By ERWIN FREED
Around 10 in the morning on May 31, three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF) were arrested at The Teardown House during a joint Atlanta Police Department and Georgia Bureau of Investigations raid.
The Atlanta Community Press Collective describes how “ASF provides jail support to ensure those in police custody have their rights protected and intact during the legal process. The group also provides cash bail assistance to those who are unable to pay the unconscionable bonds set by the courts … [and] works alongside lawyers to provide legal representation to those who need support navigating the complex legal system that is oftentimes pitted against them.” ASF organizers, including those arrested today, have been tireless in organizing jail vigils, coordinating legal defense and know your rights events, and helping political prisoners have a sense of community and support. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, “all [were] charged today with money laundering and charity fraud.”
The arrests are happening only five days before the next Atlanta city council meeting, where council members will vote on whether or not to approve funding for Cop City. The last city council meeting where that funding bill was proposed saw a historic mobilization of Metro Atlanta residents against Cop City. Police appear to be attempting to intimidate community members from participating in the public comment and demonstrating around City Hall. The Atlanta Community Press Collective also recently uncovered documents that show the price Atlanta residents would pay for the facility is over $50 million instead of the often publicized number of $30 million.
Stop Cop City repression!
Workers’ Voice has extensively reported on the ongoing political repression and defense of the Stop Cop City movement. Activists are fighting to stop the planned construction of a militarized police “training” facility on the borders of working-class Black neighborhoods in Southeast Atlanta. The facility would be built on over 80 acres of important urban forest lands, alongside the construction of a massive movie sound stage studio by Shadowbox Studios. The general context for the facility is the capitalists’ reactionary response to social movements and particularly the 2020 George Floyd upsurge and the local and national ruling class’s desires to gentrify Atlanta, push out poor Black residents through aggressive policing, and turn the city into a capitalist playscape for speculative investment.
The state appears to be using repression of the Stop Cop City movement as a testing ground for what it can get away with against all social movements. Since at least December 2022, Georgia State, Atlanta, Dekalb County, and other police departments have been functioning through a task force alongside the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and, less publicly, the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Department of Homeland Security, to surveil, disrupt, and attack the movement. Between Dec. 2022 and March 2023, at least 42 activists and community members have been baselessly charged with “domestic terrorism.” On Jan. 18, 2023, Georgia State police murdered Manny “Tortuguita” Paez-Teran during a raid on forest defenders in the Weelaunee/South River Forest. Two Forest Defenders remain in jail, having been repeatedly denied bond after being arrested on March 5.
Alongside the unprecedented and unconstitutional domestic terrorism charges, police have been harassing Stop Cop City activists in a number of ways. These include carrying out a raid on March 11 at Lakewood Environmental Arts Foundation where “police reportedly awoke everyone present at gunpoint with a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), detaining 22 people but only arresting one person on an old traffic ticket from another county. … After they left, tents and food/medical supplies were found to have been destroyed and several vehicles on site had their windows smashed.” Three people were arrested on May 2 for flyering with information on Tortuguita’s death in a neighborhood in Bartow County, Ga., and now face potential felony charges.
On May 24, the Department of Homeland Security quietly released a new report on supposed “terrorist threats” to the United States, which included a section that reads: “Since spring of 2022, alleged DVEs [“Domestic Violent Extremists”] in Georgia have cited anarchist violent extremism, animal rights/environmental violent extremism, and anti-law enforcement sentiment to justify criminal activity in opposition to a planned public safety training facility in Atlanta. Criminal acts have included an alleged shooting and assaults targeting law enforcement and property damage targeting the facility, construction companies, and financial institutions for their perceived involvement with the planned facility.”
There has been a huge amount of solidarity actions in Atlanta and around the country calling for charges to be dropped, writing letters to jailed Forest Defenders, and fundraising for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund throughout 2023.
Attack on Atlanta Solidarity Fund: An attack on all!
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund has been an essential organization to combat police repression in Metro Atlanta for a number of years. The group takes a non-partisan stance towards helping all left-wing victims of police repression access legal services and cover costs associated with incarceration and its aftermath. These activities are essential to maintain social movements that are increasingly under attack by the state.
While the Stop Cop City movement has been largely “leaderless,” prosecutors have made clear attempts to paint the Solidarity Fund as a nebulous criminal organization directing the movement. At bond hearings, prosecutors repeatedly used defendants having written the Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s jail support number on their bodies as evidence of a larger “conspiracy.” These people were arrested on March 5, at a music festival organized to give cultural support to the movement against Cop City. Tortuguita had been murdered by police only a few months earlier, in close proximity to where the music festival took place. Writing jail support numbers on one’s body while in a location that has been a target for multiple violent police raids is a normal practice and in no way indicates intending to break the law, much less an underground criminal network.
As early as February, Marlon Kautz, one of today’s arrestees and CEO of Network for Strong Communities—the non-profit of which ASF is a part—stated that there was evidence that the state was attempting to construct a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case against him and the Solidarity Fund. During a preliminary bond hearing for Forest Defenders on May 4, Dekalb County DA prosecutor Lance Cross singled out “the Atlanta Solidarity Fund … as a central part of the Defend the Forest Movement,” saying, “they’re being investigated as a part of this whole thing.” At a previous hearing on March 23, Deputy Attorney General John Fowler “introduc[ed] what he and the State of Georgia view as “a well-funded group with millions of dollars hiding behind 501c3 non-profit organizations,” heavily implying and later admitting he was referring mainly to the Solidarity Fund.
The Atlanta Observer obtained copies of the arrest warrants for the ASF3, which show once again that the state is casting a wide and arbitrary net on what it is calling a “crime.” The warrants for people arrested allegedly in connection with the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement have always been highly irregular and often contradictory. That includes the claim that all arrested on March 5 had “shields,” which police later admitted was simply copy and posted for expediency despite being totally false.
The bases of charges listed on the warrants fall into two categories, both of which are deeply troubling in their far-reaching implications for state interference in movement activity. The first is that the ASF3 “misled” donors by using money collected by Network for Strong Communities to “fund the actions in part of Defend the Atlanta Forest.” It is hard to make heads or tails of what this sentence means due to the writer apparently not having a basic grasp on syntax or grammar, but the warrant continues with two lies. One is that “Defend the Atlanta Forest” is an organization, which is simply not true. The second is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) classifies DTAF as a “domestic terrorist” organization. The latter has been repeatedly claimed by Georgia police and politicians while denied by the DHS. As mentioned above, the DHS recently mentioned that the movement in Atlanta as a whole contains “alleged domestic violent extremists,” which is an escalation in its own right but appears to simply be acknowledging the charges by Georgia cops. The warrants use these two outright fabrications to make another huge logical leap by saying ASF has been funding DTAF, and implying that with these funds activists have carried out criminal activity at the direction of ASF. All of these are absolute lies, and the proof is in the actual financial claims in the warrants.
The second base of charges levied by the warrants appears to be that defendants were reimbursed for regular movement-based expenses. These include being reimbursed for new phone lines, gasoline, COVID tests, and equipment for forums/community events. The total amount of reimbursements claimed to “prove” money laundering is around $8000 over two years to three people. Moreover, the funds do not even appear to come from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund but rather Network for Strong Communities and the Forest Justice Defense Fund. Ironically, the Forest Justice Defense Fund is run on the Open Collective, a fundraising website that provides itemized descriptions of funds and what they are used for. The message appears to be that no matter how transparent activists are, the state will view all of their activity as inherently criminal.
Further highlighting the extreme escalation represented by the arrests, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr stated that they “are about the violence that occurred at the site of the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center and elsewhere. … We will not rest until we have held accountable every person who has funded, organized, or participated in this violence and intimidation.” The Atlanta Solidarity Fund is an organization that does legal defense, not movement organizing. Bail funds are important and completely legal entities.
RICO cases are used to attack activists under nebulous “conspiracy” charges. In Georgia, a successful RICO case has a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. Energy Transfer Partners attempted to use RICO statutes against activists fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
Conditions in Dekalb County Jail
Unicorn Riot, a left-wing activist news organization, recently released an exposé on the conditions in Dekalb County Jail, where many arrestees in the area, including Forest Defenders, are held. Nine people died in the jail last year, proportionately well above national average. Two died of hypothermia. Horrid living conditions include broken plumbing leading to gallons of human excrement backing up into cells. Inmates also complain of irregular and disruptive eating schedules, lack of recreation time, outright inedible food quality, and guards who “seem to think being cruel to detainees is “the best part of the job.”
Between Jan. 2022 and March 2023, over 17,000 grievances were filed through the jails’ official system. Unicorn Riot analyzed all of the available information and found: “All grievances filed by detainees are automatically assigned to a jail staff member. The staff member then determines whether the grievance was valid or not, eventually marking them ‘unfounded,’ ‘founded,’ or ‘sustained.’ However, only 10 percent of the grievances filed in 2022 and early 2023, including the oldest ones, had been marked as ‘resolved’ or ‘complete with objection.’ The DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to a request for information on the grievance resolution process.
“Indeed, most of those interviewed by Unicorn Riot said the majority of their grievances were ignored by jail staff or given responses that seemed like a brush-off. Detainees filed grievances about medical attention more than any other subject area. Those interviewed by Unicorn Riot said medical treatment in the jail is highly unreliable and jail medical workers didn’t really seem to care about helping those held in jail custody.”
These conditions are all within the norm of the United States’ racist criminal “justice” system. They are being used as a weapon against all poor and working-class Atlantans and now as a threat against those that want to fight against expanding the police state.
What this means and how to respond
The framing of the charges against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund are an attack on the political rights and legal functioning of all activist organizations in the United States and particularly groups that call for environmental justice and fight against racist policing. If successful, prosecutors would set a precedent for openly surveilling and cracking down on even mainstream nonprofits and NGOs.
There is a long history of political repression in the capitalist world and the United States. As the domestic and international situations continue to shift in directions that are unfavorable to the U.S. ruling class, workers and oppressed people are pushed more and more into struggle. The main mechanism that the capitalists in a period of imperialist decline have to curtail these movements is repression and expanding the apparatus of policing. The movement’s ability to combat each instance of this repression strengthens its own standing in the coming conflicts. The inverse is true as well.
What is necessary is coordinated mass actions that can connect civil liberties defense, the labor movement, and all social movements through democratic planning and street demonstrations. Defensive struggles are essential to building solidarity and maintaining the rights that have been won through massive fights in the past.
Photo: Cheney Orr / AFP / Getty Images