The state of Georgia is refusing to release evidence tied to the police shooting and killing of an activist protesting a police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”, prompting concern from police accountability experts who say this sets a “frightening” precedent .
District attorney George Christian released a 31-page report earlier this month concluding that the 18 January shooting of Manuel Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, was “objectively reasonable”. Paez Terán was one of a small group of “forest defenders” camping in a wooded public park to protest Cop City, planned for a separate part of the forest south-east of Atlanta, Georgia, less than a mile away. Dozens of officers from multiple agencies raided the park; the state claims Paez Terán fired a gun first, prompting six officers to shoot the activist. The activist sustained 57 gunshot wounds and died nearly instantly.
The Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), the agency charged with the investigation, also announced that the evidence would not be released to the Paez Terán family or to the public because the movement itself is the subject of a separate “criminal investigation and prosecution”. That evidence includes “photographs, audio witness interviews, crime scene drawings and reports, forensic lab reports … and body camera (video and audio)”.
Jon Feinberg, a Philadelphia civil rights attorney and incoming president of the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), called the announcement “unique and chilling”.
The state’s Rico, or racketeering, indictment issued last month is the reason behind withholding the evidence. That indictment alleges that 61 people belong to a criminal conspiracy in connection with opposing Cop City. The case will probably drag on for years, well beyond the two-year statute of limitations for any lawsuit the family might have been interested in pursuing if their attorneys could obtain the investigative file.
Experts across the nation were stunned at the state’s decision.
“I have not heard of another case like this where a prosecutor cites Rico charges/investigations into a movement as a reason not to release information” about a police killing, said Samuel Sinyangwe, founder of the Police Scorecard, a data-based evaluation of state-by-state policing in the US.
Jeff Filipovits, one of the Paez Terán family’s Atlanta-based attorneys – whose firm has five decades of experience litigating police shootings – told the Guardian: “Every other case we’ve been involved in – this is the time at which the file is released.”
Feinberg emphasized that “conclusions without evidence are essentially worthless”. In this case, he added, “the message that it communicates … is that police officers can kill you and hide details, because you’re a member of a movement.”
Similarly, Lauren Bonds, executive director of NPAP, said: “Any time there isn’t transparency around use of force by state actors, the greater the risk of being targeted for first amendment-protected activities.”
The effect may be most felt in protests against policing itself. After George Floyd’s killing, “what you saw was a [police] use of force that was different, an increased aggression … as a response to when they are the subjects of protest,” said Bonds.
Tying the decision to withhold state’s evidence to the investigation of those who oppose the planned training center “feels like a thinly veiled threat to any movement to stop cop cities anywhere”, said Alejandro Villalpando, a California State University Los Angeles professor who researches state violence.
Paez Terán, who used they/them pronouns, had been camping in the wooded public park on and off for months by 18 January. They did so alongside other “forest defenders” opposed to the $90m training center. As part of the police operation aimed at getting them out of the forest described in the special prosecutor’s report, six Georgia state patrol troopers came to Paez Terán’s tent that morning, ordered them to come out, and fired pepper balls at the tent when they did not comply. Paez Terán fired four shots in response, wounding one officer. The troopers shot back and killed the activist, according to the report.
None of the troopers wore body cams. There were members of a handful of other agencies nearby, but it is unclear from the report what they witnessed. Atlanta police released some body-cam videos taken nearby in late January that appeared to show officers talking about hearing friendly fire. Within weeks, the GBI asked the police not to release more of them, citing the ongoing investigation into the shooting.
Paez Terán’s death galvanized a broad-based movement already in its third year that includes grassroots activists, academics, environmentalists, teachers, lawyers and unions, who share concerns about the climate crisis, police abuse of power and environmental racism.
It also began the family’s search for answers, which has lasted nearly nine months. Earlier this month, Paez Terán’s brother Daniel, mother Belkis, and father Joel came to Georgia from as far away as Panama to meet with the prosecutor ahead of the state releasing its decision on the shooting.
Back home in Texas, Daniel told the Guardian he was “angry I let myself think … that we had gotten through to him, and that he would release the evidence – because we deserve to know everything”.
In the absence of the file, he said the report’s narrative “might be true – or something else happened that they might want to hide”. Until the family finds out, “it’s almost like a delay in the grieving process”, he said.
The state’s decision shows what Villalpando called an “asymmetry” between the state and families of people killed by police, given “the power of the bureaucracy to hide the truth, and justify the hiding”.
Filipovits and his colleagues sued months ago to obtain access to the Atlanta police body-cam videos. “There’s no conceivable link,” he said, between those videos, other unreleased evidence such as diagrams of the shooting and the Rico investigation.
“I was expecting our work to begin now,” the attorney added. “The precedent this sets is alarming and the lack of transparency is frightening … 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?”
