Civil rights advocates and family members say they’re alarmed by the decision this month of Georgia officials not publicly to release evidence related to the death of activist Manuel Paez Terán, who was shot by a group of state police officers in January while protesting a controversial proposed $90m Atlanta-area police training centre dubbed ‘Cop City’ by critics.
On 6 October, the special prosecutor investigating the incident dubbed officers’ actions “objectively reasonable” and announced no charges would be filed against the six officers involved in the shooting.
Officials say a group of state police SWAT troopers encountered Paez Terán in a tent on the forested site of the future training centre and ordered the activist, who used they/them pronouns, to surrender.
Police claim Paez Terán did not comply with instructions, and officers fired into the tent with less-lethal pepper ball rounds. Officials say Paez Terán then fired at officers with a pistol, and that the SWAT team returned fire, fatally hitting the activist 57 times. In the course of the gunfight, officers say they witnessed an explosion inside the activist’s tent, which they believed was an improvised explosive device.
As part of the charging announcement, officials added that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation would not release evidence related to the shooting, owing to the ongoing prosecution against 61 members of the “Stop Cop City” movement. Officials indicted members of the movement last month for alleged violations of Georgia’s organised crime Rico statue, citing alleged offences like money laundering and arson.
The evidence being witheld, according to the GBI, includes “photographs, audio witness interviews, crime scene drawings and reports, forensic lab reports … and body camera (video and audio)”.
Civil rights advocates said the decision not to release the files, even after the investigation into Paez Terán’s death, marks a worrying precedent for those seeking to investigate potential police misconduct.
“The message that it communicates … is that police officers can kill you and hide details, because you’re a member of a movement,” Jon Feinberg, incoming president of the National Police Accountability Project, told The Guardian.
He called the development “unique and chilling.”
“The precedent this sets is alarming and the lack of transparency is frightening,” Jeff Filipovits, an attorney for Paez Terán’s family, added in an interview with the outlet. “If you can kill someone and then refuse to provide any evidence from your determination about that killing, where does that leave us as a country?”
Georgia officials defended the decision to withold the files.
“The GBI investigative file for the January 18 shooting incident near the site of the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is not being released at this time,” the GBI told The Independent. “The investigative findings are part of a pending criminal investigation and RICO prosecution by the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.”
Family members and Cop City activists have spent months asking for an independent investigation of the shooting and for the public release of evidence surrounding the encounter.
The officers involved in the shooting itself were not wearing body cameras, and critics of the investigation argue there are evidentiary holes and remaining questions in the state’s case.
According to their friends and family, Paez Terán was a pacifist who wouldn’t shoot someone for any reason but self-defence.
A county autopsy of Paez Terán released in April found no gunfire residue on the activist’s hands, which some have argued suggests they didn’t fire on police at all.
In February, body camera footage from officers in a nearby area captures police discussing whether the shooting actually began with friendly fire between police, rather than the activist firing on officers.
Kamau Franklin, one of the organisers of the Stop Cop City movement, told The New York Times earlier this month the story painted by Georgia officials is “just outrageous.”
“Terán somehow now is some Rambo figure in a cloth tent, able to take multiple gunshots, fire back and launch an explosive device,” Mr Franklin said.
Concerns about the evidence in the shooting are part of a larger set of criticisms against how the state has prosecuted the movement.
Civil rights advocates say they were alarmed by Georgia’s decision in September to prosecute a large group of activists under a statute usually reserved for violent street gangs and organised crime syndicates.
Of the 61 people named in the indictment, only eight people are charged with the core criminal offences in the alleged conspiracy, arson and money laundering, and the latter charge was applied to bail fund organisers who helped fundraise for Stop Cop City activists’ legal expenses.
Others named in the indictment had far more tenuous alleged links to the movement, such as handing out flyers, buying food for activists, reimbursing protesters for supplies, and writing the anti-police slogan ‘ACAB.’
“Taken together, these disproportionate charges send a clear message: Think twice before voicing your dissent. Unfortunately, punitive intimidation tactics against civil rights, social justice, and environmental activists is not new,” the ACLU wrote after the charges were announced. “We do not forget that civil rights movement leaders like Rep. John Lewis and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were labeled security threats and investigated, monitored, and often arrested — including in Georgia — based on their organizing and civil disobedience in the pursuit of equality.”
“If you come to our state and shoot a police officer, hurl Molotov cocktails at law enforcement, set fire to police vehicles, damage construction equipment, vandalize private homes and businesses, and terrorize their occupants, you can and will be held accountable,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said last month announcing the charges.
As The Independent has reported, the Stop Cop City movement comprises a diverse array of individuals, groups and tactics.
Critics of the training centre argue it was imposed on the community with little public input, violates environmental law, and will train police in military-style policing tactics that will be used on people of colour. Some see it as a hard-line response to the 2020 racial justice protests and their criticisms of police.
“This project, from their own words, they’re planning on practicing high-speed car chases, bomb deployments. There’s going to be a shooting range. They’re going to be training on how to bust though peple’s doors,” Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders, a grassroots organisation in Atlanta that opposes Cop City, told The Independent earlier this year. “They’re training on how to arrest and imprison and brutalise people. It’s not an accident that this has taken place in the aftermath of 2020. It was introduced in 2021. We had uprisings to resist the exact police repression that has been going on.”
Protests against the development have ranged from peaceful marches and occupying the Atlanta-area forest where the centre will be built, to a group allegedly setting fire to police motorcyles.
Opponents of the project are hoping to initiate a public referendum on the the training centre.
