‘Stop Cop City’ Organizers In Georgia Continue To Face Harsh Charges After New Arrests
Georgia officers arrested one other set of individuals Wednesday who’ve ties to the varied motion in opposition to “Cop City,” including to its roster of dozens of individuals going through harsh prices for combating the large training facility being inbuilt Atlanta.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department arrested three members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a company that helps bail out arrested activists, the GBI said in a statement on Twitter. Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah D. Patterson and Adele Maclean had been charged with cash laundering and charity fraud.
The arrests of the three board members are unprecedented, The Intercept reported, citing Lauren Regan, govt director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. The Intercept additionally referred to as out the “extreme law enforcement persecution” of activists against the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — or Cop City, because it’s been nicknamed by critics — and pointed to a SWAT workforce raiding a home to take the board members into custody.
“When three community organizers who help to run a bail fund are arrested with an entire SWAT team on clearly bogus financial charges, it signals that not only is it illegal to protest, it’s also illegal to try and support people who have been criminalized for protesting,” Hannah Riley, a author and organizer, instructed HuffPost.
“If bail funds aren’t safe, what’s next?” she added.
The website is predicted to take up at the very least 85 acres in a traditionally and environmentally vital forest owned by town of Atlanta.
The motion to maintain the ability from being completed has been persistent and has a nationwide attain. People who disapprove of the ability span age teams and identities and are drawn to the motion by totally different causes — akin to environmentalism or abolition.
As the motion has continued with quite a few protests and occasions, dozens of individuals have been arrested by Georgia regulation enforcement. One protester, Manuel Esteban “Tortuguita” Paez Terán, died after being shot by Georgia troopers almost 60 occasions. (Tortuguita’s loss of life marks the primary time an environmental activist has been killed by police.)
More than 40 people are going through home terrorism prices. And three others who face felonies ― accused of putting flyers on mailboxes naming an officer who shot Paez Terán ― had been positioned in solitary confinement.
“Most protest crimes are misdemeanors or ordinance violations, like a traffic ticket,” legal professional Lyra Foster beforehand instructed HuffPost. “We’ve seen many of those cases since the George Floyd protests” over the May 2020 police killing in Minneapolis. “People need to understand the actions of protesters haven’t changed; the crimes they’re charged with have. This isn’t an escalation in protest, it’s a crackdown on those same First Amendment protected protests as before.”
Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, each Democrats, have inspired activists to not resort to violent protests and to lean on reaching out to metropolis officers as a substitute, according to Axios. But nonviolent opponents of the location have nonetheless been arrested and charged, and metropolis officers have reportedly largely ignored hours of public remark.
“As we have said before, we will not rest until we have held accountable every person who has funded, organized, or participated in this violence and intimidation,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr tweeted Wednesday.
Micah Herskind, additionally an organizer in opposition to the training website, beforehand instructed HuffPost that “the literal murder of a forest defender and these incredibly severe political prosecutions” are galvanizing.
“I do think that it makes people more determined to fight than ever and to stop Cop City in Tortuguita’s name and to free all of the political prisoners,” Herskind added.
The Georgia Attorney General’s Office and the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, that are prosecuting the arrestees, didn’t instantly reply to HuffPost’s request for remark. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund additionally didn’t instantly reply to HuffPost’s request to offer remark for this text.
