It Could Happen Here Weekly 83
00:00Between 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.
00:22Listen 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 iHeartRadiobring you a new 12-part scripted audio time travel adventure.Join Nikki and her friends as they travel back to the 90s
00:49and change the past to save our future.Listen to Nikki Fix's Time Mix on the iHeartRadio app,Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.Hi there, I'm Bob Jeffy, host of the Daily Dad Jokes podcast.I've delivered over 10,000 dad jokes to over 3 million listeners.And man, the postage fees are killing me.I'm on a mission to spread dad jokes far and wide.If you want to make your family and friends laugh and groan,
01:21then 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 herein one convenient and with somewhat less ads packagefor you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
01:46If 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 gatheredfor 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.
02:16Initially, 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-seriescovering 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.
02:51Reverend 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 Dickensand the members of the City Council of Atlanta knowthat 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 opportunityand said emphatically, no, we don't want your Cop City.
03:31We 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.
04:09This 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.
04:32The 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.
05:17That'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
06:01to 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.
07:02We 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.
08:22Today, 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.
09:23A 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 deceitsurrounding 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.
10:17Our 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 eldersto 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.
10:58But 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 backand 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.
11:48It'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 hearof those tenants, those persons who live in the land now.
12:31But my hope is now at this moment in time that somehow we can change the trajectory of our speciesand 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 Forestto be returned to the Muscogee people.
13:12City 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 doand always have done, work in collaboration with the Black and Brown community right therenear 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
14:00and work in community with the Black and Brown communities that are there.We call on you, Atlanta City Council, to be the moral compassand to not just halt the building of this structure, but to repatriate the landto 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 violencethe movement has already seen.We're projecting by the end of the day, there will be 40 people
14:40that 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 committedof domestic terrorism, not one dead body. Meanwhile, we can't even show the bruiseon the police officer that was allegedly shot at. But our friends ashes, we have the ashesof 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 upin 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.
15:29Both myself and Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective were at the press conferenceand 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 alignedwith the types of narratives being put out by police in relation to the events that previousnight, the Sunday Direct Action and Music Festival. I think it's also worth noting thatthe people at the clergy event did not openly demonize the actions that people chose to takeon Sunday. The media definitely gave them opportunities to try to throw people underthe bus and that did not happen. We've seen that all throughout the week. Every chance that the
16:13media is trying to throw somebody to cause dissension or a divide amongst the movementhas been really handily deflected by anyone who's come across it. The clergy didnot just a good job of not falling into that trap, but of actually pointing outhow 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 righthere in Atlanta, Georgia. You got APD, you got Georgia State Police, you got GBI, you got GeorgiaState Troopers, you got everybody except the martyr police who are engaging in violenceand terrorism against the people who are standing against this illegal land swap. So I would suggest
17:14that the next time you decide that you are going to bring up your police rhetoric that you get fromwhichever police source, you go ahead and discuss that with them because we don't know what they'redoing but what we do know is what we're doing and what we see from them that we know. I know when Iget hit by an officer. I know when I see a mother with a child begging to be let up off the groundbecause her children are with her. I know when I see officers pointing a rifle inside a bouncyhouse. If I could just say, I'd like to just bring up a story. Initially, the colonizers that cameonto this land attempted to use the indigenous folks as their slaves. However, the indigenous folksknew the land so they could get away. Now, when you ask me about why is it that you keep catching
18:07people that aren't from here that might not reflect the people that are actually involved in theresistance, God bless you. After the press conference, people from the clergy coalitionmarched to the front door and entered City Hall before making it upstairs to sign up for publiccomment 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 nowmoving through City Hall. There's a whole bunch of cops here that look relatively nervous about
19:04the 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 theclergy 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 floorsto 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 CityCouncil meeting finally began. I'm standing here today with the Faith Coalition. We are clergyand faith leaders. We are citizens and we are protectors of the land that doesn't belong to us
19:59but belongs to God. We are deeply concerned for our community members, for ourselves and theimplications for the future of public safety in the United States if this cop city developmentgoes 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 conscienceto 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 differentin Atlanta, to do something different for the South. Finally, we're asking for a communityprocess, a community process. Let us come together with moral imagination to envision
20:51how 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 ofmuskogee leaders and community members, our indigenous siblings, incarcerated folks andsurrounding prisons, families and neighbors who live in cross proximity to the firing rangeand 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 totheir homeland. The Miko of our Halebi ceremonial grounds back home in Oklahoma has come here,
21:39where 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 tovisit 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 isfrom the residents is they need investment in housing and public spaces and not investmentin further militarized policing. They want investment in the well-being of incarceratedand not further violent incarceration, but the well-being of the community members.
22:26Thank 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 mehave said the things I would say, but I would like to say that I pretty much agree with everysingle thing they have said about this insanity that you all are calling a police safety trainingfacility. So I think you need to just cancel it. Start having some real conversations with thepeople of this city to solve the real problems in a way that will actually be effective and this
23:21facility is not going to be it. And the mayor's proposed task force is just one more way to tryto propagandize us to believe that this is good for us when we're not stupid and we know it'sjust lipstick on a pig. And if you harden your heart be reminded of the story of another Pharaohwho had a very hard heart who would not free the people of God who would not leave them to theirland. 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 overbecause it will. There are a couple like things to note about how city council public commentworks. City council doesn't tend to pay attention to them. Ostensibly the only one who pays attention
24:11is city council president Doug Shipman because it is his job to call time and to call up the nextperson. But you know city counselors will like step in and out of the room get something to eatduring 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 committeebasically he's in charge of police and the other is Mary Norwood who represents Buckheadand has what I would describe as ontologically evil vibes. Buckhead is the northern primarilywhite neighborhood in Atlanta that is wanted to secede from the city which in Atlanta has
24:55very uncomfortable segregation and redlining parallels. But despite not paying attentionduring public comment these two in particular both paid extra attention after public commentwhen 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 abilityto deploy even greater force to to quill this you know the millions of damage millions ofdollars of damage to public and private properties. We will make adjustments as those that use
25:44various tactics. Yesterday was an escalation we had not seen this large number of individualsengaged in this activity and the aggressive manner in which the officers were attackedwas a significant change from what we had seen before when it generally had been setting propertyon fire we'd seen police cars set on fire windows busted but this was started as an attack againstindividuals men and women who are employees of the city so that was an escalation councilmemberHillis said we have already made adjustments for both within our capability as well as with ourpartners. Throughout Sheerbaum's testimony it was interesting the degree to which the chiefframed Sunday's direct action as primarily being targeted against officers and not the
26:25destruction of equipment and machinery at the north gate. From the videos that APD themselvesreleased of the incident it's clear that engagement with the police was limited to keeping officersat bay as construction equipment was targeted and despite the continued referring of fireworks asquote unquote mortars or explosives as the chief himself admitted no officers were harmed duringthe direct action. In a later episode we'll hear more of Chief Sheerbaum's explanation of Sundaynight's events as it gives insight into the police's own surveillance capabilities and theirability 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
27:17and went back to the woods for the first time since Sunday night for Purim. Initially people werevery cautious when entering the woods again but as the night went on more and more people startedto pour into the forest with some choosing to return to their camp. Later that night I enjoyedan experimental noise show in the living room probably to the detriment of people trying tosleep in the area. I went to the Purim in the woods I got to share my my memory of the VeggieTales ester story starring the tickle monsters. I got to bond with a few ex-vangelicals about thatso that was fine then there was an experimental noise show in the forest and really I think itactually is worth talking about because this was the first time people return to the forest yeah
28:03this was the first time that people like returned to the forest in mass since Sunday and he startedto kind of feel people's energy get reinvigorated the woods became a place again that people wereable to like begin and feel like they were able to to be in community in the woods again and thatis in keeping with sort of how this movement has always uh responded to what we I guess could calla loss right like 23 people getting arrested and charged is a is a great loss yeah and thebounce back period is is is pretty quick like the resiliency is yeah is continual and alwaysstrengthening every time that you know the repression grows like it does seem like theresiliency grows with it people were not scared away from the woods people still still were like
28:47no this is something I care about I am still going to be in the woods I'm still going to defend thesewoods and you kind of have like there's always this essence of of like fear kind of kind ofunderlying whenever you're like in the Wallani forest because you know people have been arrestedand charged for laying in a hammock like that that with another defendant with with anotherdefendant um and like so you you know that it is it is fundamentally a risky place to bebut people think the the potential cost is worth it like it they they will they continue to be herebecause they know this is a winnable fight and they know that it that it is worth it to defendthese woods early Tuesday morning a few stop cop city banner drops happened throughout the city
29:32two people were detained by police during one of these banner drops but were later releasedwith a traffic citation after being interrogated separately and extensively photographed by lawenforcement officials only identified as quote Georgia police and homeland security unquoteTuesday was the start of a series of nonviolent direct actions that were being launched arounddowntown and midtown Tuesday morning I followed a small group that went to the headquarters ofNorfolk Southern one of the Atlanta police foundation's financial contributors and notedenemy of Ohio they enter the lobby and it's a very small group but like I think half of it wasit was like five people and the another five like press people yeah so they they enter and
30:17they read aloud a letter to Alan Shaw the CEO of Norfolk Southern calling for a divestmentfrom of Norfolk Southern from cop city and immediately they are met with a security guardscreaming like go you're get out of the lobby lay if you're having you're being criminally trustor you're being trespassed you have to leave one of the other security guards runs around withcell phone camera and like shoves it in everybody's faces reaching rather rudely over you to get myface yes and they got very close to me and during the Norfolk Southern buildingand so the the whole thing lasts like less than five minutes maybe right about five minuteswhen they finish reading the letter like all they asked was that the letter go to the the CEO
31:28yep while people were inside the headquarters security called NS police which is the NorfolkSouthern police who are legally allowed to arrest people but nobody was arrested at that nonviolentdirect action the whole thing was over pretty quickly and you know as we were walking out wesaw like the the um a force of Norfolk Southern police like swarm kind of the exterior of thecampus and like keep an eye out on things and then we moved over to Woodruff Park which wasthe meeting place for these nonviolent direct actions that happened about every every day atnoon starting on starting on Tuesday it's Tuesday March 7th around noon there's about 50 or sopeople gathered in Woodruff Park who are heading out and marching to go stop by two of the Atlanta
32:25police foundation corporate funders we roll up and I think at that point there were like 20ishprotesters it was it started off very small there was no police like no real visible policepresence that were like maybe a cruiser or two like kind of around um and activists start togather and kind of talk about like what their plan is for the day which was just to march aroundto three different sites they wanted the AT&T building the Georgia Pacific building and GSUGeorgia State University they are they're now leaving Woodruff Park they got to Georgia Pacificone of the cop city financial backers without much incident and without much in terms ofvisible police presence people called on Mayor Dickens who is the chair of the board of directors
33:15for Georgia Pacific to cancel the Atlanta police foundation lease of the land that cop city isslated to be built on Mayor Dickens we want you to cancel this lease we know that you have theauthority to do so they finished up at Georgia Pacific they set up a little vigil for GeorgiaGita and from Georgia Pacific they began their trek to the AT&T building they left a little vigilfor Georgia Gita in front of the Georgia Pacific center and the group of like more than 50 peopleare continuing to march north police eight to ten police officers are directly behind themand a whole bunch of police cars are blocking peach tree along the path to AT&T was the APF'sheadquarters just across the street and as the crowd approached this intersection the amount of
34:06police ballooned massively in the block around the Atlanta police foundation headquartersthere's got to be about 30 to 40 officers stationed blocking off the entrance to the APF and alsojust like following the crowd around as they're as they're marching through the through the sidewalksthere's definitely over god there's I think around 75 officers deployed in this area right now thethe number keeps growing as we start walking down different different sidewalks in different streetsyou just see more officers that are already stationed there are 50 activists and whatcertainly over a hundred somewhere probably between 100 and 120 police officers startedmarching not like behind not in front but directly beside the march sort of pinning the march to the
34:55wall and like essentially kettling the march there was police station in front there was policestation behind and police stationed on the side surrounding the surrounding like these 50 peoplewho were who were simply walking on the sidewalk assembling upon a new group of officers got tobe about 100 officers in this area right now at one point a police vehicle was just parked on thesidewalk completely blocking it during this entire time police were blocking all of the traffic inthese intersections and roads driving wrong way up on one way like just you know doing doing policethings yeah a door to state university canine unit this blocking off the entire sidewalk nextto a folton county sheriff's vehicle they're trying to make it impossible for people to
35:41actually move on the sidewalk but for the most part people have been able to move around thepolice and and keep keep their movement going instead of just stalling in one spot or liketrying to physically confront the what is now like hundreds hundreds of law enforcement officersfrom folton county sheriffs and alana police department and even like georgia state universitypolice so the group is split up in between two streets right now because people are trying tofollow the follow the crossing signals because otherwise police are going to tackle and violentlyassault people no one was arrested people march to their prospective locations people verypointedly kept to laws there was a couple of times when like the crosswalk changed and the group
36:23kind of had to split they would stay and wait until the crosswalk went back to walk and thencrossover and join it's so funny that the cops are so insistent if you step on the streets you'regoing to get arrested um and making sure people stay on the sidewalks but the result of that isthat all the cops are standing in the street and they're blocking off like miles of trafficdowntown right now people just arrived at the 51 peach street center avenue at and t building indowntown atlanta police were already stationed in front of the at&t building so there wasn't muchto do after a brief speech talking about at&t's contributions to the police foundation and copcity the crowd moved on now people are turning west in the uh the opposite direction from the
37:06at&t headquarters heading back into the woodruff park area where this march began police withlong guns here finally the crowd stopped at georgia state university and talked about gsu'sconnections to the at&t police foundation what is of note for this action and really all of theactions that happened the next few days is not what the protesters did it's the police's disproportionateresponse to just 50 people walking on the sidewalk chanting and giving short speeches outside ofbusinesses tied to apf with a small line of officers in front of gsu they gave their theirlast round of speeches and sort of dispersed for the day before we wrap today and give theseclouds something else to go do we will be out here we will be out here for the rest of the week for
37:56the rest of the month for the rest of the year and we will fight until we win some of the policeare now grouping up and opening up the sidewalk so people can actually leave it seems officerswere in fact instructed to make arrests during this action but for some reason did not followthrough on those orders according to scanner audio from atlanta police department's swat teamextensive police activity continued later that night at around 5 30 to 6 p.m police startedstaging around the forest in a way that usually indicates that a raid is forthcoming word spreadaround the recovering encampment that police could be preparing for a raid so the initialreports were like that there were 50 police officers staged at key road and ready to go
39:13and then the de cap county swat starts to roll up at the the fire station and i would say a fairamount of like panic starts to set in a camp multiple multiple police copters are gettingare getting flown overhead multiple different swat teams are being brought in at least likethree or four different agencies are are stationing officers around the woods i believe it'sestimated that at least 120 police officers were were being staged in the area directlysurrounding the forest and in the area by the power line cut on key road and it should be saidthat you know up until this point uh the police have never brought in that many resources to anyprotest action that i am aware of and not come in and engaged so i was with a group offsite who
40:02like immediately began to fear like you know for they wouldn't be able to get back to their campsites they wouldn't be able to get their their gear they wouldn't be able to get their medicationand and that from what i understand was the the general vibe around but nothing happened nothingseemed to happen and and then at around seven police started to almost like express confusionon what was going on and then everyone else expressed express confusion for why the policewere confused and we think we've kind of put together what may have happened soclark what what is what is suspected of of going down here so the one thing that policedon't understand and probably will never understand is humor now they become the butt
40:47of the joke often but they don't understand comedy so at seven o'clock that evening was scheduledcomedy in the forest and from what we've gathered the police thought that the comedy in the forestevent was going to be a cover for another sunday night like action so this event was scheduledon the public defend the atlanta forest calendar that anyone can look at online is this comedy inthe woods event for people to tell jokes around a campfire and i i guess they thought it was likeit was like this event that was like a red herring so that people could then go do violent militancyin around the woods so when seven o'clock came and went like police were expecting people tolike arrive at the woods or something and that just didn't happen because turns out a few minutes
41:37before seven o'clock this comedy event was canceled for like unrelated reasons the organizer hadhad things come up so this event just didn't happen but there still was comedy in the woodsit just was that the police wasted probably over a hundred thousand dollars mobilizingover a hundred officers i mean obviously i think some people in the woods were you knowknow had some frustration that that that you know they experienced this fear of this possiblyincoming raid that then resulted in there being nothing i think it's always important to whenpeople are relaying information they relay information that is known without like uninduespeculation so like it is a fact to say that there's over a hundred cops stationed by the woods
42:23and they've never had that many cops there before without doing some sort of raid or some sort ofof some sort of like activity in the forest and and part of what i've heard go on since thenwas you know some very generative conversations about how they're going to take into accountlike this this new paradigm that developed that night um and i i think that again speaks to sortof just how the movement continues to develop and grow and like you know handle new new challengesand and shifts so with the forest camp still intact the week of action continued on as plannedwith another downtown nonviolent direct action that next morning so wednesday anew is a lot smallerof direct action than than the day before it starts with like a dozen people it slowly
43:09grows to like a few dozen but yeah it started extremely extremely small so this was one onedifference from tuesday is that when we arrived police already had a visible presence in downtownstationed around woodruff park so a group of people just launched from woodruff park theykind of split off in different different little sub sub groups lots of people are just stationedoutside of marta stops handing out flyers and that is what people are doing right now policeseem relatively confused and are trying to like mobilize to different areas where theyfeel like something might happen but it's just people handing out flyers and uh they decidedto split into groups and engage in like just some typical outreach activity that you would see
43:53you know from any group like just passing out flyers and and pamphlets and and attemptingfrom what i saw to have like one-on-one conversations with anyone who wanted toso this this group that it broke off into these smaller sub groups the group that would kind ofa accompanied stationed themselves around some marta stops around i believe it was like them itwas the peach tree marta station peach tree center marta station yeah so they stationed at thethe like the three different exits or entrances for that just just handing out flyers handing outleaflets trying to you know talk to anybody who walks by another group of people standing outsideof a public transit spot handing out flyers probably like i don't know four or five other
44:31small small groups doing similar things throughout downtown which means police have a lot more placesto be as opposed to just following one big group the group that we followed uh had its own policepresence follow it and then when they split into three more groups each group had its own policepresence follow it and police stuck to the protesters the entire time and of course likethere's there's white transport vans that are full of cops kind of driving by big white van fullof police officers just showed up across the street army green tan swat vehicle just parkeda block away from the atlanta police foundation headquarters there was an atlanta swat vehicleparked outside of the hooters totally normal response totally normal response and so the
45:17leafletting goes on for you know like 45 minutes and then all of the groups start to gather togetherconveniently with the group that like we had embedded with all right there's actually a prettydecent number of people gathered here for the flyering event today you know normal policeresponds to people handing out flyers just 50 officers in a swat team um but yeah there'sprobably at this point like you know two or three dozen people that have kind of all convergedtogether they started off very small people were very very spread out this they splintered off intolittle little smaller groups but now they've all kind of coalesced together back again soall the little subgroups kind of meet up on andrew young and peach tree right next to the
46:00hooters and the hard rock cafe this area is like the business district so in the middle of the dayit's like really busy it's a fairly like good spot to pass out leaflets so they are passingout these leaflets at pedestrians they're still able to like walk through at the sidewalks it'spretty it's pretty chill um and then uh apd approaches the crowd like the apd has alreadybeen around this area there's the there's the swat vehicle across the street watching peoplehand out flyers um but then a lieutenant neal welch approaches the crowd and gives them adispersal order okay can i read the dispersal order all right so i'm uh lieutenant neal welchof police officers city of atlanta i hereby declare that being on this sidewalk you are
46:46obstructing or repeating the normal and reasonable movement of pedestrian traffic and violation ofatlanta city ordinance okay in the name of the people of santa georgia i hereby command thatall present in the sidewalk all present here in the sidewalk immediately exit the street or theroadway or sidewalk if you do not do so you may be detained or arrested should you fail to exitthe sidewalk in accordance with this lawful command you shall be in violation of section 150266obstructing pedestrian traffic which prohibits standing or being on any street roadway or sidewalkin a manner to obstruct or impede the normal or reasonable pedestrian traffic cops threatenedarrest and detainment they claimed that people were blocking the sidewalk which they absolutely
47:39were not i was walking freely as was all of the downtown pedestrian traffic they were not blockinganything this is uh this is pretty silly uh utterly utterly ridiculous response to peoplehanding out flyers so they were told they cannot be on the sidewalk obviously they can't be on thestreet where where are you allowed to protest if not the sidewalk or the street um seemed like verylike flimsy legal footing but obviously they police can arrest anyone they want to at any time forany reason so people decide to move they cross over the street they walk like a block norththey cross the street again and they they they move onto this part of the sidewalk that is likereally large like a massive massive open open section that yeah right in front of the mall
48:24um so it's it's it's meant to like have a bunch of people pass by it so people continue to handout flyers while this is happening uh there's another group who comes in to the side ofpeteri center mall and enters the mall to find mayor andre dickens there are a couple boardsin atlanta that stipulate the mayor is is like the the head of the board and this is one of themand it meets uh in peteri center mall as as one does so the mayor is having a meeting in the malland his office space is you know sort of above the mall and this group of people from the muskogeenation enter um and try to meet up with the mayor to hand off a letter objection objection we havea letter being delivered from the muskogee creek nation on behalf of muskogee creek spiritual
49:15leadership in opposition to cop city i came all the way on the trail of tears to deliver thisletter to you folks um we want you to know that the contemporary muskogee people are now makingtheir journey back to our homelands and hereby give notice to mayor andrew dickens the atlantacity council the atlanta police department the atlanta police foundation the de cobbe countysheriff's office and so-called cop city that you must immediately vacate muskogee homelandsand cease violence and policing of indigenous and black people in muskogee lands we lived asstewards and in relationship to this land for more than 13 000 years until the illegitimatestate of georgia negotiated with the tyrant andrew jackson for the militarized for the militarized
50:09force removal of muskogee and Cherokee relatives to indian territories mayor dickens can i givethis letter to you oh he got onemayor we want to talk to you about our homeland muskogee creek people three indigenousactivists along with camau franklin um arrive and um they find the mayor they enter the boardmeeting and they begin to read this letter from the muskogee nation allowed and in the letterit essentially says that atlanta is being evicted out of the woolly lawny forest and the muskogeepeople are going to return and reclaim their ancestral land um mayor dickens in true mayorfashion bolts away from this running through an exit door which is then like blocked by a guard
51:02which i i think that has its own like set of legal issues um essentially just ignoring themover his shoulder he calls out i've i've got a copy of the letter and hides just completelytrying to to escape what is not a good look for him the atlanta police department apex swatchteam was called to the mall and right as the activists were able to exit the special policeunits rushed into the building finding no one by now the police repression during this week of actionfar exceeded police activity during any of the prior weeks of action and this trend would continueas the week entered its last few days the next episode will wrap up our coverage for the weekas well as contain a bit more analysis of the police repression and the fallout of sunday's
51:52direct action but then there will be a fifth bonus episode that gives an overview of what'shappened in the woolly lawny forest in the intervening two months see you on the other sidemusic festival audio courtesy of unicorn riotmusicbetween april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets inwashington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person wasresponsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom this child waslaying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car
52:56it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he mayhave been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst people i thoughtthat they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killeris still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever youget your podcasts picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swaying in the windpicture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silenced the radio murdersthey left the body there for a reason it was the calling card it's like the mafia used to doand yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into a world of drugs
54:00and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy this year they clearlygave it me in life i was velocity listen to silence the radio murders on the i heart radio appapple podcasts or wherever you get your podcastshey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at theiconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlordsold the rank but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitarwhat's happeningwhere are we wait look at this september 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the present
55:07einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought you lethal litdaughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio timetravel adventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the pastto save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast or whereveryou get your podcast welcome back to it could happen here i'm garrison davis this isepisode four of my mini series detailing the march 2023 week of action to stop cop cityin atlanta georgia this episode will be hearing from a lot of new people as we close out theday-to-day coverage of this week of action one of the last big organized rallies was on thursday
56:02night and it was put on by community movement builders and other black led groups from atlantathe big event thursday night was a six o'clock rally that met at the martin luther kingnational historic site there was police stationed at king center before anyone got there we sawlike dozens and dozens of police cars going by all around the the site are various you knowquick response forces and riot cops just ready to move in large police response in the area alreadyas has been expected for the past few days multiple multiple sandy springs police buseswere driving by there was a multiple unmarked white vans full of officers the area is crawlingwith police cars and now there's a small detail of officers across the street from people gathering
56:51here in the park we are currently surrounded on every side by groups of police officers in riotgear the the crowd started off like actually fairly decently size maybe like 50 people and thencontinued as well as as the the speeches progressed to i would say like 200 250 maybe even a littlebit more they were passing out signs so like anyone who who came like they had a sign ready for youandre dickens is a sellout of course is a very popular one there were stop-cop city like bannersthat people could like hold atl verse 12 like you know just a bunch of like really cleversort of protest slogans and things that people could get behind the makeup of the crowd wasdefinitely leaned like far less like white anarchists than certainly the accusations
57:38of this movement i think i think more representative of the movement as a whole like it was a mix ofa bunch of different people i would say like it probably accurately reflected atlanta demographicsdefend the forest signs and banners are being handed out throughout the crowdother people are passing around the jail support number and jail support contact informationand people are starting to get ready so it meets at six o'clock and for about an hour and a halfwe listen to a series of speeches as the crowd begins to swell so we are here in solidaritytogether today to make it clear to the mayor that he's not going to keep lying on our namesthey'll literally be building a moxie of Atlanta practice how to repress realize and kill people
58:23and so we find it ridiculous we find it disgusting we find it embarrassingthat our mayor andre dickens would fix his mouth to say that black people want to be killed by thepolice that black people walk off stage the mayor must have forgotten that our ancestors were literallyfighting abolition since they were brutally brought to this country they were fighting for freedomfighting the original police right the slave patrols that captured black bodies to take themback to their white masters he's talking to the same black people whose elders were fighting herein these same streets in the 60s and the 70s to stop police occupation of our communities that'sright resistance to police resistance to state violence is literally in our blood as black people
59:16it is in our dna they're lying on our name because they want money from the same white corporationsthat are funding cop city home depot chick-fil-a coca-cola no folks southern at and t cops enterpriseswho owns the ajc and this is a fight that we will win that we are committed to winningright and so when we talk about winning it's important to say what do we mean when we saythat we'll win we mean no cop city anywherenot in south atlanta not in the cab not in north atlanta nowhere when we say that we will winwe are meaning that this fight does not stop with cop city this is a fight for the liberation of alloppressed people here and abroad that's right and that's why it's disgusting that the mayor
01:00:11and that these corporations will talk about outside agitators okay the reason that there are peoplecoming from all over the world to support this fight is because this is a fight that affects all ofus that's right the atlanta police foundation admitted that 43 percent of the cops being trainedat that facility will not be in georgia okay so when people come from tennessee from new york fromcalifornia it's because they know that their local police might learn how to kill them betterhere that's right and when people come from abroad they know that currently the atlanta policedepartment trains with the israeli police so the same techniques being used to brutalize blackpeople are being used to practice genocide on the palestinian people and the same tactics being
01:00:59used to practice genocide on the palestinian people are being used to brutalize black people righthere so when people come from all over the world to say stop cop city they're not outside agitatorsare standing in solidarity with us because this is a fight that affects us all as the rain picked uptortita's mother belkis toran spoke next all the court is the center i call them i call them to comehere to support us all the people from different religions come here and help us this is a matterof the earth we're talking about the earth that is dying the earth needs our love the earth needsour attention and we are we are conscious we know that this is not right don't go by yourselfwhen we go to activities stay together don't go outside by yourself don't we need to make
01:02:09understand that this is the right thing to do we we are the correct people we are rightbecause we are driving by love and we love all of i love you and i know that you love mea speaker from black votes matter addressed the crowd next starting off by talking about theimportance of mass action i just want to explain something because sometimes people get confusedthey get twisted they say oh y'all look like voters matter all y'all do is talk about votingbe clear we understand that the way that we get to liberation is not going to come just througha vote that's never been how it's worked for our people in this country sister harry didn't get achance to vote for liberation she didn't get a chance to vote to take our people off the plantation
01:03:04right so we are very clear that what we have got to be in fact we just celebrated commemorated theanniversary of of selma and the march to montgomery but be clear the people of selma didn't vote fora voting rights act they had to fight for it they had to march for it in some cases they bled for itthey had to resist for it they had to take to the streets for it it's in their tradition that weare out here today so yes i believe i believe in the power of the vote but i also believe in thepower of mass action he then talked about the intersection of cop city and efforts to furtherrestrict the democratic process in georgia the same corporations that are funding cop cityare the same ones that are funding the voters question the same ones we did a whole campaign
01:03:55a couple years ago when georgia did that voter suppression bill and we called out home depotand coca cola and delta and many of the other corporations that give money to the peoplethat are that are taking away our rights to vote and then if you don't have a government thatreflects the people then what do you need you need a police force to enforce the fact that youdon't have a government that reflects the people and so our message from mayor dickens our messagefor the city council is that if you don't respond to the people you about to lose your job you aboutto lose your job because we've got that power we've got the power to make that happen studentsfrom the atlanta university center a consortium of four black colleges in atlanta where some of
01:04:44the last people to give speeches before the march we have attempted to reform our police force adddeal escalation training add civil rights history training and give more money to our police butwe continue to see black bodies across social media platforms television and other media platformsbeing displayed being murdered the victims have received no justice and when we say no justicewhat do we say no justice no justice no justice the building of the atlanta public training centeris an insult and an act of the utmost disrespect from our city leaders we have a duty to fight forthe change that we seek as an active member of this community i refuse to sit by and be idle andjust let things happen this city has been my home ever since i was born i've been to various events
01:05:39here i have seen the sights and i've lived through some of the most important events right here inthis city this is my home this is your home this is our home this is a home of black excellencethis is the home of dr martin luther king jr this is the home of john lewis this is thehome of joseph evelyn and joseph elowey this is the home of civil rights this is the home of ctvivian this is the home of great blackness itself this is the home of every single black person herein america this city this house this place of black excellence says no to cop see my afro pessimistfriends and revolutionaries both agree we are at war the police in the city have said as muchloudly with their words and their actions it feels obvious to me that we need warriors
01:06:41weapons and i know that that fact may give some of us trepidation but i want to assure you that weneed so much more than soldiers to win this fight whatever it is that you do whatever skill you bringi just ask that you make it a weapon if we are ever going to experience democracy we need yourtools to be repurposed in this fight against cop city if you're a writer like me child that betterlook like a threat to cop city if you do mutual aid caring for community ain't gonna get any easierplease show us the way if you're an artist where my heart is at you got a lot of them out hereyes let every painting reveal the truth including the joy and freedom that abolition calls us tolet us make songs that inspire revolution if you're a healer get ready yes we need you
01:07:46much will be lost in this struggle let us not forget if you're a teacher well we got a lot tolearn about this war we're fighting and how police practice urban warfare if you're a lawyerguide us when they say that any fighter is a criminal if you're a digital organizers keepyour finger on the pulse and tell our stories far and wide and if you're a community organizerwe need to tend to our relationships not just use them we need real solidarity which goes beyondunity we need pluralism making space for many strategies to coexist and ultimately we need topractice democracy if we plan to build one cop city is the police in the establishment preparingfor domestic war right here in the city of Atlanta that's right any further training of the police
01:08:38is training against our existence that shit cannot be built it will never be builtwe all must fight for the democracy we've never seen before what are you willing to dothank you so after about an hour of speeches people are now finally getting ready to movethey announced on the loudspeaker where we are going we are marching to the atlantic policefoundation headquarters on peach tree the same location that had the front windows broken onthe protest following the killing of tortuguita that saturday so people leave uh they stickonto the sidewalk because there's cops staring at them and cops had definitely had had indicatedthat if if people step onto the street they would be arrested the length of the march is
01:09:40stretching for about two or three city blocks just because you know trying to cram 300 peopleonto a sidewalk makes that stretch out really long but the the cops have been pretty pretty adamantthat if anyone steps onto the street they're going to get arrested that there's a banner being carriedacross that says what you water grows fund our future stop cop city defend the forestpeople with the stop cop city signs in the coca-cola font signs that read atlanta versus copcity no cop city on stolen land the thursday march definitely had the most amount of signs out ofall of the individual marches or actions that i want to both small handheld signs and also signswith really tall handles to hold up above the crowd all right people are being led into the
01:10:41street now after walking after walking on the sidewalk for a for a decent while people havenow taken to the streets along the path of the march there's a projector was set up projectinglike stop stop cop city slogans onto the side of a building all with like really really goodgraphic design visuals is definitely a strength of the movement there's this uh police riot helmetthat is has a tree growing underneath it breaking apart the helmet it says trees give life policetake it we got a police riot line set up a few blocks ahead of the people marching on the streetright next to the building with these uh with these stop cop city stuff projected onto the siderather than let the police do an escalatory show of violence people opted to move back
01:11:26onto the sidewalk to continue the march uninhibited people seem to be moving closerback onto the sidewalk as they're staring down this riot line and police are now heading backinside their white rent a rent a bus little vans that they've been staging their riot cops out ofand they're driving off people are now in downtown atlanta outside of the georgia pacific centerwe have uh like 12 regular police cars the two two white vans full of riot copsand lots of cops the station places i cannot currently see all right we're marching northalong peach tree street heading heading to the atlanta police foundation got the two thetwo bus max rent of buses full of full of riot cops right beside right beside the march cops
01:12:23really adamant about not letting anybody march in the street it's funny because a few days agothey wouldn't let people stand on the sidewalk either most of the cops that are surrounding themarch right now are still in their vehicles at least from this current vantage point as opposedto the nonviolent direct act to march as opposed to the nonviolent direct action marches and actionsthat have happened launching out of woodruff park the past week in which the police justtailed and surrounded the march on foot i think this march is just slightly i think this march isjust slightly too big to use that tactic so they're surrounding them with vehicles instead as themarch arrived at the atlanta police foundation the hundreds of protesters crammed onto the
01:13:08sidewalk were greeted by armed apd officers riot police are standing in front of the boarded upatlanta police foundation headquarters at 191 peach tree there is a large large crowd in front ofthese relatively small amount of officers standing in front of the boarded up doors a few dozen copssome armed with ar-15s a lot of cops stationed outside the apf headquarters and even morestationed inside apf headquarters police blocked off traffic in the uh on this section of peachtree street um basically sandwiching everybody in they they could have mass arrested as i'm surethey wanted to yeah the police were ready to to mass arrest the entire time this is this is kindof a wild site we have hundreds of people staring down about three dozen officers from the alana
01:14:00police department armed with ar-15s obviously all of their handguns but hundreds of hundreds ofpeople holding signs staring down the police you can you can feel the kind of you can feel thetemperature rising a little bit here the cops look very nervous as hundreds of people who arechanting at them and i'm not very happy or facing them down they're so they're so close togetherwe're just sandwiched in this is such a tense situation right now no one in the crowd hasany visible weapons of any kind of course they're holding big signs cops have some zip cuffs readycops have all of their all their guns ready i was able to see inside the building via a smallslit in the plywood there were tons of riot cops inside with shields and all the cops on the inside
01:14:53of the building had gas masks strapped to their leg at least one riot cop on the other side of thedoor was wearing a unique armored suit not like the regular police suits with riot armor likeon the outside this armored padding was built into the clothing he had these massive bulky legpants with armor on the insides of them and like a massive riot helmet he was one of those cops whodoesn't need a riot shield because his body is the riot shield it was very weird but for thosefirst few minutes it was a very high stress situation in front of the apf building it feltlike neither the crowd nor the police knew exactly what was about to go down as a few hundred angryprotesters were pushed up against a line of armed police but as time went on you got the
01:15:42impression that this crowd was probably not going to initiate conflict with the policeand i feel like some of the mood is maybe kind of died down cops are starting to kind of movearound the crowd a bit there's this cops being stationed to the north to the south to behindthe crowd on the other side of the street we this could go so many ways right now this thiscould end in so many different scenarios but people have not initiated anything other thanstanding on the sidewalk and chanting and giving speeches if you look there's a small section ofthe apf building where they're still a tiny tiny tiny sliver of glass by one of the doors and youcan see lots of lots of cops stationed inside with riot shields but uh i do not believe this crowd
01:16:28is going to be busting down any doors camu franklin the founder of community movement builderswas the last person to speak in front of the atlanta police foundation we know cop city is nothingbut a strategy for overpolicing our communities we know that cop city is nothing but a strategyto stop our movements and what movements are those the movements against police violenceand terrorism in our community it is in 2021 that they introduced this idea to start to putcop city out here to stop our movements when people were talking about the funding the policeabolish the police find alternative to public safety they said hell no we want more policeand they put that idea out there and the movement was born to stop cop city this movement is two
01:17:24years old and it doesn't look like it's going to stop to me by the end you got this sense thatthis march did exactly what it wanted to there were 300 people standing like a foot away fromtwo dozen cops staring them down giving speeches chanting if people wanted to other things couldhave happened this rally could have resulted in many ways many of them probably very ugly andcarrying a very high cost the reason we did a march like this today was to say to all the naysayersblack folks don't want cop city indigenous people don't want cop city white folks don't want copcity atlantis don't want cop city folks from outside Alaska don't want cop city nobody in the unitedstates wants cop city the Palestinians don't want cop city the people in Latin America don't want
01:18:20cop city no here in this world do we want cop city we wanted to make sure that we came in safetyand we live in safety we wanted to make sure that we don't have any more political prisoners todaythat we wanted this to be a march about our unity and our safety in numbers and as we wrap up todaythat's what we want it's not like we got to give them an excuse when you're around the copthe same way when you're around a wild animal what do you got to do you got to be cautiousyou got to be careful you got to move a certain way you got to know which way to go because you'relooking to protect your safety and right now looking to protect our safety so as we departhere today we are departing in unity we are departing together we are going to walk back
01:19:21in close quarters together where our cars work if you're going to martyr you're going to walkclose together with other people as you go to martyr if you need a band to pick you up if youcan't take martyr two blocks this way by the problem so we want you to be safe secure becauseyou want to be out here again to fight cop city there was a sense that the people therewanted to show that if they wanted to do things they could have but they knew that this was notthe this was not the right time nor the right place restraint and an understanding of whatlike practice i would say in that situation is and i mean in the speeches that happened beforehandthere was people from community movement builders from black votes matter a whole bunch of other
01:20:12like a black led groups in the city and similarly like like what happened at the clergy event therewas not a single width of condemnation of militant tactics of of of property destruction of actionsthat people take this they people there who gave speeches recognized that such tactics were a stapleof the civil rights movement early saturday morning i woke up to news that police had begunanother raid but instead of raiding the wallani forest the police were searching the 10 acreproperty of the lakewood environmental arts foundation or leaf a local nonprofit that wasoffering safe haven for people during the week of action all right so the land police have executeda warrant on the leaf meetup spot in southeast alanta that people have been using as a welcome
01:21:03center as like a medic station and just another spot to hang out it was set up after the raidsunday night and it is now saturday morning the police have executed this warrant to searchpremises id everyone who's there we got a group of people is being able to leave right now therehas been a prison transport vehicle called in and cops have like blocked off intersections around thearea no one's allowed to get close people are not allowed to return to their cars people are notallowed to return to the private property since sunday night the land was being used as a medic huband provided a secondary place to camp for those who didn't feel safe staying in the forest duringtheir raid saturday morning police detained at least 22 people and refused to show anyone the
01:21:51search warrant and yeah the group that got released is just walking up now maybe like two dozen peoplehave been able to walk up um we just got through their police lines and um we're gonna yeah huddleup and and get to a safe place uh we were woken up by um helicopters there had been helicoptersdoing rounds all evening uh and i don't even know what time seven something we heard loud speakerssaying that they had a warrant um for to search the property private property and umum that was very disorienting obviously i was in the middle of sleeping uh we came out with ourhands open our hands up uh we had more than 20 guns pointed at us um some people have theirfingers on triggers certainly they were screaming at me um and as i was waking up uh we came through
01:22:57the line they said that they had a warrant to search the property we know that homeland security wasone of the departments that was arrested that was part of the arrest through or extraction throughor whatever um it's very traumatic obviously it's freezing this is the coldest day this week and sowe are um you know worried about people's health because people are cold um they detained us theytook identification it was yeah extremely violent situation but everyone here was reallytaking care of each other and remaining calm to address the raid activists scheduled a pressconference for later that day after a youth rally to defend the forest was to take place in eastvillage and i think you can hear said youths in the background so excuse their joyous young screams
01:23:51we thought that it was important for us to not only amplify the wonderful children's march thathappened here today the community in east atlanta this community where they are proposing to buildcop city came out this morning overwhelmingly to say that they don't want cop city so we had parentswe had children we had other neighbors and community stakeholders who gathered right herein brownwood park today at east atlanta to say that we are east atlanta and cop city is not a partof what we imagine and envision for this community also this morning unfortunatelythere is a place that was held as a commune for campers who wanted to stand in solidarity duringthis week of action the place is called leaf leaf that is the lakewood environmental arts
01:24:42foundation a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to combating food insecurity here within the cityof atlanta offered up their space to be used for people who did not feel safe camping in theforest because of the over aggression of police there and they wanted to stand in solidaritywith this week of action so leaf offered up their space for those people to camp safelyunfortunately this morning a gang of police officers descended upon that sacred spaceduring the raid up to 40 officers swarmed the property ransacking the infrastructure set upat the leaf encampment site cops slashed apart two medical supply tents disrupting medic operationsbroke windows of a camper van parked on the site and ripped apart a greenhouse police took pictures
01:25:34of the people detained at leaf and collected their ideas but after being held for several hoursthe police let all but one person go free to quote an article by kandace burned in truth outquote one person was arrested for an outstanding parking ticket demonstrating the state's desperationto snatch up anyone associated with the stop cop city movement uh good afternoon everybody uh myname is marlon kautz i'm an organizer with the atlanta solidarity fund um we're civil libertiesand anti repression organization that exists to make sure that people who participate in socialmovements have the right to protest and don't suffer from repression um so the reason i'm hereis because um as we've all heard previously there was an incident of political repression
01:26:24early this morning police executed a search warrant and performed a raid against thelakewood environmental arts foundation which is a community space in lakewood atlanta that existsprimarily to serve artists and musicians it's clear that it was part of a political strategy torepress and intimidate protesters who are associated with the stop cop city movement to defend theforest and this is very concerning um especially when taken in context um of course it's very likelythat police are going to report that this was part of a routine uh investigation a law enforcementmatter that they had every right to conduct the other thing that police are likely to claimis that they made an arrest on scene and our understanding is that uh they did make an arrest
01:27:18due to somebody who was there having an old traffic ticket from a long time ago so it'simportant to to clarify that the arrest was because of a traffic ticket not because of anyalleged crimes related to the movement or any other you know serious criminal activity uh soit's important that we understand this raid as part of a series of ongoing abuses of the legalprocess to harass and intimidate political protesters they were unable to demonstrate anycriminal activity during their their raid on the lakewood environmental arts foundationbut they're continuing to abuse every uh every justification that they canto to raid spaces to make arrests and to hold people in jail so before the police come out and
01:28:09say we raided this place where all of these outside aggressors were and we picked up someviolent offenders we want you to know that our brothers and sisters who were standing with usin solidarity just saying hey we want to camp here since we don't feel safe camping in the people'spark that's been overrun with police repression and aggression they raided that place they snatchedpeople up some people were sleeping they took pictures of people they took their IDs and theysearched and searched found nothing else never produced a warrant and only one person was arrestedbecause of an outstanding parking ticket about a week after the raid the guardian obtainedevidence of the search warrant the warrant stated that there was probable cause for believing that
01:29:00evidence of quote conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism unquote could be found at the lakewoodlocation listed in the warrant were objects officers sought which included quote cameras radiosboxes of nails lighters tents camping equipment spray paint black clothing and literature relatedto defend the forest these were the materials tied to domestic terrorism as the week progressedthere were an increasing number of reports of police tailing people coming and going froma marches and especially the actions downtown basically officers would follow people suspectedof participating in the movement pull them over try to ID anyone within the vehiclesand then issue some nonsense traffic citation this continued on thursday after the community
01:29:54movement builders march as people were heading home from the public park police stalked a fewindividuals and pulled over multiple vehicles a van carrying one of the speakers was targetedas well as two other cars that were pulled over as they were leaving the protest marlin from theatlanta solidarity fund talked about the various ways police have been using their power to intimidateactivists and suppress protest our organization has gotten many reports of pretext stops ofpolitical protesters or people who are suspected of being political protesters because of bumperstickers on their car or the state that their license plate is from we've gotten reports ofuh people being stop and frisked simply because they're profiled as looking like political activists
01:30:45um and of course we've seen dozens of protesters or suspected protesters arrested and chargedwith domestic terrorism simply because they were found at a music festival that's associated withthe stockopsity movement and so we can see that every step of the way police and prosecutorsare abusing the legal process to intimidate and discourage this movement throughout this timepolice have been watching or monitoring one of the offsite locations in the forest um they'veparked in front of this site and and uh kept up surveillance on it and then leading all the way upinto friday uh there was a journalist pulled over leaving the final non-violent direct action fromwoodruff park um they were pulled over with two other people in the car and like detained briefly
01:31:35uh ostensibly to you know continue to identify and and connect people a big part of the storyfor this week of action is the excess of the police response to quite typical acts of quoteunquote non-violent protest the sorts that the government and even the police love to claimthat they actually protect with every single action downtown this week virtually no laws werebeing broken not even any civil disobedience people were handing out flyers marching on sidewalksgiving out letters and the police's response was to deploy swat to mobilize hundreds of officersto shut down multiple city blocks to carry ar-15s as they tail crowds of a few dozen people justwalking on the sidewalk and yelling at people if they accidentally misstep off the curb and threaten
01:32:24violent arrest this was the sort of extremely aggressive response to people doing protestquote unquote the right way we should highlight that that is the apparent goal of these protestswas to show that even when they are doing things the right way this is how the state reacts todissent it reacts in this militarized fashion where you like it's it's i think a big part ofwhat's happened in these types of protests that have happened the past week is demonstrating whypeople are campaigning to stop cop city because the sheer amount of resources that the police alreadyhave in the city to be to be to be deploying hundreds and hundreds of officers every single dayto respond to people handing out flyers uh it's like to respond to people who are walking on
01:33:10the sidewalks they have they have this massive amount of of resources they are they're usingtear gas in the woods they're using pepper balls they're using flash bangs they're they're havingmultiple different swat teams follow around people handing out pamphlets the level of policemilitarization in atlanta is already at this extremely high point and cop city is only goingto intensify that and that is the reason they want to build cop city it's for this type of urbancounter-insurgency training to quell civil unrest and to quell protest on thursday night we held avery peaceful and successful march in downtown atlanta starting at the king center we had someonewho was stopped by the police and asked if he was picking up protesters taken out of the vehicle
01:34:00handcuffed for no reason they couldn't find a reason to detain him any longer so they had tolet him go but atlanta this is why we're standing against cop city because if cop city is builtyou can guarantee that you won't even be able to go to the grocery store without being harassedby the police for no reason at all when i spoke with matthew johnson he brought up a similar pointwith the resources that the police had to respond in the way that they did the assertion that theyneed more training in a militarized facility or they need more resources is crazy because youhad them literally outnumbering protesters and kettling them and we have credible sources thatsay that there were SWAT forces who had instructed the officers to arrest nonviolent protesters
01:34:57and there were actually police officers that refused to take that order which i think isanother fascinating dynamic that is worth exploring and understanding more but just withthe resources that they had to try to shut down protesters harass folks constantly ticket and pullover people that they saw you know creating like a logistical framework for the week of actionis nuts and they're making our point for us like on friday the word came out that tortugita hadbullet holes through both of their palms and that they were more than likely sitting cross legwith their hands up when they were shot by police and now we are supposed to be convinced that thesepeople that lied about this killed somebody that was absolutely no threat to them on the same grounds
01:35:57that they're trying to build this police training facility we're supposed to believe that this isgoing to make them less violent towards people like as you're building a militarized policetraining facility and like people that try to convince themselves that these is going to be aplace where people are also being taught de-escalation tactics while like everything around that ismilitarized it's like if you had somebody build a water park and you're like oh yeah i'm justtrying to stay dry i don't want to get splashed or anything like that and it's like oh no no nodon't worry we have a food court right in the middle of it and it's great you're really justcoming there for the food court so don't worry about it and then like you go there and then you get
01:36:41splashed what were you expecting like that's obviously not what that facility is for because all theinfrastructure around it is made to be a water park or a militarized police training facility sodon't be surprised when maybe they might have one de-escalation program and like you know where thefood court would be and then somebody gets killed right because they're actually building theinfrastructure for killing so that's where we're at this week of action has shown a lot about howthe police are operating post the 2020 uprising how they will respond to people exercising theirfirst amendment right and the indiscriminate way that police will respond to any act of protestone of the main takeaways from this week is that their response to protest is deployed against
01:37:31people without target or focus they care very little if you are breaking a window or if you'remarching on the sidewalk they're still gonna send the SWAT team police are acting as if they areentirely incapable of differentiating between acts of dissent toward the end of the week i sat downand talked with an unnamed forest defender to get their thoughts on the week of action for securityreasons we did a vocal replacement the police presence has been pretty unprecedented i haven'tseen shit like that here since 2020 not downtown at least i mean shit i don't think we had seengas in atlanta in a minute and then they gas the forest it'd been a while but yeah i mean they'repunching out especially like tuesday they were putting out 150 200 cops the entirety of downtown i
01:38:17mean multi-jurisdictional task forces deployed multiple different atlanta apd swat teams betweenlike regular apd swat and apex which is like the drug and gang interdiction unit i mean a fuckingwhole drone unit gsp some weird unmarked cars that i won't speculate on helicopters all thatshit you know the type of police response you would expect to see in like a dystopian fuckingpolice state for some people handing out flyers that just say this is bad for the environmentdoesn't matter how milk toast or not and like i shouldn't say milk toast like that's not a badthing we need people to go hand out flyers we need to inform people as far as what this is to getpeople involved but like as nonviolent as you can get and still they're gonna treat you like you're
01:38:56fucking al-qaeda you know and it puts you in a weird position because then it's like okay cool ifyou're gonna treat us the exact same for being nonviolent why not do crime if the police responseto an assault on an outpost that drove the police out and burned five things down the police responseto 15 people handing out flyers downtown are going to be about the same then why not take moremilitant radical action the 23 people arrested on sunday march 5th were not arrested as anyone wastorching equipment they were not arrested at the powerline cut it was people who were attendinga music festival arrests were not widely targeted against people who police knew wereengaged in property destruction they were targeted against anyone the cops could grab
01:39:39same was the case at the january 21st action where people were marching downtown the saturdayafter tortugita was killed the only people arrested and subsequently charged with domesticterrorism was anyone the police could get their hands on officers went after people who werecarrying banners the entire duration of the march it was not targeted against people whowere engaged in militant action among all this talk of police repression and multiple raidsit's easy to overlook that throughout the week people still sought opportunities for findingjoy and resistance because most people wouldn't dedicate years of their life to this if it wasjust miserable battles with police the whole time i think one thing that's been lost in all of this
01:40:29too is all of the light-hearted events that have continued to go on through the week andlike the joy of the movement that was represented in in the bouncy castle ripbut that joy is continuing in the woods like people are people still continue to camp in thewoods people are still having dinner in the woods people are still having campfires peopleare still talking the woods it is still a place that people are gathering at and are enjoyingeach other is company in now enjoying the woods it is it is a place that the morale has neverbeen fully crushed the morale has never been fully crushed and like the participatory actsof the week of action are continuing like none of that has been quashed an example of the joyful
01:41:13continuous resistance during the week of action can be found at the youth rally that happened onsaturday the 11th all right so i'm at the youth rally saturday after the uh warrant was servedon the meetup spot in southeast atlanta there's around 200 people marching through east villagein atlanta pretty pretty joyous group here actually and they're actually like on the streets this isthe first time we've had a large march like this take to the streets because every uh every actionthat was in downtown or midtown atlanta was just so heavily surveilled by police who were not lettinganyone get near the street at all but there's no police here uh they were busy doing the searchfor and so this group is actually is actually able to take to the streets it's like everyone everyone
01:41:58kind of in this area of atlanta is pretty uh pretty pro pro this little protest herethere's like workers from the little shops and stores nodding alongfolham county shares just walked by the march like on there just you know off shift workout routinewearing folham county gear that's pretty funny people dancing in the streets families walkingwith their kids through the streets all right i'm walking around the park that the youth rallystarted at and the uh press conference about the raid this morning just ended atthere's as you can probably hear kids playing in the park people are handing out food massivemassive amount of food just in the middle of the park with like always the table set up
01:42:44overall this is kind of one of the more joyous events that we've had since the initial saturdayrally at gresham park just with the amount of food the amount of kids just running around and playingall of uh all the information tables that are handing out literature and giving you know makingconnections with people yeah when i was down here in in january the mood was very somber the moodwas very grim like coming to the vigil when there was the destroyed remains of the gazebo the tornup parking lot all of the trees in there still within their like winter state with all of theleague has gone everything was very kind of barren and the first thing i noticed on saturday as wewere marching is like there's new life springing in the woods there's this invigorated sense of
01:43:31the the almost assurance of victory that people are carrying with them as they take action and ithink that really does change what the action you take is and that does change the types ofresults that people will see is if they go at this with the idea that we are going to win thisand i think that that is kind of why the nonviolent direct actions have becomelike have moved to the fore right when you think that you're going to lose and you have nothingto lose you engage in these incredibly radical actions because what else are you going to doand then when you have this belief that no we can win we just have to find that pathwayand that is a part of the diversity of tactics is is using both of those and almost every ecological
01:44:14movement that's been successful has demonstrated that the pathway to success is often paved witha diversity of tactics with people doing nonviolent action at you know noon which will pull a massivemilitarized police response as people are doing regular ass shit and then a part of diversityof tactics is also people leaving a music festival to go torch a bulldozer and both both of thosethings are a diversity of tactics now i stand by most of that statement however issues can arisewhen there is a ticking clock and during the time spent looking for this pathway the enemymeanwhile is making steady progress issues may also arise when a large diversity of tacticsis shoved under just one roof i had a lot of conversations with movement participants regarding
01:45:07the direct action that happened on sunday night and how it cast a shadow of repression over thewhole week of action to synthesize the many conversations in general most people thoughtthat what physically happened was good the actual actions at the north gate were successful andjustified but there are other things on the periphery of that action that make it slightlymore complicated and now we can have lots of questions about tactics and cost-benefit analysisabout that action which i did not think it would be wise especially being so visible for me to haveto be anywhere near on that day we can have questions about that but what was for certainwas that the way in which the police responded was absurd and predictably so now with the
01:46:01destruction that i saw etc it cost them less than a million dollars and maybe like two weeksactually of construction that they were pushed back max these are like max numbers was that worth23 people being arrested and quoting what could have been a larger occupation and wider participationand wider buying in the movement instead by the time we got to monday the clergy was having to docleanup rather than like cast division of what the world could be and so these are trade-offs rightwhere even though we have to be very clear about what a diversity of tactics means and also a separationof time and space so i mean we can't just look at a diversity of tactics and everybody does whatthey want as if they're operating in a silo but rather we give space for one another to do different
01:46:56things that may work respectful of the fact that some of our actions may affect one anotherin the lead-up to the week of action nighttime sabotage actions decreased around atlantain favor of these big public demos during daylight that seemed to result in more people getting arrestedand one of the results of sunday's action happening in such close proximity to the festival and theencampments is that the people at the festival and in the woods who did not consent to participatingin a high-profile direct action got disproportionately hit with the immediate repression from policea lot of the people who were arrested were completely unaware of the actions that tookplace at the north gate even if those actions were 100% justified in the end it still creates
01:47:48a dynamic with an unequal distribution of police violence now obviously the woods are an inherentlydangerous place to be and people are not responsible for actions that police choose to take but thereare still considerations to be had regarding the proximity of space and time when engaging in morerisky actions and how the consequences of those actions may affect people who did not consentto participating in actions at other locations especially when people are lulled into a falsesense of safety by claiming that police have never cracked down hard in the forest during previousweeks of action yeah in terms of the actions done sunday in reference to a group of peopleassaulting like police position driving them out with force and then burning their shit
01:48:39that was all good and we should not denounce that or step away from it it only harms the movementto back away from radical action and act like there are definitions of good and or bad protestersbecause eventually the logical conclusion of that is snitching and that only furthers like the gbi'smotivations to tear the movement apart what went wrong sunday is is a result of two thingsit's one that the police use indiscriminate violence when people beat them they were beatenthey got angry and they were beaten because they got their shit rocked by like fireworks and thenthey use indiscriminate violence against people who they knew were on the side of like where theevents were that weren't where all the militants were coming back from they didn't want to go up
01:49:18against those people because they're cowards and second because of how big the movement'sgotten over the past two years the strategy of the weeks of action has stagnated it's made itso work so compact in a singular week that when you have all the diversity of tactics that existwithin defend the Atlanta forest and stop cop city those tactics with how big everything is nowthey start to step on each other's toes they can hurt each other sometimes because yeah not everyonewho was at the rc field was like ready for the consequences of like a militant radical actionlike that and that doesn't mean that the action wasn't good or justified because the action waswildly successful there were no arrests made at that action there were arrests made when the
01:49:56police got angry and used indiscriminate violence because they were pissed off and they wanted toriot so they retaliated at a music festival that was happening nearby yes and that's the fault ofnobody but the police that's not the fault of the people who went and assaulted that outpostthat's only the fault of the police and really the fault of a bad long-term strategy of two heavilycompacting factors of you know being just like a week and where making it so this movement wherepeople can take radical action it feels so limited to just inside the forest because yeah that putspeople in harm's way and that that put people in harm's way including the people who you know wentand did the thing on sunday but no it would be wrong as the movement to like bulk at a radical
01:50:36action like that radical action like that is such a big part of why this movement has been as successfulas it has been it's a huge part of why the police didn't do like a full sweep or a larger sweep ora series of raids in the following days because they were afraid that those 300 to 400 people whohit that outpost were lying and waiting in the forest ready to attack them because they wereafraid of militant radical action on thursday when i was in front of the apf building i could likehear some of the supervisors and coordinators talking about being scared of ambushes or likebeing scared of splinter groups like being staged to attack officers it's it's bizarre how fearfulthey are of the types of people who are opposing the cop city project they're the most afraid of
01:51:19the people who are willing to go do physical violence to them and not even physical violencebut people who are just willing to like throw a rock at them or like a firework once they realizethat they haven't paralyzed somebody with fear once they realize that they've not made you soafraid of taking action they become such cowards in the aftermath of the police killing forestdefender tortugita law enforcement agencies tried to claim that tortugita shot at them first leavingone officer injured but recently released findings from multiple autopsies have cast more doubt onthe state's version of events on the afternoon of friday march 10th towards the end of the week ofaction the family of tortugita released the findings of an independent autopsy done by former gbi
01:52:05chief medical examiner dr christ spary the results suggested that tortugita was sitting cross-leggedwith their hands in front of their face when shot and bullet exit wounds through the palms of bothof their hands the family ordered autopsy also did not find any evidence of gunshot residuefrom a gsr test kit and then a month later de cab county released the results of their officialautopsy which found at least 57 bullet wounds across tortugita's body and according to thisautopsy tort did not have any gunpowder residue on its hands then a few days later via a publicrecords request the atlantic community press collective received the gunshot residue test kitfrom the georgia bureau of investigations crime lab the document contained the names of six
01:52:57georgia state patrol swat members who shot and killed tortugita bryland l mires jerry a perishjonathan salseda jonathan mark lamb ronaldo kegel and roice zaw with zaw being the subject of alawsuit after he shot a protester in the face with a less lethal round during the georgefloyd protests in may of 2020 the document also included the results of the gbi's crime lab reportclaiming that they found quote the presence of more than five particles characteristic of gunshotprimer residue unquote from a test kit with the report also stating quote it should be noted thatit is possible for a victim of gunshot wounds to have gsr present on their hands unquote consideringthat among the more than 57 gunshot wounds were entrance and exit wounds on tortugita's hands
01:53:54which could be caused for gunshot residue if the crime lab findings are genuine the findings do notpoint to any specific interpretation of events as it's not unusual to find primer residue on thehands of a victim following the path of a bullet plus coupled with the ever-changing story from thegbi on the ground chatter from apd officers claiming that georgia state patrol quotefucked their own officer up unquote as well as reports from force defenders from the day of theshooting there is indication that georgia state patrol most likely suffered from so-called friendlyfire with many people believing that the killing of tortugita was essentially an executioninstant reports obtained via public records requests also revealed that gsp fired a quote
01:54:41unquote a less lethal pepperball gun at tortugita's tent as a swat initially approached once againcontradicting the claims made by gbi officials in the months since the killing as the week came toa close on sunday march 11th a memorial service for tortugita was held in the wilani forestwhere torts family spread their ashes in the forest it died to protect i attended the sunday morningmemorial the sky opened up and poured down rain in south atlanta throughout the whole morninghundreds of people gathered in wilani people's park to light candles under a canopy and hearfrom torts family then led by tortugita's mother we walked through the forest to thesite of the shooting where a banner hung that read quote on this ground gsp assassinated
01:55:37forest defender comrade friend lover tortugita unquote family and friends spread tortugita'sashes throughout the woods along the path to quote kandace burned in truth out in contrastto its tumultuous start sunday's vigil and ceremony provided a somber and heartfeltclose to the fifth week of action i met up with matthew johnson after the memorial to discussthe week of action and we briefly touched on the memorial in the forest i think thatwe have to hold space for very real grief uh we lost a friend and at the same time just two daysago on a friday what we always knew to be true was found to clearly be true tortugita was murderedand we have to bear the brunt of that pain and all the people in power lied and even gave their
01:56:42condolences to a state trooper that seemed as if he he was shot by a state trooperand did not say a mumbling word to even acknowledge our friend's existence and the value of theirlife and this morning was beautiful i had been able to meet bill keys uh tortugita's motherpreviously and she really does have a beautiful spirit i've really grown appreciation for thatfamily um and just to see just how large these gatherings were like throughout the week evenin spite of the hoopla in the opening weekend it was very encouraging uh but in a lot of waystortugita has become the face of this movement uh because they really didin light up wherever they were uh one thing that's gotten me through i'm just thinking about
01:57:44when you would just see them sometime and they would just give you the biggest like cheesiestsmile like out of nowhere just and like that like got me through the first week uh aftertheir passing um yeah i but uh i've grown a great appreciation for that family because in so manyways tortugita is their hero and just to learn how consistent they were as like such a welcomingand loving and caring person just meant so much i mean to know that this wasn't something new thatthey had stumbled upon they had lived this whole life of caring and making space for others someof tort's friends have raised concerns that a side effect of tort unwittingly becoming theface of the movement is that the details around their death have eclipsed some of what they died
01:58:41fighting for in doing so stripping tort of their individuality and removing their own agency toturn them into this perfect liberal friendly avatar of the movement to simply be used as apolitical tool and add to a list of demands there's a thing that's been happening more and morerecently that i've been bothered by which is when organizations specifically more liberalorganizations are invoking torts name at actions they're misgendering the hell out of them andit's alienating a lot of people and i understand that sunday's action alienated a lot of liberalorgs this is a problem with the weak of action type strategy with the diversity of tactics allbeing forced under one roof but we cannot stand to alienate each other and it's really frustrating
01:59:27and really angering to see this really beautiful soul be flattened into just a murder that theseliberals want them to be stripping them of so much of their life and what was a revolutionary lifeand a revolutionary death into just martyrdom by taking away their identity and who they wereand making them nothing more than someone who was murdered when they were someone who wasliving such a full and beautiful life until the day they died and this movement will tear itselfapart if we do not accept the fullness of torts life what it stood for and what they live forthis movement has always been built on a lot of trans people in the woodsfucking the cops up and if we alienate those people we're fucked there's no winning and we
02:00:03can't lose we don't have a choice about this anymore we have to win by any means necessarythat will wrap up our day-to-day coverage of the entire week of action but much has happened inthe intervening two months so in the next episode we'll cover where the movement is now discussthe future of the fight to stop cop city and offer a more critical retrospective on the fifth weekof action see you on the other side music festival audio courtesy of unicorn riotbetween april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets inwashington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person wasresponsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway fans this child was
02:01:20laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the carit's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed thathe may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst peoplei thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possiblethat the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcastor wherever you get your podcasts picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swayingin the wind picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silencedthe radio murders they left the body there for reasons it was the calling card it's like the
02:02:20mafia used to do and yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deepinto a world of drugs and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracythis year they clearly gave it me in life and was voloshen listen to silence the radio murderson the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcastshey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at theiconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlordsold the rank but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitar whatwhat's happening where are we wait look at this tember 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the
02:03:33present einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought the lethal lid daughtersof dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time travel adventurejoin nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past to save our futurelisten to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get yourpodcast welcome back to it could happen here this is a bonus fifth episode following mycoverage of the stop cop city week of action in march of 2023 this will be a more criticalretrospective on the week as a whole and offer a glimpse into what the movement might look likein the next few months as we are rapidly approaching summer in the last episode we talked about the
02:04:29police repression of protests and demonstrations as they happen but we have yet to mention thevarious methods of state repression the movement is facing day to day repression for the week ofaction started well before the kickoff rally in gresham park emails from early february obtainedvia public records requests found that the atlanta police foundation and its contractors were waitingfor quote indictments to the leaders unquote of the stop cop city and defend the atlanta forestmovement to quote the atlantic community press collective in a february third email to apf boardmembers the director of public affairs rob baskin calls the defend the atlanta forest and stopcop city movement a quote conspiracy of protesters against the public safety training center
02:05:14investigated by a consortium of federal state and local law enforcement agencies unquote baskinpromised the apf board in an email quote that the recent arrests are receipt of the landdisturbance permit the mayor's announcement of the project will be moving forward and thecontinued investigation by law enforcement will dampen activists efforts we will likely seemore indictments in the coming weeks unquote back in february breastfield and gory the generalcontractor for the project planned to mobilize for land clearing around april but told theatlanta police foundation that subcontractor bidding wouldn't happen quote until indictmentshave happened unquote and then of course a few weeks later 23 people were charged with domestic
02:05:59terrorism at a music festival matt from the atlantic community press collective talked aboutthe history of domestic terrorism charges in the movement and how they affected bail proceedingsthe domestic terrorism charges go back to like the middle of december that's when the first ofthem happened and up until the week of action there have been a total of 19 arrests or individualswho have been charged with domestic terrorism and then of those people anyone who did not haveeither a georgia license or could not prove like georgia residency they were all initiallydenied uh bond but everyone who who lives here they were able to to get bond before the bondhearing we're kind of there there are discussions that there's no way that they're going to hold
02:06:5223 people without bond with on such flimsy evidence that's the most people that have been like arrestedand held in one in one day it really is in in relation to the movement so far yeah the largestmass arrest of the of the movement so it's it's kind of inconceivable for 23 people to be heldwithout bond so we get to the bail hearing the first person has their mother come on their lawyerbrings their mother on who swears essentially on like every religious text ever writtenthat her child will immediately go home with her and she will personally bring her child backback to every court hearing and her child will have no you know further contact with with themovement and all of these things and the judge denies the bond so at that point it's like okay
02:07:49they're you know i guess we're going to go back to the old thing if you can't prove residencyyou're you're you're not getting out uh it was like person number five is from Athens georgiawhich is about an hour outside of Atlanta and the judge denies her bond not because the judgethinks she's a flight risk but because she is a threat to the community and that was the momentwhere the understanding changed it was like oh no like nobody's getting out of yeah this thisisn't this isn't a real this isn't a real bond here at the press conference after the leaf raidcamau franklin from the community movement builders spoke about the years of state repressionagainst people fighting to stop cop city this movement has been repressed by the state by the
02:08:39city such as very beginnings where we first started organizing in 2021 where we had ralliesand demonstrations we would have police break them up throw people to the ground pepper spray themand arrest them we had over 20 arrests in our first years of rallying and demonstratingagainst cop city at the time those folks were charged with resisting arrests obstruction ofgovernmental administration and then the police decided to step up their tactics and they startedto to form a task force a task force that included the atlanta police the de cab county police thegeorgia bureau of investigation georgia state troopers the federal bureau of investigationand homeland security where they began to talk about bringing charges of domestic terrorism
02:09:32against organizers and activists and so now we're coming to a point where they're raiding houseswhere they're telling organizers and activists that they can't stand on corners and legally getabout leaflets and then the judge kept saying like i'm not here to hear anything on evidentiaryclaims and i'm not here to engage with the domestic terrorism statute like both of thosewere i think very valid things that defense attorneys kept bringing up because yeah they'reproblematic yeah one of the defense attorneys mentioned that the way people are being chargedwith domestic terrorism right now doesn't really have any legal basis in the state of georgiabecause the terrorism law works as like an enhancement for other felonious charges and
02:10:17these people aren't being charged with anything besides domestic terrorism there's no evidencethese people committed any any actual crimes so they're just being charged with terrorism thislike a nebulous concept um the judge said that the legal basis of these claims will have to bedecided on another day um similarly they said that in regards to like actual evidence thatthese people charged did any crimes she said that she had none of this evidence in front of herand that evidence is for another day one of the main reasons the judge said that defendants weredenied bond was due to quote a lack of ties to community in atlanta but regarding this ties tothe community aspect the judge had this weird double standard there was this one person arrested
02:11:00and charged who lives with their partner in atlanta who also had ties to another state where theyhad previously lived so despite them having ties to the community in atlanta which was one of themain things the judge considered for this one individual they were still denied bond on thebasis that this individual also has ties to a different community thus deeming them a flightrisk even though they currently live in atlanta one of the reasons that the judge mentionedbased on the arrest warrants that she was given for why these people were a threat to the communityis that the state claims that they were in possession of metal shields as they were beingarrested you know shields the the offensive weapon that that shows that you're a threat
02:11:42you holding a shield and so first of all that's that's that's funny on us on that on that levelwhen you and i were coming in um on saturday uh and along with the march we passed by a bunch ofshields right and they were kind of placed um near the end of the path like in anticipationthat there might be police presence and i took pictures of the shields um and it they are evidentlyplastic shields there's no way of mistaking them for anything other than plastic the the plasticfive gallon shields that you see at almost every protest in every city across the country the copsknow what these things are the fact that they claim that people were arrested carrying metalshields is so ludicrous because there was not there was not a single metal shield at this music
02:12:31festival and there's a lot of footage of these arrests i don't there's i've not seen evidencethat every that any person was arrested that was carrying a shield let alone a metal one there'sthis weird thing where um so typically when you do these these bail hearings um the the defenseattorneys wave the reading of the warrant um typically because they have already gone overthat with their client and you know everybody's aware and it just kind of speeds up the processand it was like really notable that these attorneys weren't doing it and once you started to listento them you you notice this very repetitive nature of them and so about halfway throughwe get to a lawyer who straight up calls out the fact that these warrants seem like they were
02:13:17just copy pasted for like every single person all the way down line during the first hearingonly one person was let out on bail and they were an nlg legal observer and lawyer at thesouthern poverty law center after the week of action on march 23rd there were a second setof bail hearings for 10 of the people arrested on march 5th at the south river music festivalin a rare move the second in command of the state of georgia's attorney general's officejohn fowler was deployed to argue against granting bond fowler along with several topcounty prosecutors weaved a complex narrative of a grand conspiracy of protesters dating back to2019 saying that the quote unquote organization behind defend the forest is responsible for quote
02:14:03100 incidents nationwide unquote fowler claimed that the forest defenders are a well-funded groupwith millions of dollars hiding behind 501c3 nonprofit organizations and at the so-calledautonomous zone at the wendy's where rayshard brooks was murdered in 2020 is a part of the sameorganization fowler also attempted to tie the use of laser pointers in the forest to a racialjustice protests in 2020 as well as a sophisticated communication network of prepaid phones telegramchannels proton males and rise up accounts prosecutor landscross stated that the quote unquoteleader of the defend the land of forest movement never actually goes into the forestokay so to paraphrase a friend of mine as potentially dangerous as claims like these are
02:14:55it will never stop being funny that the state just simply cannot conceive of horizontal organizingas like a real thing that exists and not just a smoke screen for this shadowy cabal of protestersprosecutor landscross claimed that anyone at the music festival is a party to the crime of thedirect action that took place around one and a half kilometers away at the construction siteand that after the direct action individuals left to return to the other side of the woodscrossing over the creek and changing out of their black block for the first defendant at this hearingprosecutor cross said that there's police helicopter video of this first person changingout of their black block but when asked by the judge if the state has any evidence that this
02:15:39defendant did anything illegal not just change clothing in a forest the prosecutor was unableto provide any such evidence this defendant received a $25,000 bond with a stay away fromgeorgia order and a no contact order with any co-defendants or anyone associated with thedefend the atlanta forest movement only one other defendant was granted bond during this hearinga second year law student who was arrested as they were eating food at a food truck at thehearing they presented letters of support from tibetan monks a former mayor numerous academicsand charlotte's mayor pro tem was on the call bond was also set at 25k along with having tosurrender their passport to wear an ankle monitor and maintain no contact with co-defendants nor
02:16:25join any future protests to paraphrase my friend again these are old green scare tactics back inaction and kicked into high gear courts are being used as a meat cleaver to hack off and isolatepeople from their communities regardless of evidence this is the type of repression that courts wereborn to do much of the repression we're seeing in atlanta is a revamped version of the greenscare with additional tactics and knowledge the state gained from the 2020 protests includingthe targeting of jail support and bail fund organizations another thread in this grand cabalof forest defenders narrative that the state was trying to weave was that prosecutors claimed thathaving an atlanta solidarity fund jail support number on your person is evidence of criminal
02:17:13intent and that the solidarity fund is quote being investigated as a part of this whole thingunquote the majority of the eight individuals denied bond were not even found to be at the siteof the direct action and none of the eight individuals had any evidence against themshowing they committed any crime at that location but were still deemed a risk to the communityand denied bond being held against them is the fact that they had a jail support number on theirperson as former communications director at the southern center of human rights hannah riley saidit is a gross irony that a jail support number is being framed as evidence of intent to commit crimeswhere in fact it's evidence that we live in a horrifying police estate a defense attorney pointed
02:17:59out that all of the warrants had the same bits of evidence copy pasted like this alleged possessionof a metal shield to which the prosecution claimed this was simply a typo meaning that people werebeing held in jail based on typos and also the prosecutor responded by saying quote they were30 40 50 shields out there i can't attest that he was carrying one when referring to a specificdefendant for one individual denied bond prosecutors claimed that they were in anarchist based oninformation provided by customs and border protection and yet no evidence of criminal actswere presented extra scrutiny was put on two defendants who were foreign nationals with prosecutorswondering how someone from out of country could possibly know the solidarity fund a jail support
02:18:48number a defense attorney tried to point out that jail support numbers are often passed out to everyonepresent at protests by volunteers and in the case of the circumstances regarding the raid of themusic festival panicked concert goers were instructed to write down the jail support number as itbecame clear that police were indiscriminately grabbing people deputy attorney general fallorargued that wearing black clothes at a protest is akin to wearing a football uniform indicatinga player was part of the team who took to the field during the game and even if we may not knowthey carried the football we do know that they were on the field which i i i don't even want to getinto but it is still a fact that the majority of people were denied bond because some had black
02:19:37clothing mud on their shoes and ran from police this is what made them a quote unquote threat toour community and this is the evidence being used against people who were allegedly engaged indomestic terrorism near the end of the hearing the judge claimed that everyone is presumed innocentand that the state does have to bear the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt at some pointbut not now during this bail hearing one of the claims was that the reason why people were arrestedis because they had mud on their clothes the night before the festival started there was a tornadowarning in atlanta i forgot about that and there was rain which makes i i don't know if the prosecutorsknow this but when rain mixes with dirt it creates something called that we that we refer to as mud
02:20:27so when people are you know at this music festival in a field full of dirt they might get mud ontheir clothes and yeah so when you if you've ever been to a music festival uh standing around for avery long period of time really annoying people like to sit down uh so i like my feet were cakedin mud and i sat down a few times i'm i'm my dr martins are still caked in mud not to mentionthe parking lot completely torn up covered in mud and as i mentioned earlier the you know the personwho having like fill in mud all along the trails with gravel so there's mud everywhere and it isan inescapable fact of just being in both the forest and the festival at the time of the bailhearings they very clearly had no evidence linking individuals to crimes so the best they could come
02:21:13up with was metal shields and mud two things two things that are completely nonsense there was nothere was no metal shields and oh wow you have mud on your you have mud on your clothing this is whyyou're a terrorist during the hearing a defense lawyer alleged that the 12 people who were detainedat the music festival but not arrested and were later released at Gresham Park were all from Atlantaand by releasing these 12 locals police can claim that the people arrested were from 14 differentstates which is obviously part of an attempt to continue accelerating the outside agitator narrativethat they've been pushing out since last in December of the 23 who were charged only two hadthe the Georgia licenses the person from Athens and the legal observer the rest were out of state
02:22:03and two were out of country so at one point during the proceedings the the the bail proceedingsone of the lawyers says that from what they understand the 12 individuals who were let goSunday night all had in-state licenses so it does appear that that APD released people tocontinue this this outside agitator narrative that they have been using for for months now sincesince uh since may since early summer prosecutor cross responded to claims that detained localatlantans were let go by saying that the people released were interviewed did not have the jailsupport number on their arm and quote-unquote knew little about the movement at a press conferencemarlin from the solidarity fund talked about how repression has taken form and concerns of what
02:22:56other tactics the state may try to employ no evidence has been presented to support any ofthese claims of domestic terrorism including on the other 18 people who've been given this chargepreviously in this movement police and prosecutors are not involved in a law enforcement effortthey're involved in a political campaign to suppress a political movement which they findobjectionable because as the police they have a vested interest in the construction of cop cityfrom a civil liberties perspective we find this very concerning we find it to be an abuse of powerand we're committed to ensuring that all of the activists who are targeted have access to thelegal resources that they need not only to defend themselves from these bogus charges but also to
02:23:38pursue civil litigation against police who have abused their power and violated people's rightswe are concerned about the possibility uh that prosecutors may try to use rico charges againstorganizers um because rico has understood as a way of suppressing organizations um and the narrativethat we've seen coming from police and prosecutors is their belief that the broad and diversestock cop city movement is in fact a criminal conspiracy whose members conspire to commitacts of terrorism this could not be further from the truth this is like a clear misrepresentationof a broad movement that encompasses all of society um but this is the narrative thatprosecutors are trying to promulgate to make it easier to target activists in the intervening
02:24:26month and a half five more people were let out on bond then on may 3rd a series of preliminaryhearings took place for the last three people being held into cab county jail from amongst the23 individuals arrested at the music festival and charged with domestic terrorism before the changesto the law in 2017 the state of georgia required 10 or more people to be killed for domestic terrorismcharges to even be filed during a wave of anti protest bills while citing racially motivatedmass shootings to get the bill passed the state of georgia removed any death threshold and essentiallyreplaced it with references to property damage to quote a write-up by the atlantic communitypress collective quote the cab county magistrate judge james altman explained that he decided
02:25:12whether to uphold the charges based on two criteria the first was whether prosecutorsprovided enough evidence to satisfy the conditions set forth in the georgia domestic terrorismstatute namely the threat to critical infrastructure the second criteria prosecutors needed to meetwas identification or their ability to show that the defendants were each a party to the allegedcrimes committed on march 5th unquote and it's worth noting that the threshold for probable causeis much lower than the threshold needed to convict someone of a crime in opening arguments assistantda lance cross claims that defend the forest activists are well funded and quote have a prettygood propaganda arm on social media unquote and that doing direct action while chanting stop cop
02:25:59city qualifies activists to be charged under the georgia domestic terrorism statute because it'susing violence to advocate change of government policy judge altman found that the first criteriaof the domestic terrorism charges were met for all three defendants on the basis that settingfires at the construction site in such close proximity to a power line tower was an attackon critical infrastructure even if the defendants did not themselves start any fires georgia bureauof investigation special agent ryan long testified that the entire music festival was cover for thedirect action against the construction site even without evidence of defendants in black block orproof that they engaged in any destructive acts assistant da cross said that everyone at the
02:26:46site was enabling the destruction of the property and as such is party to the crime due to theassertion that the alleged crimes were only possible due to the large size of the crowd one of thestate's witnesses a sergeant of the apd said that he wouldn't be able to recognize anyone who wasat the site and that he could not tell if the defendant was even in the crowd of people at thenorth gate let alone through rocks or set fires defense argued that mere presence at a locationshould not be automatic aiding and abetting but judge altman said there was sufficient evidencepresented showing the acts of the crowd and that the defendants presence is at least sufficientfor being party to the crime even by simply participating at the music festival one of the
02:27:32hearings was for the indigenous person who was tased at the music festival who was specificallywitnessed to be there during the duration of the direct action under questioning from the defensespecial agent long said that the defendant was not visible on the helicopter footage of the incidentafter initially suggesting that the defendant was identified by a helicopter pilot long rolledthat back by saying he was unsure if the chopper was able to track the defendant and then had toleave to go make a few calls to get a more definitive answer which he failed to providebut the judge still found that the second criteria of identification was sufficientto find two of the defendants at least party to the actions at the construction site special agent
02:28:15long testified that there is a quote-unquote command structure in the stop cop city movementand described the movement as a pyramid scheme created by activists with different names likestop cop city and defend the forest to act as little different subgroups to attract newsubordinate members to operate under leadership long asserted that activists pretend to be ecologistsone day and then anarchists the next to further their cause which once again we have to point outis on one hand a dangerous thing to claim on the other hand extremely funny social media postswere brought up by prosecutors as evidence linking defendants to criminal acts and a conspiracy ofterrorism during the first hearing special agent long claimed that they knew that the defendant
02:29:02was at the construction site due to street pull camera footage and social media posts allegedlymade by the defendant's friend in another hearing agent long claimed that on the defendants socialmedia there were posts of stop cop city banners and flyers demonstrating an awareness of thenature of the stop cop city movement the state also cited alleged social media posts of the defendantself-describing as anti-capitalist and anti-colonial as proof of criminal intent near the end of thelast hearing judge altman said that social media posts do not count towards probable cause howeverthe framing of social media posts by prosecutors as an indication of guilt is still cause for alarmand what gets admitted as evidence during trial is still yet to be determined when the prosecution
02:29:56asked if a defendant had a jail support number on their arm the judge noted that quote the existenceor non-existence of an organization doesn't really seem to me as an element of the crimeunquote similar to the march 23rd hearings prosecutor johnson tried to argue that thesolidarity fund and jail support is an arm of the stop cop city movement to which the judgereiterated that participation in an alleged organization is not part of the crime of domesticterrorism for one defendant the judge granted bond on the conditions of $25,000 bail with thedefendant having to turn over her passport a no contact order with other co-defendants and noparticipation in discussion of stop cop city on social media bond for the other two defendants
02:30:43was denied ultimately judge altman upheld the domestic terrorism charges against all threedefendants on the low barrier of evidence sufficient for ruling probable cause judgealtman said that quote whether it gets any further than that is not my problem unquote and that ifthe da wanted further charges brought against defendants he must use a grand jury as the judgedid not find probable cause for arson or assault on an officer judge altman mentioned that he wasconcerned about alleged witness intimidation by members of the defend the forest movementmeanwhile in the adjacent folton county there was also a preliminary hearing for one of the sixpeople arrested at the protest in downtown atlanta on january 21st the saturday following the killing
02:31:32of tortiguita judge ashley drake upheld a total of eight charges including one of domestic terrorismand the next day the defendant was released on bail one thing of note from this hearingis that deputy attorney general john fowler compared the defend the forest movement to 911by saying quote protesters were trying to knock out the windows of 191 peach tree street thatis a dangerous situation that's a twin towers unquote when talking about the various hearingsi mentioned helicopter and street pole camera footage of the direct action on sunday that bothprosecutors and the defense were using to support their claims and i think it's worth diving a bitdeeper into specifically the police helicopter footage since i like keeping up with the methods
02:32:29that police are using to surveil and suppress protest i'm going to start by letting atlantapolice chief darin shearbaum walk us through what was able to be observed via helicoptermounted cameras based on his testimony during the city council meeting that took place lessthan 24 hours after the incident individuals were seeing changing out of the clothes thatthey were wearing at the concert and we're now dressing themselves in all black with backpackswith items fencing of nature approaching what we saw is this group move rather quickly to the sitefor the proposed public safety training center they move quickly on the group of officers thatwere assembled there these officers had been stationary at the site protecting the location
02:33:09in the first line there are individuals with shields that are forming the officers attemptedto first to deescalate by repositioning themselves thank you repositioning themselves inside of thefenced in area the officers again start to reposition because they can tell this is not apeaceful demonstration she just start to see smoke occurring as fires are set multiple cocktails arethrown and fireworks are discharged from our air unit that is deployed in the area you will seeindividuals that are started to move against the officers they will have start throwing rocks fireworksas they are pushing the officers in the area where we see individuals as another group isengaging the officers with rocks Molotov cocktails and bottles are moving to set fire to the various
02:33:53equipment that in the area what you see in the left hand of the gentleman with the mask over hisface is a Molotov cocktail it is being there will be accelerants in his hands that will be usedalso to attack some of the construction equipment that is in the area these individuals are maskedhide their identity this is playing out across the area that had been previously been fenced inthere will be generators that are be destroyed other pieces of equipment that's being destroyedthere you see more accelerant being thrown onto the vehicle that is being set on fire and whatyou see here ladies and gentlemen is as some of the individuals that had just previously attackedthe work site returned back into the woods they start changing back into the clothes that they
02:34:35were just wearing moments before as they were portraying themselves to be attendees of theevent that was occurring in the music so it was clear today that we saw a repeat of what we'veseen in the past where events that are shown to be peaceful and to be being publicized asbe peaceful are being used by individuals as cover to launch illegal and criminal attackswe had a rapid response from our partners at the decaps county police department the sheriffs offolton county as well as the george state patrol those officers entered into the woods as individualswere attempting to flee hide the weapons they had just used as well as to change their clothingand we began to make a number of arrests i spoke with the unnamed forest defender about the
02:35:18surveillance capabilities of the state on full display during the week of action i find thatthermal helicopter video fascinating for a variety of reasons one it's interesting to look at thesurveillance capacity of the state it's to my memory the first time the apd has ever postedtheir own thermal chopper footage it's a very similar camera to the type you would see on abi-reactor or on some kind of armed unmanned aerial vehicle what i found most interestingabout the thermals is exactly how they were using that type of targeting software to track peopleand i think it's worth people knowing what they were doing with it so we have an idea how to counterit when you're using a software to track targets on an optical lens at least during a daytime event
02:35:54thermals are easier because it breaks the image up into just two colors white and then like blackand gray so they can track the body heat shapes of people in white and then just click the thermalsoff get a snapshot of the outfit they're wearing click the thermals back on and track them easierthan it is to track them with just a normal camera this gives them a clear image of whatthey're wearing before they de-blocked and then they can go back to tracking that person followthem to where they're de-blocking wait for them to de-block get another picture with the regularcamera and then arrest them so that meant that when people were leaving it was advantageous tobe de-blocking under overhead cover under thick brush under thick canopy out of direct line of
02:36:25sight with the chopper you know not in the open air it's definitely a really hard thing to counterthe surveillance states one of the things that i find the most fearful about the police statenot like individual beat cops their guns and shit are cool or whatever but man those camerasthey're really something you know i think the portland police bureau just got a new spy planea new sesna loaded up with surveillance equipment and shit like that all that stuff does so muchmore to fuck you up than just like a riot team does you can throw mortars at a riot team sorry ishouldn't say mortars fireworks that are called mortars my bad don't want to lean into the explosivesnarratives honestly they're fucking weird about fireworks but uh you know the surveillance capacities
02:36:59are one of the hardest things to counter one term that's already come up during our coverage ofstop cop city is fukos boomerang and while that still applies here we're now also kind of gettinginto some panopticon territory as shown by this type of surveillance capacity specifically atactions and one of the biggest reasons why the panopticon works is that people are scared of itit scares you away from even taking action in the first place and like as soon as you overcome thatparalyzing fear the cops become really afraid of you that's why we say that like the biggest weaponthat the state has is fear because like the cops go from these big fucking tough guys to like whiningcowards the second you just become not afraid you don't even have to beat them you don't have to
02:37:40overcome the actual physical weapons but once you get out of that headspace that paralyzing fearonce you let it pass over you and through you they're fucking terrified and if we're gonna winwe need to be their worst nightmare as state repression against the stop cop city movementcontinues the coalition against the police training facility only continues to grow last month angeladavis returned an award proclamation given to her by the atlanta city council in protest of cop cityif the attempts by the atlanta police to build the largest police training grounds in the countryare successful this will represent a major setback for the movement for radical democratic futuresnot only throughout the u.s but globally as well as a person who has participated in campaigns against
02:38:38prisons and police for far longer than a half century i want to salute all those who areinvolved in the stop cop city movement and i want to urge people everywhere to find ways to generatesupport for them angela davis made it clear that she stood in solidarity with force defendersfacing repression from the police and the city of atlanta and joined in calls to halt the constructionof this facility which will only serve as a tool to advance what she called militarized policeracism and repression atlanta activists are on the front lines of the abolitionist movementat its crucial intersection with movements to save our forests indeed to save our planetthe attempt to build a massive militarized police training facility is a dangerous and
02:39:45ominous development that we have to oppose with all our might and so i want to join those who arestanding strong in defense of the forest against the construction of this police training groundi urge people everywhere to join the campaign to stop cop city after angela davis's announcementthe walter rodney foundation released a statement supporting davis's decision and against theconstruction of cop city it's it's interesting to see there are more mainline sort of center orcenter left like organizations that have begun to come on board even with what happened sundayand especially the thursday march and rally had it necessitated a response from the city so fridaymorning there was actually an organization concerned black clergy who had a press conference
02:40:48like calling out cop city protesters and so you had this like very state run one of the citycouncil members antonio louis was there like live streaming at the entire time and so you can tellthe efficacy of a lot of things that have happened this week by how the city is reacting and howlike it is necessitating them going to to greater and greater lengths to like try to show that themovement is wrong one way that the city has been working to advocate for the further development ofthe cop city project is by launching a website of their own for the public safety training centerfull of videos of the mayor and police chief walking through south atlanta trying to convinceneighbors that the project is a good idea in the past few months the city has also been turning
02:41:36the official city of atlanta twitter account into a hilarious cop city propaganda outletabout two weeks after the end of the week of action on march 24th de cab county ceo michaelthurmond announced an executive order to indefinitely close entrenchment creek park also known aswell on the people's park claiming that the park was a danger to the public due to booby traps allegedlyfound in the forest at a press conference thurmond displayed photos of wooden boards with nails stickingout of them allegedly found in the park the executive order reads that the park will quoteremain closed until further notice to protect the safety of the families residents and visitors andtheir pets in the area and to county personnel unquote a few days after the announcement de cab
02:42:24police led a joint task force in a raid of the wilani forest and entrenchment creek park the landwas effectively cleared of all forest defenders with one person being arrested during the raid thememorial for tortugeta was destroyed by the police and cement barricades were set up around theentrances and exits to the park days later police and contractors began cutting trees in the wilaniforest with no one around to resist the destruction the solidarity fund put out a statement sayingquote closing down a public park in order to prevent protests from happening in that spaceis unconstitutional de cab ceo michael thurmond is trying to do an end run around the first amendmentunquote de cab county commissioner ted terry is pushing to reopen the park through a resolution
02:43:13expected to be introduced in early may but it wasn't just the park's closure that made forestdefense more challenging after the mass action at the north gate in early march security wasgreatly increased at the construction sites in the wilani forest with massive spotlightsilluminating the area to daylight levels 24 hours a day which made returning to the sort ofnighttime sabotage actions in the forest that pioneered some of the movement's militancyin its early days to be much more complicated during my conversations with forest defendersthere was still a desire to see more of those small sabotage actions as the large daytime massactions seemed to result in more people getting arrested near the site of militant activity
02:44:00people are angry you know like their friend our friend was murdered you can just feel however youwant about this but like a lot of people and i guess myself included are just really angrythere's this like kind of blinding rage that comes with it of just like eye for an eye bloodfor blood you know that the police killed our friend and that they need to hurt for that oneand they need to hurt for all the people that they've murdered and all the things they're trying to doand that leads people to take actions that may not be well thought out but that are very wellintentioned and have tangible results that hurt the police state but that are actions that dobring harm to themselves or others because there are not you know these like middle of the night
02:44:39slash and run sabotage attacks that don't have arrests happen that are safer and i think weshould see a return of that tactic because the level of police presence that we saw at all theactions this week post sunday like doing shit at downtown protests fuck that like that's not likewe're not pulling shit off there without a mass arrest or like everyone's getting gassed likeit's not a tactically advantageous or viable way of doing things but i think people wanted to proveto the cops that like no no no we could open field fuck them up and yeah there were consequencesto that but people fucked them up in the open field and that's worth applauding the boundsof the forest is not the only location actions take place just about a week after the park closure
02:45:21and when some of the clear-cutting began a report back was posted online that read quoteon the night of wednesday april fifth we set fire to three excavators owned by brent scarboroughcompany on a site across from the federal penitentiary in atlanta brent scarborough is thecompany and individual responsible for clear-cutting the wilani forest cop city will never be builtunquote the march 2023 week of action was always going to be a kind of turning point in showcasingwhat will be seen in the struggle to defend the forest this is spring and how that will thenlead into the summer and what forms of resistance people will choose to take whether that be anothersingular week of action or take notes from the old earth first playbook and try to do a whole summer
02:46:07of action how do you kind of see the the the movement to stop capacity like changing orevolving than in the next few months i mean because all this is kind of felt like it's beenkind of very much on the heels of what happened in in january people have tried to like you knowjust tried to find new paths of resistance in the wake of the police killing right umhow do you how do you see like the fight continuing at this stage where like theyhave some land disturbance permits there's early construction what are what are like the avenuesof of resistance that people are trying to go down i think that we have to be very clear andassessing what has worked installing the project and what will work to stop the project because
02:46:52those aren't necessarily the same things i think there are nuances in particular strategiesthere is a difference between especially in our particular context that's similar between adifference between guerrilla warfare and urban guerrilla warfare and i see like guerrilla warfareis more so uh when people have been destroying equipment it you know at contractors you knowoffices or wherever or like near the forest etc and you could just hide off into the woods orjust like disappear back into nothingness nobody gets touched what we have to look at with uhuh the actions at the music festival were it exposed a lot of people uh because and this isonce again uh because the police acted so heavy-handedly but we also know that the police act heavy
02:47:49handedly which is why we're here so that gets kind of dicey because that's like kind of likeurban guerrilla warfare where you have the guerrillas just shooting pow pow pow and then like runninginto somebody's grandma's house people do not fuck with the people they're just running grandma'shouse for cover right and that's where things get a little bit dicey because in many ways uma lot of us were looking at means to open up the movement with this week of action and that waswhat was widely understood for a lot of people and nevertheless when you just uh come in with theboomstick from the beginning that dictates the tone of the rest of the week and then where youcould you know for instance operate from a space of like moral authority uh it becomes much easier
02:48:36for people on the fence to justify to themselves well what are the police supposed to think rightI mean we have to realize that there are several like mental resistances that have been taught topeople for them to try to discredit us and I just I think there's some important context rightuh when Martin Luther King Jr. was doing like the nonviolent direct action at a certain pointthey had to make a calculated decision to include women and children in the marches because theyhad assessed that America had become too desensitized to seeing black men beaten in the streetsright so that was a tactical decision to bring in more people right so there are like calculationsthat people have to make and assessments that they have to make based on the information that
02:49:22we're dealing with through talking with force defenders I've heard a variety of internalcritiques of the week of action format because it is such a concentrated time period the week ofaction can give police a very concentrated time to over police and over surveil and for activistsit can open up an expenditure of energy during the week which then can lead to a lack of energyleading up to what's been called the week of repression in the past every time following aweek of action after people from out of town leave it then leads into a week of repression wherepolice will then do a raid of the forest and have their sort of retaliation the week afterthere's been talk of potential changes to some of the week of action format perhaps doing something
02:50:08more akin to a summer of resistance so the week of repression is always the week that comes afterthe week of action where the cops are like okay the bulk of your reserves your out of state supportis gone we're going to come fuck you up now there are less of you now you're less ready to deal withus and that is like a major strategic flaw in the weeks of action because it it kind of creates aactivist tourism for people coming out of state and not that Atlanta doesn't appreciate theirsupport and their solidarity and that so many of those out of state people do stay long termbut it does create a situation where like yeah we're having an influx of people for a week buildinginfrastructure for a week and then the bulk of those people a good percentage are going to go home
02:50:46because yeah like traveling long term is hard people have jobs kids whatever you have commitmentswherever you are and they have to go home and then the cops just wreck our shit and do raids andlike unless people want to get on board with doing some pretty crazy shit those raids are hard tocounter it would behoove us to take a realistic audit of what the weeks of action have meant andwhat they are actually useful for which the strategic gains of the weeks of action are alwaysnow going to be more metaphysical than physical they bring people to this space they give thema closeness to the forest that they would not achieve without actually coming here but as faras tangibly like materially stopping cop city those kind of middle of the night slash and run
02:51:21attacks tertiary targeting of contractors all that stuff that's how you pressure the money and themoney is where you win ultimately it's up to the autonomous actors that make up this so-calledmovement and how their choices will determine how the fight to stop cop city will grow and evolveas i'm writing this just 30 minutes ago we found out that the clear cutting at the copcity construction site has essentially been completed the overhead photos are devastatingwhere there were young growing trees just weeks ago is now a flattened mound of red clay and dirtas if the ground itself was bleeding i counted over 100 trees uprooted from the earth hundreds ofpeople have dedicated years of their life to defending this forest and the site of sizeable
02:52:14destruction has brought out a variety of grieving reactions if cop city doesn't get built in thewillow knee the land could be carefully reforested and healed via regenerative permaculture withintentional stewardship the forest could grow to be ecologically healthier than it was beforein some ways the destruction that has already taken place makes it even more vital to try andstop the construction of cop city no one is advocating a defeatist approach where force defendersessentially give up and let the police foundation build it because there are still numerous waysto fight against the construction of this facility but now is not the time to sugarcoat the diresituation people are in and there should be time allowed to grieve this loss as well as strike back
02:53:03against the destruction it would be a mistake to gaslight each other and act as if we're closerthan ever to halting the cop city project the fact that it's gotten this far itself is devastatingfrom the beginning people have said that even if they do believe that cop city will never be builtthe Atlanta police foundation and police will absolutely attempt to do as much damage as theycan possibly get away with anyway both to force defenders and to the forest itself the past fewmonths i've been increasingly hearing the vice versa of that sentiment if cop city does end upgetting built people have pledged that the Atlanta police foundation will have to pay for every inchthey take even if there is no longer hope to save the entire Wallani forest then we must
02:53:52do so without hope at least there is always vengeance it is a long road ahead and thereis still much to do to quote my favorite anarcho monarchist Tolkien at this moment the movementwill hone its focus to prevent or at the very least disincentivize the physical construction of copcity i think it'd be worth thinking of this movement as an almost two-year-old movementthat's outgrown the week of action you know why limit ourselves to seven days fuck it do a summeryou know do three months of like we're doing three months of action in Atlanta come to Atlantawhenever you want and then go home and do shit at home there well as far goes where you live thereare chase banks where you live there are atlas construction offices where you live and yeah
02:54:33you should come to Atlanta and you could should come see the space and you should be in the forestand you should feel like the love and community that's there we win by fighting on enough frontsthat they can't fight us back on all of them the state dies by a thousand cuts not by all of usbeing in one place where they can kettle our asses like that's just not how we're gonna win so yeahif we had three months of like we're occupying the forest for three months come to the spacewhenever you feel like it but you know hopefully when people go home they feel inspired to likeunderstand that they can do just as much hitting those companies where they live as they can hearbecause the money's all going to the same place the ceo at the top doesn't care if you hit their
02:55:09businesses in georgia or in fucking illinois or in origan or washington or whatever the money'sall the same a phrase i've been hearing a lot lately is cop city is everywhere to quote acommunique posted on scenes dot no blogs dot org quote we will keep winning not just here in socalled atlanta but we must attack all across these so-called states the money and power that seek tokill us and destroy balani are nationwide and so our movement must be nationwide a netof resistance too vast to comprehend and too resilient to suppress reality is the battlefieldbut so-called america all of it is the backdrop unquote when chief at sheer bomb gave testimonyat city council even he mentioned the far-reaching manifestations of the fight to stop cop city we
02:56:01have been seeing over the last number of months crimes that have been occurring in other citiesfocused toward the public safety training center so we have seen arsons in cities outside of atlantawe've seen the destruction of property outside of atlanta and we've seen the harassment of privatesector employees outside of atlanta so that is the nexus where the federal bureau of investigationhas been assisting in the um in this administration like i said in the second episode the stakes ofthe movement may soon exceed the balance of the forest and a cop city and in fact that processthat may have already begun we are seeing stop cop city turn into a new mode of insurgency andresistance to modern policing in general not simply limited to the construction of this one
02:56:47training center as the police are trying to build a training center to practice quelling future civilunrest the site of the wallani forest and beyond has been a training ground for anarchists and thosewho fight the ever-growing police state the past two years it's been a dangerous playground forexperimentation and liberation applications for the lessons learned in the wallani forestextend far past the barriers of the woods as far right attacks on abortion and trans people areaccelerating across this country but especially the south perhaps some of the organizing infrastructurethat's been developed can take new focus on these battlegrounds and even just the mere existence ofthe struggle against cop city in atlanta has been a deterrent for other cities and states
02:57:36seeking to push forward similar proposals but as the movement possibly expands past its originalscope in these next few months people will need to be careful that the idealic notion of the struggledoesn't eclipse the original and still active goal which is to stop cop city cop city is indeedeverywhere but the current manifestation in atlanta is unique to atlanta and the correspondingstruggle to stop the physical construction of this training facility cannot be overlooked in favorof fantasies of utopian anarchy to steal an idea from matt of the community press collectiveone interpretation of the phrase cop city is everywhere is the realization that atlantais a cop city and it already has been for years without us knowing it and if we don't turn back
02:58:27the tide here cop city will be exported everywhere atlanta be once again because of the atlantapolice foundation is uh the most prevailed city in the country because of 2017's operation shieldprogram where they put tons of cameras all throughout the city and essentially made it asurveillance state once again crime has continued to go up uh during this time and that would havesignificantly more to do with the disparity of wealth and opportunities uh of black atlantansthat are born under the poverty line only five percent of them are projected to ever cross thatline at the same time uh the average median income of black households is one third thatof the average median income of white households in atlanta so that's about thirty five thousand
02:59:20dollars to one hundred four thousand dollars and so the wealth is just so disproportionatelyspread and so much of the labor intensive economy is predicated on it that uh black people arepigeonholed into service economy jobs and they have very few opportunities here now that typeof inequality breeds discontent and people looking for other opportunities and the policeare ready to catch them at every turn for resting the juvenile in the point system that they havefor atlanta police department it's five points however you only receive a quarter of a pointas a police officer if you answer a service call so police officers often ignore service callsbecause that doesn't give them the credit that they want so just to put that in context you get
03:00:1820 times the credit in atlanta's uh point quota system for arresting a juvenile than going wherepeople actually wanted police to show up and we're supposed to be convinced that this system is madeto keep us safe right the city of atlanta and the police foundation wants cop city to be anational training center for police to come and practice militaristic counterinsurgencyfor export across the country they murdered someone to further this goal all eyes must be on atlantacop city is a symbol of police repression cop city is a symbol of the oppression of the people ofatlanta i want you to look around and see the families here in this park today these are peoplewho came because they're concerned for their children these are people who are concerned
03:01:10because they don't want their city overrun by militarization the level of repression the movementis facing is a sign that the state feels like this movement is a threat and the state feelslike this movement has the possibility of actually succeeding so in response they're increasingrepression and on the flip side of that during this past week of action i saw a lot of affirmationthat this is going to be successful and that people believe that they will stop cop city a commonrefrain during the past week of action is that cop city will never be built and i believe that wewill win there's been such a unique emphasis on the fact that people believe that this fight is100 winnable and that people do have the ability to stop cop city and the people who are participating
03:01:59truly believe that and i think that is an important part of why it's gotten as far as it has so we canget everything we want for this city we can stop cop city we got the power but we just got to believey'all we got to believe in our power that's the last thing on the state is this there's gonna be alot of people telling us about what we can't do about what these organizers out here can't dothey always want to tell us about what we what we can't do but i'm going to tell you all of us outhere we're organizers we are in the business of taking that which other people say is impossibleand we make it possible we got that power as long as we believe so i just need you to saythis is interesting to me because in my experience a lot of leftists and anarchists approach much of
03:02:59their praxis with the concept of them expecting to not succeed but they're going to do it anywaywhich there is a kind of fated beauty to that in a certain way and part of that is taking actioneven if you don't think it will lead to a decisive victory but also i feel that being in that mindsetmight set you up for that outcome if you're preparing to fail that means you're probablygonna fail or at the very least limit the ways that you do action and throughout this movementthus far it's been interesting the degree to which people are convinced that they are going to winif you're being prepared to fail you won't take the radical action that it takes to winwinning is hard and winning means doing things that are scary and uncomfortable and doing things
03:03:44that put you in danger and doing things that are new and unknown and different and taking newstrategies and doing new things and we in the us and a lot of other places but this is us basedmovement so there's so much learned helplessness on the left here from so many years of likewe lost at occupy and then we lost in ferguson and standing rock and in 2020 all of thesemovements that put big body blows to the state put some hits in but were just followed by thesewaves and waves of repression we've learned so much helplessness and for the first time in mylife i'm looking at a movement that i'm like no no we can fucking beat them and people are stagnatingwe're blinking because of what happened on sunday and like no no no what happened on sunday proved
03:04:28that we can win it proved that we can one fight them in the open field and beat them that theyare afraid of us that they will see territory if we hit them and it proved that they are so afraidof us that they need to mobilize fucking 10 different police departments to come deal and thenthey won't even step like into the actual brush of the forest because they think we're the fuckingvietcong that proves we can win more than anything that proves we can win and if we do not acceptthat what is proved that we can win is like property destruction and to a degree doingviolence we won't win those fireworks helped a lot they pushed the cops out and like we shouldn'tbulk at that and i guess i don't classify that as violence the police classify that as violence
03:05:11what they consider taking hits i guess but yeah we are so on the cusp of a make or break kind ofdeal here and the only way that we win is not this internal debate we're having about theefficacy of tactics it's doubling down on what we are already doing because it's working and expandingon it do you believe that cop city will be will be actually stopped we got to um and here's what imean by that this is the line right we have environmental racism uh police militarizationand brutality and police and racism and it's all coming to a head right here in this particularmovement we have to win because what they're doing now is to build capacity to make surethat we can't win right and so why people are pushing so hard is that as we've seen over the
03:06:09past couple of weeks the police have plenty of like tanks and shit and all sorts of militarizedand tactical gear and now they're trying to build another base in the blackest part of the city andto build up more capacity to put down any sense of rebellion or pushback against empire we cannotallow it to happen and i mean there is so much money going to kill people and end life and if wewin right here and make this stand right here that changes the potentiality for how we viewhow to keep one another safe and how to reinvest in ourselves and our people throughout this countryin a huge way i think that we are at the precipice of not only winning cop city but pushing back thetide of the cult of death that this country has become the clear cuts in the wilani forest at
03:07:14this stage serve a three-fold purpose one it obviously gets them closer to construction andthe mass land grading that is scheduled to start on may 23rd two it's a ploy by the apf to secureadditional needed funds from cop city investors and finally it's to demoralize the people whohave spent years of their life working to stop this project everything that police have doneis essentially always a reprisal right the the movement does something and the policeclamp down in a reprisal to try to repress the movement police always escalate but they havealways been like in response to something and their goal of course is to quiet and chillfree speech and end the movement but every time this happens the opposite effect is what comes
03:08:03out of it and from the domestic terrorism rest in in december like really that's when this evenlarger groundswell of national support happened and people started to take notice because this wasan extreme measure and then with the killing of tortugita in january that changed so much aboutthe movement including people's personal connection to this struggle where no longer are people doingthis simply because they believe it is what's right they are doing this because they have tobecause the state cannot get away with this this death cannot be in vain and now people believethat they have to succeed or at the very least make the state pay for every inch and that may meanlooking beyond the binary of victory and defeat according to a construction timeline from this
03:08:52past april the atlanta police foundation plans to start construction on august 29th 2023 in orderfor a quote unquote soft opening of the facility in december of 2024 one hiccup that the apf hasrun into is that it seems they have yet to secure enough money to finish the project and have beenforced to ask their investors and the city for more additional money despite scaling back theirplans for the project as a short clip put together by the atlanta community press collective explainsthe city council will in fact have to vote on whether or not to allocate 33 million taxpayerdollars to the construction of cop city in the very near future additionally the atlanta policefoundation budget documents show that current construction plans have been scaled back from
03:09:39what was originally promised this indicates a failure by the foundation to raise the promise60 million dollars in private funds should the city vote down this funding package of 33 millionit is difficult to see a path forward for the atlanta police foundation's effort to begin constructionon cop city anytime in the near future the city council has actually not yet voted to approvethe allocation of millions of dollars in city funds to the cop city project through an openrecords request we were able to get our hands on emails between the atlanta police foundationand atlanta's deputy chief operating officer lechandra berks in this email exchange the policefoundation expressed a need for the city to provide 33.5 million dollars in funding for the
03:10:21project berks responded by mentioning the need for legislative action to secure the funds theemails state that the police foundation wants to pass this legislation before june 30th becausethey need the city of atlanta's money to secure their construction loan it's expected that assoon as may 15th a member of the city council will introduce legislation to allocate public funds tothe atlanta police foundation to build cop city and a final vote could happen as soon as june 5thone thing that the movement to stop cop city has shown us is that no matter what police do peoplecontinue to show up despite what happens and the movement keeps expanding as the unnamed forestdefender told me infrastructure wise this week of action was the biggest infrastructure i've seen
03:11:08doing a week of action i thought that the infrastructure we put together for week onewas pretty big but i mean it doesn't even compare it's not the same ballpark as what happened forweek five just from how the medics were set up and how food was handled there was a shuttle busprogram there was a welcome table at a church at one point there was like 24 7 clinic spaces therewas 24 7 ride programs and medics on standby and like all these things that were ready to supporteverybody like there was all this infrastructure set up to make sure that people were as supportedas possible and to make it as easy as possible and lower the barrier of entry to the movement asmuch as possible more than there has been in any other week of action so far i feel like the way
03:11:47that we continue that is to take lessons learn from what's happened this week from the problemswith the infrastructure the issues that it had expand on it and then fucking do it for way longerlike we could do this for an entire summer i am fully of the belief that the infrastructure isaw on display during the fifth week of action we could do that for a summer i believe in the kindof people who put it together and i believe in the people who did it to do that we just have tokind of look at what went wrong what went right and fix it all the things that existed in this weekof action as far as there being food rides medics and like group supplies all these things existedduring weeks of action one through four it's just grown it's gotten more logistically intense there
03:12:24are more and more people filling those roles there's more and more stuff coming in like theamount of supplies that we just got sent in or people brought with them from out of state hasjust so vastly expanded since the first week of action it's just gotten more i don't know likenot professional but more polished it's become a much more polished setup system as time went onfrom the first camp that we had during the first week of action to now you know almost two yearslater and that's a huge part of why i think we've outgrown the week of action we have these typesof thought processes and logistics to do this for a summer or for a month we just need people andresources we need more people to be willing because i don't want people to get tired just last month
03:13:02another week of action was called for june 24th to july 1st directly leading into what's beingcalled the Wallani summer with locals in atlanta calling on supporters and forced defenderseverywhere to come to atlanta for the week and stay for the summer with the entrenchment creekpark still closed and there being ongoing efforts to have it be reopened what the week and followingsummer will look like is still very unknown we always are going to need more people people areour most important resource always the way that we limit burnout is by having more and more peopleso that the burden falls less and less heavy on small groups of people and so that people can takebreaks and that's another problem i have with like the week of action as a strategy is you're
03:13:49just going non-fucking stop for a week if you had three months you're like uh i'm going tochill for a couple of weeks i'll be back you know because i have all this time and it freesup people from out of state to come in have times to work it out and their schedule morethere will be more information put out in the coming weeks you can keep up to date by followingstop cop city on instagram defend atl forest on twitter or by checking out stopcopcitysolidarity.orgideally with a vpn and tor slash brave browser if you were at the music festival and you're just anormal person you weren't involved with the movement before this and you were at the musicfestival and you kind of saw why we're fighting for this you saw that space and then you saw the
03:14:29type of violence that the police were willing to output to do it let that move you to getinvolved further you don't have to join an organization you know i don't want to speakfor other people i'm a hard anarchist fuck organizations to a large degree but like havean affinity group get your friends together if you guys want to be helping out with the foodpeople help out with the food people you want to be medics go join a medic collective likefind whatever thing calls to you and just go and do it because we need people and there's nobarrier of entry to join the movement there's no test you have to take you just have to show upi will end this week of action retrospective with a promise from forest defenders see you on the other
03:15:04sideif you build it we will burn it music festival audio courtesy of unicorn riotbetween april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets inwashington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsiblei will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom this child waslaying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the carit's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed thathe may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst people
03:16:28i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possiblethat the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcastsor wherever you get your podcastspicture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swaying in the windpicture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silenced the radio murdersthey left the body there for a reason it was the calling card it's like the mafia used to doand yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into a world of drugsand darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy this year they clearly
03:17:26gave a green light i was velocity listen to silence the radio murders on the i heart radio appapple podcasts or wherever you get your podcastshey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at theiconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlordsold the rank but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitar whatwhat's happening where are we wait look at this tember 27th 1996 this is our chance to fix the presenteinhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought you lethal litdaughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time
03:18:32travel adventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the pastto save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast orwherever you get your podcast welcome to it could happen here this is robert evans uh and it couldhappen here is a podcast about things falling apart uh and you know sometimes about uh making thembetter um today we're talking both about uh something that is implicated in a number of youknow aspects of uh what we call the crumbles here in the united states which is the policeand we're also talking about the um the tremendous difficulty um that people encounter whenever theytry to improve this particular aspect of american society the the near impossibility of reform
03:19:27within the police uh and to talk with me about that and to talk with me about their incrediblenew book the writers come out at night uh is ali winston uh ali co-wrote this book with darwinbondgram um and it it covers particularly the oakland police and a scandal that um kind ofhappened at around the same time as the rampart scandal uh in los angeles focused around a groupof oakland police officers called the writers um who well i'm gonna let ali tell you about thatit's a it's a pretty pretty shocking and bleak story though ali welcome to the show hi therehow are you doing i'm doing good how are you today lovely lovely ali this is a great book it'sit's very deeply reported um i want to talk a little bit about kind of the uh the what sort of uh
03:20:16brought you into this story um because this is something that kind of happened around the turnof the the last century and uh it's kind of adjacent to a lot of issues that are still verymuch uh relevant in kind of the the problems we have with policing both kind of the um the thinblue line code of silence um the way in which police departments act in a very ganglike fashion toprotect uh bad actors the way in which kind of ill thought out reform policies targeted at uh kindof assuaging the um the fears of of business owners um lead to policies of of tremendousviolence a lot of things that are still very much kind of at play all around the country it's it'sfascinating to me so we came out this book both kind of independently we came out this as two
03:21:10reporters who'd worked kind of hand in glove together for about 10 well since 2012 um when wesigned our contract it was 2020 but we'd i'd started reporting on the oakland police department in2008 when i moved to the bay area for a graduate school at cal go bears and um i'd kind of doveright into the topic of police and police conduct in oakland because i'd wanted to i'd been messingaround with criminal justice reporting when i was back east um in new york and north new jersey wherei was working and uh there really was there were some really egregious shootings at that point intime in the early 2000s mid 2000s late 2000s um opd about average i think eight uh 14 officerinvolved shootings police shootings a year um invariably there would be one or two or three
03:22:09or four depending on the year or maybe more that involves someone who's unarmed fleeingbats it was an awful but lawful shoot or maybe just an awful shoot that the da didn't charge ordidn't properly investigate and at that time it was really tough to get information about policeshootings in california because of a combination of laws and supreme court california supremecourt decisions that intersected and kind of shut the door on any sort of record you could getabout police uh disciplinary action or their past histories so you kind of had to mine thecivil courts and look for backdoors and through the da's offices and just kind of or source upreally well to try and report out these incidents and darwin and i met about around 2012 we started
03:22:56interrogating questions about power and the political economy of law enforcement um westarted to raise questions about the percentage of budgetary um allocation that opd receives it'sabout 40 percent of the city's billion dollar budget giver takes so we're talking 350 400billion dollars every year um the result the net result for public safety is questionable umat best it doesn't really tie in to increase in police funding increase in manpowerdecrease in crime oakland is a very violent city often ranks in the top 10 or top fivenationally and per capita crime per 100 000 uh residents and you know in it's also been underthis reform program forever and we this is the backdrop to all our reporting there was always
03:23:43this backdrop of court ordered reforms there's external oversight the external oversight isoftentimes how the public and the press became aware of some very deep-seated issues in thedepartment and how they would get addressed because the politicians here are feckless orinexperienced or complicit or all the above so we over the course of our reporting together kind ofyoke together around a decade eight years or so we kind of realized okay we have a paragraphin each one of our stories that explains the backdrop or maybe a little bit more dependingon how legalistic a piece it was we need to peel all this back we need to explain to peoplebecause this is the longest running oversight regime in the country right two decades now
03:24:27over two decades since the consent decree the negotiated settlement agreement was signedand we just needed to explain to people why this city had gone so far why it was an edge case whyit was an outlier and in order to do that we couldn't we couldn't use 5 000 words we needed120 000 160 000 yeah this is um a dense book in a way that's still intensely readable and I thinkpart of what makes it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of effort laying out thingsthat people kind of know in broad and a good example of this would be people talk a lot aboutyou know the kind of concept of you know the bad apples that you know there's both on the side ofpeople defending police departments that it's a few bad apples and then kind of and you find this
03:25:16more and sort of people on the left criticizing police as an institution the idea that like wellthe fact that those bad apples are supported and defended by the rest of the department kind ofmeans that they're all but bad um you get this these kind of like broad you know discussionsabout that phenomenon what you do in this in this book is kind of get very granular withthe way in which that actually functions on the ground I'm thinking about a specific pointwhere you've got one of the characters you know one of the people that is a major source kind offor this book and a major source for this scandal was a police officer who effectively turned onhis fellow officers and reported all of this illegal violence being done by this this gang
03:25:59and there's a point where this guy after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusionedby what you know he's the guys that he's writing with are doing goes to other people in the departmentwho are like yeah those guys are like messed up and it's it's bad and you just kind of have toyou should just kind of like you know try to try to move on but don't make waves about it rightand it's this it's this the the kind of the fact the the degree to which other people can not justknow in the department what's happening but be disgusted by it and still when I'm kind of thethe shit hits the fan fundamentally defend the officers doing it right like the fact thatthey're able to warn other officers away from you know hanging being around those guys doesn't
03:26:43mean that they won't like absolutely throw down to defend them which is is is you knowsomething I think people are kind of broadly aware of but the kind of going into the actualpersonal dynamics is I think really valuable and you do a very good job of capturing that at theground level well what we wanted to do is explain how so it's not bad apple theory I think is yeahhonestly it's a distraction and frankly it's an excuse what you're dealing with is cultureright and culture eats politics and policy for lunch breakfast lunch dinner and all the mealsin between every single time you can't change culture unless you understand it so what wewanted to do and we were able to do this because we had very good sourcing not only inside and
03:27:34around the department current former officers we had reams of records I mean we sued for I want tosay hundreds of thousands of record pages of records videos audio files got old court transcriptscassette tapes of old internal affairs interviews back were backstop those by talking to peoplethere and involved and we were really able to we were able to kind of reconstruct not just theinitial scandal of the riders of which stem from this young officer Keith bat who is from a cityfrom Sebastopol which is yeah bit north of of Oakland very different place rural bit crunchyquite crunchy not nearly the like real rough and tumble grit of Oakland around the turn of themillennium and Keith comes in he's a criminal justice major in college really idealistic wanted
03:28:30to join an active police department applied to dozens of partners to several departments aroundthe area and the first one that took him was Oakland and Oakland had a good reputation amongpolice culture it was an active department the cops worked hard they were well trainedthey were decently paid and it wasn't a you know in the Bay Area like the two departmentsthat people look to are like are the Oakland Police Department SFPD and SFPD is a closed shopit is a legacy department is run by an intense old boy network of Italian and Irish folks someChinese some Asian immigrants that are kind of led into that now but it is just it's such aninsular place OPD is actually typically more welcoming of recruits from outside and they
03:29:13really like people who are hard chargers active willing to learn and Keith finished the top ofhis near the top of his academy excellent shot really sharp on the uptake his instructors liked himand right when he was about to go on the street they one of his instructors pulled him aside andsaid hey I hear you got a side to Chuck to Clarence Mabinang who was his field training officerhe said okay listen you need to keep your mouth shut you need to keep your eyes openyou're going to see some crazy shit but just go along to get along you know just keep your headdown yeah Keith was like wait what what are you talking about like that's that's some wildthat's a wild shit like that's not what I'm expecting it's a little bit odd and these are
03:30:00older officers who you respected he goes out and gets in the car with Chuck and Chuck is this littleyou know very very intense buzz cut Filipino dude he's like all right I'm gonna teach youand I take take you out and toughen you up like this is not the academy anymore I'm gonna teachyou how to be in the streets we're gonna get a fight we're gonna get in a fight tonight this isthat's first shot night on the job first time stepping into a Crown Victoria patrol car withwith his FTO and he's like what what and sure enough Chuck gets in a confrontation that very nightwith someone drunk in front of his own house just drunk in front of his own house threatens to shootthe guy's dog takes the guy in after beating him up and Keith is like wait what you shoot
03:30:47dogs and yeah they told him that you know every now and then they would encounter somebody withthe dog and they would shoot the dog and then cut the leash in order to make it seem like the dogwas going to attack them and that was just his introduction to it and over the two weeks thathe worked with several officers on shift there were three other officers who kind of made up thislittle clique of freewheeling cops that they call they call themselves the riders and they were theywere Jude Siafno Frank Vasquez and Matt Hornung and those three were kind of at the center of itand they would they were basically took it on themselves they were not a task force they werejust patrol officers they would kind of roam around West Oakland going out and looking for
03:31:35people to arrest just jumping out at random folks they were pro not reactive they were proactiveso they essentially ended up kidnapping people planting droves on them when they didn't finddrugs beating the tar out of them torturing them Siafno's nickname was the foot doctor becausehe had a habit of taking his ass to retractable baton and beating detainees on the soles oftheir feet till they couldn't walk yeah their bruises were so painful for some reference that'sthat was called bastonado by the the Spanish Inquisition who loved to do the exact same thingyeah no it's it's really um it's grim it's really really grim ship so Keith sees all this stuff it'sjust like two weeks of like training day that film it's two weeks of that it's not just one week
03:32:22and he's like I can't do this this can't be the way policing is and he keeps going you know kind ofcasting around for help and the the cash 22 that he's in is that anybody who he tells about thisbehavior is obligated by OPD's regulations to then report said misconduct and if they don'tthen they're guilty of failing to report misconduct so he has to kind of hedge his words and you knowtalk around these issues and his friends who work in OPD who work in CHP California HighwayPatrol he tells about the stuff in this roundabout way are all giving him the same advice you knowI don't know like do you want to write out your career like can you do this is there a way youcan switch out is there a way that you can thread the needle and it gets to be too much and um
03:33:12so one day after two weeks he decides I can't do this anymore I can't put more I can't putinnocent people in jail I can't forge paperwork for my my supervisors I can't forge their overtimeyou know I can't help them steal money from the taxpayers like this so he goes into the you knowhe confronts them in a parking garage in front of a church in right north of downtown Oaklandthese guys called the light cave they would hang out at and he's telling chuck listen you know Ican't do this this isn't the right way and Mabinax as well you know you have a problem no no I don'tthink you're really getting this he's trying to like talk him past it and then Keith keeps bringingup Frank Vasquez and Frank he'd seen Frank choke people he'd see Frank empty like can't pepper
03:33:54spray into somebody's mouth put his fingers into their eyes like a bowling ball um he said oh ifyou have a problem with Frank you can talk to him Vasquez comes over you know drives over there thatthey have a conversation about that and Keith at this point is so wired up and so terrifiedhe's looking at Mabinag and looking at Vasquez and thinking to himself okaycan I get to my pistol before they get to theirs if they want to hurt meand if we have a shootout how's it going to look if three Oakland copsare bucking lead at each other in uniform on shift right he's running this calculus in his headum doesn't come to that in the end Mabinag convinces him to go in and sign a resignation letter
03:34:39and when he does that at OPD headquarters one of his supervisors from the academy gets hold ofhim gets a hold of him says no no this isn't what's what this is not you what he's going onand they convince him to go upstairs and talk to internal affairs and then he spills the beans onthe what he's seen the past two weeks and that blows the lid off his scandal there had beena number of people who had like attempted to kind of like victims of this particular gang of guyswho had that's right like attempted to complain attempted to come forward but yeah it's not reallyuntil this officer on the inside with a very good record is willing to say something thatthat anything starts to happen so you have to remember the context here i'm sorry for cutting
03:35:25in but i was remiss on this so the context of oakland in late 1990s early 2000s is that it'sin the middle of new york style urban renewal jerry brown who later became governor of californiawas kind of on his way back up the political rung and oakland was his first stop he wasreelected mayor in 1998 i believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he because he wasgoing to turn oakland into this socialist you know environmental friendly metropolis buthe gets into office he starts going to the community meetings and he realizes publicsafety is the number one concern so he becomes rudy juliani west as one of his former employeesput it to us pushes a massive building program in downtown oakland for new residential market rate
03:36:12housing and enlists his police department to go on a clean up the street spree by any meansnecessary and he would go into the lineup and cheer them on root them on say listen you know i gotyour back i'll back your play you know just take back those corners from these dealersthat's what those officers that's what mabinang hornow siapno and vasquez were responding tothey were responding to the instructions from their supervisors from their chief from theirmayor that came down the command chain to clean up the streets and do this sort of stuff and theywere actually you know mabinang and vasquez in particular were very highly valued officersthey were proactive they made their supervisors look good it was this kind of one hand washes the
03:36:55other this yeah and i one of the things that i found particularly kind of impactful is theway in which you describe both the the violence the the absolute like horrifying cruelty of whatthese guys are getting up to and how that intersects with jerry brown's political career with the umthe kind of promises he's making to clean up the city and the kind of metrics that are establisheduh you know to provide basically evidence that that this this plan is succeeding you know it'sit it really like kind of gives on the ground context to what this kind of broken windows stylepolicing um what it actually means in terms of a human cost and it's it's devastating um andequally devastating is the lawsuit that kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed
03:37:47um one of the things that was most shocking to me because i was i was only kind of broadly awareof this case at all is when when these guys the the officers in this in this gang get you knowgo on trial or sort of when that process starts one of them this guy vasquez like goes on the runsteals an ar 15 from his department and fucking disappears and he's still in the wind no one'sever found this guy yeah he was most likely in mexico um he's from mexico he's born down thereand has family around medida um the theory is that he and you know he was stopped by a cop that'swhen yeah that he people realized that he had been that he'd stolen a gun from the department buthe kind of badges way out of the this encounter with a cop in suison city which is a delta town
03:38:38near where he lived and near his house and that was the last anybody had seen of him has seen ofhim uh the theory the theory that's rattled around quite often um and there's more often thanthere's probably some heft to it is that somebody from the either the department or the police unionhelped him down to the border um chula vista and he walked across so the odds are that he's inmexico ostensibly the fbi are still looking for him he's a fugitive but he's never never been foundno and he when this happens because his his buddies and the writers are all go all do infact go on trial and you know you might think the fact that that one of them like bounced andfled the country after stealing a gun would have an impact on things but no no in court they're not
03:39:30you know the the prosecutors aren't allowed to tell the jury what happened with fast gas becausethey're it's worried that it might prejudice them which is wild to me well in the first trial sothere were two trials sorry a little bit all three cops in the first trial there's hung juries in themi think they were one or two holdouts maybe and from the reporting that we did the interview thatwe did with the ada on the case dave holiser it seemed that these were people who were convincedthat these were good cops and the ends justified the means or therefore you know this kind of noblenoble cause corruption actually has an audience among some segments of the population around herei mean it i'm sure you see this across the bay now in san francisco there's all these people who are
03:40:16you know kind of advocating the sort of vigilante violence that former fire commissioner wascommitted against uh against homeless folks unhoused yeah for folks who aren't aware thefire commissioner of san francisco this was a couple of months ago right around the time thatthere was a big wave of san francisco's collapsed into anarchy sort of stories which happen everyten years which yeah yeah and have been you know it happened at the same time that that tech CEOwas stabbed to death turns out by another tech founder what do you do but yeah this story thatthe fire commissioner had been attacked and there's this video of him getting brutally beaten by ahomeless man it turns out he had been going around at night and macing homeless people at random one
03:40:55of the air spray yeah air spray air spray air spray it was crazy this is awful shit yeah and thensomeone attacked him with the homeless with a uh with a crowbar but all that those facts wereomitted anyway so the bottom line is with the um with horning of horning vasquez in siapno they'rethey're hung on the first trial and then the second trial they're acquitted uh they'rehorning is acquitted of some charges and there's hung juries in the rest of his charges and thosefor siapno and mavenang but in the second trial the first trial the defense was well they didn'tdo what keith did keith's bad is lying the second trial was well the defense turned to a strategyof well actually frankifasquez was the leader so it's all frank's fault yeah it's easy to throw
03:41:40that guy under the bus because he's gone exactly yeah exactly and you know to say he was a ringleader is absurd because everyone knew in opd and outside opd that mavenang was the shotcaller inthat little gang um what's interesting is the lawsuit so there's a little vagary here aboutthe criminal investigation into the riders the police department and the the police department'sinternal affairs investigators and the police chief made a decision from day one from on highthat the investigation would only be limited to what keith bat saw that it would not expandout beyond his two weeks on the job and the incidents that he witnessed personally andthat they were able to corroborate with other people there was another cop uh scott he was in
03:42:22who did um did corroborate some of this stuff once it came out that he'd falsified some reports hedecided to save save his own skin so he also caught some of the flak that bat did but notnearly the same sort of death threat type shit that keith caught so with regard to the broaderum the broader broader lay of the land the criminal the investigation didn't go into abroader pattern of what else was happening on these shifts what are their cops who are involvedbecause the riders you know there's a ball that they actually signed for each other and there'sseveral names on that ball it's not just those four cops so the civil suit there was a civil suitbrought by two civil rights two attorneys um in the area john burris and jim channon who had been
03:43:09suing the department for years they'd actually received walk ins the victims that you'd mentionedearlier over the years alleging that they'd been arrested beaten up framed up tortured by these copsin west oakland and when the news of keith bat blowing the whistle on the riders hit the newspapersit clicked for them and they realized they'd been seeing this pattern so they opened up their ownpattern and practice investigation and did their own investigation of complaints andcanvassed neighborhoods and gotten names uh from people who had filed complaints andyou know alleged similar patterns of misconduct and came up with 119 plaintiffs who let who laidout a pattern of abuses that spanned much more of the city the downtown area other parts of west
03:44:02oakland even as far as east oakland and a much broader time frame stretching back almost basicallyto 1995 five years prior so the reality of opd's abuses and their kind of deep corruption in thatperiod of time was far larger than the criminal case against those four riders would have itand the i should say that these civil attorneys took up the challenge where both the state attorneygeneral and the federal authorities both the local united states attorney and federal um andcivil rights um in main justice dropped the ball they did not open pattern and practiceinvestigations into opd and we have it from the ada himself who's in the room when he presentedtheir case because they were cross designated as um as they were cross editor is designated as us
03:44:58attorneys during their whole investigation and vice versa he presented the case to the sittingunited states attorney at the time one robert meuler who should be familiar to your listenersas the former head of the fbi twice over swinging bob meller that's right and um you know millerflipped through the pages and was looking you know trying to see if any connections to russiaan alpha bank and so on um but no actually i mean he's flipping through and he's pulls out thesefiles and he looks at the long rap sheet of some of these witnesses and these were people in thestreet these are people who had been arrested before had been involved in narcotics salespetty assaults that robberies burglaries what have you like they were people who were not
03:45:41they they were not kids they were not clean sheets and he handed the file back to holister to theada and said i wish you the best of luck it's important to note that this was a different eraa cop's word was very very very hard to impeach on the stand there was no body camera video therewere no cell phone videos at the time um you would maybe have a rough camcorder every nowand then of somebody shooting like a little video on the street um kind of grainy digital camerasand they were the sound wasn't great but there wasn't much beyond eyewitness testimony and that'swhy keith's words were so important why his testimony was so critical is that you had a copcoming out and blowing the whistle on his department and saying no this is not right this is what
03:46:26they're doing they should be punished for it you know i i can't help but thinking about the umthe story that's kind of blown up right now about there's a man uh on the subway recentlyin new york city who was you know acting kind of erratically yelling and stuff but was not hadnot done any violence to anyone and a a bystander strap hanger restrained him put him in a headlockfor 15 minutes and he died and kind of the response that i'm seeing from guys like madwalsh the daily wire crew you know particularly in right wing media is well this guy had beenarrested you know 40 times or whatever it's like well that that's not that's not germane to anythingthat doesn't give you the right to lynch someone yeah exactly like that like the the penalty for
03:47:08having been arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death that's not the way the systemis that's not the way any of this is supposed to work and it's it's interesting there's a degree towhich um i guess it hasn't changed and there's a degree to which i'm kind of worried that uhthe the sort of nature of social media means that we're a lot more open about the kind ofviolence we're willing to accept for i agree with that entirely i mean that's unfortunately thebacklash to a lot of to both black lives matter cycles in 2014 15 and the current cycleis a lot more virulent than than you'd have it if you just watch kind of the soft focuspbs front line documentary versions of it there's a lot of really naked um
03:47:57justification and support uh for extra legal violence and that is part of the issue withyou know law enforcement and holding them accountable there's always going to be a segmentsmall sometimes vocal sometimes not of the society that supports violence beyond the extent of thelaw beyond the you know constraints of our system and that's why oversight why running the rule overlaw enforcement and making sure that they they behave according to the laws and that they areoperating within the bounds of their limits insofar as we have set them out for them andinsofar as like it look this book is not a book questioning whether or not police should exist it'sa history they do exist they have existed this is what it has looked like to date right if people
03:48:52other people want to make those cases and look at you know hypotheticals or envision a differentfuture that's totally fine what we're trying to do is lay out the ways in which people have pushedback on one of the most egregious departments in the country consistently over for over a centuryand actually had some sort of lasting impact on it and there have been some impacts that havereally changed um because of look they don't there are there's no more public strip searchingof people in the streets that happen in Oakland on the regular every day as late as 2009 and 10it was common that the cops would say look i'm going in your ass for rocks you better not haveanything there right in the middle of the morning on a crowded street in front of people driving by
03:49:42on the way to work that sort of civil rights violation would happen all the time the departmentno longer shoots shoots maybe about three or four people a year that's way down from 14 to 15 a yeara decade 12 years ago that's because they've changed their chase policy their pursuit policythey used to pursue people with an intent to catch them at all costs that ended upresulting in cops chasing people down blind alleys or ending up way too close to a suspectand pulling out their weapon and opening up fire regardless of whether or not they actually hadthe suspect had a firearm or another weapon or the whether the cops were under threatthe change of the in the pursuit policy has led to more of a their the instruction now is to contain
03:50:23don't pursue close call for backup set a perimeter preserve life that's not been that change was notsomething the department submitted to voluntarily they were brought they're kicking and screamingbut because there has been this outside imposition of court oversight for so longand because it hasn't gone away because it's not overseen by the justice department or thestate attorney general so you know they some of the political figure can't like they can't therecan't be a deal cut in the back room between a senator staffer and the federal department ofjustice or the mayor and the state attorney general and their wife or whatever like thatsort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's attorneys are beholden to anybody
03:51:08other than themselves and when the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation play outas it will and hold and both judges on this case have actually been very by the book and very stringenton how the oversight is gone so that's why it's gone up for 20 years and it actually has resultedin good changes there are a lot of people who bitch about it who cry that oh well we need to be outfrom another this oversight it's hampering the police they can't do their job as they will welldo you want to go back to 20 years ago do you really want that do you want that sort of abuseno and that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that did manage to change a lot ofthings around there's a police commission here that now oversees the department it's not perfect
03:51:51it's very much in the infancy but that's a body that existed to take control away from the mayorand move it more towards civilian control of a police department and this is yeah it's a long arcbut the bottom line is that it's not about a one or a zero there's no linear progress hereit's kind of goes in ways but there has been progress which is a crazy thing to say when youlook at that the shit that's in the book yeah yeah but it is like it's important both you know Ithink our audience is definitely much more of of our audience is in the constituency of you knowget rid of the police entirely even if you're coming at it from that I mean especially ifyou're coming at from that standpoint actually I think kind of one of the mistakes that a lot of
03:52:36people who are are on that side of things which is generally where I find myself is using that asan excuse to not actually understand how the police function using sort they're sort of distastefor the institution as an excuse to not understand how the institution works why it's resilientand the ways in which you know both harms can to an extent be mitigated but also kind of juston its strategic level how it functions to defend itself and I think this book does an exceptionaljob of going through that in a way that's nuanced and detailed but also compelling and readablelike you're not going to have to I do really recommend your book people are not going to havelike trouble getting into it like I was drawn in from the first page so I really do think this is
03:53:25something folks should look into no matter where you live in the United States even if you've neverbeen to Oakland you will you will get a lot out of this I would say that we didn't make an explicitattempt to make the city the main character so to draw people into Oakland and kind of cast it inthe same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles and City of Courts may he rest in peace it was agreat inspiration for us but more than anything else there are tons of parallels in Oaklandto other places it's not a unique play I mean it is a unique place but it's also yeah very typicalfor an American city like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago are completely atypical they'rehuge they don't most American cities are like 400 to 600,000 people large Oakland's racial balance
03:54:13is almost 30 30 30 white Latino black 10 Asian roughly 8 to 10 percent Asian than everyone elsethrown in there it's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative and it's alsoyou know Rust Belt City in certain respects although that's changed a lot with the tech boomwe could be going back the other way yeah but it really there are echoes in stuff that's happenedin New York and Los Angeles in Cleveland in New Orleans in Portland in Seattle it it's the experiencethat we've had here particularly with police oversight and reform I mean Portland and Seattleare two other cities that have actually undergone very similar programs with departments thatare more alike to OPD than not yeah well Ali is there anything else you wanted to to make sure
03:55:05to get into in this conversation or yeah I think your point about I just wanted to touch on yourpoint about where people come out for the institution I think it's really important evenregardless of what you believe about where we should and shouldn't be with law enforcementyou got to understand it yeah because it's such a huge institution in our society it is basicallythe main point of contact most people have with the state now yeah in many American cities becausewe've stripped down so many other aspects of our societies our mental hospitals are gone our schoolsare failing public housing barely exists we our healthcare system is decimated and cops essentiallycatch a lot of the end product of those problems it's one of the reasons why I started reporting on
03:55:51criminal justice because you can look at so many other issues of an American society through thatsystem and also you can see ways in which like political agendas the way that police departmentslobby and the messaging that they push out they don't do it in an isolated fashion it's coordinatedlike there are these big swings that happen on the national political stage if you will like we wereat one moment with police reform and abolishing the police defunding them but with black livesmatters the immediate pushback within six months was there's a crime wave there's a crime wavethere's a crime wave we need to support our cops and now we're at the point where people are takingacts or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they have it in their head
03:56:36that things are so out of control in new york homeless man is choked to death because he'shaving a he's having an episode on the train san francisco this fire commissioner is going aroundbearspring people who are camping out on the streets this is the sort of like back and forth swingthat oftentimes starts with people who are trying to protect their budget line who aretrying to protect their political power and it ends up with consequences like that where peopletake it to that level and i think that looking at law enforcement as a political actor is reallyimportant for understanding how we are where we are in the society and also understanding the waysin which you can try and rein them back in and keep your boot on their neck because realistically
03:57:22they will if you let if there's no oversight if oversight is pulled back there's a reactionarycore at the heart of american law enforcement it's always been there we document it backbasically to the turn of the century in oakland in just this one city which is a newer city in thestates um and if you don't if you let that go that core will rise up and basically take overthe department that's what happened with the riders that's what they were they were a representationof a hardcore that had existed in oakland for decades and i think that that's really a reallyi think that's a critical takeaway for readers from this book yeah i would i would absolutelyagree um well folks uh the book is called the writers come out at night brutality corruption
03:58:05and cover-up in oakland uh it's by ali winston who you've just been listening to and darwin bondgraham um i can't recommend it enough ali thank you so much for for being on the show thank you somuch Robert between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off thestreets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one personwas responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantomthis child was laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either draggedout of the car it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killerbelieved that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst
03:59:12people i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possiblethat the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcastor wherever you get your podcast picture miami picture it's beaches picture the palm trees swayingin the wind picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood this is silencedthe radio murders they left the body there for reason it was the calling card it's like themafia used to do and yet the mastermind has never been caught to find him we had to go deep into aworld of drugs and darkness and then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracythis year they clearly gave a green light i must have lost him listen to silence the radio murders
04:00:17on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcastshey i'm nicky fix and my first step towards my dreams of musical stardom is playing at theiconic millennium roller rink in old bridge new jersey there's only one small problem the landlordsold the rink but then something incredible happened uh nicky what's going on with that guitarwhat what's happening where are we wait look at this september 27th 1996 this is our chance to fixthe present einhorn's epic productions and i heart radio the team who brought the lethallid daughters of dc and see you in your nightmares bring you a new 12 part scripted audio time traveladventure join nicky and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past
04:01:22to save our future listen to nicky fix's time mix on the i heart radio app apple podcast orwherever you get your podcast oh my goodness it's it could happen here a podcast about thingsfalling apart putting them back together and the uh sissive fissian task of occasionally trying tostop them from crumbling as fast as they otherwise would i'm robert evans uh who is not great atintroducing this podcast i'm joined with james who is better at introducing this podcast but istrong harmed him out of it no true um well we'll let the audience decide um so james today you andi are here to talk to a journalist uh that we both like quite a lot uh amy westervault amy is thehost of a podcast called drilled which focuses on shady stuff uh done by the oil and gas industry
04:02:24and particularly we're talking about season eight of drilled which is focused on what axon is doingin a south american country called gayana um and it's a really fascinating story uh there's a lothere including kind of the way in which oil and gas companies um move in and in a kind ofpredatory way create contracts um with smaller countries that don't maybe have the legal resourcesto set themselves up uh as well as they otherwise would that don't have kind of the the long basisof environmental law rulings that like areas that have been you know uh used for by theoil and gas industry for longer periods of time have um and kind of the fight by activists inthat country to um rest control back from axon um and a bunch of other stuff besides amy welcome
04:03:13to the show i think that's that's enough of an intro from me hi thank you thanks for having meyeah amy i'm curious kind of what got you started thinking about and focusing on and really digginginto what's been happening in in gayana because um obviously this is you know uh the oil and gasindustry is a topic of concern for most progressives um but people tend to focus on you know kind ofthe permean basin the gulf of mexico um obviously the middle east these places that are kind ofseen as traditionally more the the bread basket of the oil and gas industry yeah yeah i um i startedlooking at gayana because i um follow a lot of axon's shareholder um briefings and reports likethat and i kept seeing them talking about um about the project in gayana and just like the
04:04:09projections kept increasing so quickly and it got to a point where i was like hold on a secondthey are projecting that this is going to be producing more than the permean basin by 2025and this is a country that shipped its first barrel of oil in 2019 that's incredible uh kindof unheard of that that something would happen that fast so um and i happened like just so happenedto have had a friend years and years and years ago in san francisco who who like helped doi don't know like marketing for the tourism board in gayana and was constantly telling meabout how gayana was this amazing ecotourism destination so i had this i know so i had thislike this idea of gayana in my head is like ecotourism central and then i kept seeing all
04:05:00of these updates around around drilling there so that's kind of what initially got me interestedand then i got a press release about um a lawsuit being filed there by an attorney who was trying tokind of stop the oil drilling um so yeah yeah and and this attorney has a has a pretty interestingbackstory herself right she does and that was also very interesting because she actually was in housecouncil for bp yeah the deep water horizon folks yeah yeah exactly exactly so she um grew up ingayana her family left uh when she was around 12 or 13 there there was quite a bit of politicalunrest in gayana spurred like so many places by da and oh gosh like the history of gayana is reallyinteresting but anyway so there was a lot of political unrest her family felt a bit unsafe
04:05:56they left they went to zambia and then trinidad and then you end up going to school in englandum went to oxford you know has this like very posh english accent now and um and then at onepoint decided you know she was working for bp and traveling all over and um and just kind of gotfed up with it and wanted to move back to gayana um so she moved back started working for a corporatelaw firm there to get very interested in environmental laws because at the time thecountry was just starting to write its first environmental laws this was like mid 90s-ishyeah and one of the things you make a point on in the podcast that is reallyis interesting is you know i i grew up in in texas and i had a lot of friends from the permean
04:06:50basin and you don't think of it and you don't think of the gulf as like an area of strongenvironmental regulations and if you've spent any time swimming in the gulf of mexico you certainlydon't feel that way but it actually i mean it is not not which is not to say that they're strongenough you know um it's not to say that they are sufficient but it's i mean and it's not just thatthere's stronger regulations there and the regulations are largely a product of how longpeople have been taking gas out of oil out of the ground but it's also that um because it's got acentury you know or so of being utilized by the industry there's kind of a um there's a level ofinstitutional knowledge built up about how to do it relatively which number one speaks to
04:07:31how inherently dangerous it is because the deep water horizon disaster happens right in the heartof this area but it also means that when you've got a company like exxon starting work in a placelike geanna um they don't have any of that any of that build up built up kind of competence orexpertise in sort of dealing with these problems yeah that's right they don't have you don't havekind of the heavy bench full of you know experts just hanging out looking for jobs you don't havethe um disaster response to expertise in case of a spill for example and you also don't have theregulatory oversight expertise which has been a huge problem in geanna um they got they got a grantfrom the world bank at one point this was also super controversial because like this was really
04:08:20interesting to me yeah yeah it was like it was right like right before the world bank issuedits whole you know we're not gonna um recommend fossil fuel development as much anymore kind ofpronouncement um they sort of fast tracked this grant to geanna to uh create and grow like a petroleumregulatory department in its EPA because they didn't have it like it didn't exist before um so theystarted to build that out and um but you know it's almost like they're building the regulatory apparatusas they're starting to drill so you can imagine like how well that's okay i think you said inyour podcast and like they dropped this hundreds of pages like environmental risk report and itgot approved the same day that they received it right that's right yeah it's like stamped like the
04:09:16date of receipt and the date of approval are stamped on the report and it's the same day sothere's not a lot of oversight happening hey some people are speed readers amy you knowyou got a whole team of them they spent all that well bank money on speed reading coursesyeah yeah really moving it up yeah and a lot of Adderall i'm gonna guess yes yes they're veryfocused over there yes yeah so you know i mean they um i actually talked to i actually talked tothis guy who ran the EPA in geanna like the first couple years that they were producing oil and hehad formerly worked for the department of energy in the us and was trying to set up like real oversightand like his recommendation was that they have um an EPA staff member actually physically on the
04:10:13production vessel at all times um which like uh yeah no one was into so that guy got firedyeah great so maybe um talking about like the uh legal panacea of texas and and like the differentsystem in geanna will be a good way to segue into talking about this this like rights-basedapproach that they used to i guess ultimately try and ensure some kind of responsibility wastaken by uh the oil companies can yeah yeah do you want to explain that for peoplein terms of like the right to a healthy environment yeah because i think it's veryyeah it's really interesting it's super interesting so melinda jenki this lawyer whoused to work for bp from geanna moved home starts working on these laws she helped to
04:11:04write the um the country's first kind of environmental protection act which establishedits EPA and then in 1996 and again in 2003 there were some revisions to the constitution so inearly 2000s she worked on getting a right to a healthy environment um integrated into theconstitution which basically just says you know every citizen has the right to a livable environmentfor you know themselves and for future generations so that actually opened up the ability for forcitizens to sue the government over this oil drilling project so there's a couple of peoplewho are doing that and they are arguing that the government is violating their right to ahealthy environment by not just permitting this offshore drilling but doing it in this really
04:12:05kind of reckless way where they're sort of rubber stamping permits they're not reallyproviding any oversight exon like brags constantly about how this project is like you know we'vedone in five years what usually takes 10 i asked them i was like oh is there like a new technologyor like a new drilling approach or something and that like the answer is is you know more or lessboils down to a very quote-unquote collaborative government so oh dear you know oh boy yeah that'sit yeah that's good very fast you don't need to dig into that it's uh the zuckabag approach you movefast to break things nothing yes totally totally exactly and and the the guy who is governmenthas this idea i think that well they've they've actually said this out loud a few times like
04:12:57that um like net zero is uh you know commitments to net zero is sort of like their timeline youknow where they're like okay well you know everyone wants to get to net zero by such and such datesso we need to get oil out of the ground as fast as possible and sell it yeah so that we can meetnet zero right so um and because of how really crappy the contract is for anna they are kind ofincentivized to do that as well because the faster they can get oil out of the ground and sold thefaster they might be able kind of get to a place we're actually getting sort of their promisedshare of the oil money so they um they're incentivized to move fast and kind of lookthe way on on stuff i mean there's the first two years of that project exxon talked publicly about
04:13:58the fact that a pretty key piece of equipment on the boat was um broken for two years two yearsso that's cool yeah um and again it's like it's an offshore deep water drilling project this islike the most risky type of oil dream there is there's an enormous amount of pressure at thatyou know level of depth of the ocean it's exactly the sort of situation that deep waterstill happened in um and uh a lot of like similar kind of approaches to maintenance and safetyhappening um so yeah not great now i wanted to talk a little bit one of the things that youyou kind of open up the series with that uh i found very very intriguing and it's somethingi've heard from other journalists in the same uh beat as you is that when you start work on a project
04:14:53that focuses on exxon um some peculiar things start to happen uh just like nothing nothingnothing we can say for certain is like tied to exxon mobile that's right yeah you do noticesome like weird things i wanted to chat a little bit about that because it's it it does scan withother things i've heard from from other folks it's true it's true and i you know i report on all ofthe oil company and none of them particularly like journalists especially the journalists andthey um you know will kind of do the usual thing of sending you nasty emails or refusing to havetheir executives talk to you and it's like that but with exxon like every every time i'm working onan exxon story it's just like you know if i'm traveling all my travel plans get cancelled
04:15:42there's always just there's always just weird stuff that happens like you know you start tofeel like being watched and followed a lot um and and yeah it's super not just me thatexperience i know that everyone i know that has reported on them has um said that's definitelylike there's you know just a kind of an intimidation thing that they like to do i actually was surprisedthat um that steve call who wrote the book private empire about exxon said to me and i have this inthe podcast too that he has you know reported on al-qaeda and reported on the cia and if he's everlike disappeared he told everyone he knows that it's probably exxon so um so yeah yeah then andthat definitely happened on this project too like we um my hotel room got cancelled hotel room also
04:16:44got broken into um yeah and and it was one of those where it's like i had cash on the nightstandwas still there but like my computer was open with like certain files open like that and i don'tkeep like you know sensitive files on my laptop and even in my hotel room but it was definitelylike okay this seems very um pointed and you know yeah it's intimidation yeah yeah yeah yeahtotally yeah normal and good and i know people always ask me they're like are you afraid ofgetting sued by exxon and i was like well i guess if i had assets i would be afraidyeah it's not they're suing it's the most concerning thingyeah exactly exactly yeah but like i wonder i was really interested in i get this legal
04:17:39approach which was very successful in gianna right and if we compare that like if we come back tothe united states uh and i know there's a court case i think it was like it was i'm pretty sureis bolder colorado um i might be wrong but it was somewhere like that uh where they they tried to sueoil companies for causing fires right yes there's a climate liability case there um and it's stillgoing actually it's still it's still alive they just got a like a move in their favor at the supremecourt because yeah isn't the the case in the us is a bit different right where we don't have thisconstitutional right to like a healthy environment and i'm totally sure don't yeah yeah let me tell youalthough actually guess who does have that in the us the montana the state of montana yes and so
04:18:35there's like a there's a case there actually that's invoking their state constitutional right which isvery interesting there's this um a lot of people don't know this about kind of the the the northernwestern part of the country uh you know mountain which montana is it's not really pw but it's themountain west which is that they had especially kind of in like the 70s and 80s this weird history oflike republican governors i think into the 90s some of the early 90s too like republican state leaderswho were also because i guess our our national discourse wasn't so inherently toxic reallyprogressive in in bizarre ways one of like probably the best governor oregon ever had was a republicanwho's like one of his chief accomplishments was he made all of the coastline in oregon both like lake
04:19:23and river coastline and the um the ocean coastline public property he like set it up so that it'sregulated like highways basically so that no one can own private beaches now there's some littlejanky ways kind of around aspects of that but like as a general rule it's a really positive thingand it's like not what you would expect from a republican and i think the same thing is true ofof that law in montana where it just like you used to be able to have republic i mean likenixon created the epa right it just didn't used to be the same kind of partisan that it is todayeven like um in the early trump era there were a decent number of republican folks who likespecifically opposed drilling in bears ears or like uh demonizing bears your thing was interesting
04:20:09wherever they went hunting or something yeah right 100% was like yeah yeah because we uh i was likethe outdoor industry they had to stop doing trade shows in utah because utah was gonna the governorof utah supported demonetizing it a lot of their like quote unquote hook and bullet people werelike yeah fuck this it's bad uh yeah i mean it's the same i think it's in the same category as likejohn mccain having a good take on torture right where it's like yeah i mean they they live rightthere of course they don't want it destroyed yeah but everybody's okay with you know umpoisoning the gulf or um you know the stuff that the uh that the coke industries was guilty of havinglike uh uh fucking pipelines full of holes running under towns that then explode right yeah yeah
04:20:55exactly exactly and that is actually like the number it's like the number one thing that getspeople on and on board with environmental regulation is like having something happenin their community where they're like wait a minute this doesn't seem fair um same withpesovania like people were really into fracking until it became like wait so if my neighborhas a lease and that lease ends up poisoning my well i have no records yes that's how it worksyeah welcome to america yeah yeah yeah so now i mean they're all like actually there's there'stowns in pennsylvania now that are um actually speaking of the rights-based thing that areinvoking home rule and baking rights of nature into their charters and these are like pretty
04:21:46conservative districts too and the whole reason they're doing it have more local control overland use decisions yeah yeah which is probably i'm sure a mixed bag to some degree exactlybecause you could imagine that going in a bunch of different ways yes yes yeah like school board levelshenanigans exactly mm-hmm yeah right now it's like to get rid of fracking waste sites but itcould easily be yeah we don't want any i don't know integrated schools here for example yeahyeah um yeah and exactly yeah i wonder like it's different in the u.s. in the sense that like uhi've i understand right this this case when gianna went to the supreme court of gianna rightand um is that right several so so um melinda has now filed seven different cases
04:22:40yeah she's she's very busy um and most of them have wound up at gay at the high court of giannawhich is their supreme court they just had a big verdict in um another case that she filed whichis really interesting and potentially huge game changer for um oil drilling kind of around theglobe they so in the environmental permit that axon had to get in order to start drilling offshoreit is laid out as a requirement of that permit that they have to have insurance policy from anindependent insurer so they can't self-insure which is what oil companies usually do they have theyall have like their own insurance companies to ensure their project yeah it's great it's bizarrebut anyway so it really it stipulates an independent insurance company and an unlimited
04:23:39parent company guarantee that's really really huge because basically in gianna as in most otherplaces that they're operating outside of the u.s. they use like a local subsidiary that has veryfew assets so they have so exploration and production gianna limited which is worth youknow maybe two billion dollars on paper um and and so you know it's very handy for them to youknow something bad happens and the subsidiary might get drained but the parent company is protectedit it was actually written into their permits they had to have this unlimited guarantee thatthey will cover whatever damages which is important because in all of the environmental impactassessments you know exxon's own environmental impact assessments they're saying if there were
04:24:30a well blowout which is like what happened with deep water it would hit up to 14 differentcaribbean islands plus various countries and like the northern coast of south america so like areally big problem and these are mostly countries that rely on tourism and for their economies soum the argument that malina bade was look because the government has been lacked in regulationand now they haven't required this guarantee you're opening up the citizens of this country torisk because if there's a spill like this these countries could come to gianna asking to bepaid for damages and um we're not able to and now you've like taken you know exxon paying for itoff the table so um anyway the judge in their favor and said yeah you're right exxon you need
04:25:27to have this in writing within 30 days oh wow um yeah it's incredible i mean that could really makei'm it would change the math considerably for this project and i would say most other projectsthat they're working on um the ep is it's the epa and exxon were sort of like co-defendantsin this case the epa is appealing also like just by the way when your epa is a co-defendantwith an oil company there's something very wrong yeah they might not they might not do be doing thepee part so they're appealing and you know there's a lot of government corruption and stuff going onso we'll see we'll see what happens but this judge everyone was like i was talking to a journalistthat we've been working with there and she was like yes everyone's very worried for his safety
04:26:22because like this this was a big deal and he really i mean in like the most prim and properlegalese possible he repeatedly was like epa why are you just being exxon's bitchit smells like bitch in here what's going on it was really it was like it was like a real likewhoa bomb of a of a ruling so um so yeah that's a big win the constitutional case is still umthey're still waiting for a ruling in that case but that's also the supreme court that will beruling on it because it's a constitutional argument yeah yeah a talking of being people'sbitch it's probably time for us to uh hear from our advertisers ah yes great great great greatno james yeah perfect uh you laid it up and i disdunked it it was good these these advertisers
04:27:19none of whom were in any way involved in the oil and gas industry uh we actually can't promise thatbut you know pretend we can yeah uh we're back uh and continue to be blameless uhall right let's uh should we move on to talking about um we chatted a little before this startedand one of the things that kind of is is perennially on um or perpetually on our our our beat isdifferent laws and uh and rules and attempts around the world to crack down on the abilityof people to protest and exercise dissent um which you have some some some thoughts on and alsosome some information on kind of the way in which the the oil and gas industry is tied to a lot ofthese uh these legal kind of assaults yeah yeah yeah they are uh very into cracking down on protests
04:28:15and the thing that i think is really interesting right now is that you have the fossil fuelindustry on the one hand working behind the scenes to you know the american fuel andpetrochemical manufacturers which is the lobbying group for like coke industries and a bunch ofoil companies and all of that um they helped to write sample legislation in the wake of standingrock to um pass around all of these republican states that would increase the fines associatedwith protest and jail time and they also did a lot to try to um broaden it out to includeorganizations so you know any anyone any organization being to organize or plan protests can also befind um in kansas they included a riko charge in that so you know they're trying to make protest
04:29:10organize crime yeah um but at the same time that they're doing all of that stuff the number oneargument that the fossil fuel industry is making in all of the climate cases against it in the usis a corporate free speech argument and that is like it's terrifying so actually in you mentionedboulder before yeah um there's been there's like 24 ish of these cases where uh towns orthese or states are saying hey it's really expensive for us to adapt to all of theseclimate risks and it would be less expensive if the oil and gas companies hadn't kept everyonefrom doing anything about this for the last 40 years therefore they should pay some portionof the cost that's like the basic argument and the oil companies for the last three or four years
04:30:01have been saying you know oh you're trying to get around federal law by bringing these in state courtand these cases belong in federal court the supreme court finally declined to hear that argumentthat department of justice was like they can stay in state court it's fine so that argument is sortof dead in the water but they've already started with like their next attempt to get these casesto the supreme court and it's this free speech argument that they've been making which basicallysays look anything we've ever said about climate change was in the interest of shaping policythat makes it political speech or in like legal um words petitioning speechand therefore protected by the first amendment now they're saying in these cases our first
04:30:51amendment argument is foundational to our arguments therefore uh these can't be in state court statecourts can't rule on on like key first amendment issues so i i'm like convinced that one of thesecases is going to be the next citizens united and this supreme court that's very very scaryyou know they're talking about blurring that like they're basically saying likelying can be free can be protected if it's in the interest of shaping policy a particular wayyeah it's fine if we're okay with lying if it's good for us yeah which is you know is my moneywhenever i'm pulled over by the police but probably probably oil and gas company shouldbe held to a higher standard so you can see why it's like bad but like really for everything
04:31:42very bad if that president gets said um yeah so yeah they're doing that at the same time that they'retrying to limit individual free speech and i think that parallel is um well a not accidental butvery very gross and disturbing yeah very much so i'd like i think it's interesting to get thetrite like they very clearly see this supreme court as like the the the one to go for rightnot that it's going anywhere anytime soon i guess didn't amy cony barrett just like like dad wasn'ther dad like a shell yeah yeah he went for shuffle like 20 years he sure did of coursebecause yeah there's a class thing happening and she never recuses herself on any of these casesever also elito i think it's elito has stock in conico philips so that's cool that's cool
04:32:35probably find out that clarence thomas owns an oil rig yeah it was gifted to him by someoneyeah dude with a nazi statue yeah yeah so yeah i i think it's um it's and and i mean they have saidout loud in multiple places that the whole push to criminalize protest was a hundred percent areaction to standing rock yeah um they were very freaked out by that um i think they always havelike a an organized reaction to anything that indigenous people are doing periodit's like that whole gross extra layer to it um and then actually elsewhere too like in um incanada this um i like we're working with a reporter who's been looking into this in canada for a whilehis name's jeff dembecky and he's found that um there's this the the oil and gas companies they're
04:33:38like wrote down in strategies i don't know why these guys write this stuff down all the time butthey do they wrote down we're gonna make first nations people the face of climate protest becausethat'll make it easy to vilify climate protest in the press wow yeah uh fuck Jesus christ sorrythat one's fully sent me um it yeah yeah so and a very similar thing there too where it's likeincreasing fines and jail time and you know um yeah it's interesting how yeah it's like in theus anyway like if you look at the bleeding edge of settler colonialism it's it's nearly alwaysfossil fuel extraction right like if like oak flat uh did the proposed extraction of lithium ontribal lands like a lot of these the nexus of like protest and yeah like colonialism will be
04:34:35these i guess not lithium but in a fossil fuel but these extractive projects on tribal landyeah yes yes which is why actually the um the the rights of nature stuff is becoming reallyinteresting in tribal court so i don't know if you guys followed this but like um with the linethree protests the um the tribe there they um they actually filed a case against a the minnesotai don't know department of public works or something like that and they um they they were like uh wehave a um in in their case it's manoman the uh the rights of manoman so manoman is umoh god it just went out of my mind entirely it's uh wild rice sorry whoo okay manoman is the wordis the indigenous word for wild rice and they have rights for this rice written into their
04:35:43uh tribal laws and so they're saying look um based on our treaties you are actually violatingthis law and therefore we can we can take you to court in tribal court to stop this pipelineinteresting it didn't work to stop line three but actually the case is still making its waythrough the courts because the the minnesota dpw tried to say look um tribal court hasaction over us and the state court was like uh yeah they do actually because treaties existyeah and um so it it's really interesting because now um it's the same tribe that ispotentially impacted by line five in michigan and they are looking at using the same argument andand it could end up actually working there because there's now been enough time that you
04:36:38know it could it could make its way through the courts and set a precedent but anyway yeahit's really really really interesting yeah it's uh that's very that's really weirdlysimilar to the kumiai people here in san diego who are challenging the construction or quoteunquote repair uh which is not what's happening of border wall pick yes that's what they allsay about the pipelines too it's always repairing an old pipeline but you look at the plan and it'slike that's a whole new ass pipeline yeah in a different place than it was before yeah yeah yeahthey're repairing a three foot fence with a 30 foot steel barrier uh but yeah they it cuts directlythrough burial grounds here and they're repairing it by destroying the burial grounds which again
04:37:24they uh they've opposed with mixed results i guess but it's yeah i guess if folks are listeningand they're interested like there are a lot of places where they can they can help those struggleslike different ways to do that but that might be more effective here than going to the supreme courtgiven the our supreme court's composition i guess exactly yeah exactly that's why yeah with the umthe tribal court stuff i think will be interesting to watch in the next couple of years to see ifthey're able to to do anything um but you know tribal solemnities all under attack by the supremecourt yes yeah yeah the likelihood of disresulting in like indigenous nations getting ever morefucked by uh the u.s. it's equally high as an i kid of ever having success i guess yeah yeah um
04:38:19anyway sorry i got really far afield there um the counter protest stuff is very very umvery much being driven by oil and gas and there's it just keeps going too i mean every year there'slike you know multiple more of these laws being proposed and passed i think we're at 20 it's nowhave passed them 14 or 15 have actually implemented them um and yeah it's not not great no i also thinklike you know you're seeing the expansion of the whole eco terrorist and really like come back withevents too i feel like that was something that happened in like early post 9 11 days and is nowhappening again where it's it's like i don't know let's expand the definition of terrorism to includeenvironmental activists and um then we can you know go after them with those charges too
04:39:23that happened in cop city too right weren't they using yes yes they are in the processof still doing that yeah um great well amy this is all really important uh despite beingsuper fun at parties i'm so fun no no no we we are this is a this is a real meeting of thepeople who are fun at parties sit down and you know that dissent has been criminalizedin the united kingdom yeah yeah i don't know man i guess i'll have a man hat like what do you what doyou want the last party robert and i attended together uh we we saw a car bomb happen so atleast that we didn't see a car bomb happen yeah bring positive vibes oh it was you're not talkingabout it just a demonstrative car bomb you know yeah yeah don't know the Burmese car bomb sadly no
04:40:21no if it was an irish car it would have gotten more people um uh there's a little bit of a littlebit of ira humor for the audience um okay we should probably i'm making the next slash motion yeahyeah all right well amy westwell thank you so much for coming on today and thank you forcontinuing to put out um a podcast that is keep that can at least if people you know listen keep themvery updated on some of the most important um climate related news going on today and someof the real like fuckery being carried out by the oil and gas industry again the podcast isdrilled season eight right now is about exxon in geanna um amy you have anything else you wantedto say before we we roll out no that's it thanks for having me this was fun yeah thank you so much
04:41:18amy really appreciate it and uh yeah uh this has been robert and james um we should probably dosomething on the themes at some point james that'll rhyme i know it's not pronounced that way i knowthis was just me let's do it anyway we could call it robert and james on the tims you know there we goabsolutely not all right podcast is overhey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universeit could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zonemedia visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the i heart radio app applepodcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated
04:42:08monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening between april 1971 and september1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc this child was uh layingon the side of the road the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may havebeen seen i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom listen to freewayphantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts what if you hadthe chance to change the past september 27th 1996 and create the future you've always dreamed ofeinhorn's epic productions and i heart radio bring you a new 12 parts scripted audio timetravel adventure join niki and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past
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