SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
tortuguita
Militarized Police 'Indiscriminately' Attack Nonviolent Stop Cop City March With Tear Gas
"This is the type of 'training' they will get if Cop City is built," said one activist group.
Nov 13, 2023
Militarized state and local police on Monday attacked a peaceful protest against the construction of the so-called "Cop City" training center outside Atlanta, Georgia with "less-lethal" weapons including tear gas, pepper balls, and flash-bang grenades, journalists and activists there said.
Hundreds of #StopCopCity activists marched from a park toward the Weelaunee Forest in suburban DeKalb County early Monday morning. Some carried large and elaborate puppets, others had saplings to plant in woodlands bulldozed during construction, and a few carried banners reading "Block Cop City" and "Viva Tortuguita"—a reference to forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, aka "Tortuguita," who was fatally shot 57 times with live ammunition by police during a January raid on a protest camp.
A marching band and members of the Wanbli Ska Society—a South Dakota-based Indigenous advocacy group—hyped up the activists, who then started their two-mile march toward the Cop City construction site.
Journalists and protesters said police blocked the road about half a mile from the march's planned destination.
"The police have effectively separated the press at the front of the march from the rest of the march," the group Defend the Atlanta Forest wrote on social media. "Police are preventing them from rejoining the march and threatening to tow their cars."
NDN Collective, an Indigenous advocacy group, posted video of police pushing reporters away from the march, calling the area a "crime scene" and threatening to arrest journalists.
Backed by menacing SWAT vehicles, including one labeled "The Beast," police attacked the nonviolent marchers, some of whom attempted to push through the line of armored officers.
Many of the activists chanted: "Don't panic, stay tight, we gonna be alright!"
Some protesters lobbed tear gas canisters back at the officers.
"Protestors and police both retreated because neither group was wearing gas masks," Defend the Atlanta Forest reported. Neither were the police dogs, whose only protection appeared to be goggles and noise-reducing ear coverings.
The activists regrouped and continued their march. Eight activists reportedly made it to the construction site and locked themselves to equipment there.
Responding to the police action, Mary Hooks, field secretary for the Movement for Black Lives, said in a statement: "We just witnessed overt violations of our civil rights on a road named after the U.S. Constitution. Atlanta claims itself to be a civil rights hub, but it erases its own legacy when protests arise that confront the power of politicians and police. The police's violence against protestors today affirms our belief that Cop City must never be built."
Prior to the march, activists gathered in a local park, where speakers included community organizer Kamau Franklin and Tortuguita's parents.
"Now is not a time for cowardice. You are either with the oppressed or with the oppressors," Franklin told the crowd. "You cannot stand in the middle. You cannot be [on] both sides. You cannot close your eyes to the terror of policing that happens in this country and in this world. And you cannot deny and cannot be silent on the capitalist economics and the system that controls all of our people across the world."
"You're either with the colonialist or the colonized," he added. "So today when you march and demonstrate and conduct acts of civil disobedience… you are doing it with the oppressed people."
Cop City—which is funded by the private Atlanta Police Foundation and backed by major corporations including Amazon, Home Depot, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS—is being built on land stolen from the Muscogee people, many of whom were forced westward during the genocidal Trail of Tears period in the late 1830s.
Since Terán's killing, more than 40 Stop Cop City campaigners have been criminally charged as domestic terrorists, while over 60 activists have also been indicted under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—some for simply handing out fliers.
On Monday, Belkis Terán, Tortuguita's mother, said that "we are here to protect nature."
"To fight the police, we must be happy. And to be happy we must be strong," she added. "This is one step. We will continue."
Echoing Terán, Joel Paez, Tortuguita's father, told the crowd: "We are going to continue defending the forest. We are going to continue defending the legacy of Tortuguita. We are family. You are my family."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Report Exposes US Media for Framing Social Justice Protests as 'Terrorism'
"Equating activism with terrorism is undemocratic and serves to silence dissenters," said Deepa Kumar, who analyzed how major U.S. media outlets have covered protesters of "Cop City" in Georgia.
Nov 07, 2023
A paper published Tuesday by a media studies scholar explores what she calls "one of the enduring costs of the 'War on Terror,'" mainstream outlets parroting police talking points on terrorism and "legitimating state violence while stifling democratic protest."
Rutgers University professor Deepa Kumar's paper—released by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs—focuses on how major U.S. media outlets have covered protesters of "Cop City," Atlanta's proposed Public Safety Training Center just outside of city limits in Georgia.
"Even though the 'War on Terror' is supposedly over now that the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan, U.S. federal and state governments continue to use and even expand punitive measures targeting those they label as 'terrorists,'" Kumar said in statement. "The U.S. mainstream media sometimes supports this expansion, and in doing so imperils U.S. democracy. All of this is part of the legacy of the post-9/11 wars."
As Kumar's paper notes, "previous research has shown that the mainstream media's framing of terrorism influences public opinion and shapes support or opposition to policies such as Georgia's 2017 terrorism law," which expanded the definition of terrorism to include certain property crimes committed with the intent to use intimidation or coercion to change policy.
The expert analyzed how a local newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and six national outlets—USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the New York Post, and the Los Angeles Times—reported on the "domestic terrorism" arrests of 42 anti-Cop City activists from December 2022 to March 2023.
The paper details her findings:
At first, the national news media did not cover the terrorism arrests in Atlanta. The local The Atlanta Journal-Constitution effectively served as the Atlanta Police Foundations' propaganda outlet. In January, 2022 several national media outlets picked up the story when violence and property destruction occurred, following the "if it bleeds, it leads" framework. However, some newspapers adopted a more critical stance. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the LA Times humanized the protestors, depicting them as concerned activists opposing police militarization and environmental destruction. The New York Post and TheWall Street Journal, however, portrayed protestors as violent Antifa activists and justified their arrest on the grounds of terrorism. USA Today adopted a sensational tone, in effect also justifying the arrests.
As the protest movement gained national and international support, national media paid more attention. All seven outlets covered the story in March 2023. Also significant is that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shifted to a more balanced tone and included the voices of Atlanta residents opposing Cop City. Rather than labeling protesters solely as "outsider agitators" and "far-left" activists who exist on the fringes of society, the newspaper quoted local activists, civil rights groups, and clergy. This happened at the highpoint of government arrests, when 23 more people were indicted on terrorism charges.
However, the analysis also reveals that apart from a handful of notable articles in The Washington Post and the LA Times that tacitly criticize the wider application of terrorism charges evidenced in Georgia, the majority of the seven media outlets have deferred unquestioningly to government authorities in the use of this label.
"Government and police officials have portrayed the protestors as violent terrorists," Kumar stressed. "For instance, in January 2023, when Georgia State Patrol Troopers shot and fatally injured activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, they claimed that Terán had initiated gunfire. Shockingly, Tortuguita was shot a staggering 57 times."
The DeKalb County medical examiner's autopsy report "indicated an absence of gunshot residue on Tortuguita's hands," the professor pointed out. There was also an independent autopsy. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation later claimed gunshot residue was found on the activist's hands. Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney George R. Christian concluded last month that the use of deadly force "was objectively reasonable under the circumstances of this case," so police will face no charges for killing Tortuguita.
Kumar wrote that "in theory, the media are entrusted with the responsibility of posing critical questions and disseminating accurate information to the public so that troubling practices like the use of state violence and extrajudicial killings are not normalized. In reality, U.S. media institutions have often continued to defer to government sources, reproducing and thus reinforcing the expansion of terrorism discourses to criminalize protestors—with sometimes deadly consequences."
Costs of War Project co-director Stephanie Savell responded to the paper by nudging journalists to do better. She said, "The media can make or break how activism is portrayed in an increasingly militarized era of policing that imperils our democratic rights."
The research comes after 57 of the 61 Cop City protesters charged in September under Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law appeared in court on Monday, as hundreds of their supporters rallied outside the building in Atlanta.
"Among the defendants: more than three dozen people who were previously facing domestic terrorism charges in connection to the protests; three leaders of a bail fund previously accused of money laundering; and three activists previously charged with felony intimidation after authorities said they distributed flyers calling a state trooper a 'murderer' for his involvement in Paez Terán's death," according toThe Associated Press.
Noting the RICO charges, Kumar's paper quotes a pair of ACLU experts, who wrote in September that the indictment "paints the provision of mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise. In doing so, it flies in the face of First Amendment protections for speech, assembly, and association."
This post has been updated with additional autopsy reports.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Stop Cop City' Campaigners Decry State's Refusal to Charge Georgia Troopers Who Shot Activist 57 Times
"The system has, once again, declared its own innocence," lamented one activist after a Georgia prosecutor's office said it would not charge the killers of Manuel Terán, better known as "Tortuguita."
Oct 06, 2023
Human rights advocates on Friday condemned a Georgia prosecutor's decision to not charge the state troopers who fatally shot forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán—better known as "Tortuguita"—during a militarized January raid at a Stop Cop City protest camp outside Atlanta.
"The system has, once again, declared its own innocence," Stop Cop City activist Micah Herskind wrote on social media in response to the decision by the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney's office.
The Cop City Vote Coalition (CCVC) campaign said that "Tortuguita's memory and the memories of all those stolen by police killings demand that we all continue the collective struggle for a future without state violence."
Georgia State Patrol officers say they shot Terán after the 26-year-old Venezuelan activist opened fire on them, wounding an officer in the leg during the January 18 raid to evict protesters from the encampment protesting the $90 million, 85-acre Public Safety Training Center—widely known as "Cop City"—in the Weelaunee Forest just outside Atlanta city limits in DeKalb County.
According to a statement from Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney Pro Tempore George Christian explaining the decision not to charge the troopers:
Terán... refused to comply with the lawful commands of the troopers to come out of a tent. The troopers used a 'less lethal' device known as a pepperball launcher in an effort to have Terán leave the tent. Terán responded by shooting four times his 9mm pistol through the tent, striking and seriously injuring a Georgia State Trooper. Six troopers returned fire resulting in the death of Teran.
"The use of lethal... force by Georgia State Patrol was objectively reasonable under the circumstances of this case," the prosecutor concluded.
A DeKalb County Medical Examiner's Office autopsy—which officials suppressed for months—revealed that Terán was shot 57 times and that there was no gunpowder residue on the victim's hands, which advocates say debunks claims that the activist fired first. There is no police bodycam video of the incident.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said that ballistics analysis proved a gun found at the scene of Terán's killing—a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol GBI said the victim legally purchased in 2020—fired the bullet that wounded the trooper.
CCVC said that "from the start, the state's response to Tortuguita's murder has been to lie and cover up the facts."
"Today's announcement ruling the killing as 'reasonable' is just the latest in a long line of changing stories and withholding evidence," the campaign added.
Since Terán's killing, more than 40 Stop Cop City campaigners have been criminally charged as domestic terrorists, while over 60 activists have also been indicted under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—some for simply handing out fliers.
"These charges, like the previous repressive prosecutions by the state of Georgia, seek to intimidate protesters, legal observers, and bail funds alike, and send the chilling message that any dissent to Cop City will be punished with the full power and violence of the government," organizers with CCVC toldThe Appeal last month.
Friday's decision to not charge the troopers comes as CCVC attempts to get a referendum on the project on November's ballot. Although they've collected more than 115,000 signatures—more than double the number needed to qualify for the ballot—campaigners accuse Atlanta officials of voter suppression due to what they say is an onerous signature verification process created solely to thwart the initiative.
City officials are refusing to even start the signature verification process, arguing that the campaign may have missed an August 21 submission deadline. Although the deadline had been extended until September by a federal judge, an appeals court subsequently blocked enforcement of the extension, creating a state of legal limbo for the initiative.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular