Atlanta police on Monday charged 23 people with state domestic terrorism charges, a day after officers detained dozens of people following a violent clash at the proposed construction site of what has been dubbed “Cop City” – a $90m police and firefighter training center in a forest near Atlanta.
As a “week of action” against “Cop City” unfolds, the charges amplify alarm from activists and experts that Georgia authorities would rely on charging demonstrators with domestic terrorism as a way to suppress opposition.
To them, the pursuit of such charges – paired with correspondingly strident rhetoric from police and politicians – represents an attempt to redefine largely peaceful environmental activism as dangerous opposition worthy of criminal charges. Six activists were arrested in January and charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism statute, marking the first time state law had been used this way in the history of environmental movements in the US.
An Atlanta attorney representing some of the activists, Eli Bennett, told the Guardian in January that the state’s statute was “overly vague”, adding that pursuing charges amounted to “trying to turn a political movement into a criminal organization”.
The clash came less than two months after police shot and killed environmental activist Manuel Paez Terán, known by their chosen name “Tortuguita”, who had been one of dozens of demonstrators camped at the site in protest against the project. The multimillion-dollar project on at least 85 acres of land, largely financed by the Atlanta Police Foundation, is nestled in the South River forest – known by activists as the “Weelaunee forest” – and would sit in an area bordering a Black working-class neighborhood. The site had once been a state prison farm.
Dozens of officers from the Atlanta and DeKalb county police departments, the Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), the Georgia state patrol and possibly the FBI swept through the forest with the goal of clearing activists when Paez was killed, the Guardian has reported. Officials claimed that Paez had shot at a state trooper first “without warning”, although they have yet to release evidence to back that claim, the Guardian has reported.
The unprecedented killing of an environmental activist by US police escalated tensions between activists and authorities, thrusting the movement that had started in 2021 into the national and international spotlight. Police have arrested 18 activists on Georgia’s “domestic terrorism” charges, raising concern among activists over whether demonstrations this week would result in further arrests.
On Sunday, police say a group of protesters dressed in black left the South River music festival and entered the construction site at about 5.30pm.
Video footage released by the Atlanta police department showed that the protesters tossed molotov cocktails as well as large bricks and set off fireworks at police officers while they attempted to ignite construction equipment.
CONSTRUCTION SITE BURNS: Huge plumes of smoke and massive police response after @defendATLforest / #StopCopCity protesters face off with police at the site of Atlanta’s future Public Safety Training Facility. I’m told Molotov cocktails were thrown. Construction equipment is on… https://t.co/6dIyrPff6T pic.twitter.com/0F9qj8dgFn
— Billy Heath III (@BillyHeathFOX5) March 5, 2023
Atlanta’s police chief, Darin Schierbaum, described the clash as a “coordinated, criminal attack against officers”, adding: “Actions such as this will not be tolerated. When you attack law enforcement officers, when you damage equipment – you are breaking the law.”
In a statement, police said that they detained 35 people, noting that officers “exercised restraint and used non-lethal enforcement to conduct arrests”. Of the 23 people charged on Monday, all but two were described as being from outside the state of Georgia, the Atlanta news station WSB-TV reported.
On Saturday, demonstrators – including environmental activists, clergy and families – gathered for peaceful protests, marching and chanting “stop Cop City”, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Local organizers led tours of the forest to highlight the need for land preservation.
Beyond the police training facility, which would be the largest in the US, a movie studio is also proposed to be built on 40 acres of forest land. A lawsuit from environmental activists has blocked that project at the moment.
Local pastor Chad Hale told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he was disappointed that Atlanta’s city council approved the project. “For us to get more and more militarized is not a good direction – it’s the most uncreative way to approach crime,” he said.
Demonstrations by the Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign, as well as by other racial justice groups such as Black Voters Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, are expected to continue in Atlanta throughout the week. In a statement to WSB-TV, the group Defend the Atlanta Forest described “Cop City” as an illegitimate project that was “widely opposed by Atlantans”.
“It continues to be widely opposed by Atlantans,” the group’s statement added. “The civil rights violations committed by police today reaffirms that this cop training facility should never be built.
“We stand steadfast in our conviction to build a new world in which all people are safe from police terror.”
• This article was amended on 8 March 2023 to give the preferred pronoun for Manuel Paez Terán.
