean into the explosives narratives honestly they're fucking weird about fireworks but uh you know the surveillance capacities

are one of the hardest things to counter one term that's already come up during our coverage of stop cop city is fukos boomerang and while that still applies here we're now also kind of getting into some panopticon territory as shown by this type of surveillance capacity specifically at actions and one of the biggest reasons why the panopticon works is that people are scared of it it scares you away from even taking action in the first place and like as soon as you overcome that paralyzing fear the cops become really afraid of you that's why we say that like the biggest weapon that the state has is fear because like the cops go from these big fucking tough guys to like whining cowards the second you just become not afraid you don't even have to beat them you don't have to

overcome the actual physical weapons but once you get out of that headspace that paralyzing fear once you let it pass over you and through you they're fucking terrified and if we're gonna win we need to be their worst nightmare as state repression against the stop cop city movement continues the coalition against the police training facility only continues to grow last month angela davis returned an award proclamation given to her by the atlanta city council in protest of cop city if the attempts by the atlanta police to build the largest police training grounds in the country are successful this will represent a major setback for the movement for radical democratic futures not only throughout the u.s but globally as well as a person who has participated in campaigns against

prisons and police for far longer than a half century i want to salute all those who are involved in the stop cop city movement and i want to urge people everywhere to find ways to generate support for them angela davis made it clear that she stood in solidarity with force defenders facing repression from the police and the city of atlanta and joined in calls to halt the construction of this facility which will only serve as a tool to advance what she called militarized police racism and repression atlanta activists are on the front lines of the abolitionist movement at its crucial intersection with movements to save our forests indeed to save our planet the attempt to build a massive militarized police training facility is a dangerous and

ominous development that we have to oppose with all our might and so i want to join those who are standing strong in defense of the forest against the construction of this police training ground i urge people everywhere to join the campaign to stop cop city after angela davis's announcement the walter rodney foundation released a statement supporting davis's decision and against the construction of cop city it's it's interesting to see there are more mainline sort of center or center left like organizations that have begun to come on board even with what happened sunday and especially the thursday march and rally had it necessitated a response from the city so friday morning there was actually an organization concerned black clergy who had a press conference

like calling out cop city protesters and so you had this like very state run one of the city council members antonio louis was there like live streaming at the entire time and so you can tell the efficacy of a lot of things that have happened this week by how the city is reacting and how like it is necessitating them going to to greater and greater lengths to like try to show that the movement is wrong one way that the city has been working to advocate for the further development of the cop city project is by launching a website of their own for the public safety training center full of videos of the mayor and police chief walking through south atlanta trying to convince neighbors that the project is a good idea in the past few months the city has also been turning

the official city of atlanta twitter account into a hilarious cop city propaganda outlet about two weeks after the end of the week of action on march 24th de cab county ceo michael thurmond announced an executive order to indefinitely close entrenchment creek park also known as well on the people's park claiming that the park was a danger to the public due to booby traps allegedly found in the forest at a press conference thurmond displayed photos of wooden boards with nails sticking out of them allegedly found in the park the executive order reads that the park will quote remain closed until further notice to protect the safety of the families residents and visitors and their pets in the area and to county personnel unquote a few days after the announcement de cab

police led a joint task force in a raid of the wilani forest and entrenchment creek park the land was effectively cleared of all forest defenders with one person being arrested during the raid the memorial for tortugeta was destroyed by the police and cement barricades were set up around the entrances and exits to the park days later police and contractors began cutting trees in the wilani forest with no one around to resist the destruction the solidarity fund put out a statement saying quote closing down a public park in order to prevent protests from happening in that space is unconstitutional de cab ceo michael thurmond is trying to do an end run around the first amendment unquote de cab county commissioner ted terry is pushing to reopen the park through a resolution

expected to be introduced in early may but it wasn't just the park's closure that made forest defense more challenging after the mass action at the north gate in early march security was greatly increased at the construction sites in the wilani forest with massive spotlights illuminating the area to daylight levels 24 hours a day which made returning to the sort of nighttime sabotage actions in the forest that pioneered some of the movement's militancy in its early days to be much more complicated during my conversations with forest defenders there was still a desire to see more of those small sabotage actions as the large daytime mass actions seemed to result in more people getting arrested near the site of militant activity

people are angry you know like their friend our friend was murdered you can just feel however you want about this but like a lot of people and i guess myself included are just really angry there's this like kind of blinding rage that comes with it of just like eye for an eye blood for blood you know that the police killed our friend and that they need to hurt for that one and they need to hurt for all the people that they've murdered and all the things they're trying to do and that leads people to take actions that may not be well thought out but that are very well intentioned and have tangible results that hurt the police state but that are actions that do bring harm to themselves or others because there are not you know these like middle of the night

slash and run sabotage attacks that don't have arrests happen that are safer and i think we should see a return of that tactic because the level of police presence that we saw at all the actions this week post sunday like doing shit at downtown protests fuck that like that's not like we're not pulling shit off there without a mass arrest or like everyone's getting gassed like it's not a tactically advantageous or viable way of doing things but i think people wanted to prove to the cops that like no no no we could open field fuck them up and yeah there were consequences to that but people fucked them up in the open field and that's worth applauding the bounds of the forest is not the only location actions take place just about a week after the park closure

and when some of the clear-cutting began a report back was posted online that read quote on the night of wednesday april fifth we set fire to three excavators owned by brent scarborough company on a site across from the federal penitentiary in atlanta brent scarborough is the company and individual responsible for clear-cutting the wilani forest cop city will never be built unquote the march 2023 week of action was always going to be a kind of turning point in showcasing what will be seen in the struggle to defend the forest this is spring and how that will then lead into the summer and what forms of resistance people will choose to take whether that be another singular week of action or take notes from the old earth first playbook and try to do a whole summer

of action how do you kind of see the the the movement to stop capacity like changing or evolving than in the next few months i mean because all this is kind of felt like it's been kind of very much on the heels of what happened in in january people have tried to like you know just tried to find new paths of resistance in the wake of the police killing right um how do you how do you see like the fight continuing at this stage where like they have some land disturbance permits there's early construction what are what are like the avenues of of resistance that people are trying to go down i think that we have to be very clear and assessing what has worked installing the project and what will work to stop the project because

those aren't necessarily the same things i think there are nuances in particular strategies there is a difference between especially in our particular context that's similar between a difference between guerrilla warfare and urban guerrilla warfare and i see like guerrilla warfare is more so uh when people have been destroying equipment it you know at contractors you know offices or wherever or like near the forest etc and you could just hide off into the woods or just like disappear back into nothingness nobody gets touched what we have to look at with uh uh the actions at the music festival were it exposed a lot of people uh because and this is once again uh because the police acted so heavy-handedly but we also know that the police act heavy

handedly which is why we're here so that gets kind of dicey because that's like kind of like urban guerrilla warfare where you have the guerrillas just shooting pow pow pow and then like running into somebody's grandma's house people do not fuck with the people they're just running grandma's house for cover right and that's where things get a little bit dicey because in many ways um a lot of us were looking at means to open up the movement with this week of action and that was what was widely understood for a lot of people and nevertheless when you just uh come in with the boomstick from the beginning that dictates the tone of the rest of the week and then where you could you know for instance operate from a space of like moral authority uh it becomes much easier

for people on the fence to justify to themselves well what are the police supposed to think right I mean we have to realize that there are several like mental resistances that have been taught to people for them to try to discredit us and I just I think there's some important context right uh when Martin Luther King Jr. was doing like the nonviolent direct action at a certain point they had to make a calculated decision to include women and children in the marches because they had assessed that America had become too desensitized to seeing black men beaten in the streets right so that was a tactical decision to bring in more people right so there are like calculations that people have to make and assessments that they have to make based on the information that

we're dealing with through talking with force defenders I've heard a variety of internal critiques of the week of action format because it is such a concentrated time period the week of action can give police a very concentrated time to over police and over surveil and for activists it can open up an expenditure of energy during the week which then can lead to a lack of energy leading up to what's been called the week of repression in the past every time following a week of action after people from out of town leave it then leads into a week of repression where police will then do a raid of the forest and have their sort of retaliation the week after there's been talk of potential changes to some of the week of action format perhaps doing something

more akin to a summer of resistance so the week of repression is always the week that comes after the week of action where the cops are like okay the bulk of your reserves your out of state support is gone we're going to come fuck you up now there are less of you now you're less ready to deal with us and that is like a major strategic flaw in the weeks of action because it it kind of creates a activist tourism for people coming out of state and not that Atlanta doesn't appreciate their support and their solidarity and that so many of those out of state people do stay long term but it does create a situation where like yeah we're having an influx of people for a week building infrastructure for a week and then the bulk of those people a good percentage are going to go home

because yeah like traveling long term is hard people have jobs kids whatever you have commitments wherever you are and they have to go home and then the cops just wreck our shit and do raids and like unless people want to get on board with doing some pretty crazy shit those raids are hard to counter it would behoove us to take a realistic audit of what the weeks of action have meant and what they are actually useful for which the strategic gains of the weeks of action are always now going to be more metaphysical than physical they bring people to this space they give them a closeness to the forest that they would not achieve without actually coming here but as far as tangibly like materially stopping cop city those kind of middle of the night slash and run

attacks tertiary targeting of contractors all that stuff that's how you pressure the money and the money is where you win ultimately it's up to the autonomous actors that make up this so-called movement and how their choices will determine how the fight to stop cop city will grow and evolve as i'm writing this just 30 minutes ago we found out that the clear cutting at the cop city construction site has essentially been completed the overhead photos are devastating where there were young growing trees just weeks ago is now a flattened mound of red clay and dirt as if the ground itself was bleeding i counted over 100 trees uprooted from the earth hundreds of people have dedicated years of their life to defending this forest and the site of sizeable

destruction has brought out a variety of grieving reactions if cop city doesn't get built in the willow knee the land could be carefully reforested and healed via regenerative permaculture with intentional stewardship the forest could grow to be ecologically healthier than it was before in some ways the destruction that has already taken place makes it even more vital to try and stop the construction of cop city no one is advocating a defeatist approach where force defenders essentially give up and let the police foundation build it because there are still numerous ways to fight against the construction of this facility but now is not the time to sugarcoat the dire situation people are in and there should be time allowed to grieve this loss as well as strike back

against the destruction it would be a mistake to gaslight each other and act as if we're closer than ever to halting the cop city project the fact that it's gotten this far itself is devastating from the beginning people have said that even if they do believe that cop city will never be built the Atlanta police foundation and police will absolutely attempt to do as much damage as they can possibly get away with anyway both to force defenders and to the forest itself the past few months i've been increasingly hearing the vice versa of that sentiment if cop city does end up getting built people have pledged that the Atlanta police foundation will have to pay for every inch they take even if there is no longer hope to save the entire Wallani forest then we must

do so without hope at least there is always vengeance it is a long road ahead and there is still much to do to quote my favorite anarcho monarchist Tolkien at this moment the movement will hone its focus to prevent or at the very least disincentivize the physical construction of cop city i think it'd be worth thinking of this movement as an almost two-year-old movement that's outgrown the week of action you know why limit ourselves to seven days fuck it do a summer you know do three months of like we're doing three months of action in Atlanta come to Atlanta whenever you want and then go home and do shit at home there well as far goes where you live there are chase banks where you live there are atlas construction offices where you live and yeah

you should come to Atlanta and you could should come see the space and you should be in the forest and you should feel like the love and community that's there we win by fighting on enough fronts that they can't fight us back on all of them the state dies by a thousand cuts not by all of us being in one place where they can kettle our asses like that's just not how we're gonna win so yeah if we had three months of like we're occupying the forest for three months come to the space whenever you feel like it but you know hopefully when people go home they feel inspired to like understand that they can do just as much hitting those companies where they live as they can hear because the money's all going to the same place the ceo at the top doesn't care if you hit their

businesses in georgia or in fucking illinois or in origan or washington or whatever the money's all the same a phrase i've been hearing a lot lately is cop city is everywhere to quote a communique posted on scenes dot no blogs dot org quote we will keep winning not just here in so called atlanta but we must attack all across these so-called states the money and power that seek to kill us and destroy balani are nationwide and so our movement must be nationwide a net of resistance too vast to comprehend and too resilient to suppress reality is the battlefield but so-called america all of it is the backdrop unquote when chief at sheer bomb gave testimony at city council even he mentioned the far-reaching manifestations of the fight to stop cop city we

have been seeing over the last number of months crimes that have been occurring in other cities focused toward the public safety training center so we have seen arsons in cities outside of atlanta we've seen the destruction of property outside of atlanta and we've seen the harassment of private sector employees outside of atlanta so that is the nexus where the federal bureau of investigation has been assisting in the um in this administration like i said in the second episode the stakes of the movement may soon exceed the balance of the forest and a cop city and in fact that process that may have already begun we are seeing stop cop city turn into a new mode of insurgency and resistance to modern policing in general not simply limited to the construction of this one

training center as the police are trying to build a training center to practice quelling future civil unrest the site of the wallani forest and beyond has been a training ground for anarchists and those who fight the ever-growing police state the past two years it's been a dangerous playground for experimentation and liberation applications for the lessons learned in the wallani forest extend far past the barriers of the woods as far right attacks on abortion and trans people are accelerating across this country but especially the south perhaps some of the organizing infrastructure that's been developed can take new focus on these battlegrounds and even just the mere existence of the struggle against cop city in atlanta has been a deterrent for other cities and states

seeking to push forward similar proposals but as the movement possibly expands past its original scope in these next few months people will need to be careful that the idealic notion of the struggle doesn't eclipse the original and still active goal which is to stop cop city cop city is indeed everywhere but the current manifestation in atlanta is unique to atlanta and the corresponding struggle to stop the physical construction of this training facility cannot be overlooked in favor of fantasies of utopian anarchy to steal an idea from matt of the community press collective one interpretation of the phrase cop city is everywhere is the realization that atlanta is a cop city and it already has been for years without us knowing it and if we don't turn back

the tide here cop city will be exported everywhere atlanta be once again because of the atlanta police foundation is uh the most prevailed city in the country because of 2017's operation shield program where they put tons of cameras all throughout the city and essentially made it a surveillance state once again crime has continued to go up uh during this time and that would have significantly more to do with the disparity of wealth and opportunities uh of black atlantans that are born under the poverty line only five percent of them are projected to ever cross that line at the same time uh the average median income of black households is one third that of the average median income of white households in atlanta so that's about thirty five thousand

dollars to one hundred four thousand dollars and so the wealth is just so disproportionately spread and so much of the labor intensive economy is predicated on it that uh black people are pigeonholed into service economy jobs and they have very few opportunities here now that type of inequality breeds discontent and people looking for other opportunities and the police are ready to catch them at every turn for resting the juvenile in the point system that they have for atlanta police department it's five points however you only receive a quarter of a point as a police officer if you answer a service call so police officers often ignore service calls because that doesn't give them the credit that they want so just to put that in context you get

20 times the credit in atlanta's uh point quota system for arresting a juvenile than going where people actually wanted police to show up and we're supposed to be convinced that this system is made to keep us safe right the city of atlanta and the police foundation wants cop city to be a national training center for police to come and practice militaristic counterinsurgency for export across the country they murdered someone to further this goal all eyes must be on atlanta cop city is a symbol of police repression cop city is a symbol of the oppression of the people of atlanta i want you to look around and see the families here in this park today these are people who came because they're concerned for their children these are people who are concerned

because they don't want their city overrun by militarization the level of repression the movement is facing is a sign that the state feels like this movement is a threat and the state feels like this movement has the possibility of actually succeeding so in response they're increasing repression and on the flip side of that during this past week of action i saw a lot of affirmation that this is going to be successful and that people believe that they will stop cop city a common refrain during the past week of action is that cop city will never be built and i believe that we will win there's been such a unique emphasis on the fact that people believe that this fight is 100 winnable and that people do have the ability to stop cop city and the people who are participating

truly believe that and i think that is an important part of why it's gotten as far as it has so we can get everything we want for this city we can stop cop city we got the power but we just got to believe y'all we got to believe in our power that's the last thing on the state is this there's gonna be a lot of people telling us about what we can't do about what these organizers out here can't do they always want to tell us about what we what we can't do but i'm going to tell you all of us out here we're organizers we are in the business of taking that which other people say is impossible and we make it possible we got that power as long as we believe so i just need you to say this is interesting to me because in my experience a lot of leftists and anarchists approach much of

their praxis with the concept of them expecting to not succeed but they're going to do it anyway which there is a kind of fated beauty to that in a certain way and part of that is taking action even if you don't think it will lead to a decisive victory but also i feel that being in that mindset might set you up for that outcome if you're preparing to fail that means you're probably gonna fail or at the very least limit the ways that you do action and throughout this movement thus far it's been interesting the degree to which people are convinced that they are going to win if you're being prepared to fail you won't take the radical action that it takes to win winning is hard and winning means doing things that are scary and uncomfortable and doing things

that put you in danger and doing things that are new and unknown and different and taking new strategies and doing new things and we in the us and a lot of other places but this is us based movement so there's so much learned helplessness on the left here from so many years of like we lost at occupy and then we lost in ferguson and standing rock and in 2020 all of these movements that put big body blows to the state put some hits in but were just followed by these waves and waves of repression we've learned so much helplessness and for the first time in my life i'm looking at a movement that i'm like no no we can fucking beat them and people are stagnating we're blinking because of what happened on sunday and like no no no what happened on sunday proved

that we can win it proved that we can one fight them in the open field and beat them that they are afraid of us that they will see territory if we hit them and it proved that they are so afraid of us that they need to mobilize fucking 10 different police departments to come deal and then they won't even step like into the actual brush of the forest because they think we're the fucking vietcong that proves we can win more than anything that proves we can win and if we do not accept that what is proved that we can win is like property destruction and to a degree doing violence we won't win those fireworks helped a lot they pushed the cops out and like we shouldn't bulk at that and i guess i don't classify that as violence the police classify that as violence

what they consider taking hits i guess but yeah we are so on the cusp of a make or break kind of deal here and the only way that we win is not this internal debate we're having about the efficacy of tactics it's doubling down on what we are already doing because it's working and expanding on it do you believe that cop city will be will be actually stopped we got to um and here's what i mean by that this is the line right we have environmental racism uh police militarization and brutality and police and racism and it's all coming to a head right here in this particular movement we have to win because what they're doing now is to build capacity to make sure that we can't win right and so why people are pushing so hard is that as we've seen over the

past couple of weeks the police have plenty of like tanks and shit and all sorts of militarized and tactical gear and now they're trying to build another base in the blackest part of the city and to build up more capacity to put down any sense of rebellion or pushback against empire we cannot allow it to happen and i mean there is so much money going to kill people and end life and if we win right here and make this stand right here that changes the potentiality for how we view how to keep one another safe and how to reinvest in ourselves and our people throughout this country in a huge way i think that we are at the precipice of not only winning cop city but pushing back the tide of the cult of death that this country has become the clear cuts in the wilani forest at

this stage serve a three-fold purpose one it obviously gets them closer to construction and the mass land grading that is scheduled to start on may 23rd two it's a ploy by the apf to secure additional needed funds from cop city investors and finally it's to demoralize the people who have spent years of their life working to stop this project everything that police have done is essentially always a reprisal right the the movement does something and the police clamp down in a reprisal to try to repress the movement police always escalate but they have always been like in response to something and their goal of course is to quiet and chill free speech and end the movement but every time this happens the opposite effect is what comes

out of it and from the domestic terrorism rest in in december like really that's when this even larger groundswell of national support happened and people started to take notice because this was an extreme measure and then with the killing of tortugita in january that changed so much about the movement including people's personal connection to this struggle where no longer are people doing this simply because they believe it is what's right they are doing this because they have to because the state cannot get away with this this death cannot be in vain and now people believe that they have to succeed or at the very least make the state pay for every inch and that may mean looking beyond the binary of victory and defeat according to a construction timeline from this

past april the atlanta police foundation plans to start construction on august 29th 2023 in order for a quote unquote soft opening of the facility in december of 2024 one hiccup that the apf has run into is that it seems they have yet to secure enough money to finish the project and have been forced to ask their investors and the city for more additional money despite scaling back their plans for the project as a short clip put together by the atlanta community press collective explains the city council will in fact have to vote on whether or not to allocate 33 million taxpayer dollars to the construction of cop city in the very near future additionally the atlanta police foundation budget documents show that current construction plans have been scaled back from

what was originally promised this indicates a failure by the foundation to raise the promise 60 million dollars in private funds should the city vote down this funding package of 33 million it is difficult to see a path forward for the atlanta police foundation's effort to begin construction on cop city anytime in the near future the city council has actually not yet voted to approve the allocation of millions of dollars in city funds to the cop city project through an open records request we were able to get our hands on emails between the atlanta police foundation and atlanta's deputy chief operating officer lechandra berks in this email exchange the police foundation expressed a need for the city to provide 33.5 million dollars in funding for the

project berks responded by mentioning the need for legislative action to secure the funds the emails state that the police foundation wants to pass this legislation before june 30th because they need the city of atlanta's money to secure their construction loan it's expected that as soon as may 15th a member of the city council will introduce legislation to allocate public funds to the atlanta police foundation to build cop city and a final vote could happen as soon as june 5th one thing that the movement to stop cop city has shown us is that no matter what police do people continue to show up despite what happens and the movement keeps expanding as the unnamed forest defender told me infrastructure wise this week of action was the biggest infrastructure i've seen

doing a week of action i thought that the infrastructure we put together for week one was pretty big but i mean it doesn't even compare it's not the same ballpark as what happened for week five just from how the medics were set up and how food was handled there was a shuttle bus program there was a welcome table at a church at one point there was like 24 7 clinic spaces there was 24 7 ride programs and medics on standby and like all these things that were ready to support everybody like there was all this infrastructure set up to make sure that people were as supported as possible and to make it as easy as possible and lower the barrier of entry to the movement as much as possible more than there has been in any other week of action so far i feel like the way

that we continue that is to take lessons learn from what's happened this week from the problems with the infrastructure the issues that it had expand on it and then fucking do it for way longer like we could do this for an entire summer i am fully of the belief that the infrastructure i saw on display during the fifth week of action we could do that for a summer i believe in the kind of people who put it together and i believe in the people who did it to do that we just have to kind of look at what went wrong what went right and fix it all the things that existed in this week of action as far as there being food rides medics and like group supplies all these things existed during weeks of action one through four it's just grown it's gotten more logistically intense there

are more and more people filling those roles there's more and more stuff coming in like the amount of supplies that we just got sent in or people brought with them from out of state has just so vastly expanded since the first week of action it's just gotten more i don't know like not professional but more polished it's become a much more polished setup system as time went on from the first camp that we had during the first week of action to now you know almost two years later and that's a huge part of why i think we've outgrown the week of action we have these types of thought processes and logistics to do this for a summer or for a month we just need people and resources we need more people to be willing because i don't want people to get tired just last month

another week of action was called for june 24th to july 1st directly leading into what's being called the Wallani summer with locals in atlanta calling on supporters and forced defenders everywhere to come to atlanta for the week and stay for the summer with the entrenchment creek park still closed and there being ongoing efforts to have it be reopened what the week and following summer will look like is still very unknown we always are going to need more people people are our most important resource always the way that we limit burnout is by having more and more people so that the burden falls less and less heavy on small groups of people and so that people can take breaks and that's another problem i have with like the week of action as a strategy is you're

just going non-fucking stop for a week if you had three months you're like uh i'm going to chill for a couple of weeks i'll be back you know because i have all this time and it frees up people from out of state to come in have times to work it out and their schedule more there will be more information put out in the coming weeks you can keep up to date by following stop cop city on instagram defend atl forest on twitter or by checking out stopcopcitysolidarity.org ideally with a vpn and tor slash brave browser if you were at the music festival and you're just a normal person you weren't involved with the movement before this and you were at the music festival and you kind of saw why we're fighting for this you saw that space and then you saw the

type of violence that the police were willing to output to do it let that move you to get involved further you don't have to join an organization you know i don't want to speak for other people i'm a hard anarchist fuck organizations to a large degree but like have an affinity group get your friends together if you guys want to be helping out with the food people help out with the food people you want to be medics go join a medic collective like find whatever thing calls to you and just go and do it because we need people and there's no barrier of entry to join the movement there's no test you have to take you just have to show up i will end this week of action retrospective with a promise from forest defenders see you on the other

side if you build it we will burn it music festival audio courtesy of unicorn riot between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom this child was laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst people

i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swaying in the wind picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silenced the radio murders they left the body there for a reason it was the calling card it's like the mafia used to do and yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy this year they clearly

gave a green light i was velocity listen to silence the radio murders on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at the iconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlord sold the rank but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitar what what's happening where are we wait look at this tember 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the present einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought you lethal lit daughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time

travel adventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past to save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast welcome to it could happen here this is robert evans uh and it could happen here is a podcast about things falling apart uh and you know sometimes about uh making them better um today we're talking both about uh something that is implicated in a number of you know aspects of uh what we call the crumbles here in the united states which is the police and we're also talking about the um the tremendous difficulty um that people encounter whenever they try to improve this particular aspect of american society the the near impossibility of reform

within the police uh and to talk with me about that and to talk with me about their incredible new book the writers come out at night uh is ali winston uh ali co-wrote this book with darwin bondgram um and it it covers particularly the oakland police and a scandal that um kind of happened at around the same time as the rampart scandal uh in los angeles focused around a group of oakland police officers called the writers um who well i'm gonna let ali tell you about that it's a it's a pretty pretty shocking and bleak story though ali welcome to the show hi there how are you doing i'm doing good how are you today lovely lovely ali this is a great book it's it's very deeply reported um i want to talk a little bit about kind of the uh the what sort of uh

brought you into this story um because this is something that kind of happened around the turn of the the last century and uh it's kind of adjacent to a lot of issues that are still very much uh relevant in kind of the the problems we have with policing both kind of the um the thin blue line code of silence um the way in which police departments act in a very ganglike fashion to protect uh bad actors the way in which kind of ill thought out reform policies targeted at uh kind of assuaging the um the fears of of business owners um lead to policies of of tremendous violence a lot of things that are still very much kind of at play all around the country it's it's fascinating to me so we came out this book both kind of independently we came out this as two

reporters who'd worked kind of hand in glove together for about 10 well since 2012 um when we signed our contract it was 2020 but we'd i'd started reporting on the oakland police department in 2008 when i moved to the bay area for a graduate school at cal go bears and um i'd kind of dove right into the topic of police and police conduct in oakland because i'd wanted to i'd been messing around with criminal justice reporting when i was back east um in new york and north new jersey where i was working and uh there really was there were some really egregious shootings at that point in time in the early 2000s mid 2000s late 2000s um opd about average i think eight uh 14 officer involved shootings police shootings a year um invariably there would be one or two or three

or four depending on the year or maybe more that involves someone who's unarmed fleeing bats it was an awful but lawful shoot or maybe just an awful shoot that the da didn't charge or didn't properly investigate and at that time it was really tough to get information about police shootings in california because of a combination of laws and supreme court california supreme court decisions that intersected and kind of shut the door on any sort of record you could get about police uh disciplinary action or their past histories so you kind of had to mine the civil courts and look for backdoors and through the da's offices and just kind of or source up really well to try and report out these incidents and darwin and i met about around 2012 we started

interrogating questions about power and the political economy of law enforcement um we started to raise questions about the percentage of budgetary um allocation that opd receives it's about 40 percent of the city's billion dollar budget giver takes so we're talking 350 400 billion dollars every year um the result the net result for public safety is questionable um at best it doesn't really tie in to increase in police funding increase in manpower decrease in crime oakland is a very violent city often ranks in the top 10 or top five nationally and per capita crime per 100 000 uh residents and you know in it's also been under this reform program forever and we this is the backdrop to all our reporting there was always

this backdrop of court ordered reforms there's external oversight the external oversight is oftentimes how the public and the press became aware of some very deep-seated issues in the department and how they would get addressed because the politicians here are feckless or inexperienced or complicit or all the above so we over the course of our reporting together kind of yoke together around a decade eight years or so we kind of realized okay we have a paragraph in each one of our stories that explains the backdrop or maybe a little bit more depending on how legalistic a piece it was we need to peel all this back we need to explain to people because this is the longest running oversight regime in the country right two decades now

over two decades since the consent decree the negotiated settlement agreement was signed and we just needed to explain to people why this city had gone so far why it was an edge case why it was an outlier and in order to do that we couldn't we couldn't use 5 000 words we needed 120 000 160 000 yeah this is um a dense book in a way that's still intensely readable and I think part of what makes it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of effort laying out things that people kind of know in broad and a good example of this would be people talk a lot about you know the kind of concept of you know the bad apples that you know there's both on the side of people defending police departments that it's a few bad apples and then kind of and you find this

more and sort of people on the left criticizing police as an institution the idea that like well the fact that those bad apples are supported and defended by the rest of the department kind of means that they're all but bad um you get this these kind of like broad you know discussions about that phenomenon what you do in this in this book is kind of get very granular with the way in which that actually functions on the ground I'm thinking about a specific point where you've got one of the characters you know one of the people that is a major source kind of for this book and a major source for this scandal was a police officer who effectively turned on his fellow officers and reported all of this illegal violence being done by this this gang

and there's a point where this guy after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusioned by what you know he's the guys that he's writing with are doing goes to other people in the department who are like yeah those guys are like messed up and it's it's bad and you just kind of have to you should just kind of like you know try to try to move on but don't make waves about it right and it's this it's this the the kind of the fact the the degree to which other people can not just know in the department what's happening but be disgusted by it and still when I'm kind of the the shit hits the fan fundamentally defend the officers doing it right like the fact that they're able to warn other officers away from you know hanging being around those guys doesn't

mean that they won't like absolutely throw down to defend them which is is is you know something I think people are kind of broadly aware of but the kind of going into the actual personal dynamics is I think really valuable and you do a very good job of capturing that at the ground level well what we wanted to do is explain how so it's not bad apple theory I think is yeah honestly it's a distraction and frankly it's an excuse what you're dealing with is culture right and culture eats politics and policy for lunch breakfast lunch dinner and all the meals in between every single time you can't change culture unless you understand it so what we wanted to do and we were able to do this because we had very good sourcing not only inside and

around the department current former officers we had reams of records I mean we sued for I want to say hundreds of thousands of record pages of records videos audio files got old court transcripts cassette tapes of old internal affairs interviews back were backstop those by talking to people there and involved and we were really able to we were able to kind of reconstruct not just the initial scandal of the riders of which stem from this young officer Keith bat who is from a city from Sebastopol which is yeah bit north of of Oakland very different place rural bit crunchy quite crunchy not nearly the like real rough and tumble grit of Oakland around the turn of the millennium and Keith comes in he's a criminal justice major in college really idealistic wanted

to join an active police department applied to dozens of partners to several departments around the area and the first one that took him was Oakland and Oakland had a good reputation among police culture it was an active department the cops worked hard they were well trained they were decently paid and it wasn't a you know in the Bay Area like the two departments that people look to are like are the Oakland Police Department SFPD and SFPD is a closed shop it is a legacy department is run by an intense old boy network of Italian and Irish folks some Chinese some Asian immigrants that are kind of led into that now but it is just it's such an insular place OPD is actually typically more welcoming of recruits from outside and they

really like people who are hard chargers active willing to learn and Keith finished the top of his near the top of his academy excellent shot really sharp on the uptake his instructors liked him and right when he was about to go on the street they one of his instructors pulled him aside and said hey I hear you got a side to Chuck to Clarence Mabinang who was his field training officer he said okay listen you need to keep your mouth shut you need to keep your eyes open you're going to see some crazy shit but just go along to get along you know just keep your head down yeah Keith was like wait what what are you talking about like that's that's some wild that's a wild shit like that's not what I'm expecting it's a little bit odd and these are

older officers who you respected he goes out and gets in the car with Chuck and Chuck is this little you know very very intense buzz cut Filipino dude he's like all right I'm gonna teach you and I take take you out and toughen you up like this is not the academy anymore I'm gonna teach you how to be in the streets we're gonna get a fight we're gonna get in a fight tonight this is that's first shot night on the job first time stepping into a Crown Victoria patrol car with with his FTO and he's like what what and sure enough Chuck gets in a confrontation that very night with someone drunk in front of his own house just drunk in front of his own house threatens to shoot the guy's dog takes the guy in after beating him up and Keith is like wait what you shoot

dogs and yeah they told him that you know every now and then they would encounter somebody with the dog and they would shoot the dog and then cut the leash in order to make it seem like the dog was going to attack them and that was just his introduction to it and over the two weeks that he worked with several officers on shift there were three other officers who kind of made up this little clique of freewheeling cops that they call they call themselves the riders and they were they were Jude Siafno Frank Vasquez and Matt Hornung and those three were kind of at the center of it and they would they were basically took it on themselves they were not a task force they were just patrol officers they would kind of roam around West Oakland going out and looking for

people to arrest just jumping out at random folks they were pro not reactive they were proactive so they essentially ended up kidnapping people planting droves on them when they didn't find drugs beating the tar out of them torturing them Siafno's nickname was the foot doctor because he had a habit of taking his ass to retractable baton and beating detainees on the soles of their feet till they couldn't walk yeah their bruises were so painful for some reference that's that was called bastonado by the the Spanish Inquisition who loved to do the exact same thing yeah no it's it's really um it's grim it's really really grim ship so Keith sees all this stuff it's just like two weeks of like training day that film it's two weeks of that it's not just one week

and he's like I can't do this this can't be the way policing is and he keeps going you know kind of casting around for help and the the cash 22 that he's in is that anybody who he tells about this behavior is obligated by OPD's regulations to then report said misconduct and if they don't then they're guilty of failing to report misconduct so he has to kind of hedge his words and you know talk around these issues and his friends who work in OPD who work in CHP California Highway Patrol he tells about the stuff in this roundabout way are all giving him the same advice you know I don't know like do you want to write out your career like can you do this is there a way you can switch out is there a way that you can thread the needle and it gets to be too much and um

so one day after two weeks he decides I can't do this anymore I can't put more I can't put innocent people in jail I can't forge paperwork for my my supervisors I can't forge their overtime you know I can't help them steal money from the taxpayers like this so he goes into the you know he confronts them in a parking garage in front of a church in right north of downtown Oakland these guys called the light cave they would hang out at and he's telling chuck listen you know I can't do this this isn't the right way and Mabinax as well you know you have a problem no no I don't think you're really getting this he's trying to like talk him past it and then Keith keeps bringing up Frank Vasquez and Frank he'd seen Frank choke people he'd see Frank empty like can't pepper

spray into somebody's mouth put his fingers into their eyes like a bowling ball um he said oh if you have a problem with Frank you can talk to him Vasquez comes over you know drives over there that they have a conversation about that and Keith at this point is so wired up and so terrified he's looking at Mabinag and looking at Vasquez and thinking to himself okay can I get to my pistol before they get to theirs if they want to hurt me and if we have a shootout how's it going to look if three Oakland cops are bucking lead at each other in uniform on shift right he's running this calculus in his head um doesn't come to that in the end Mabinag convinces him to go in and sign a resignation letter

and when he does that at OPD headquarters one of his supervisors from the academy gets hold of him gets a hold of him says no no this isn't what's what this is not you what he's going on and they convince him to go upstairs and talk to internal affairs and then he spills the beans on the what he's seen the past two weeks and that blows the lid off his scandal there had been a number of people who had like attempted to kind of like victims of this particular gang of guys who had that's right like attempted to complain attempted to come forward but yeah it's not really until this officer on the inside with a very good record is willing to say something that that anything starts to happen so you have to remember the context here i'm sorry for cutting

in but i was remiss on this so the context of oakland in late 1990s early 2000s is that it's in the middle of new york style urban renewal jerry brown who later became governor of california was kind of on his way back up the political rung and oakland was his first stop he was reelected mayor in 1998 i believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he because he was going to turn oakland into this socialist you know environmental friendly metropolis but he gets into office he starts going to the community meetings and he realizes public safety is the number one concern so he becomes rudy juliani west as one of his former employees put it to us pushes a massive building program in downtown oakland for new residential market rate

housing and enlists his police department to go on a clean up the street spree by any means necessary and he would go into the lineup and cheer them on root them on say listen you know i got your back i'll back your play you know just take back those corners from these dealers that's what those officers that's what mabinang hornow siapno and vasquez were responding to they were responding to the instructions from their supervisors from their chief from their mayor that came down the command chain to clean up the streets and do this sort of stuff and they were actually you know mabinang and vasquez in particular were very highly valued officers they were proactive they made their supervisors look good it was this kind of one hand washes the

other this yeah and i one of the things that i found particularly kind of impactful is the way in which you describe both the the violence the the absolute like horrifying cruelty of what these guys are getting up to and how that intersects with jerry brown's political career with the um the kind of promises he's making to clean up the city and the kind of metrics that are established uh you know to provide basically evidence that that this this plan is succeeding you know it's it it really like kind of gives on the ground context to what this kind of broken windows style policing um what it actually means in terms of a human cost and it's it's devastating um and equally devastating is the lawsuit that kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed

um one of the things that was most shocking to me because i was i was only kind of broadly aware of this case at all is when when these guys the the officers in this in this gang get you know go on trial or sort of when that process starts one of them this guy vasquez like goes on the run steals an ar 15 from his department and fucking disappears and he's still in the wind no one's ever found this guy yeah he was most likely in mexico um he's from mexico he's born down there and has family around medida um the theory is that he and you know he was stopped by a cop that's when yeah that he people realized that he had been that he'd stolen a gun from the department but he kind of badges way out of the this encounter with a cop in suison city which is a delta town

near where he lived and near his house and that was the last anybody had seen of him has seen of him uh the theory the theory that's rattled around quite often um and there's more often than there's probably some heft to it is that somebody from the either the department or the police union helped him down to the border um chula vista and he walked across so the odds are that he's in mexico ostensibly the fbi are still looking for him he's a fugitive but he's never never been found no and he when this happens because his his buddies and the writers are all go all do in fact go on trial and you know you might think the fact that that one of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing a gun would have an impact on things but no no in court they're not

you know the the prosecutors aren't allowed to tell the jury what happened with fast gas because they're it's worried that it might prejudice them which is wild to me well in the first trial so there were two trials sorry a little bit all three cops in the first trial there's hung juries in them i think they were one or two holdouts maybe and from the reporting that we did the interview that we did with the ada on the case dave holiser it seemed that these were people who were convinced that these were good cops and the ends justified the means or therefore you know this kind of noble noble cause corruption actually has an audience among some segments of the population around here i mean it i'm sure you see this across the bay now in san francisco there's all these people who are

you know kind of advocating the sort of vigilante violence that former fire commissioner was committed against uh against homeless folks unhoused yeah for folks who aren't aware the fire commissioner of san francisco this was a couple of months ago right around the time that there was a big wave of san francisco's collapsed into anarchy sort of stories which happen every ten years which yeah yeah and have been you know it happened at the same time that that tech CEO was stabbed to death turns out by another tech founder what do you do but yeah this story that the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's this video of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man it turns out he had been going around at night and macing homeless people at random one

of the air spray yeah air spray air spray air spray it was crazy this is awful shit yeah and then someone attacked him with the homeless with a uh with a crowbar but all that those facts were omitted anyway so the bottom line is with the um with horning of horning vasquez in siapno they're they're hung on the first trial and then the second trial they're acquitted uh they're horning is acquitted of some charges and there's hung juries in the rest of his charges and those for siapno and mavenang but in the second trial the first trial the defense was well they didn't do what keith did keith's bad is lying the second trial was well the defense turned to a strategy of well actually frankifasquez was the leader so it's all frank's fault yeah it's easy to throw

that guy under the bus because he's gone exactly yeah exactly and you know to say he was a ring leader is absurd because everyone knew in opd and outside opd that mavenang was the shotcaller in that little gang um what's interesting is the lawsuit so there's a little vagary here about the criminal investigation into the riders the police department and the the police department's internal affairs investigators and the police chief made a decision from day one from on high that the investigation would only be limited to what keith bat saw that it would not expand out beyond his two weeks on the job and the incidents that he witnessed personally and that they were able to corroborate with other people there was another cop uh scott he was in

who did um did corroborate some of this stuff once it came out that he'd falsified some reports he decided to save save his own skin so he also caught some of the flak that bat did but not nearly the same sort of death threat type shit that keith caught so with regard to the broader um the broader broader lay of the land the criminal the investigation didn't go into a broader pattern of what else was happening on these shifts what are their cops who are involved because the riders you know there's a ball that they actually signed for each other and there's several names on that ball it's not just those four cops so the civil suit there was a civil suit brought by two civil rights two attorneys um in the area john burris and jim channon who had been

suing the department for years they'd actually received walk ins the victims that you'd mentioned earlier over the years alleging that they'd been arrested beaten up framed up tortured by these cops in west oakland and when the news of keith bat blowing the whistle on the riders hit the newspapers it clicked for them and they realized they'd been seeing this pattern so they opened up their own pattern and practice investigation and did their own investigation of complaints and canvassed neighborhoods and gotten names uh from people who had filed complaints and you know alleged similar patterns of misconduct and came up with 119 plaintiffs who let who laid out a pattern of abuses that spanned much more of the city the downtown area other parts of west

oakland even as far as east oakland and a much broader time frame stretching back almost basically to 1995 five years prior so the reality of opd's abuses and their kind of deep corruption in that period of time was far larger than the criminal case against those four riders would have it and the i should say that these civil attorneys took up the challenge where both the state attorney general and the federal authorities both the local united states attorney and federal um and civil rights um in main justice dropped the ball they did not open pattern and practice investigations into opd and we have it from the ada himself who's in the room when he presented their case because they were cross designated as um as they were cross editor is designated as us

attorneys during their whole investigation and vice versa he presented the case to the sitting united states attorney at the time one robert meuler who should be familiar to your listeners as the former head of the fbi twice over swinging bob meller that's right and um you know miller flipped through the pages and was looking you know trying to see if any connections to russia an alpha bank and so on um but no actually i mean he's flipping through and he's pulls out these files and he looks at the long rap sheet of some of these witnesses and these were people in the street these are people who had been arrested before had been involved in narcotics sales petty assaults that robberies burglaries what have you like they were people who were not

they they were not kids they were not clean sheets and he handed the file back to holister to the ada and said i wish you the best of luck it's important to note that this was a different era a cop's word was very very very hard to impeach on the stand there was no body camera video there were no cell phone videos at the time um you would maybe have a rough camcorder every now and then of somebody shooting like a little video on the street um kind of grainy digital cameras and they were the sound wasn't great but there wasn't much beyond eyewitness testimony and that's why keith's words were so important why his testimony was so critical is that you had a cop coming out and blowing the whistle on his department and saying no this is not right this is what

they're doing they should be punished for it you know i i can't help but thinking about the um the story that's kind of blown up right now about there's a man uh on the subway recently in new york city who was you know acting kind of erratically yelling and stuff but was not had not done any violence to anyone and a a bystander strap hanger restrained him put him in a headlock for 15 minutes and he died and kind of the response that i'm seeing from guys like mad walsh the daily wire crew you know particularly in right wing media is well this guy had been arrested you know 40 times or whatever it's like well that that's not that's not germane to anything that doesn't give you the right to lynch someone yeah exactly like that like the the penalty for

having been arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death that's not the way the system is that's not the way any of this is supposed to work and it's it's interesting there's a degree to which um i guess it hasn't changed and there's a degree to which i'm kind of worried that uh the the sort of nature of social media means that we're a lot more open about the kind of violence we're willing to accept for i agree with that entirely i mean that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of to both black lives matter cycles in 2014 15 and the current cycle is a lot more virulent than than you'd have it if you just watch kind of the soft focus pbs front line documentary versions of it there's a lot of really naked um

justification and support uh for extra legal violence and that is part of the issue with you know law enforcement and holding them accountable there's always going to be a segment small sometimes vocal sometimes not of the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law beyond the you know constraints of our system and that's why oversight why running the rule over law enforcement and making sure that they they behave according to the laws and that they are operating within the bounds of their limits insofar as we have set them out for them and insofar as like it look this book is not a book questioning whether or not police should exist it's a history they do exist they have existed this is what it has looked like to date right if people

other people want to make those cases and look at you know hypotheticals or envision a different future that's totally fine what we're trying to do is lay out the ways in which people have pushed back on one of the most egregious departments in the country consistently over for over a century and actually had some sort of lasting impact on it and there have been some impacts that have really changed um because of look they don't there are there's no more public strip searching of people in the streets that happen in Oakland on the regular every day as late as 2009 and 10 it was common that the cops would say look i'm going in your ass for rocks you better not have anything there right in the middle of the morning on a crowded street in front of people driving by

on the way to work that sort of civil rights violation would happen all the time the department no longer shoots shoots maybe about three or four people a year that's way down from 14 to 15 a year a decade 12 years ago that's because they've changed their chase policy their pursuit policy they used to pursue people with an intent to catch them at all costs that ended up resulting in cops chasing people down blind alleys or ending up way too close to a suspect and pulling out their weapon and opening up fire regardless of whether or not they actually had the suspect had a firearm or another weapon or the whether the cops were under threat the change of the in the pursuit policy has led to more of a their the instruction now is to contain

don't pursue close call for backup set a perimeter preserve life that's not been that change was not something the department submitted to voluntarily they were brought they're kicking and screaming but because there has been this outside imposition of court oversight for so long and because it hasn't gone away because it's not overseen by the justice department or the state attorney general so you know they some of the political figure can't like they can't there can't be a deal cut in the back room between a senator staffer and the federal department of justice or the mayor and the state attorney general and their wife or whatever like that sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's attorneys are beholden to anybody

other than themselves and when the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation play out as it will and hold and both judges on this case have actually been very by the book and very stringent on how the oversight is gone so that's why it's gone up for 20 years and it actually has resulted in good changes there are a lot of people who bitch about it who cry that oh well we need to be out from another this oversight it's hampering the police they can't do their job as they will well do you want to go back to 20 years ago do you really want that do you want that sort of abuse no and that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that did manage to change a lot of things around there's a police commission here that now oversees the department it's not perfect

it's very much in the infancy but that's a body that existed to take control away from the mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a police department and this is yeah it's a long arc but the bottom line is that it's not about a one or a zero there's no linear progress here it's kind of goes in ways but there has been progress which is a crazy thing to say when you look at that the shit that's in the book yeah yeah but it is like it's important both you know I think our audience is definitely much more of of our audience is in the constituency of you know get rid of the police entirely even if you're coming at it from that I mean especially if you're coming at from that standpoint actually I think kind of one of the mistakes that a lot of

people who are are on that side of things which is generally where I find myself is using that as an excuse to not actually understand how the police function using sort they're sort of distaste for the institution as an excuse to not understand how the institution works why it's resilient and the ways in which you know both harms can to an extent be mitigated but also kind of just on its strategic level how it functions to defend itself and I think this book does an exceptional job of going through that in a way that's nuanced and detailed but also compelling and readable like you're not going to have to I do really recommend your book people are not going to have like trouble getting into it like I was drawn in from the first page so I really do think this is

something folks should look into no matter where you live in the United States even if you've never been to Oakland you will you will get a lot out of this I would say that we didn't make an explicit attempt to make the city the main character so to draw people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles and City of Courts may he rest in peace it was a great inspiration for us but more than anything else there are tons of parallels in Oakland to other places it's not a unique play I mean it is a unique place but it's also yeah very typical for an American city like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago are completely atypical they're huge they don't most American cities are like 400 to 600,000 people large Oakland's racial balance

is almost 30 30 30 white Latino black 10 Asian roughly 8 to 10 percent Asian than everyone else thrown in there it's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative and it's also you know Rust Belt City in certain respects although that's changed a lot with the tech boom we could be going back the other way yeah but it really there are echoes in stuff that's happened in New York and Los Angeles in Cleveland in New Orleans in Portland in Seattle it it's the experience that we've had here particularly with police oversight and reform I mean Portland and Seattle are two other cities that have actually undergone very similar programs with departments that are more alike to OPD than not yeah well Ali is there anything else you wanted to to make sure

to get into in this conversation or yeah I think your point about I just wanted to touch on your point about where people come out for the institution I think it's really important even regardless of what you believe about where we should and shouldn't be with law enforcement you got to understand it yeah because it's such a huge institution in our society it is basically the main point of contact most people have with the state now yeah in many American cities because we've stripped down so many other aspects of our societies our mental hospitals are gone our schools are failing public housing barely exists we our healthcare system is decimated and cops essentially catch a lot of the end product of those problems it's one of the reasons why I started reporting on

criminal justice because you can look at so many other issues of an American society through that system and also you can see ways in which like political agendas the way that police departments lobby and the messaging that they push out they don't do it in an isolated fashion it's coordinated like there are these big swings that happen on the national political stage if you will like we were at one moment with police reform and abolishing the police defunding them but with black lives matters the immediate pushback within six months was there's a crime wave there's a crime wave there's a crime wave we need to support our cops and now we're at the point where people are taking acts or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they have it in their head

that things are so out of control in new york homeless man is choked to death because he's having a he's having an episode on the train san francisco this fire commissioner is going around bearspring people who are camping out on the streets this is the sort of like back and forth swing that oftentimes starts with people who are trying to protect their budget line who are trying to protect their political power and it ends up with consequences like that where people take it to that level and i think that looking at law enforcement as a political actor is really important for understanding how we are where we are in the society and also understanding the ways in which you can try and rein them back in and keep your boot on their neck because realistically

they will if you let if there's no oversight if oversight is pulled back there's a reactionary core at the heart of american law enforcement it's always been there we document it back basically to the turn of the century in oakland in just this one city which is a newer city in the states um and if you don't if you let that go that core will rise up and basically take over the department that's what happened with the riders that's what they were they were a representation of a hardcore that had existed in oakland for decades and i think that that's really a really i think that's a critical takeaway for readers from this book yeah i would i would absolutely agree um well folks uh the book is called the writers come out at night brutality corruption

and cover-up in oakland uh it's by ali winston who you've just been listening to and darwin bond graham um i can't recommend it enough ali thank you so much for for being on the show thank you so much Robert between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom this child was laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst

people i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swaying in the wind picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silenced the radio murders they left the body there for reason it was the calling card it's like the mafia used to do and yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy this year they clearly gave a green light i must have lost him listen to silence the radio murders

on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at the iconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlord sold the rink but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitar what what's happening where are we wait look at this september 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the present einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought the lethal lid daughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time travel adventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past

to save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast oh my goodness it's it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart putting them back together and the uh sissive fissian task of occasionally trying to stop them from crumbling as fast as they otherwise would i'm robert evans uh who is not great at introducing this podcast i'm joined with james who is better at introducing this podcast but i strong harmed him out of it no true um well we'll let the audience decide um so james today you and i are here to talk to a journalist uh that we both like quite a lot uh amy westervault amy is the host of a podcast called drilled which focuses on shady stuff uh done by the oil and gas industry

and particularly we're talking about season eight of drilled which is focused on what axon is doing in a south american country called gayana um and it's a really fascinating story uh there's a lot here including kind of the way in which oil and gas companies um move in and in a kind of predatory way create contracts um with smaller countries that don't maybe have the legal resources to set themselves up uh as well as they otherwise would that don't have kind of the the long basis of environmental law rulings that like areas that have been you know uh used for by the oil and gas industry for longer periods of time have um and kind of the fight by activists in that country to um rest control back from axon um and a bunch of other stuff besides amy welcome

to the show i think that's that's enough of an intro from me hi thank you thanks for having me yeah amy i'm curious kind of what got you started thinking about and focusing on and really digging into what's been happening in in gayana because um obviously this is you know uh the oil and gas industry is a topic of concern for most progressives um but people tend to focus on you know kind of the permean basin the gulf of mexico um obviously the middle east these places that are kind of seen as traditionally more the the bread basket of the oil and gas industry yeah yeah i um i started looking at gayana because i um follow a lot of axon's shareholder um briefings and reports like that and i kept seeing them talking about um about the project in gayana and just like the

projections kept increasing so quickly and it got to a point where i was like hold on a second they are projecting that this is going to be producing more than the permean basin by 2025 and this is a country that shipped its first barrel of oil in 2019 that's incredible uh kind of unheard of that that something would happen that fast so um and i happened like just so happened to have had a friend years and years and years ago in san francisco who who like helped do i don't know like marketing for the tourism board in gayana and was constantly telling me about how gayana was this amazing ecotourism destination so i had this i know so i had this like this idea of gayana in my head is like ecotourism central and then i kept seeing all

of these updates around around drilling there so that's kind of what initially got me interested and then i got a press release about um a lawsuit being filed there by an attorney who was trying to kind of stop the oil drilling um so yeah yeah and and this attorney has a has a pretty interesting backstory herself right she does and that was also very interesting because she actually was in house council for bp yeah the deep water horizon folks yeah yeah exactly exactly so she um grew up in gayana her family left uh when she was around 12 or 13 there there was quite a bit of political unrest in gayana spurred like so many places by da and oh gosh like the history of gayana is really interesting but anyway so there was a lot of political unrest her family felt a bit unsafe

they left they went to zambia and then trinidad and then you end up going to school in england um went to oxford you know has this like very posh english accent now and um and then at one point decided you know she was working for bp and traveling all over and um and just kind of got fed up with it and wanted to move back to gayana um so she moved back started working for a corporate law firm there to get very interested in environmental laws because at the time the country was just starting to write its first environmental laws this was like mid 90s-ish yeah and one of the things you make a point on in the podcast that is really is interesting is you know i i grew up in in texas and i had a lot of friends from the permean

basin and you don't think of it and you don't think of the gulf as like an area of strong environmental regulations and if you've spent any time swimming in the gulf of mexico you certainly don't feel that way but it actually i mean it is not not which is not to say that they're strong enough you know um it's not to say that they are sufficient but it's i mean and it's not just that there's stronger regulations there and the regulations are largely a product of how long people have been taking gas out of oil out of the ground but it's also that um because it's got a century you know or so of being utilized by the industry there's kind of a um there's a level of institutional knowledge built up about how to do it relatively which number one speaks to

how inherently dangerous it is because the deep water horizon disaster happens right in the heart of this area but it also means that when you've got a company like exxon starting work in a place like geanna um they don't have any of that any of that build up built up kind of competence or expertise in sort of dealing with these problems yeah that's right they don't have you don't have kind of the heavy bench full of you know experts just hanging out looking for jobs you don't have the um disaster response to expertise in case of a spill for example and you also don't have the regulatory oversight expertise which has been a huge problem in geanna um they got they got a grant from the world bank at one point this was also super controversial because like this was really

interesting to me yeah yeah it was like it was right like right before the world bank issued its whole you know we're not gonna um recommend fossil fuel development as much anymore kind of pronouncement um they sort of fast tracked this grant to geanna to uh create and grow like a petroleum regulatory department in its EPA because they didn't have it like it didn't exist before um so they started to build that out and um but you know it's almost like they're building the regulatory apparatus as they're starting to drill so you can imagine like how well that's okay i think you said in your podcast and like they dropped this hundreds of pages like environmental risk report and it got approved the same day that they received it right that's right yeah it's like stamped like the

date of receipt and the date of approval are stamped on the report and it's the same day so there's not a lot of oversight happening hey some people are speed readers amy you know you got a whole team of them they spent all that well bank money on speed reading courses yeah yeah really moving it up yeah and a lot of Adderall i'm gonna guess yes yes they're very focused over there yes yeah so you know i mean they um i actually talked to i actually talked to this guy who ran the EPA in geanna like the first couple years that they were producing oil and he had formerly worked for the department of energy in the us and was trying to set up like real oversight and like his recommendation was that they have um an EPA staff member actually physically on the

production vessel at all times um which like uh yeah no one was into so that guy got fired yeah great so maybe um talking about like the uh legal panacea of texas and and like the different system in geanna will be a good way to segue into talking about this this like rights-based approach that they used to i guess ultimately try and ensure some kind of responsibility was taken by uh the oil companies can yeah yeah do you want to explain that for people in terms of like the right to a healthy environment yeah because i think it's very yeah it's really interesting it's super interesting so melinda jenki this lawyer who used to work for bp from geanna moved home starts working on these laws she helped to

write the um the country's first kind of environmental protection act which established its EPA and then in 1996 and again in 2003 there were some revisions to the constitution so in early 2000s she worked on getting a right to a healthy environment um integrated into the constitution which basically just says you know every citizen has the right to a livable environment for you know themselves and for future generations so that actually opened up the ability for for citizens to sue the government over this oil drilling project so there's a couple of people who are doing that and they are arguing that the government is violating their right to a healthy environment by not just permitting this offshore drilling but doing it in this really

kind of reckless way where they're sort of rubber stamping permits they're not really providing any oversight exon like brags constantly about how this project is like you know we've done in five years what usually takes 10 i asked them i was like oh is there like a new technology or like a new drilling approach or something and that like the answer is is you know more or less boils down to a very quote-unquote collaborative government so oh dear you know oh boy yeah that's it yeah that's good very fast you don't need to dig into that it's uh the zuckabag approach you move fast to break things nothing yes totally totally exactly and and the the guy who is government has this idea i think that well they've they've actually said this out loud a few times like

that um like net zero is uh you know commitments to net zero is sort of like their timeline you know where they're like okay well you know everyone wants to get to net zero by such and such dates so we need to get oil out of the ground as fast as possible and sell it yeah so that we can meet net zero right so um and because of how really crappy the contract is for anna they are kind of incentivized to do that as well because the faster they can get oil out of the ground and sold the faster they might be able kind of get to a place we're actually getting sort of their promised share of the oil money so they um they're incentivized to move fast and kind of look the way on on stuff i mean there's the first two years of that project exxon talked publicly about

the fact that a pretty key piece of equipment on the boat was um broken for two years two years so that's cool yeah um and again it's like it's an offshore deep water drilling project this is like the most risky type of oil dream there is there's an enormous amount of pressure at that you know level of depth of the ocean it's exactly the sort of situation that deep water still happened in um and uh a lot of like similar kind of approaches to maintenance and safety happening um so yeah not great now i wanted to talk a little bit one of the things that you you kind of open up the series with that uh i found very very intriguing and it's something i've heard from other journalists in the same uh beat as you is that when you start work on a project

that focuses on exxon um some peculiar things start to happen uh just like nothing nothing nothing we can say for certain is like tied to exxon mobile that's right yeah you do notice some like weird things i wanted to chat a little bit about that because it's it it does scan with other things i've heard from from other folks it's true it's true and i you know i report on all of the oil company and none of them particularly like journalists especially the journalists and they um you know will kind of do the usual thing of sending you nasty emails or refusing to have their executives talk to you and it's like that but with exxon like every every time i'm working on an exxon story it's just like you know if i'm traveling all my travel plans get cancelled

there's always just there's always just weird stuff that happens like you know you start to feel like being watched and followed a lot um and and yeah it's super not just me that experience i know that everyone i know that has reported on them has um said that's definitely like there's you know just a kind of an intimidation thing that they like to do i actually was surprised that um that steve call who wrote the book private empire about exxon said to me and i have this in the podcast too that he has you know reported on al-qaeda and reported on the cia and if he's ever like disappeared he told everyone he knows that it's probably exxon so um so yeah yeah then and that definitely happened on this project too like we um my hotel room got cancelled hotel room also

got broken into um yeah and and it was one of those where it's like i had cash on the nightstand was still there but like my computer was open with like certain files open like that and i don't keep like you know sensitive files on my laptop and even in my hotel room but it was definitely like okay this seems very um pointed and you know yeah it's intimidation yeah yeah yeah yeah totally yeah normal and good and i know people always ask me they're like are you afraid of getting sued by exxon and i was like well i guess if i had assets i would be afraid yeah it's not they're suing it's the most concerning thing yeah exactly exactly yeah but like i wonder i was really interested in i get this legal

approach which was very successful in gianna right and if we compare that like if we come back to the united states uh and i know there's a court case i think it was like it was i'm pretty sure is bolder colorado um i might be wrong but it was somewhere like that uh where they they tried to sue oil companies for causing fires right yes there's a climate liability case there um and it's still going actually it's still it's still alive they just got a like a move in their favor at the supreme court because yeah isn't the the case in the us is a bit different right where we don't have this constitutional right to like a healthy environment and i'm totally sure don't yeah yeah let me tell you although actually guess who does have that in the us the montana the state of montana yes and so

there's like a there's a case there actually that's invoking their state constitutional right which is very interesting there's this um a lot of people don't know this about kind of the the the northern western part of the country uh you know mountain which montana is it's not really pw but it's the mountain west which is that they had especially kind of in like the 70s and 80s this weird history of like republican governors i think into the 90s some of the early 90s too like republican state leaders who were also because i guess our our national discourse wasn't so inherently toxic really progressive in in bizarre ways one of like probably the best governor oregon ever had was a republican who's like one of his chief accomplishments was he made all of the coastline in oregon both like lake

and river coastline and the um the ocean coastline public property he like set it up so that it's regulated like highways basically so that no one can own private beaches now there's some little janky ways kind of around aspects of that but like as a general rule it's a really positive thing and it's like not what you would expect from a republican and i think the same thing is true of of that law in montana where it just like you used to be able to have republic i mean like nixon created the epa right it just didn't used to be the same kind of partisan that it is today even like um in the early trump era there were a decent number of republican folks who like specifically opposed drilling in bears ears or like uh demonizing bears your thing was interesting

wherever they went hunting or something yeah right 100% was like yeah yeah because we uh i was like the outdoor industry they had to stop doing trade shows in utah because utah was gonna the governor of utah supported demonetizing it a lot of their like quote unquote hook and bullet people were like yeah fuck this it's bad uh yeah i mean it's the same i think it's in the same category as like john mccain having a good take on torture right where it's like yeah i mean they they live right there of course they don't want it destroyed yeah but everybody's okay with you know um poisoning the gulf or um you know the stuff that the uh that the coke industries was guilty of having like uh uh fucking pipelines full of holes running under towns that then explode right yeah yeah

exactly exactly and that is actually like the number it's like the number one thing that gets people on and on board with environmental regulation is like having something happen in their community where they're like wait a minute this doesn't seem fair um same with pesovania like people were really into fracking until it became like wait so if my neighbor has a lease and that lease ends up poisoning my well i have no records yes that's how it works yeah welcome to america yeah yeah yeah so now i mean they're all like actually there's there's towns in pennsylvania now that are um actually speaking of the rights-based thing that are invoking home rule and baking rights of nature into their charters and these are like pretty

conservative districts too and the whole reason they're doing it have more local control over land use decisions yeah yeah which is probably i'm sure a mixed bag to some degree exactly because you could imagine that going in a bunch of different ways yes yes yeah like school board level shenanigans exactly mm-hmm yeah right now it's like to get rid of fracking waste sites but it could easily be yeah we don't want any i don't know integrated schools here for example yeah yeah um yeah and exactly yeah i wonder like it's different in the u.s. in the sense that like uh i've i understand right this this case when gianna went to the supreme court of gianna right and um is that right several so so um melinda has now filed seven different cases

yeah she's she's very busy um and most of them have wound up at gay at the high court of gianna which is their supreme court they just had a big verdict in um another case that she filed which is really interesting and potentially huge game changer for um oil drilling kind of around the globe they so in the environmental permit that axon had to get in order to start drilling offshore it is laid out as a requirement of that permit that they have to have insurance policy from an independent insurer so they can't self-insure which is what oil companies usually do they have they all have like their own insurance companies to ensure their project yeah it's great it's bizarre but anyway so it really it stipulates an independent insurance company and an unlimited

parent company guarantee that's really really huge because basically in gianna as in most other places that they're operating outside of the u.s. they use like a local subsidiary that has very few assets so they have so exploration and production gianna limited which is worth you know maybe two billion dollars on paper um and and so you know it's very handy for them to you know something bad happens and the subsidiary might get drained but the parent company is protected it it was actually written into their permits they had to have this unlimited guarantee that they will cover whatever damages which is important because in all of the environmental impact assessments you know exxon's own environmental impact assessments they're saying if there were

a well blowout which is like what happened with deep water it would hit up to 14 different caribbean islands plus various countries and like the northern coast of south america so like a really big problem and these are mostly countries that rely on tourism and for their economies so um the argument that malina bade was look because the government has been lacked in regulation and now they haven't required this guarantee you're opening up the citizens of this country to risk because if there's a spill like this these countries could come to gianna asking to be paid for damages and um we're not able to and now you've like taken you know exxon paying for it off the table so um anyway the judge in their favor and said yeah you're right exxon you need

to have this in writing within 30 days oh wow um yeah it's incredible i mean that could really make i'm it would change the math considerably for this project and i would say most other projects that they're working on um the ep is it's the epa and exxon were sort of like co-defendants in this case the epa is appealing also like just by the way when your epa is a co-defendant with an oil company there's something very wrong yeah they might not they might not do be doing the pee part so they're appealing and you know there's a lot of government corruption and stuff going on so we'll see we'll see what happens but this judge everyone was like i was talking to a journalist that we've been working with there and she was like yes everyone's very worried for his safety

because like this this was a big deal and he really i mean in like the most prim and proper legalese possible he repeatedly was like epa why are you just being exxon's bitch it smells like bitch in here what's going on it was really it was like it was like a real like whoa bomb of a of a ruling so um so yeah that's a big win the constitutional case is still um they're still waiting for a ruling in that case but that's also the supreme court that will be ruling on it because it's a constitutional argument yeah yeah a talking of being people's bitch it's probably time for us to uh hear from our advertisers ah yes great great great great no james yeah perfect uh you laid it up and i disdunked it it was good these these advertisers

none of whom were in any way involved in the oil and gas industry uh we actually can't promise that but you know pretend we can yeah uh we're back uh and continue to be blameless uh all right let's uh should we move on to talking about um we chatted a little before this started and one of the things that kind of is is perennially on um or perpetually on our our our beat is different laws and uh and rules and attempts around the world to crack down on the ability of people to protest and exercise dissent um which you have some some some thoughts on and also some some information on kind of the way in which the the oil and gas industry is tied to a lot of these uh these legal kind of assaults yeah yeah yeah they are uh very into cracking down on protests

and the thing that i think is really interesting right now is that you have the fossil fuel industry on the one hand working behind the scenes to you know the american fuel and petrochemical manufacturers which is the lobbying group for like coke industries and a bunch of oil companies and all of that um they helped to write sample legislation in the wake of standing rock to um pass around all of these republican states that would increase the fines associated with protest and jail time and they also did a lot to try to um broaden it out to include organizations so you know any anyone any organization being to organize or plan protests can also be find um in kansas they included a riko charge in that so you know they're trying to make protest

organize crime yeah um but at the same time that they're doing all of that stuff the number one argument that the fossil fuel industry is making in all of the climate cases against it in the us is a corporate free speech argument and that is like it's terrifying so actually in you mentioned boulder before yeah um there's been there's like 24 ish of these cases where uh towns or these or states are saying hey it's really expensive for us to adapt to all of these climate risks and it would be less expensive if the oil and gas companies hadn't kept everyone from doing anything about this for the last 40 years therefore they should pay some portion of the cost that's like the basic argument and the oil companies for the last three or four years

have been saying you know oh you're trying to get around federal law by bringing these in state court and these cases belong in federal court the supreme court finally declined to hear that argument that department of justice was like they can stay in state court it's fine so that argument is sort of dead in the water but they've already started with like their next attempt to get these cases to the supreme court and it's this free speech argument that they've been making which basically says look anything we've ever said about climate change was in the interest of shaping policy that makes it political speech or in like legal um words petitioning speech and therefore protected by the first amendment now they're saying in these cases our first

amendment argument is foundational to our arguments therefore uh these can't be in state court state courts can't rule on on like key first amendment issues so i i'm like convinced that one of these cases is going to be the next citizens united and this supreme court that's very very scary you know they're talking about blurring that like they're basically saying like lying can be free can be protected if it's in the interest of shaping policy a particular way yeah it's fine if we're okay with lying if it's good for us yeah which is you know is my money whenever i'm pulled over by the police but probably probably oil and gas company should be held to a higher standard so you can see why it's like bad but like really for everything

very bad if that president gets said um yeah so yeah they're doing that at the same time that they're trying to limit individual free speech and i think that parallel is um well a not accidental but very very gross and disturbing yeah very much so i'd like i think it's interesting to get the trite like they very clearly see this supreme court as like the the the one to go for right not that it's going anywhere anytime soon i guess didn't amy cony barrett just like like dad wasn't her dad like a shell yeah yeah he went for shuffle like 20 years he sure did of course because yeah there's a class thing happening and she never recuses herself on any of these cases ever also elito i think it's elito has stock in conico philips so that's cool that's cool

probably find out that clarence thomas owns an oil rig yeah it was gifted to him by someone yeah dude with a nazi statue yeah yeah so yeah i i think it's um it's and and i mean they have said out loud in multiple places that the whole push to criminalize protest was a hundred percent a reaction to standing rock yeah um they were very freaked out by that um i think they always have like a an organized reaction to anything that indigenous people are doing period it's like that whole gross extra layer to it um and then actually elsewhere too like in um in canada this um i like we're working with a reporter who's been looking into this in canada for a while his name's jeff dembecky and he's found that um there's this the the oil and gas companies they're

like wrote down in strategies i don't know why these guys write this stuff down all the time but they do they wrote down we're gonna make first nations people the face of climate protest because that'll make it easy to vilify climate protest in the press wow yeah uh fuck Jesus christ sorry that one's fully sent me um it yeah yeah so and a very similar thing there too where it's like increasing fines and jail time and you know um yeah it's interesting how yeah it's like in the us anyway like if you look at the bleeding edge of settler colonialism it's it's nearly always fossil fuel extraction right like if like oak flat uh did the proposed extraction of lithium on tribal lands like a lot of these the nexus of like protest and yeah like colonialism will be

these i guess not lithium but in a fossil fuel but these extractive projects on tribal land yeah yes yes which is why actually the um the the rights of nature stuff is becoming really interesting in tribal court so i don't know if you guys followed this but like um with the line three protests the um the tribe there they um they actually filed a case against a the minnesota i don't know department of public works or something like that and they um they they were like uh we have a um in in their case it's manoman the uh the rights of manoman so manoman is um oh god it just went out of my mind entirely it's uh wild rice sorry whoo okay manoman is the word is the indigenous word for wild rice and they have rights for this rice written into their

uh tribal laws and so they're saying look um based on our treaties you are actually violating this law and therefore we can we can take you to court in tribal court to stop this pipeline interesting it didn't work to stop line three but actually the case is still making its way through the courts because the the minnesota dpw tried to say look um tribal court has action over us and the state court was like uh yeah they do actually because treaties exist yeah and um so it it's really interesting because now um it's the same tribe that is potentially impacted by line five in michigan and they are looking at using the same argument and and it could end up actually working there because there's now been enough time that you

know it could it could make its way through the courts and set a precedent but anyway yeah it's really really really interesting yeah it's uh that's very that's really weirdly similar to the kumiai people here in san diego who are challenging the construction or quote unquote repair uh which is not what's happening of border wall pick yes that's what they all say about the pipelines too it's always repairing an old pipeline but you look at the plan and it's like that's a whole new ass pipeline yeah in a different place than it was before yeah yeah yeah they're repairing a three foot fence with a 30 foot steel barrier uh but yeah they it cuts directly through burial grounds here and they're repairing it by destroying the burial grounds which again

they uh they've opposed with mixed results i guess but it's yeah i guess if folks are listening and they're interested like there are a lot of places where they can they can help those struggles like different ways to do that but that might be more effective here than going to the supreme court given the our supreme court's composition i guess exactly yeah exactly that's why yeah with the um the tribal court stuff i think will be interesting to watch in the next couple of years to see if they're able to to do anything um but you know tribal solemnities all under attack by the supreme court yes yeah yeah the likelihood of disresulting in like indigenous nations getting ever more fucked by uh the u.s. it's equally high as an i kid of ever having success i guess yeah yeah um

anyway sorry i got really far afield there um the counter protest stuff is very very um very much being driven by oil and gas and there's it just keeps going too i mean every year there's like you know multiple more of these laws being proposed and passed i think we're at 20 it's now have passed them 14 or 15 have actually implemented them um and yeah it's not not great no i also think like you know you're seeing the expansion of the whole eco terrorist and really like come back with events too i feel like that was something that happened in like early post 9 11 days and is now happening again where it's it's like i don't know let's expand the definition of terrorism to include environmental activists and um then we can you know go after them with those charges too

that happened in cop city too right weren't they using yes yes they are in the process of still doing that yeah um great well amy this is all really important uh despite being super fun at parties i'm so fun no no no we we are this is a this is a real meeting of the people who are fun at parties sit down and you know that dissent has been criminalized in the united kingdom yeah yeah i don't know man i guess i'll have a man hat like what do you what do you want the last party robert and i attended together uh we we saw a car bomb happen so at least that we didn't see a car bomb happen yeah bring positive vibes oh it was you're not talking about it just a demonstrative car bomb you know yeah yeah don't know the Burmese car bomb sadly no

no if it was an irish car it would have gotten more people um uh there's a little bit of a little bit of ira humor for the audience um okay we should probably i'm making the next slash motion yeah yeah all right well amy westwell thank you so much for coming on today and thank you for continuing to put out um a podcast that is keep that can at least if people you know listen keep them very updated on some of the most important um climate related news going on today and some of the real like fuckery being carried out by the oil and gas industry again the podcast is drilled season eight right now is about exxon in geanna um amy you have anything else you wanted to say before we we roll out no that's it thanks for having me this was fun yeah thank you so much

amy really appreciate it and uh yeah uh this has been robert and james um we should probably do something on the themes at some point james that'll rhyme i know it's not pronounced that way i know this was just me let's do it anyway we could call it robert and james on the tims you know there we go absolutely not all right podcast is over hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated

monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc this child was uh laying on the side of the road the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts what if you had the chance to change the past september 27th 1996 and create the future you've always dreamed of einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio bring you a new 12 parts scripted audio time travel adventure join niki and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past

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