A sweeping indictment announced in Atlanta alleging that opposition to a police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” adds up to a criminal conspiracy has observers concerned about a chilling effect on protest everywhere across the US.
The indictment of 61 people under the state’s racketeering, or Rico statute, is “clearly intended to chill larger political participation”, said Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, an environmental and social justice legal organization.
Rico laws are usually used against organized crime and have been famously deployed against the mafia. More recently in Georgia, they are being leveled at former US president Donald Trump and others for alleged efforts to change the 2020 election result.
But in Atlanta they have now been deployed against activists opposed to Cop City as part of a broad-based movement. The 109-page court document includes a series of “overt acts” by defendants that include writing ACAB or buying glue to make pamphlets about the movement against the training center, planned to be built in a forest south-east of Atlanta.
Regan, who has defended activists for two decades, noted that those named in the court document included a legal observer and three members of a bail fund – both mainstays in US political life, gaining prominence in the civil rights movement.
The state’s move is “part of the worldwide wave of trying to block protest, which is a sign that the powers-that-be are everywhere threatened”, said Bill McKibben, who has been writing about climate change for four decades.
“When the Paris accords were signed, civil society had a role in most of the world’s important countries, but the rise of authoritarianism has changed that,” McKibben said. “My close colleague Hong Hoang is in jail in Vietnam; Xi has ended all protest in China; in Russia activists get killed, and so on. Even places like the UK are bringing ridiculous charges against peaceful activists.
“This is particularly sad, because Atlanta was a headquarters of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; that they are now using tools to suppress protest is as ironic as it is sad,” McKibben added.
Atlantans and Georgians in general will now foot the bill for the state’s prosecution, which may take years. “If I were the citizens of Georgia, I would be looking at the millions of taxpayer dollars to prosecute these charges,” said attorney Stanley L Cohen, who represents one of the 61 defendants.
Historians and other longtime observers of political movements consulted by the Guardian could recall no case in which a US state used Rico against such a large number of protesters or activists. Several named attempts to use the racketeering law to charge much smaller groups of environmental or civil rights activists, all of which failed.
Others pointed with concern to the state’s theory that the conspiracy began on 25 May 2020 – the day Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, igniting historical, multi-generational and multiracial protests across the US.
“The demonstrations and protests eventually ended, but an undercurrent of threatening, violent anti-police sentiment persisted with some individuals in the Atlanta area, including those that make up Defend the Atlanta Forest,” reads the indictment – the latter being the state’s name for the movement.
The 2020 protests happened a year before Cop City plans were publicly known. “Using the death of George Floyd’s murder as the birth of a criminal conspiracy means that the movement across the country is a criminal conspiracy,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, an Atlanta group that opposes Cop City and organizes in poor and working-class, historically Black neighborhoods.
“Why not blame it on the Black Panther Party? Why not blame it on H Rap Brown [a Black Panther leader], who is doing a life sentence in Georgia as we speak?” said Cohen, who has represented clients ranging from members of Hamas to Indigenous American activists.
The movement against Cop City is in its third year and came to global attention after police shot dead Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán, an environmental protester, in a January raid on the forest – the first incident of its kind in US history.
The state says Paez Terán shot first, but video footage from police nearby raises the possibility that one officer wounded another in the raid. A special prosecutor is evaluating the case.
Paez Terán was one of the “forest defenders” who camped in a wooded public park across a creek from the Cop City site for nearly two years, trying to protect the surrounding forest as a whole. The movement has no formal leadership, is largely decentralized and has included school teachers, attorneys, civil rights and environmental organizations, Indigenous leaders, political organizers and everyday Atlantans.
About 1,000 people attended an Atlanta city council meeting this spring to oppose spending $67m for the project, a historic show of civic participation.
Nonetheless, the state has persisted in criminalizing the opposition. The bulk of the indictments come from 42 people who were arrested in the forest and on the streets of Atlanta and were previously charged under a state domestic terrorism law – but remained unindicted until Tuesday’s announcement. Some of these defendants were alleged to have participated in acts such as burning construction equipment and throwing rocks at police.
The domestic terrorism charges carry a penalty of up to 35 years in prison; the racketeering charges, up to 20 years.
Despite the seriousness of the indictments, observers derided the state’s logic in its case. The indictment opens with an attempt to describe anarchism as a political philosophy. “It’s very alarming, and also absurd – to see how they’re criminalizing basic, constitutionally protected activities, and punishing thought crimes, or things like sharing food,” said Dan Berger, a historian on social movements.
Keith Makoto Woodhouse, author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, said “the idea that [a movement like this] is highly coordinated or organized stretches credulity … they operate largely in a decentralized way … and anarchism and Rico, it seems to me, are polar opposites”.
Regan, who is also providing legal support for 12 defendants in the group, said some of them texted her on Tuesday with excerpts from the indictment and comments such as, “Being reimbursed for glue is evidence of furtherance of a criminal conspiracy? That was for making ’zines!”
Franklin noted that “Cop Cities”, or multimillion-dollar police training centers, are being planned elsewhere in the US. “In other cities … you know they’re having conversations about how to handle protests,” he said. “They’re looking at these charges and asking, ‘Is this what we do to squash the movement before it gets too big?’”
