Atlanta police condemned for heavy-handed action at Cop City protest
Police actions during a mass protest called “Block Cop City” that drew people from across the US to Atlanta this week have been condemned as heavy-handed after they included flash-bang grenades, teargas canisters, tanks and a press conference full of demonstrably false or misleading descriptions of the event.
The Guardian also spoke with a protester who was detained, repeatedly called a “terrorist”, handcuffed and threatened with arrest in a supermarket parking lot near the march – only to be released with no charges.
The actions are the latest hardline display against opposition to Cop City, a sign that Atlanta authorities are determined to combat dissent on the project.
The Block Cop City action did not achieve its stated goal of occupying the site of the controversial, $90m police and fire department center known as “Cop City”, but did shut down work for a day at the 171-acre construction footprint in a forest south-east of Atlanta.
The event drew nearly 500 people from dozens of cities and included nonviolent direct action training and planning and a commitment to no property damage or weapons. Nonetheless, multiple jurisdictions deployed police to the project’s construction site and streets in the surrounding area and Atlanta’s police chief, Darin Schierbaum, characterized the event as a threat to public safety, citing evidence such as gas masks.
“It’s absurdly hypocritical of the police,” said Jamie Peck, an organizer who came from New York. “They’re claiming we were the violent ones, when non-violence was in the DNA of the action from the beginning. Trying to say we’re violent when we brought protective gear is sort of Orwellian.”
The march began early on Monday morning at a park several miles from the Cop City site and included between 350 and 400 marchers as well as carnival-sized puppets and a marching band. Dozens wore spray-painted, white jumpsuits – in homage, organizers said, to European environmental activists.
Joel Paez and Belkis Terán warmed up the crowd – parents of Manuel Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, who police shot and killed on 18 January, while the activist was camping in a forested public park about a mile from the construction site. Paez told the crowd he saw them all as “family”. “I pray for the safety of everyone here,” he said. “I pray for the generations fighting for a better world.”
The march then wound its way through the park and toward another park that abuts the Cop City site. Police blocked a tunnel connecting the two parks, so marchers turned into a nearby neighborhood and, eventually, on to a four-lane road leading to the site’s entrance.
Soon after, marchers were met by a line of DeKalb county police. They had shields, teargas guns, a dog and a tank called “The Beast”; there were officers with automatic weapons whose uniforms read “sniper”. As soon as the first line of marchers made contact with police, several officers aimed gas canisters and flash-bang grenades at the crowd. They also fired at a group of clearly identified members of the press who were on the shoulder of the road.
About a dozen journalists were separated from the march. When one tried to return, an officer blocked him on the public road and said, “this is an active crime scene”. Another officer later let him return to doing his job.
One protester who had come from Arizona to participate in the action had gone to a nearby supermarket with another protester. The activist, who uses they/them pronouns, didn’t want the Guardian using their name.
The activists were sitting together in a car watching a live feed of the march when police approached. “What are you doing here? Commanding the action from your car?” asked one officer. Police repeatedly accused the activist about “inciting crimes”, of being a “terrorist”. Officers asked, “Why do you come to our town to mess things up?” One said: “You don’t even know what this project is about – there’s crime in this town, and you need us.”
The officers also separated the two; the Arizonan later discovered their fellow protester had been arrested after supplying a false name and released on misdemeanor charges.
Meanwhile, officers eventually told the 39-year-old human resources professional they were free to go – until a plainclothes officer came behind them and said they were being arrested for “conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism”. Another officer then asked them if they possessed incendiary devices. They were eventually released.
The language of terrorism echoes the state of Georgia’s recent indictment and arraignment of 61 people in connection with Cop City under the state’s Rico, or racketeering law, accusing them of forming a conspiracy.
At a later press conference Schierbaum, the police chief, told the public that police had kept the city safe from dangerous people who were “prepared to do harm, prepared to do destruction”.
He displayed evidence of his claims such as tools used to plant trees by a roadside, gas masks and bolt cutters – presumably intended to cut through the fence surrounding the construction site. Ample video evidence exists of the peaceful roadside tree planting and it was police who used teargas.
Atlanta police did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
The Arizonan activist decided to get away for awhile, and drove to the (Martin Luther) King Center in Atlanta. “I just cried for awhile. I thought, ‘This isn’t your legacy. This isn’t what you dreamed of.’”
stabilized, and you have so many days to leave or take the buyout,” Henry said. And if tenants don’t know their rights, they may fall for it.
While there’s little in the way of hard data to quantify landlord subterfuge and neglect, there is one element of tenant-landlord relationships that can be linked, however speculatively, to the rise of LLCs: evictions.
Nick Graetz, a researcher at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, has been combing through years of court filings and analyzing plaintiff names to find links between who’s getting evicted, who’s doing the evicting and where it’s taking place. While Graetz’s research is preliminary and as yet unpublished, he has found a substantial rise in the percentage of eviction filings by LLC landlords.
In 2000, evictions from LLCs contributed to less than 5% of the national total. By 2018, that number jumped to nearly 34%.
However, certain states saw an even more dramatic increase. Wisconsin’s rate of eviction by LLC landlords increased from 8.2% in 2000 to 54.8% in 2018. It was one of five states where over 50% of evictions now come from LLCs.
Still, it’s difficult to prove that the rise of landlord LLCs has incentivized evictions. “Are there these big bad actors in certain cities who are behind a huge disproportionate amount of evictions?” Graetz asked. Or “is it just one person or company who’s doing a lot of evicting and we just can’t see that happening?” But Graetz says it makes sense that landlords who move toward a more business-minded structure might file for more evictions.
“I think it’s a slippery slope for landlords who might otherwise not be very likely to evict tenants who they know personally on a day-to-day basis,” Graetz said. “These structures can make landlords more removed from their tenants.”
And that distance or anonymity can make it more difficult for their tenants to connect with each another. While it’s easy enough to knock on doors in a single apartment building, if tenants across a number of properties wanted to coordinate a larger action like a rent strike to force their landlord into fulfilling certain legal obligations, it may be hard if ownership is obscured through multiple LLCs.
In 2021, years after the Los Sures protest at the Mail Boxes Etc, Gallagher introduced the LLC Transparency Act during her first term in office. The bill proposed disclosure of all LLC owners,
AI to automate tasks, make decisions or perform services might be subject to taxes on the profits or revenue generated through AI-driven processes. Or, governments might tax the collection, processing or sale of data on which AI heavily relies, with a portion of this revenue used to mitigate the technology’s impact on displaced workers.
Joe Chrisp, a researcher at the University of Bath’s Universal Income Beacon, feels that conversations surrounding automation in work can sometimes resemble a “counsel of despair”.