It Could Happen Here - On the Ground at Defend the Atlanta Forest: Part One

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Garrison travels to Atlanta Georgia to talk with Forest Defenders who are attempting to prevent the construction of a massive militarized Police training facility.  https://defendtheatlantaforest.com/https://scenes.noblogs.org/https://crimethinc.com/2022/04/11/the-city-in-the-forest-reinventing-resistance-for-an-age-of-ecological-collapse-and-police-militarization Links above best viewed on Tor BrowserSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Despite it being past midnight, you can still

see through the dense forest. The moonlit sky combined with the urban light pollution make traversing the messy woods easier than you thought. You're relieved that you don't have to use your headlamp, which could have drawn unwanted attention. The company of a few of your queer friends makes the walk through the confusing woods

less intimidating. Dressed in grey and camo, you make your way through overgrown trails and hop over a small creek. Save for the occasional train, all you can hear is the croaking of frogs and chirping of cicadas, crickets, and grasshoppers. The night air you breathe through your mask is noticeably cleaner than the air from downtown that you spent months riding in during 2020, not even counting the tear gas in the air. hiding in during 2020, not even counting the tear gas in the air. As you and your pals slowly trek through the forest, your feet squish into the grassy wet ground.

You avoid the areas caked in clay and stick to the cover of trees, brush, and the soft wetland. After a short walk, and with only a few wrong turns, you reach an artificial break in the embrace of the forest. You look at your masked-up friends, and for a brief moment during the moonlit night, you can't quite tell who's who, which is a good thing, you suppose. Everyone exchanges glances, but no one says anything. Everyone already knows what to do. As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get angry, to do. As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get angry, a jarring crack in the beauty and mysterious allure of the forest. You're no longer in the woods. You're at the site of destruction, a clear cut that seeks to expand its radius. Without the tree coverage, you can see the harsh blue light of LEDs in the distance. There, among the mounds of dirt and fallen trees,

are several unguarded machines of destruction. With no cell phones in sight, you and your friends get to live in the moment. Your agenda becomes the sound of shattering glass in the cold night. Hammers meet windows and serrated knives cut the inner tubing of bulldozers and excavators. The undoing of the mechanical monsters that have violated the forest has begun. No tool of the evildoers goes unharmed. Rattling cans of spray paint leave antagonistic and proclamatory messages with rebellious hiss for those who intend to continue destroying the forest. Defend the forest. No cop city, no Hollywood dystopia.

In little time, the light pollution, moonlight, and distant LEDs are accompanied by a bright orange blaze emanating from the machines, lighting up the area around the sad mound of dirt. A splash of gasoline acts as the extension of the blood that fuels the burning fire in your hearts that became a light with the rage felt at the sight of the decimated woods. By the time the fire department took notice, you've already disappeared into the night like a specter, fading like the curling black smoke that drifted into the midnight sky. As you exit the forest, you go about as if what happened tonight never did.

You never tell a soul, and you never talk about it with your masked-up queer friends, since they were never there either. Details fade in your memory like a dream, but deep down you still remember the feeling, the peak moment of true freedom when the fire engulfed the machines. It was upon broken, unusable machines that the fires were extinguished. Laying incinerated, the excavators and bulldozers were rendered immobile, worthless piles of trash. Fires are only temporary and can be undone, but the connection between those who live in a forest, who breathe its air, and who drink its water filtered through its wetlands, is not so easily broken.

Any further attempts at destroying the forest will be met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us and will be here long after. You and your friends, among many other anonymous strangers, will see to that. Welcome to Good Happening Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and how we can put them back together. Today we'll be spanning that entire spectrum. I'm Garrison Davis, and the story I just read isn't merely a fictional one. It was inspired by over a year's worth of communiques and reportbacks

coming out of the Defend the Force movement in Atlanta, Georgia. So, uh, excuse the pretentious poetry of anarchist-azine-speak. In early 2021, it was revealed to the public that mainly four entities, namely the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, DeKalb County, and Blackhall Studios, had dual plans to devastate two complementary sections of the South Atlanta forest. The City of Atlanta and Police Foundation plans are to turn the area of the forest known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm into the largest police training facility in the country, complete with a mock city, helipad, and bomb range. Meanwhile, Entrenchment Creek,

a public forest land, will be traded by DeKalb County to Black Hall Movie Studios to clear-cut the land on which they plan to build America's largest soundstage. This project lies at a horrific intersection of police militarization, gentrification, copaganda, and exasperating the local effects of worsening climate change by clear-cutting hundreds of acres of forest. In the last year, activists, ghost-like saboteurs, and open-source researchers have vulturized together into an anonymous and diverse movement that's brought the plans to destroy the forest out of the shadows of secretive backdoor corporate deals and into the public spotlight, forming the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement that's

consistently been able to get ahead of police and media by breaking news about the forest destruction plans and setting the terms of engagement and what's deemed as acceptable direct action, all while being able to foster a relationship with the woods that they are defending. I've been really interested in this project since I heard about it last summer. Along with the intersection of police militarization and climate change, on the flip side, there's this unique intersection of urban city protest and classic forest eco-defense. The mix of tactics have produced a movement unlike anything really seen before here in the States. Not to get ahead of myself, but ever since last fall, when the Atlanta City Council approved the plan to build the largest police training facility in the country,

dubbed Cop City by activists due to the plans to build a mini version of Atlanta within the facility to practice urban combat, but I figured that I would eventually find myself inside the forest. So this last April, when an opportunity presented itself to travel to Atlanta, stay in the woods, and talk with some forest defenders, I could not pass it up. I packed a tent, sleeping bag, and some microphones, and made my way to Georgia. The first thing I noticed upon arriving in Atlanta is that when they say Atlanta is a city in a forest, they really do mean it. The amount of continuous tree coverage throughout the city was astonishing,

and that's coming from someone who lives in Portland, Oregon. As it turns out, the city of Atlanta actually has the highest amount of tree canopy of any city in the United States. On top of the citywide tree coverage, there is the South River Forest, which makes up the largest continuous section of woods and serves as Atlanta's first line of defense in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change. The forest in southeast Atlanta is said to function as the lungs of the city. The canopy offers shade and traps carbon, with some of the more heavily forested areas acting as wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent flooding by collecting runoff. Its marsh is one of the last breeding grounds for a lot of amphibians in the region, as well as an important migration site for wading birds,

and serves as a home to a lot of local wildlife. Nearly 500 acres of this forest is under threat by the Atlanta Police Foundation and Blackhall Studios. If plans succeed to develop this precious strip of forest into the massive police compound and adjacent movie soundstage, the entire metropolitan area will face much harsher effects of climate change, including worsening floods, higher temperatures, and less clean tree-filtered air. Not to mention the increased police militarization and gentrification. Speaking of, the second thing I noticed once I arrived in Atlanta is how much gentrification is currently underway. The amount of hideous 501 apartments that are

being built was impossible to overlook. And as we'll see, the way police feed off gentrification, which feeds off the corporate and movie-making sides of Atlanta, is not merely a coincidence. Last fall, I interviewed Jamal from the Atlanta chapter of the Community Movement Builders, a Black-led collective of community residents and activists serving poor and working-class Black communities. They focus on responding to encroaching gentrification, displacement, and over-policing. Here's what Jamal had to say on the intersection of issues orbiting around the Cop City and Defend the forest project.

Just to piggyback off of that, I think it's extremely important for us to recognize the connections between all of these things, right? It's like cop city is a perfect blend of environmental justice issues, just flat out racism, police brutality, and also gentrification, right? It's not a mistake that they're building this cop city right at this moment when Atlanta is also becoming, for the first time in I don't know how many decades, no longer a majority black city because neighborhoods like Pittsburgh, where we're located out of, and all across Southwest and West Atlanta, have becoming more, like the black people have been being displaced from the from our communities right um so a perfect example is that with my organization community movement builders we uh purchased we've been doing work in the pittsburgh

neighborhood for a while but we purchased a community house in the neighborhood about six years ago right at that point we purchased the house for fifty thousand dollars. Right. Pittsburgh has been historically a poor and working class community. It was it was founded as a black community, which is different from a lot of other of other neighborhoods in Atlanta. It was founded as a black community from freed Africans who were trying to escape some of the more rural areas of the South and found work in Haven in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta. And it's been a poor and working class black community ever since. But now because of the gentrification has been going on, how a house just sold maybe about a month and a half ago for $750,000. So we purchased a house at $50,000 six years ago.

A house just sold just a few blocks away from that house for $750,000. Now, it's not that every house is selling for that amount, but that just shows you the rate of gentrification that's happening. And we know that cops are a necessary part of being able to further displace people from gentrifying communities. They play an integral role within gentrification. people from gentrifying communities they play an integral role within gentrification yeah i'm just wondering does any of you have any like even like anecdotal experience with like basically marvel and tons of other industries like invading atlanta how is that like affected specifically like you already talked about how how you know increased the increase in the film industry and other things has you know has made more gentrification but like how is that even

affected just like like other types of stuff including like like policing like has has this type of like growth um affected people or people you know in in other ways yeah absolutely so i think a lot of this kind of got i won't say it got started but a lot of it went even uh you know escalated when tyler perry studio opened up in east point um and a lot of people you know were praising is like oh look at this uh you know it's a black man that was able to move down and be able to start this thing within hollywood but no it's all that is one of the things that also spurred the gentrification in east point which is uh you might not be familiar with atlanta but east point is like literally right next to atlanta so it's a lot of it's it's really close proximity and so that also spurs over to the gentrification here in the city as well

um property values have gone up since that point even more um even my tax bill has gone up a thousand dollars a year per a year um for the past like three years right um so it's yeah it's it's definitely we definitely see the effects and you know and just talking to uh you know we do we do do a lot of work around gentrification um and i think this is in tandem with you know because we have covid19 out here now with the eviction moratorium which has now been you know denied um by the supreme court um but even when there wasn't eviction moratorium there were still people that were getting evicted from their homes and i think all of this in tandem when atlanta specifically has already been going through a gentrification crisis and um with covid19 where people have been losing jobs left and right or

not been able to go to their jobs that they've had, and having salaries cut, people have been hurting. And the response from the city has not been to provide more resources to people. It's been to fund Cop City, to be able to get more police out who are the ones that execute the actual evictions themselves. And I think it all is connected in that type of way. I arrived in Atlanta a few days before the Muskogee Summit, And I think it all is connected in that type of way. what land back and rematriation means in theory and practice. Several indigenous authors were present and led workshops, including indigenous feminist scholar and community planner Laura Harjo from the University of Oklahoma, author of Spiral to the Stars, Muskogee Tools of Futurity,

and Dr. Daniel Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University, who wrote the book Red Alert, Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. In the less academic portions, there were forest walks, community meals, and singing of old Muscogee songs, including ones that were performed two centuries ago during the Trail of Tears. Muscogee Creek attendees also gathered around a sacred fire to perform a stomp dance, recreating rhythms heard and sensed in the forest long ago to rekindle the relationship with the earth and connect back to the ancestral presences. This was the second ancestral migration the Muscogee Creek tribal members have done since being forcibly removed

two centuries ago and displaced to Oklahoma. The first one took place just this last November, and both times the particular section of land they gathered on in Trenchfront Creek Park is one of the areas under threat of being ecologically destroyed and clear-cut. Over the course of a few days during my week-long stay, I sat down in the woods to record with two groups of forest offenders. One group sitting around a campfire at night next to a high-security child prison, and the other group during the sunny, bird-chirping day outside the Black Hole Studios movie plot. So if you hear campfires or bird sounds in the background, just embrace our forest punk aesthetic. Up front, I think it's really important to first talk about the history of the land that is under threat. Because on top of issues regarding gentrification

and the plans of this police training facility as a response to the George Floyd uprising and the false manufactured crime wave media narrative intended to re-justify American policing in the wake of the uprising, the fact that the Atlanta Police Foundation chose this plot of land in particular is particularly gross. The history of this small section of land in the South River watershed is deeply scarred and desperately needs time to heal. There are centuries of oppression and state violence tied to this particular spot of land, and now we're seeing that trying to be continued with this Cop City Plan. Local tribes were expelled from millions of acres in the southwest region of what is now known as the United States during the early decades of the 1800s.

Forced removal and displacement of the Muscogee Creek people began in the region in 1821 through a series of treaties, which then eventually led to a, quote, melee of removal. More on that from one of the forced offenders I spoke to. And I'll note, we'll be using a mix of voice distortion and voice actors combined with other audio distortion to help protect the identities of the force defenders that I spoke to against possible state repression. So

enjoy our cool voice distorted audio. Yeah, I think it's important to let the land heal because a lot of our comrades, Muskogee comrades and extended relatives that are identified as Muscogee that were pushed off as lands in the early 1800s, they, a lot of them did not go quietly into the night. I think that's important to remember because I feel like a lot of people

are just like the Trail of Tears or like they were pushed out, but they're, they fought against being pushed out. And then when a lot of them were pushed out or killed off, then it was used to incarcerate and house mostly black people. So we're taking it back. That is most of the people that I have seen involved. It is a diverse group of people. It's not just like white anarchists in the woods. That is a misconception. There's all kinds of folks, which really I think is interesting and makes the struggle unique and important, but there is also a lot of white anarchists

that are using their privilege to help take the land back for our comrades that want to see it back, and things feel like they're in a good way. There's good relations that are existing between the anarchist and indigenous alliance down here, where obviously no one person speaks or represents any one group, but the alliances that we do have are very informed of the variety of activities that have happened down here, including the arsons of machinery,

and we were positively told to quote-unquote keep on going. So that feels empowering, and it feels beautiful, and it feels important to note that some of the comrades that have ancestral ties to this area, it's such a dark history, and they're still here, is something that they're mentioning, and they're excited. The people that they're mentioning, and they're excited. The people that we're close to, obviously, we're not close to all of them, they're excited that people are choosing to use their privilege to help make sure these facilities don't get built. Continuing with the scarred history of this land,

shortly after the lands of the South River Forest were stolen from the Muskegee Creek people, plots were distributed to white settlers in the Fourth Georgia Land Lottery of 1821, which made available landlots of 202.5 acres. Many of these white settlers established slave plantations on which cotton and other crops were produced through slave labor. Through archival records, we know of at least 12 plantations that were on this land that existed from the 1840s up until 1865. And then, in the early 1900s, the very same land started being used as a prison farm, now known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The Old Atlanta Prison Farm was originally bought in 1917 to incarcerate prisoners of war, but this plan was abandoned within two years, and the land was converted into a prison farm where inmates, including moonshiners, public drinkers, and just loiterers, and really anybody, were sent to and forced to perform unpaid

agricultural labor. This shift from plantations to prison farm marks the rebranding of slavery into for-profit prison labor. This labor included washing cows in arsenic-laden water, which led to the early deaths of countless prisoners. The facility ran up until 1998, in which it was shut down, and then two child prison facilities were put on the adjacent land. And the Atlanta Police Department already currently uses sections of this hallowed ground as a firing range. Tear gas canisters and bullet casings from police are frequently found throughout the forest. For more on that, here's some other parts of my sit-down with the forest defenders.

And then I guess, like, fast-forwarding a little bit from this land where indigenous people lived to the prison farm um and then how this has like a long incarceral history and history of being tied to policing uh both with the child prison that's still here the prison farm and then now trying to build this militarized training facility just like continuing on this legacy of state violence, which is just another massive aspect in terms of they're trying to take this very land that needs to heal from the centuries of violence and just tear it all down and build more of that. I know there's the firing range

that we've been hearing shots from. It's just this never-ending thing it just like it just keeps happening it's a pretty weird surreal experience makes me feel like we're all like an endangered species living in like the last part of the forest in fucking south atlanta i remember when i was explaining it to one of my relatives they're like i was reading the internet about defend the at the Atlanta Forest and not sure quite what's all going on, but sounds like you're living in hell. You're between two different child prisons. One's a high security, one's a low security.

A large, massive power line cut up for an old prison farm on two sides of the road. At least three different police firing ranges and a wastewater treatment plant that doubles as a firing range and pseudo training facility for police another interesting facet is this particular piece of land where they're trying to build uh cop city is like a really important turning point in the history of slavery in the U.S. And, like, this is where a lot of things went from, like, shadow slavery and transitioned into what we now have as prison slavery. And as we're sitting here on what was literally a prison farm,

even people in pre-trial detention were here and used for unpaid labor. Even people who had not been convicted of any crime. And so it's kind like, harder to cover up and harder to, like, pinkwash. is, like, a place where children are locked in cages over, if not 300 yards from me, so, too, is this a place where people were brought for being used as slaves and, like, died and were buried in unmarked graves?

Yeah, um, could I, uh I talk a little bit more about that? This was the transition, this is like the intermediary, or intermediate transition between child slavery and modern-day prison slavery. And it was especially horrific. There is two lakes on the property that were at one point said to be filled with arsenic, um, where the, um, slaves were not only washing cattle, um, with the arsenic to remove them with, like, bugs, but also in those, in those lakes and, like, suffering horrible diseases and, like, dying from this uh the reason

the prison farm actually got closed down was because of the amount of people going in and out of like the reason why the city pushed to close it down was because of the amount of um people being sent to the hospital week after week and day after day, uh, like, officially, like, actually overloading the medical system in the area, um, and that's, like, publicly recorded information, um, it closed down, like, the 1980s or 1990s, um, and, like, during the Civil War, escaped prisoners from here would be, sorry, escaped slaves from here would be, like, going across battle lines and feeding information to the Union side in order to, like, serve their own forms of liberation. I mean, we, like, this land also exists

right next to a major, a, like, major road that serves as a carceral center. Um, it has both, like, the metro, uh, metro re-entry facility, the, um, metro youth detention center, and, like, a couple other buildings. Um, buildings. Um, uh, and, like, it's not just, like, the 80 lands that they plan to clear-cut here, it's also the, like, 300 that they plan to continue with the carceral legacy of, like, terror and horror, um, from going from, like, chattel slavery and indigenous displacement to, chattel slavery and indigenous displacement to um the intermediate intermediary um horror that the prison farm was to this new legacy of like cover-up of it all and then and it, yeah. The continuation of this land being used by the state, by police, by all these, like, oppressive groups to further their cause

is a really interesting aspect of this, and for going to prison farm and then police trying to now turn it into a militarized police training facility. Yeah, yeah. farm and then police trying to now turn it into a militarized police training facility um yeah yeah so first i think um you know this is muscovy land and it's during the muscovy summit and um it's cool you know muscovy people have been displaced for the most part and they're trying to participate in this migration back and so they're on the land right now, and it's been really special to have them here and to be able to express solidarity and work together with them has been really amazing.

I've learned a lot. And it's, yeah, it's cool to understand that. And what you're saying, that interaction of settler colonialism displacing people um like early slavery prison slavery and this this specific land has always been um a place that i feel like has been almost like the vanguard of how um and settler colonialism has experimented with how to reproduce itself in sustainable ways, with just in general the domestication of humans and the domestication of animals. And that's what APD is trying to do on this land.

And it's a direct reaction to the George Floyd uprising which caused a crisis in policing because it actually bit back with serious power. And so they're trying to figure out and experiment with ways of reproducing policing for the future in the exact same way that when slavery took a serious

L, they said, how can we recuperate? And how can we reproduce this in a way that's sustainable, and that's why we have a modern prison system that lives on to this day, and that's why they're realizing as we're gaining and we're threatening

it, oh, we have to do something good, and this land has always been a site for doing that. They're going to keep trying. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented

by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes

with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Atlanta is a heavily corporate city. It's been dubbed the Silicon Valley of the South

by people who surely must be insufferable to be around. But it is true that Atlanta and Georgia's economic policies have attached a swath of corporations to either start, grow, or migrate to the city. It's home to Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, UPS, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A, and multiple media conglomerates, as well as having headquarters for, like, Google and other tech companies as well. The city serves as a massive transportation hub. In fact, Atlanta, the city, started off as a train hub, and now it boasts the world's busiest airport. Recent tax credits for the film industry have made Atlanta and Georgia the new hot place to shoot high-budget Hollywood movies. There's a whole effort to make the city effectively the new Hollywood.

But like all economic growth, this comes with some heavy consequences, most often affecting those at the bottom. Atlanta is also the most surveilled city in the United States, and the city with the most wealth inequality. All the corporations and film industry stuff moving to Atlanta has indeed created jobs, but many of those jobs go to workers from out of state. On average, less than one-third of new film industry jobs have gone to people who were already living in Atlanta. The result of this out-of-state economic migration boosts cost of housing, cost of living, and pushes lower and middle-class residents of Atlanta out of their neighborhoods, disproportionately pushing out black people. And this is all while the increasing corporatization

and gentrification is actually pitched as quote-unquote providing opportunities to the city's black population, which is certainly something because the state of Georgia has the fourth largest incarceration rate in the entire world if you put U.S. states on the same level as, like, every single other country. The other top three states or countries with the highest incarceration rates are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. So, yeah. But Georgia's number four, those in Atlanta's top income bracket make nearly 20 times those who are at the bottom. And if you map the wealth disparity onto the layout of the city, it's a one-to-one match for the city's old segregation lines. The entire city runs on these like Reaganite neoliberal policies, but under this mask of woke identity politics.

And who enforces that wealth inequality and gentrification? That's right, police. Which leads us to the origin of this plan for so-called cop city. I'm going to quote a Crimethink article that came out last month called The City in the Forest, Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization, which I recommend you guys read. I'll have it in the source notes. But yeah, here's the quote from Crimethink. Quote, the government of Atlanta has developed a few tentative solutions to the dilemmas they face. To follow through on their commitments to their backers, city politicians need to continue sacrificing public assets on the altar of the economy in order to attract more major investors

to the region, especially the film industry and technology companies. To maintain control in a period of rapid displacement and rising cost of living, with chronic tension between the conservative state government and the liberal city administration, they need to funnel more resources towards law enforcement throughout the region. Finally, to appease the increasingly rebellious lower classes, they need to frame this process of restructuring and repression in the language of black empowerment, social justice, and progressivism. The bureaucrats are not in a good position to handle this. Decades of tax cuts and deregulation have created infrastructural failures and breakdowns of all kinds. Among other concerns, Atlanta lost the bid for the second Amazon headquarters, because the public

transit, one of the least funded in the United States, was not even operable when the corporate scouts came to visit. At the same time, it's precisely the low taxes and absence of regulation that attract capital to the state of Georgia, so cultivating a social democratic governing strategy may now be impossible without creating a flight of wealth to other parts of the country. It seems that the current plan is to give over as many public contracts and resources to private developers as possible, to allow them to incur the costs of social disintegration and anger, to use police to control the blowback, and to use images of Martin Luther King Jr. to preempt any meaningful resistance. Thus, the plan to transform a wild space into a police training compound is dubbed

the Institute for Social Justice. That's right, The plan to make the country's biggest militarized police training facility, they're planning to call it the Institute for Social Justice. Ignore the bomb range and urban combat mock city section. Anyway, here's Jamal again from the Community Movement Builders. I think one thing that's also really significant is that, so my city council person, uh, for is district 12, Joyce Shepard. Um, district 12 is where Pittsburgh is, where, uh, Summerhill is where several of, uh, poor and black working class neighborhoods of Atlanta are located. They're also the areas where they're the

most uh gentrifying areas of the city as well and it's in in city council district 12 joy shepherd she is the person who brought this proposal forward right she is over the quote-unquote public safety um you know they ain't keeping shit safe uh quote-unquote public safety, you know, they ain't keeping shit safe, quote-unquote public safety, you know, commission. And she brought this forward. And she has been, since she's been in office, she has been a, even, she's been a champion of gentrification, right? She's been a champion of over-policing as well. And I think it's a tie between even our city council or even our representation has in their interest of gentrifying the city because that gives them more tax dollars. It gives them a way to be able to say that they are decreasing their crime rates, et cetera, and all these different types of things when it's really just deplacing poor folks.

And so I think that's important about talking about how this kind of was established that's an important topic to be able to address is that even and she's a black woman right so even um you know even how like when people when people might you think they might be representing your interests um when they get to be in these positions, we have to recognize that they are not necessarily Florida people. In the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising against police violence, the city responded by striking down any police reform measures and restricting opportunities for public input, while increasing the police budget and upping citizen surveillance. On a national level, a media-manufactured crime wave narrative

has been used to re-justify American policing in the wake of the 2020 uprising, and the city of Atlanta is using that narrative while wrapping their increased militarization plans in a nice, woke social justice package, i.e. a militarized police training compound being dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. Heading up this effort is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a non-profit police advocacy organization that claims to have, quote, united the business and philanthropic community with the Atlanta Police Department. It's backed by an array of Atlanta-area corporate donors, including Delta Airlines, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, which owns the Atlanta Journal

Constitution, which is, like, the city's biggest newspaper, and they were formally, formally backed by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola dropped out this last November. A leaked promo video for the Institute for Social Justice details some of the features of the Atlanta Police Foundation's, quote, world-class trading campus. With an estimated cost of $90 million, the space will provide a place for recruiting, training, mid-career education, and practice with new technology and equipment for police and fire department personnel. The renderings show the

campus will house a, quote, mock city for real-world training, a canine training center, and 40 horse stalls for police horses. 12 acres of forest land are slated to be converted into an emergency vehicle operations course. And the whole compound will be located across 380 acres of the old Atlanta prison farm, which is a city-owned, but technically outside of city limits, located just east of the city in unincorporated DeKalb County. The police foundation has proposed funding the training center through a public-private partnership, which will leave taxpayers to pay an estimated $30 million for this out-of-city police training facility, which is one-third of the early estimated cost.

According to the land use ordinance, the property will be leased to the police foundation by the city for $10 a year for 50 years. It's almost 400 acres of forest land for $10 a year. The ground lease will, quote, provide that the city will be able to have input or approval on the stages of construction along with the development of the property. And will allow waiving of certain code requirements. Such a facility would be three times the size of the New York Police Department's training facility, and four times the size of the LAPD's. It's worth noting that the NYPD and LAPD are the two largest police departments in the country, while Atlanta is only the 19th largest, yet they'll have a facility

that's like three times the size of New York's. According to the mayor of Atlanta during the time of the facility's announcement, the massive training complex would, quote, raise morale among officers and hopefully bring more recruits to the department. And importantly, the whole project was initially supposed to be totally under wraps, approved through back fast as possible. The public wasn't really supposed to know about it. The videos that existed were only meant to be known by the sponsors, board members, funders of the Atlanta Police Foundation. And the Atlanta Police Foundation, unlike most police unions, is a foundation that is made to funnel corporate money into the hands of police.

The cop city side of things is just one part of the Defend the Forest project. The other big aspect of this is pushing back on the movie studio, Blackhall, from being able to clear-cut more forest to expand their soundstage. Projects shot on their current lot include Godzilla King of Monsters, Venom, D.R. Evan Hansen, HBO's Lovecraft Country, and Amazon Prime's The Tomorrow War. On the east side of the forested land, the part that's referred to as Entrenchment Creek Park, was bought by Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank in the early 2000s with a plan to combine that section of land with 300 acres of the prison farm

to create a 500-acre park, a project that never came to fruition, and now the park is currently under control of DeKalb County. On top of the heat insulation and air filtering that the tree canopy provides, Entrenchment Creek plays a crucial role in maintaining the South River watershed, being a partial wetland and marsh that mitigates flooding in South Atlanta. Quoting that Crimethink article again, quote, The plundering of public assets for the benefit of a movie company and real estate mogul

is described as an opportunity to create, quote, good jobs for local Atlantans, not as a criminal expropriation of infrastructure. The clear cut that Black Hole Studios plans to trade in exchange for a section of forest is to be renamed Michelle Obama Park, unquote. So yeah, that also clearly demonstrates the type of gentrification wrapped in this nice woke package by doing this really sketchy land swap and then building a park on it and calling it Michelle Obama Park. Cool stuff, guys. Black Hole Studios is currently a 150-acre complex about 10 minutes south of downtown, and they seek to add over a half

million square feet of soundstage, 200,000 square feet of offices, 420,000 square feet for warehousing, and 22,000 square feet of catering space, according to a filing made through the state's Development of Regional Impact program. The DRIs are filed when a project's size is large enough that it's likely to impact the infrastructure of neighboring communities. The DeKalb County Board of Commissioners in October 2020 voted to approve the land swap deal with Blackall Studios as a part of the planned expansion. voted to approve the land swap deal with Blackhall Studios as a part of the planned expansion. The county would give approximately 40 acres of mostly wooded land around the South River Forest, and in return, Blackhall Studios would give the county around 50 acres of nearby land as well.

The project has faced some legal and construction issues ever since then, and we'll discuss the details of those shortly. Also worth noting that Blackhall Studios was sold to a private equity firm in LA just last year, and this last February announced that they purchased another 1,500 acres in Newton County, Georgia, which is about 40 miles east of downtown Atlanta. And they plan to shoot productions there for an upcoming, quote, action-oriented streaming service dubbed Black Hole Americana, which sounds horrible. Here's a quote from Black Hole CEO Ryan Millsap, quote,

this is the kind of space we need to fly in Blackhawk helicopters and drive Humvees at speed. We have lakes, we have swamps, and rivers, and forests, and fields, and hills, and dales. That's the nice thing about 1,500 acres. Yep, so look forward to Blackhawk Americana, the new hit streaming service, coming out of Georgia, destroying the forest for Blackhall Americana. Oh boy. But yeah, if this project succeeds, it would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood, along with like Tyler Perry Studios and all of the other movie studios moving to Atlanta. And it would continue the skyrocketing cost of living in Atlanta and accelerate gentrification at an even more horrifying rate. So, actually, the Blackhall site that's being defended as well is also in the Wielani Forest, which is what the Muscogee name for the South Atlanta Forest is. And it's actually right across the road from where we currently are.

So the, and it's like, I want to believe three or 400 acres by itself. And that is actually under imminent threat as well. They are waiting on the land destruction permit to pass. And that can happen any day or any week. On what you were saying about the gentrification issue, that's something that's been really noticeable to anyone that lives in Atlanta and has for any amount of time, just looking around them. Like, the filming that is just regularly happening here and all these kind of new companies popping up around it.

Blackhall was sold maybe a little over a year ago now to a hedge fund out in California. They're getting funding for all of these projects and rent here in Atlanta, I'm sure across the country, I'm not sure what the trends are elsewhere, has been skyrocketing. Like, you'll see homes that sold during the financial crisis for like $80,000, $120,000,

selling for like half a million dollars today. And, you know, I'm not like a fucking economist, but the way that the film industry has been exploding and other industries like Google and Microsoft have been building these massive, expensive new headquarters while people literally go out on the street because they can no longer afford to pay rent here, and people just get displaced. It's like the opposite of white flight back into the suburbs when, you know, folks are moving into the city

for economic opportunities that only very wealthy people can get. I mean, it's difficult not to see Blackhall as ushering in just another huge wave of gentrification. Yeah, Blackhall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life. Yeah, Blackhall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life we hear gunshots from the police firing range all the time and we hear almost as many gunshots from the Blackhall filming sites and

yeah it's very much about creating propaganda that makes people think they need police and that's a huge part of what they're doing and why they're filming and on the gentrification thing like even just driving through the city the past few days

I've noticed so many places that used to be wooded totally torn down and they're putting up these horrible quote unquote luxury condos which are like you know $2,000 rent per month for a tiny studio and I've even seen

things that were used to be section 8 housing turned into luxury condos like it's it's been absurd driving through the city and watching so many places that used to be wooded just turn like so much like active construction sites building these exact same like these identical apartment complexes that are the most hideous things you've ever looked at and completely unaffordable for anyone who's not, like, someone who's working for a tech company? Yeah, so, um, like, currently they are, like, destroying a section of Atlanta called Chosewood Park, and it was, like, a large green space that was largely, like, unmanaged and in Lakewood, um, and creating, quote quote affordable housing, which is

really just the legal term for they have a certain amount of available housing that's 10 units and 100 unit thing is affordable housing. Affordable just means market value or the median market

value. Low income is things that people that aren't, like, average money makers can afford. Right, and I wonder, like, I think it's has kind of gotten lost throughout the struggle that the actual Defend the Atlanta Forest struggle is, like, not specific to just Cop City or Black Hole, it's actually

the entire forest as a city. Um, and that, like, part of the reason why it has been so focused is because of like how pressing these current things are and how like stretched thin people

kind of are who are working on this and that like yeah Chosewood Park is a good example there's also an area that's like near Grant Park and like the Zone 3 old Zone 3 precinct So Park is an example. There's also an area that's, like, near Grant Park and, like, the Zone 3, old Zone 3 precinct, or, like, the zoo.

They were, like, actually in the same property area. They kept the pigs near the zoo. And, like, it was an entire forest land, like, absolutely massive, that they clear-cut, and now they're doing disgusting condos all along the road. And it's a continuation, again, of a distinctive political pattern in Atlanta.

Back when Mayor Jackson was elected as the mayor, he at first tried to build like affordable, not affordable, like low-income housing and do community projects and stuff, but the business end of Atlanta fought back against those efforts, and that is what saw projects like the 1996 Olympic Games, which destroyed an entire community in Atlanta, you should look up People's Town here in Atlanta, was just, and Summerhill, completely raised to build arenas and all of this shit, and it feels like a continuation of the pattern where politicians

decide what is best for the city. The Olympics, a new police training facility, or whatever business measure is on the table today. Not to mention that, like, during the 96 Olympics, they, like, specifically built Atlanta City Detention Center for the, for a, uh, place to put houseless people who had been sweeped off the streets and, like, criminalized them, and

during the George Floyd uprising in 2020, that was reused to, uh, as detainments and overnight stays for protesters who were, like, going to get low bail just as a form of repression. It is regularly used against, like, that, uh, jail is regularly used specifically against protesters and isn't used for anything else. It is a, like, absolute scour on the face of humanity keisha lance bottoms said during her term that she was going to turn that into a social justice side or what it's still a jail it probably already

it probably always will be until we fucking destroy it uh and like now the fulton county sheriff wants to take over the jail and use all of those beds because the jails here are so overcrowded with bullshit charges that they are just expanding and expanding and expanding, and there's no sign of stopping. For every one time that they promise that they're going to be closing jails, repurposing shit, doing all this liberal reform bullshit, there's a new training facility,

they're selling jails to people that are using them more. The system just continues to expand and expand and expand until we fight back and destroy it. Police need Blackhall. Yeah, police need Blackhall just as much as Blackhall needs the police. You know, and these are the symbiotic relationship between the two of them. Police are instrumental in gentrification and also police need

gentrification to capture poor black and brown people and lock them in cages. And so these are two things that feed each other in a relationship. So it's very important to do our best to attack both. Is Atlanta, was it

the Atlanta police who had like the point system for arrests? Yes, Atlanta police had, oh sorry, yes Atlanta police has actually a point system where among the highest points is capturing a child for, capturing a child and arresting them

or alongside felony charges felony warrants and other things. Along this point system, they use it as a rubric to measure how well an officer's doing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in terms of needing gentrification to continue your job, yeah. That's the exact same thing. Let's have this point system so we can get raises and arrest all the people who are on the street.

And it's a mask-off moment, as they say. Yeah, and I also think it's this funny thing. I don't know, right? They're building this fake city to train in, and I wouldn't be surprised if if black hall ends up renting it out from time to time to shoot films right absolutely but also at the end of the day even if they don't it's literally the same exact thing right one is training people to actually do it and the other is performing it so people think it's cool exactly yeah yeah so i just pulled up the um

actually my friend just pulled up the, uh, like, chart, which is, uh, it's a one to five scale, and it's five scale, it's five for juvenile arrest, five points for felonies, four for a misdemeanor charge, three for a city charge, four for DOIs, and it goes on, um,

and, like... The fact that juvenile arrest is the top one is fucking monstrous no i i expected like they are the monster like yeah yeah yeah like if it's not it's not shocking but it shows the extent of like the the the horribleness of of what of like what their job is like that is their job that's real police yeah that's what that's what Like, that is their job. Real police shit. That's real police shit. That's what they do.

That is the entire thing. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHe fire and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One thing that's given the Atlanta Defend the Force movement an edge is being able to consistently set the terms of engagement and establish a media framework regarding the destruction of the forest and the development of Cop City to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Like we've mentioned, the Cop City project was never actually initially announced by the city or the police foundation. It was brought to light by activists digging through open source data and public records. It was brought to light by activists digging through open source data and public records. In April of 2021, when activists discovered the proposal to destroy the South River Forest,

first news spread via word of mouth for several weeks about a large information-sharing session at Entrenchment Creek Park, one of the areas under threat. On May 15th, over 200 people gathered for a barbecue and info presentation night on the threat of the forest and the broader campaign to defend it. The city government had yet to announce its plans publicly, so the activists and forest defenders were able to craft the public narrative first and lay the media groundwork. At the information session, presenters were able to accurately contextualize the development within the cross-section of racist and authoritarian backlash against the George Floyd protests, the increasing gentrification and urban displacement, and the devastating climate effects such a project will inflict upon the region.

Having activists and forced offenders break the news of such a development denies the city and the police the opportunity to introduce a development to the public with a distorted narrative, assuming that they were going to announce their plans and make them public at all. And then on May 17th, less than 48 hours after the info-sharing barbecue, seven unguarded machines at the forest destruction site, including excavators, tractors, and other pieces of heavy machinery, were targeted by sabotage. With smashed windows and severed inner tubing scorched by fire, the destruction equipment was left inoperable. An anonymous statement appeared online detailing their motivations and methods of attack, while tying the actions to the struggle against colonialism, authoritarianism,

and the history of this particular land as the site of horrific abuses, of the site of displacement, chattel slavery, and prison slavery. The communique ended with, quote, To the developers, governments, contractors, corporations, and politicians that perpetrated the heinous deforestation, any further attempts at destroying the Atlanta forest will be met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us and will be here long after. We'll see to that. Defend the Atlanta forest. To date, no one has been arrested for these actions. The presence of such a targeted direct

action campaign this early on in the movement is important for a few reasons, one of which being it's meant in sabotage as a part of this movement from the very beginning, like it was woven into the genetic fabric from the conception. So any debate around the validity of these tactics was virtually non-existent, because they were there from the beginning. That's what this movement is. And that's been super interesting to watch, because usually this type of sabotage or direct action happens later on in these movements. You escalate to that point. But in this case, it's been happening since the first week people knew that this thing was existing. Over the following weeks, there was meetings, posters and flyers that spread throughout the city. People organized public forest walks through areas of the woods

that were under threat. Even a few candidates for city council adopted the struggle as a component of their electoral campaigns. The movement's consistent ability to break the news on the development and the destruction of the forest has been crucial in the efforts to gain public trust and setting the terms of engagement and the ground rules for the conflict. The type of public discourse regarding the forest was successfully established by anonymous

activists, not by politicians and not by police. I think something that's been really cool about this movement is that from the earliest days of when this was going on, it was extremely radical. Like it wasn't, it wasn't three or four months after the first initial meeting. It was like a barbecue at the park where people were lighting bulldozers on fire to prevent construction from happening.

The Atlanta Police Foundation has had its offices, its office windows smashed, like people are not afraid to fight back physically. And this was occurring at the same time as the more electoral tactics, is how I'll phrase it. And I think that, you you know we've seen neither of these being able to successfully stop the movement but when it comes to like being able to measure that the police have and their allies have slowed down electoral tactics have been a complete and utter failure. And physically harming the property of the police and of the Black Hall and all of the fucking forces that would destroy the forest, that's been shown far and away to be a tactic that's not only acceptable in this movement, but is something that's seen as like one of the go-to strategies. We haven't had to work our way to that.

People were there from the get-go. Yeah, it was, like, a day or two after the info night, like, the very first, like, public-facing event that, like, bulldozers were set on fire in, like, Michelle Obama Park, which is, funny enough, another, like, recuperation tactic of, like, destruction of the environment and, like, ongoing gentrification,

where that's actually Blackhall Studios' old planned site for their new studio. And the idea of the land swap was they take this shitty land where they destroyed forests to replace it with an earth mound, destroyed forest to replace it with an earth mound and in and as long as they turn into a park they're allowed to um build and construct on public forest land um which is like a bonkers idea yeah yeah no it's actually like a new precedent that has not been done before. I think that one of the other things, along with the fiery start kind of kickoff, is that the folks who, in my experience, most big, broader campaign-type things, the people who are doing jail support, the people who have a broad reach, the people who have access jail support, the people who have a broad reach, the people who, you know,

have access to resources, etc., kind of the, like, backbone, life-sustaining things of a movement, tend to be folks who have really rigid, moralizing ideas of, like, what is acceptable, etc., and, you know, people in Atlanta have been, there's a lot of credit due to folks who have been putting in a lot of work and are a little wiser than to have such like a limited area of view so most of the folks that control and are not controlled most of the folks who like backline and are working really hard to do the more like reproductive things and jail support and get food and things like that are also people who have a really like um creative and uh accepting view of you know like what kind of things are okay and really don't want uh this movement to fail and aren't going to limit

themselves based on abstract ideas and so that that's something that is really special. And yeah, no one gets excluded for doing things that are effective. When talking with the forced offenders, the other thing that was really emphasized is that instead of waiting for distant politicians to save the environment, and instead of dedicating tons of effort into petitioning companies with moralizing rhetoric to make them feel bad in hopes of them dropping under the project, you can instead have immediate material attacks that hit them where it to petitioning companies with moralizing rhetoric to make them feel bad in hopes of them dropping onto the project, you can instead have immediate material attacks that hit them where it counts. And where it counts is their pockets, because you can't expect companies to be swayed by moral

decisions around harmful policing or the environment, but you can attack their physical and social capital. If it's framed as, hey, this is something that is not a good look, fam, and this is going to hurt your bank accounts, that is the type of general language that these corporations do understand. I feel like this is the most intersectional thing I've been a part of in a long time. There's just like so many different ways

to oppose the facility. And there's so many different people involved. And I'm really grateful for all of the comrades, especially the anarchist comrades, who have been holding it down for years, and have helped push the struggle in a certain direction. I think other people are touching on this. We want to keep bringing it up, because it's important. In other struggles we've been a part of, like the liberals control a lot of the money

for jail support or bail funds or food distra. And a lot of those mutual aid aspects of the struggle that help maintain an occupation, which has really turned this place up, are in the hands of mostly anarchist folks. And that has also really set the scene for what we're able to do and not able to do. Like, no one's getting thrown under the bus for alleged behavior. Like, when I was reading about this before I came down here almost exactly a year ago. There were like, machines are on fire. And I was like, holy shit. It's like, usually that's like way later in the struggle. And that was like right out the gate. People, whoever they are, were attacking the machinery. And I think to

be honest with you, that was drawing a lot of people here because people are tired of the NVDA or nonviolent direct action. It's not about like, let's criticize something to death that makes us feel bad. It's like people are tired because they're losing a lot of comrades to long prison sentences. They're getting three different felonies that are like the same amount of time or more than if you would allegedly arson something. So these are things that are coming up for people and people are realizing that old tactics aren't working anymore. A lot of the comrades that were burned into a weird shape from the green scare are aging out, or the things that they're afraid of are very valid, but we're

living in too dire of a time to neglect those tactics on a larger level. And people just are seeing how terrible things are. And it seems like more people are down or just don't care anymore ever since the George Floyd uprisings. They've just seen an uptick in a lot of this behavior. There's a campaign that launched publicly that mentions all the subcontractors that Reeves Young, one of the construction companies on the project, has to employ to make the Atlanta Police Foundation's project here possible. And a lot of that could be home visits. It could be going to where they, I don't know who else to do this, obviously, but I'm just saying, long story short, everybody knows this, but you find where they store the evil equipment. That's the best way to stop the project. Long story short, they usually don't listen to

what we have to say, but actions speak louder than words, and if you really want to hurt them, you hurt them in their pockets. And if you cost them enough money damage, they may pull out of the project. They shut down. And even if there is other subcontractors that they could get to rent machinery from to cut trees, whatever the fuck it is they're going to do, we want them to be afraid. If you look at very romanticized struggles that have largely been successful in their own ways throughout the world, I'm just going to mention a couple because people talk about them constantly, like the Zod in France, or the Humbach in Germany, or Notav in Italy. A lot of it revolves around property destruction and defending your area. Another strong point of the movement to defend the Atlanta forest is that it's not simply coalesced around a single coherent strategy, whether that

be sabotage or above-ground organizing. For over a year now, force defenders and movement participants have employed several parallel strategies in tandem. The strategies of one approach can fill in for the shortcomings of another. Often, these differing strategies can be mutually beneficial. As sabotage was happening, opponents of Cop City also organized a continuous stream of educational events on the land, as well as pressure campaigns aimed at pushing city and county officials, investors, and contractors to drop out of the project. As summer began, more traditional political activist organizations, like ones connected to nationwide socialist organizations, abolitionist networks, and ecological advocacy groups, began doing more direct community outreach by knocking on the doors and talking with people in the neighborhoods next to where the forest was being slated for destruction. construction. Forming connections and allyships with the local community in the vicinity of the South River Forest is crucial, especially since that they would be among the first of those impacted by deforestation and the close proximity to such a militarized police hub with, you know,

explosives testing and helicopter pads. Plus, you know, local community outreach is useful for learning what might help mobilize more regular folks. Other tactics and strategies emerging during early summer included getting those involved in the planning of Cop City to realize that they don't get to operate in some safe, politics-only realm. Their political decisions have real-world consequences and real-world effects for those people that they allegedly represent. So perhaps they too should be forced to feel real-world consequences. On June 16th, there was a city council meeting which was supposed to vote on the Police Foundation's land lease ordinance,

sponsored by then-councilwoman Joyce Shepard. At this point, back in 2021, the meetings were all virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the city council members hosted their conversations from inside their homes. With just a little bit of work, activists and researchers were able to locate the home address of Councilwoman Shepard. A group went to her home and displayed a banner during the city council meeting. Most protesters just chanted from the public sidewalk, and one individual approached her house, knocked on the door, and rang the doorbell before returning to the street.

Turns out, Councilwoman Shepard did not like this very much, and went into a bit of a panic. Also, one of the movements that have been kind of effective in terms of city council or other targets has been whenever the first time they were going to vote on this institute for social, actually cop city. They were going to vote on Cop City. Someone went up to Joyce Shepard's house and knocked on her door. There were a handful of protesters outside, and someone just knocked on her door, and she went into a frenzy, freaked out, called off the vote, left the meeting, ran to the precinct during the public comment section,

during the public comment section and then gave a like long speech to like a bunch of police and press which like called out which effectively called off the vote for another like three months or so just because someone visited the house of a politician because they have names and addresses and like that's also happened with r Millsap, that's happened with Dean Reeves, the CEO and chairman of Reeves Young. There's this whole idea of politics as existing within this political astral space, right? It's the same thing with corporations, right? Everything exists in the corporate space

that's removed from people's actual lives, right? It's in the corporate space that's removed from people's actual lives, right? It's removed from actual personal consequences. People in positions of power assume that their actions occur in this political or corporate astral plane. That means that consequences of their decisions won't directly impact them. But we don't need to play by those rules. After a friendly knock on her door, Joyce Shepard called off the vote and left the meeting early to call the police, who arrived after the protesters had already dispersed. Immediately after, Joyce Shepard held a press conference from the newly constructed Zone 3 police precinct. There, Shepard stood, surrounded by police officers and news

media, and described in detail the aims of her land lease ordinance, the nature of the Cop City project, as well as the efforts of protesters to stop her. By doing this short public statement, she catapulted the movement and the story into the mainstream, out of the political backdoors that it was existing in previously. An Atlanta City Councilwoman says protesters came onto her private property to speak out against a piece of legislation. Joyce Shepard says while she supports the right to protest, this time it went too far. People have a right to come out and say whether they for or against it. I have no problem with that. I've been doing this for years and know that people have that right. But what they don't have a right to do is come up on my private property, knock on my doors, protest on my lawn,

on my porch. They don't have that right. So I'm saying tonight that I'm still supporting the academy. I'm not scared. However, there will be no rights for people to come on my property and protest. The next day, she made another statement,

which you just heard a little bit of, where she also claimed that she would be pushing through the ordinance no matter what the city residents that she ostensibly represented had to say. And her and her fellow city officials took a stand against the protesters and rejected their tactics, falsely implying that the methods, like going on a sidewalk, were illegal. But by showing up outside a politician's house and knocking on her door, just a few people were able to achieve an early goal of the movement, to transform the cop city and black hall developments from backdoor agreements into big public scandals. It got out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As a bonus, the vote was delayed, buying more time to develop further strategies in defense of the forest. It was an effective demonstration of the potential of direct

confrontation with people in power. And it led to the emergence of another strategy that's become a big part of the genetic fabric of this movement, pressuring decision makers directly and dissolving their notion of a safe political or corporate astral space. During this time of showing up at politicians' doors, more sabotage and direct action were also taking place. Signs appeared in the forest warning that trees in the area had been spiked, making it possibly dangerous to attempt to cut down trees, with the risk of saws being damaged and possibly injuring unlucky workers.

On June 10th, three more excavators were burned at the Black Hole Studios site. Neither action appeared much in the local news media, but anonymous communiques and photographs of the incidents and damage circulated online among the radical anarchist milieus. In late June, there was the first planned Week of Action. There's been another one since then, and there's another one upcoming from May 8th through May 15th. We'll talk more about the upcoming Week of Action in the next episode, but I strongly encourage people to travel to Atlanta as soon as possible if you can make it for any of this upcoming week-long event. Again, that's from May 8th through May 15th. If you can make it for any of that, please go to Atlanta. It will be fun, I assure you. The June 2021 Week of Action

featured guided walks through the forest by day and by moonlight, discussion and conversations on ecology, abolitionism, colonialism, and queerness. There was nightly bonfires in safe, open sections of the woods. At a nearby radical venue, there was a hardcore punk show, during which hundreds of concert goers repelled the buzzkill police who were trying to shut it down. And there was a night rave deep into the woods, where 500 people were dancing with glow sticks late into the night and early into the morning. In all, throughout the week of action, thousands of Atlantans got to gather under the banner of

Defend the Forest. They were able to learn about the project and get plugged into taking action. During the week, people under the cover of night visited the home of Black Hole Studios' CEO, Ryan Millsap, in the Atlanta suburb of Social Creek. They also visited his second home in Tuxedo Park and the UPS he frequents in Edgewood. According to an anonymous online statement, quote, flyers were distributed to all his neighbor's mailboxes as well as plastered on his front gate and the streets that he frequents. The flyers let fellow concerned community members know about the harm he is responsible for and nicely provided the address to his 100-acre farm so that grievances could be addressed there. The flyers, placed all throughout his neighborhood and investment properties, were also distributed in hopes that it would, quote,

Two days later, on the final day of the week of action, around 50 protesters marched to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting Crimethink again, quote, as the crowd emerged from the Five Points Metro station, a small contingent of officers attempted to arrest somebody. The crowd engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with police and successfully repelled them. Advancing past security, they marched straight to the Atlanta Police Foundation's office and smashed the glass doors and windows before overturning tables in the tower's lobby. According to police, on Friday around 4 p.m., multiple protesters stopped the flow of traffic on Peachtree Street and Andrew Young International Boulevard. Photos taken by a local freelance photographer showing a group called Defend

Atlanta Forest shattering glass doors and also holding signs that say our woods not Hollywood's. CBS 46 reached out to the group but have yet to hear back. Atlanta police believe the protesting ignited over the building of the new public safety training center. When officers arrived, protesters quickly fled the scene, but the damage still remains. At this time, we know no arrests have been made, and the investigation continues. In Atlanta, I'm Barbara Malayan, CBS 46 News. Momentum was growing throughout the summer. Police and corporate press had failed in crafting a counter-media strategy. Meanwhile, the Defend the Forest Project brought together police and prison abolitionist organizations, environmental justice and preservation organizations, civil and human rights non-profits,

and even neighborhood associations near the proposed site, including the East Atlantic Community Association, the Grant Park Neighborhood Association, South Atlantans for Neighborhood Development, and the Kirkwood Neighbors Organization, each of which passed resolutions opposing the proposal. Grassroots organizations that mobilized against the proposal included Defend Atlanta Police Department, Refusal Communities, the Atlanta Sunrise Movement, Community Movement Builders, the South River Forest Coalition, A World Without Police, and the autonomous organizers working under the banner of Defend the Forest. Organizers spread informational flyers and online graphics, conducted interviews, knocked on doors,

and organized phone-in campaigns during subsequent city council meetings that were still held on Zoom because of coronavirus-related restrictions. Third August and September, the Stop Cop City Coalition and others worked to introduce tension and clog up the city council process. Taking cues from the protest outside the home of Joyce Shepard, which resulted in the vote being delayed for over two months, protesters gathered outside the homes of possible yes voters on the nights that the vote was slated to take place, causing further delays in the entire process. It got pushed back from August into September, so again, another delay. Briefly, it seemed like there was a possibility that the Stop Cop City campaign might be victorious before the end of

summer. Votes on the ground lease ordinance were repeatedly delayed because of these objections and demonstrations at the homes of Atlanta Chief Operations Officer John Keene and City Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong. Eventually, September 7th was set as the final vote day. 17 hours of pre-recorded comments from over 1,000 Atlanta residents delayed the discussion. Due to the sheer number of public comments, the vote got pushed back another day, as City Council members spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday listening to the playback. After months of organizing, community outreach, and public education efforts from the Stop Cop City organizers, approximately 70% of the callers

fiercely opposed the proposal, explaining in great detail why their quote-unquote representatives should vote it down. The minority of callers who supported the Cop City project either self-identified as residents of the disproportionately white and wealthy Buckhead and Northeast Atlanta area, or were just like actual cops. At least 30 officers called in to say that they support the destruction of the forest and the building of Cop City. So big, big shocker. The cops want Cop City. Pro-cop city callers invoked the false crime wave narrative propagated after the George Floyd uprising, and used the language of so-called white flight by threatening to leave the city if something wasn't done to stop the growing crime

wave. And yet, when the 17 hours of public comments ended and the council's discussion began, council members largely failed to acknowledge the hours of public comment that they had just spent two days listening to, much less acknowledge the far-ranging movement that produced such overwhelming public discontent. Quoting Crimethink again, quote, As those who study revolutionary movements know, the police perform an essential function in class society, without which many other hierarchies and exploitative relations could not exist for very long. This is not simply an economic or civic issue that can be worked around with some clever ideas and a bit of pressure, unquote. Despite the efforts of organizers, which culminated in 17 hours of primarily oppositional public comment, the ordinance was passed on September 8th, while the police arrested protesters outside the home of Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong, about an hour before the final vote took place during the council's final session on September 8th. The city council voted by a margin of 10 to 4 for the creation of the $90 million facility, handing over almost 400 acres of forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Obviously, many folks were pretty disappointed and kind of demoralized about this. Some turned their frustrated energy into the upcoming local elections, hoping that the city government may be stacked with abolitionists or progressive candidates that might strike down the project. Mayor Bottoms did not end up running for re-election, and the former mayor, Mayor Reed, lost to the now current mayor, Andre Dickens. I do think it's really funny that the old mayor of Atlanta was Mayor Bottoms, and the new mayor is Mayor Dickens. Anyway, city councilwoman Joyce Shepard, who introduced the COP City plan, also lost her campaign for re-election. But since the elections in November, nothing has actually changed regarding the Black Hole and COP City developments. Nothing has changed on the electoral front. There's no indication of electoral strategies

being impactful. And thankfully, not everyone focused their efforts on electoral reform. I'll leave you today with this sentiment that I kept hearing during my stay in the forest. When you criminalize non-violent direct action, the end goes away. On the final day of the vote, people went and protested outside a city council member's house, and 11 of them got arrested, despite the fact that they were already dispersing and following orders. During the Stop Line 3 movement, people were receiving felony theft charges for using lockboxes to attach themselves onto construction equipment, which of recent hasn't even really been an effective strategy resulting in any material wins. But if they're going to arrest you for standing outside of a politician's house and give you charges, you may as well

consider doing something a bit more spicy. If you're going to get felonies for basic non-violent direct action, like locking yourself onto machinery, you may as well light that machinery on fire. When non-violent direct action results in felony charges, if they're going to criminalize standing outside of a politician's house and holding a sign, then going into the forest and doing monkey wrenching suddenly becomes a very similar consequence level, and the action that can be done in secret turns out to be actually a bit easier to get away with. The funny thing is that this is the state's fault, not anyone else's fault. When state repression against public non-destructive tactics increases,

then what happens is the less public and more fiery tactics, which in this movement were already present, will just end up becoming more and more prominent and even more integral to keep the movement going. In the next episode, we'll hear about how the more radical folks continue to defend the forest after the vote, and you'll hear a lot more from the forest defenders that I interviewed. And finally, if you can, please head to Atlanta if you're able to for the upcoming week of action from May 8th through 15th. More boots on the ground are crucial as the large-scale destruction of the forest

is becoming more and more imminent. You can go to defendtheatlantaforest.com and scenes.noblogs.org for more information. See you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media, teens.noblog sources. Thanks for listening. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.