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Nevilledog

(51,055 posts) Thu Jun 8, 2023, 12:58 AM Jun 2023

Atlanta Is Trying to Crush the Opposition to "Cop City" by Any Means Necessary

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/cop-city-arrests-atlanta-repression/

No paywall
https://archive.is/lz8Dq

In the early morning of Wednesday, May 31, a heavily armed joint task force of officers from the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Teardown House, a long-standing community center in Edgewood—a historically Black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Atlanta—that doubles as a home for community organizers.

The police arrested Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson, three activists who help run the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a mutual aid and bail fund founded in 2016. Their arrests were predicated on allegations of “charity fraud” and money laundering—all connected, quite tenuously, to the effort to stop the building of the infamous police training center known as Cop City.

On Monday, Cop City took another step forward, as the Atlanta City Council voted 11-4 to spend an additional $30 million of public money on the project—bringing the city’s total funding to $67 million. The council did this after more than 14 consecutive hours of impassioned public comment against the project.

The one-two punch of the arrests and the vote can be viewed in tandem. The charges against Kautz, Maclean, and Patterson make a mockery of the notion of fair justice. They are so laughable that even the judge presiding over the three activists’ bail hearing pronounced himself skeptical about them. Similarly, the Atlanta government’s obvious contempt for its citizens makes a mockery of the notion of real democracy. And in both cases, that is the point: to send a message that anyone with the temerity to oppose Cop City will be crushed by the state, one way or the other.

*snip*