This week, we spoke with Nolan Huber of the Atlanta Community Press Collective about recent developments in the case of 61 people facing RICO indictments and other charges in relation to the movement to Stop Cop City, an urban police training center built in south Atlanta’s Weelaunee forest. For the hour we talk about the case, last week’s dismissal of racketeering and arson indictments and other recent victories for the Defend The Forest movement.
You can hear past interviews in our archives by clicking the tag for Stop Cop City and see ACPC’s coverage of the case and other local topics at ATLPressCollective.com. You can learn more about A City In The Forest, the film Nolan’s working on, at https://levomel.com/acitf or following @ACityInTheForest on Instagram. We also brought up support for Jack Mazurek, more info can be found at FreeJack.Co
Also, if you haven’t checked out Outlaw Podcast, they had a recent interview with NLG lawyer Xavier de Janon & defendant Peatmoss on the Stop Cop City RICO 61. Check out this and past episodes of this great, anti-repression podcast. Here are some notes for following up from this episode:
Follow Fire Ant Movement Defense on Instagram @fireantmovementdefense for updates and info on showing up to support in person in Atlanta.
Watch the live stream of the hearings on Youtube via Atlanta Community Press Collective: https://www.youtube.com/ The hearings begin at 9:30am ET and go through the afternoon.
PHONE ZAP: With an important motion hearing for 4 #stopcopcity defendants approaching on September 8th, call & email to demand Georgia AG Chris Carr drop ALL charges!
404-458-3600
FAX: 404-657-8733
EMAIL: AGCarr@law.ga.gov
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Featured Track:
- My Favorite Mutiny (instrumental) by The Coup from My Favorite Mutiny (Single)
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Transcription
Nolan Huber: My name is Nolan Huber. I am the director of video news at Atlanta Community Press Collective. I use they/them or he/him pronouns. I am a 20-year Atlantan. I’ve been in Atlanta for most of my life and organizing in Atlanta for all of my adult life, and started getting into journalism alongside another rad outlet in Atlanta called the Mainline. I then started working as the video director for ACPC back in 2023 in response to the RICO indictment coming out, which I will explain here in a moment. In response to 61 activists, not all from Atlanta, but being charged in the Atlanta area for racketeering and being called terrorists for their alleged involvement in a movement to stop a multi-million-dollar corporate-funded police training center called Cop City. I became the video news director in order to start working on video series and visual content. My hope was to have the opportunity to sit down with defendants who had been accused of terrorism and racketeering and understand who they were. Because the state was calling them terrorists and racketeers and violent anarchists, and all the things that the state used to dehumanize these people whom they were trying to criminalize. It felt important to hear their stories straight from them. And so that was really the beginning of my beat at Atlantic Community Press Collective, covering this RICO trial. And of course, I’ve been covering several other things over the years at this point, but this really was my first beat with this organization. It’s feeling surreal that the racketeering indictment seems to be falling apart right now.
TFSR: I definitely want to talk more about the case and give some background to it, but we’ve had Matt Scott on the show before from ACPC, who I know also shares a byline with you frequently on stories concerning the Stop Cop City movement and this case. I wonder if you could remind listeners a little bit about Atlanta Community Press Collective, what y’all do, how y’all are funded, how you’re structured.
NH: Atlanta Community Press Collective is an independent nonprofit news outlet in Atlanta. Our focus is understanding the power dynamics that exist in mainstream journalism and how those power dynamics often work to uphold racism, heterosexism, patriarchy. Trying to subvert the way that we go about telling our stories, and who gets narrative power in the stories that we write. We do a lot of investigative work, investigating corruption, mainly around policing and prisons and doing live BlueSky threads of every city council meeting, covering really any type of movement work that people are doing, whether that is the Trans Basketball League organizing big weekends of for trans folks to be playing sports to covering direct actions when people are trying to stop a project like Cop City. Our coverage is pretty wide-ranging. Lately we’ve been on beats around ICE processing centers here in Georgia, and the folks who are doing ICE watch and anti-ICE community protection work.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s super important work. And I just want to hearken back to what you mentioned with showing a little bit of perspective around the experiences and viewpoints of some of the people that were indicted. I’ve seen some of those videos that you were putting out there. Really moving. It’s amazing to see an outlet, as someone who does audio work, it’s really nice to just feel the impact of seeing someone’s face talking about these things, and the respect that you give in the coverage of folks in this case.
NH: Yeah, and I think that was really important to us. That series is on our YouTube channel under the Cop City RICO playlist. We understand the power dynamics of how this society that we have inherited and contribute to and are harmed by, how those things are set up, and the courts are never going to give any of these people a chance who represent themselves on their own terms. And we thought, as journalists, we might offer the opportunity to folks who are facing this really dire situation, whose lives were completely upended. I feel like I’ve gotten to meet some of the most principled and passionate people, and I think that that’s one of the tragedies of this RICO indictment that the state really did target a group of really brilliant and passionate people, and it messed with their lives in really serious ways.
TFSR: I wonder if you could give us a quick rundown of how the Atlanta 61 case developed, the Stop Cop City movement, who and what this case is about?
NH: I’ll start with Cop City. In response to the 2020 uprisings that were launched in Minneapolis in response to the killing of George Floyd, and bolstered by people organizing all over the country. When the police killed Breonna Taylor, and in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks in the parking lot of a Wendy’s, Atlanta really was a base of resistance during that time. In response to that, the City of Atlanta partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is functionally, for lack of a better way of saying it, a nonprofit organization that in some ways seems to have the influence of a shadow government over the Atlanta City Council. Their whole mission is to take corporate money, so tax write-offs for corporations, and move that money from corporations into funding programs for increased policing, increased police militarization, etc. So the City of Atlanta, in response to 2020, partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation and presented a plan to build the country’s largest police training center equipped with a mock city to practice suppressing urban uprising, equipped with all of the latest policing technologies, from surveillance technologies to VR technologies. So anybody who had money invested in technologies like Axon, the body cameras, anybody who had money invested in the technologies of VR police training and simulator technology, things like that. All stood to make a lot of money from building this center as well The City of Atlanta leased 381 acres of land to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Those 381 acres were in the second-largest urban forest in the country, the South River Forest. And that land was actually a plantation after the settlers in Georgia forcibly removed the Muskogee people from these lands. It became a slave plantation. After it was a slave plantation, after chattel slavery was abolished, it was turned into a prison farm, where mostly black men were incarcerated and forced to work the fields. The produce from that prison farm, which was slave labor, was produced by incarcerated workers, and that food was used to feed all of the other prisons in the state of Georgia. This was the land that the City of Atlanta chose to lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation, although a forest had really grown back up and reclaimed that land from the prison over the 30 years that it had been inactive. And when the City of Atlanta tried to move forward with the plans for Cop City, they tried to name it the Center for Policing and Social Justice. Pretty ironically, they presented it as a police reform, like “We’re meeting the people’s demands. We are reforming the police in the wake of 2020.” And people seemed to see right through that and started calling the facility “Cop City”.
When the City Council voted to lease the land, there were 17 hours of public comment that were called in because they were meeting on Zoom, still in pandemic times, almost 80% of which were against the facility, and the city council still voted it through 11 to 4. Once the City Council disrespected what seemed to be the will of most Atlantans, there was a group of people who said, “Well, we have to stop this at all costs.” And they moved into the forest to begin a forest defense campaign, a land defense campaign, to stave off construction. They successfully did that for about a year and a half until on January 18, Georgia State Patrol and Atlanta Police Department and the DeKalb County Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and ATF and game wardens, the Georgia Department of National Natural Resources, all did a massive, multi agency coordinated, militarized raid of the forest encampment. On that day, on January 18, 2023, the Georgia State Patrol shot and killed Manuel Teran, who folks in Atlanta knew as Tortuguita, and they were a beloved activist. In response to that, a massive movement ballooned through the city. ACPC uncovered that the Atlanta Police Foundation had not raised the money that they needed to raise in order to build the facility, and so the Atlanta City Council was actually about to vote to give them double the money that the city had originally told the public that they were going to give to this project. So it went from $30 million of taxpayer dollars to $60 million, and we were able to uncover an obscure part of the legislation that allowed that to happen. In opposition to that, there were record-breaking numbers of people who went to City Hall to express their opposition to that. And yet again, the city council passed that vote 11 to 4 to fund the building of Cop City in the wake of the killing of Tortuguita.
After that vote went through, there was a group of activists who launched a referendum campaign to try and get over 70,000 signatures of voters who are registered to vote in the City of Atlanta in order to put the lease of that land to the Atlanta Police Foundation up to a vote for the entire city. Right around the time that the referendum was getting started, a racketeering indictment came down on 61 people, most of whom had been arrested at some point during the movement. They were arrested for things like attending a music festival. They were arrested for things like flyering inside the neighborhood of one of the police officers who killed Tortuguita. They were arrested for camping in a public park, the forest defenders, and many of them were charged with domestic terrorism. A racketeering indictment came out against them. In Georgia, it’s called RICO. Georgia has a pretty expansive RICO law. They were originally meant to be able to prosecute gangs so that the police and state could look at the people who were committing technical criminal acts. It was a way the law was meant to be able to indict people who had not technically committed crimes. In the case of how RICO was pitched when it first started, specifically to be able to indict somebody like a mob boss, who may not get their hands dirty, but is part of a so-called criminal conspiracy to commit crimes against the community or against the state. And they use that law to indict 61 activists, and since then, those activists have been fighting those charges pretty vehemently. At the centre of the indictment, the people who were considered the “mob bosses” in this analogy were the Solidarity Fund. There were three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund who had been organizing since 2019 to be able to raise money and post bail for anybody in Atlanta who gets arrested protesting. So they are very much police accountability activists, and they do a program called Cop Watch as well, where they monitor police behavior, get badge numbers, things like that. They sue the police often after wrongful arrests. In a lot of ways, their extremely legal activities were a threat to the police here in Atlanta. And the way that the Atlanta Police Department and the City of Atlanta want to run their police department is without any accountability whatsoever.
They became the center of the indictment. They were indicted for charity fraud, money laundering, and racketeering for things like buying glue and camping supplies, and reimbursing people for $16 here, $18 there, activists who were potentially supporting the forest defence encampment. So the RICO indictment came out. Meanwhile, the people organizing the referendum campaign continued to gather signatures. Thousands of volunteers are just hitting the streets, talking to their neighbors about Cop City. They were able to gather over 115,000 signatures, which, again, was the number that they needed was 70,000 to get it on the ballot. The day that they turned those signatures in, the City of Atlanta said, “We will accept your petitions into custody, but we will not begin a verification process.” And they filed a lawsuit to challenge the validity of a referendum campaign, and that lawsuit is still being held up in court today. The city illegally published the names and addresses of all petition signers in the wake of that. In several ways, at least electorally, like engaging within the electoral system, that was the last big push to try to get the construction of Cop City stopped. By the time that the referendum was subverted and the law was wielded against that, there was a lot of confusion among people in Atlanta about what in the world they were allowed to even do, say, think, post, or feel. Because 61 people had been indicted, seemingly at random, and there were a lot of people in the indictment who were called unnamed co-conspirators, making it feel like anybody who had said Stop Cop City at all could be considered an unindicted co-conspirator in this racketeering case. And that sent a chill through the Atlanta activist community, just working-class working people in Atlanta. It was a really chilling effect that this type of repression had.
The indictment itself mentioned things like mutual aid and social solidarity and collectivism. The indictment even said that social solidarity and mutual aid are these ideas that the needs of the group are above the needs of individuals, and frames that as a harmful thing. But in several ways, it was clear that the indictment was a political move intended to target political speech, intended to target anarchistic ideas. It seems that indictment is no longer going to prevail after this past week.
TFSR: At one point, this is actually also going to be the site of movie studios that pulled out from the project, which is pretty great. And the other part, alongside the racketeering charges against the 61, some people got these domestic terrorism charges. They weren’t federal domestic terrorism. They were state domestic terrorism, right?
NH: That’s right, not federal. I believe it was 41 of the 61 people indicted had domestic terrorism charges, five of whom were actually in the City of Atlanta, and the other domestic terrorism charges were issued in DeKalb County, where the actual land for the public park that the encampment was in was located. Twenty-three of those people charged with domestic terrorism were arrested at a music festival. About a mile away from that music festival, some masked individuals stormed the construction site, burning down what I have been able to verifiably estimate to be about $2 million worth of construction equipment for the facility. One of the strategies of some people in the movement, nobody really knows who was engaged in these activities, but it was a strategy deployed where people would sabotage construction equipment, trying to drive the insurance rates of the project so high that no insurance company would even fund the construction of this thing. It proved to be a very successful strategy. One day at that music festival, the police, instead of trying to arrest the people who were engaging in that activity, raided the music festival, and I actually followed the police into the woods that day. This was March 5, 2023. I followed the police into the forest that day, and I filmed them chasing down people, and over the radio, I heard them say, “Are we going to get bodies or not? Because if we’re not going to get bodies, then we need to pull out.” To me, that suggests that they were trying to just grab as many people as they could. And interestingly, and this is where I’m going with this, what they did was they detained 40 people. They nabbed 40 people from the forest who had been attending that music festival, and they carted them out, out of the forest onto the road, and they checked everybody’s IDs, and they only ended up arresting and charging 23 of those 40 people. Believe it or not, the 23 people they ended up charging were from out of state, and the people they ended up not charging had Georgia licenses. So the next day, on the news, they said, “Look at all of these terrorists who are not from here. The people of Atlanta want this facility. We need this facility. And it’s only people who are not from here who are coming and causing chaos in our community.” So there was a very explicit spin to these charges as well. That was part of the charging; it was part of the state’s narrative creation of this police training center.
TFSR: Lovely to see “the outside agitator” come into the foreground yet again. This Tuesday, the judge in this case made a pretty momentous dismissal of a couple of parts of the RICO case on some technical points. I wonder if you could talk about this a bit. You’ve alluded to it a few times; talk about this and what it means for the case and for the defendants. Does this mean an end to the case?
NH: First of all, it’s important to note that this is a historic case of political repression that we have not seen a criminal RICO against activists. Nor have we seen state domestic terrorism charges in Georgia be deployed against activists up until this point. For two and a half years, these people have been facing these charges, their lives completely upended. They often say no matter what happens, the process is the punishment. And they were just caught their lives on pause for two and a half years while the state dragged this thing out. Then, of course, in the very first motions hearing, this week, Monday, the first motions hearings of the entire racketeering case started, two and a half years later. The defense had put in 57 motions, and they got through three motions on the first day. On the second day, they were on the fourth of 57 motions, and that motion was to dismiss based off of the fact that the Attorney General of Georgia, Chris Carr, actually did not have the constitutional authority in the state of Georgia to bring racketeering charges or arson charges, which are counts one and three of the indictment, because there was no Fulton County District Attorney who had signed off on the case, who wanted to take the case on, who wanted to partner with him on the case. In order to actually bring this indictment forward, he would have had to get a letter from the Governor, which I’m sure the Governor would have offered him had he asked. It seems like he just didn’t know. The judge came out on Tuesday after hearing that argument.
It was wild because the first day was just such a boring court day. I was the only journalist who even came to court the second day. I was sitting in there and and the judge, Kevin Farmer, came out, and he said, “After reviewing this, I do not believe that the Georgia Attorney General had the authority to do this, and so I am going to move to dismiss this case in, and a very important caveat here, and I’m going to sign a request for immediate review from the Georgia Court of Appeals to give to the prosecution.” Basically saying, “I know that the prosecutors are going to want to appeal this decision. I am going to fast-track that appeal for them.” So he is sending that to the Georgia Court of Appeals as soon as his opinion is finished and published. But he decided to dismiss counts one and three of the racketeering case, leaving only five people. So as soon as that ink dries, 56 of the 61 who were indicted will be, at that time, completely free of these charges. They’ll be free of their bond conditions. They’ll be free of everything. Now, of course, we’ll have to see how the appeals process works. But I talked to a lot of the lawyers, and they believe that their case is pretty impenetrable, even in an appellate court. So we are now looking at the possibility of this massive indictment only hanging over the heads of five people moving forward, if this is how things shake out.
TFSR: Even if the appeal doesn’t pass, as you said, it wouldn’t be surprising for the Governor to just sign such paperwork. So could they – and understanding that you’re not a lawyer, so you may not have an answer to this question – but could they just re-indict those folks, get that signature and start the whole process over, or is that double jeopardy?
NH: My understanding is that they could. They would need to pull together another grand jury. The attorney general would have to do the indictment above board this time by getting a letter from the Governor. And I think the real question is what political motivations they have right now to do that. Chris Carr, the attorney general, is running for Governor. His first campaign ad said Chris Carr fought back against sex traffickers and gang members, bringing RICO charges. Then on the screen, there was a headline about him indicting the Cop City “domestic terrorists.” So he was planning on running his campaign for Governor, but it fell through. If that is an important part of his campaign, I could see him trying to pull together another grand jury and start this process over again. The other side of that is whether or not there is a political motivation to do it, because the Cop City facility has been built. In many ways, whatever the intentions behind the indictment were, the impact is that it repressed a movement enough and scared people enough for them to be able to complete the construction. If that was the only goal the whole time, then it’s possible that they’ll be like, “Well, it served its purpose, and we’re just going to move on from this.” Now, I will say the other part that comes next, Marlon Kautz from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund issued a statement after the hearings were over, basically saying, “This case is far from over. We have names, we have evidence. We’ve been building our own case over the years. And we are about to get officers fired. We are about to have careers ended. We are about to make sure that elections are lost for all of the people who conspired to kill one activist, and indict 61 others, all in an attempt to build this police training center.”
TFSR: Jamie Marsicano, a defendant in the case and a legally barred lawyer now in the state of North Carolina, successfully challenged her domestic terrorism charges last month. Can you talk a bit about this, and if it means anything for the second count of domestic terrorism charges for the other defendants that they’re facing?
NH: This is a great question, because it allows us to get into the nitty-gritty of the complexity around the criminal legal system in this country. Because only five people in the RICO indictment were actually facing terrorism charges in that indictment, specifically. The other 36 facing terrorism charges were actually facing terrorism charges, not through the RICO indictment, but in DeKalb County, Georgia. Atlanta is in Fulton County and borders DeKalb County. So the RICO case, was for somebody like Jamie and for 35 other people, a separate case from the domestic terrorism charges. They were going to have to beat RICO, and then after beating RICO, try to defeat the domestic terrorism charges that were brought on a county level in DeKalb County, Georgia. The argument that Jamie’s legal team, and I’m sure Jamie herself, being a lawyer, helped put together a motion to dismiss that charge in DeKalb County, basically by arguing that the state was using these lingering domestic terrorism charges in another jurisdiction in order to maintain even more power over these defendants throughout the duration of the racketeering indictment. And the judge agreed with them, saying that that was an overreach of power, and that Jamie’s domestic terrorism charges could be dropped. And so those charges were dropped. It’s not super clear exactly what that means for everything else, although I think her legal team fought a very aggressive legal strategy, very public. They did not shy away from the media whatsoever. They filed motion after motion after motion, and they were extremely aggressive with their legal strategy, and it ended up paying off really well for Jamie. They created a blueprint, at least from the lawyers that I’ve talked to who are representing the 35 other DeKalb County domestic terrorism defendants; they have a road map now for the motions that they need to file to get their clients’ domestic terrorism charges dismissed as well. I think people are cautiously optimistic about the DeKalb County domestic terrorism charges.
What’s unclear about the five domestic terrorism charges that are part of the racketeering indictment–I hope everybody’s able to follow along with this complex separation, but also the connection between these two different cases, many of the same people being involved in both. There are five people who are still facing domestic terrorism charges under count two of the racketeering indictment. There are a number of ways that could shake out. One is that by dismissing counts one and three of the racketeering indictment, there’s a question whether or not the state can even just redact two-thirds of an entire indictment and have 56 unindicted co-conspirators and still pursue Count Two. That’s never been done before, where two-thirds of a racketeering indictment has been thrown out, and they’ve still moved forward with it. It’s really more than two-thirds of the racketeering indictment. Because 56 of 61 people are now dismissed. It’s really unclear whether or not that can even be a thing. That will be up to the Georgia Court of Appeals to decide.
However, on the very last day of the hearings – this is the other way that it could shake out – the defense argued that the domestic terrorism law in Georgia, and the way that that law ended up getting passed, was passed unconstitutionally in the state. If Judge Farmer, when he issues his final ruling on these motions, sees that evidence and says, “Actually, I do think the domestic terrorism law was unconstitutional altogether,” then Count Two of the indictment will also be dismissed, and Georgia will not have a legally binding domestic terrorism law anymore to hold the other 35 people facing domestic terrorism charges in DeKalb County to them. There’s been a constitutional challenge to the legality of domestic terrorism in Georgia at all. So there are a number of ways that things could shake out. Probably, I would say, from the defendant’s perspective, the worst-case scenario is the Georgia Court of Appeals overturns the decision, or Chris Carr decides to re-indict. Or, best case scenario, the Georgia domestic terrorism law that is currently on the books is completely defeated, and the folks who had been indicted begin countersuing the police, and going after the people responsible for all of this. We’re really at an interesting crux in this story where, if it shakes out a certain way, the movement could really regain a lot of momentum and a lot of power that had been stripped from it by the criminal legal system and by this political repression that it has faced.
TFSR: Another element of this story that we and you all have been covering in the past – we’ve had Matt on, for instance, to talk about it – is Ayla King’s pursuit of a speedy trial. As I understand, this is also part of the crux of Marsicano’s legal relief. Can you talk about the status of Ayla King’s case at this point?
NH: Ayla King is one of the 56 who are indicted under either Count One or Count Three of the racketeering indictment, and so her case is in the same place that those 56 people are. That’s looking like it’s going to be dismissed, not on the basis of the speedy trial, but on the basis of Chris Carr not having the legal authority to bring the indictment in the first place. That’s where she’s at. If, for some reason, the Court of Appeals overturns that decision, Ayla King and her lawyer Suri Chadha Jimenez is fighting in the Georgia Court of Appeals right now, basically arguing that if they were to reseat a jury for Ayla King’s trial, it would be putting Ayla in double jeopardy, and therefore her case should be dismissed either way. I think her legal situation is also looking very hopeful from their perspective, of course.
TFSR: There were some pretty big fails in the handling of evidence by the prosecution thus far. I don’t know if you care to comment on what your outlet has found and reported on, and where the efforts are by the defense to address this.
NH: Yes, here’s really what has happened with the mishandling of evidence: the state turned over 4TB of discovery, and right before the indictment came down, the Atlanta Police Department got a warrant to raid the Solidarity Fund’s base of operations, which is the house that the three organizers lived in, the Tear Down. They raided them with a battering ram, busted through their door, pointed guns in their faces, arrested these three organizers, who are beloved, by the way, by the Atlanta organizing community. They run food programs and bail support, and they really are, in many ways, the best of us. And they had guns pointed in their faces and their computers taken and books taken. In the discovery, the prosecution had entered into evidence books that were on their shelves, saying that books about anarchist political theory were evidence of this conspiracy. Some of the other ways that they have mishandled evidence are that they actually accessed information that was barred to the state by the attorney-client privilege through the Solidarity Fund’s computers. They connect people who have been arrested with legal resources, and they connect them with lawyers. So not only did they violate the Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s attorney-client privilege about their own situation, but they also violated the attorney-client privilege around several other protests, like cases where people had been arrested protesting by accessing things on their computers that they are not allowed to. That’s one example of a number of ways that evidence has been mishandled in this case. I know, in the case of Ayla King, there are discrepancies where there’s video evidence of one officer arresting Ayla King, but the actual arrest report has a completely different officer from a completely different agency listed as the arresting officer. And all of it, and in many ways very sloppily done at best from the police’s perspective, extremely unprofessionally, and at worst, just unaccountably because they didn’t really care. I’ve heard that they also lost evidence, lost backpacks that were supposed to be taken into evidence. All of the handling of the evidence in this case has been extremely messy and illegal.
TFSR: Another case related to this is Jack Mazurek, who wasn’t indicted during this case but was accused of sabotage after the fact. And I don’t know if any of this affects Jack’s situation, or if there’s been any updates in his case that you want to share. I can share his support website in the show notes.
NH: There’s a lot of organized support around Jack. I think the ways that this case impacts Jack are that Jamie Marsicano said on the record to us at ACPC after Judge Farmer said that he was going to move to dismiss Counts One and Two of the racketeering indictment. Jamie said on the record that this is evidence that community defense and participatory defense are how we fight repression, and I think that the lessons learned from the community defense and participatory defense and that type of legal strategy will likely carry over into national solidarity for Jack Mazurek, who has been indicted on federal charges for alleged arson in June of 2023. There was one night an anonymous action in which 60 Atlanta Police Department motorcycles were burned down, and in the middle of the night. It took several months. the police put up billboards all around the country asking for tips, offering $100,000 rewards for any possible evidence that could lead to the arrest of somebody who may have done something like that. The Police claim that they found a bottle cap allegedly used for a Molotov cocktail with Jack Mazurek’s DNA on it, is what they claim. That has not been proven. That is just like what they have said in the indictment. They raided Jack’s house and arrested him for arson and charged him on a federal level. There are a number of reasons why this occurred after the RICO indictments came out, which I think is informative, that nobody knows who it was. Jack holds that it was not him. But it is interesting that people were still taking these types of militant community defensive actions even after the RICO indictment came down. So the police’s perspective is that this is the person who did that, and I think that the movement’s perspective is that adding this federal charge to an alleged arsonist was a way to ensure that if this RICO indictment, which was very poorly put together, did not work out, that they still had a head, that they could try and hang for this. That I believe is the main perspective from movement folks on the ground in Atlanta, that the federal indictment against Jack is really just a safety valve for the state to try and get an indictment in case they didn’t get any out of the RICO.
TFSR: So the ground has been cleared in Weelaunee, and construction has already been completed. Two years after the case began, these people still live in limbo. I wonder if you could comment on some of the other ramifications of this case in your community around Atlanta. This outlet came up around the movement to Stop Cop City, and so many people participated in marches and signature drives, in preaching, direct actions, talking to neighbors and families, and so many other things. I wonder if you could just tie this up with what mark has been left on the community and the relationships in Atlanta moving forward?
NH: It’s important to just be really honest about how complex all of these things are, and what the complexities and consequences and benefits and all of the things about what it means to organize in radical movement spaces during this time in our country. There are a lot of answers to this question, and I’ll start with some of the major things. The infrastructure that has been left behind. I was outside of the courthouse after people were celebrating, and somebody said that now we, speaking about like Atlanta overall, are more equipped than any other place that they know of to fight autocracy and authoritarianism and its rise in this time, this community has has seen very firsthand how hard the state is willing to go, and if the dropping of this case moves forward and sticks, then it is also, I think, a very important reminder that a diversity of tactics among autonomous organizing, where there are no leaders and there is no hierarchy makes it really hard to stop a movement. It makes it really hard to charge people in ways that stick. By people putting aside their egos and not necessarily needing credit for all of the different parts of movement organizing, and just doing it because they love their community, actually has a lot of merit to it. That leaves a mark on Atlanta in a lot of ways. And I think it leaves a mark on organizing in our time.
In a lot of ways, Cop City is a representation of who the police are. It’s a corporate-funded project to further militarize the police against communities. As rent goes up, in the state of Georgia, as abortion becomes more and more criminalized, and who is going to come and arrest you? Who’s going to bust in your house and arrest you for getting an abortion once they have made it fully illegal in the state? It’s going to be the police. Who is going to come and break strikes when workers cannot afford their rent? Who is going to come and evict people? It’s going to be the police. And who’s going to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, to deport people? It’s going to be the police. And so having this very highly trained police force in the City of Atlanta is a sign of what was to come around the rest of the country. And we’re seeing that now with the Trump administration. That’s not to say Joe Biden, we actually uncovered emails from the White House saying that the President was telling Mayor Andre Dickens in Atlanta that he was proud of what they were doing with the Atlanta Public Safety Training Centre, and that he wanted this model of police training to be replicated throughout the country. In the wake of that, there were plans for over 77 other cop cities to be built around the country. At least four of them have already been stopped. I can’t remember exactly which cities those are. I know that Pittsburgh’s is on hold because they tried to build it, and an old hospital that had closed down, and people were able to make the connection that “Okay, so you are defunding public health resources in order to fund the police? Yeah, this is the fall of an empire.” And Pittsburgh ended up not moving forward with the legislation to do that in their last city council meeting on it.
I think it’s made a mark on organizing around the country and shown people in many places. One thing that made Atlanta unique is that they wanted to cut down a forest to build this thing, and by people wanting to protect the land and not want police to be further militarized, there was an alliance. People who had different types of political interests chose to put their differences aside and fight for the forest and for less police militarization. That type of solidarity had never existed in Atlanta before between groups who were probably a bit more on the mainstream liberal end of things. And the ways that people continue to organize. We have infrastructure in Atlanta now. ACPC, like you said, came out of the movement to Stop Cop City in many ways, and we, along with several other indie news outlets in Atlanta, are continuing to grow stronger, and we desperately need support to do that. We are continuing to investigate the police. We won a lawsuit against the Atlanta Police Foundation, making all the records pertaining to Cop City legally, publicly. We have a right to them now through the Georgia Open Records Act, because we sued them, saying that we did, and a judge found our case to be correct. We now have access to records around Cop City that the Atlanta Police Foundation was trying to keep secret. So we will be continuing to investigate all the activities at that place, all the money, who the trainers are, etc.
The people who launched the referendum campaign have begun organizing what they are calling people’s movement assemblies. Actually, last Saturday, I went out to one of the assemblies, and there were over 800 people there. 800 people showed up to an assembly where they were further politically educated on what’s going on in Atlanta, that they’re wanting to build a large base of grassroots power in the city, to be able to take back the electoral power in the city and to begin doing community defense patrols, and a number of other things that actually contribute to public safety in ways that the police do not. So, yeah, the people’s movement assemblies have been growing. Like I said, 800 people came out last weekend to learn more, and they were broken up into groups where they got to ideate about ways that they can organize in their local communities, which is, I think, a scale of radical organizing in Atlanta that I’m unaware of that has existed before this. There are several groups that are still going. There’s a group that started organizing around the forest defense, the Weelaunee Coalition, which has launched a campaign against Elbit Systems, which is an Israeli arms manufacturer. They’re trying to get a lease for their office space in Georgia canceled. We’ve discovered corruption by Marshall Freeman, who was one of the architects of Cop City for the Atlanta Police Foundation, who was then hired by the Atlanta Police Department, and he used his position at the Atlanta Police Department to sell a policing technology that he had an ownership stake in. And we uncovered that, and that investigation against him is still growing and getting bigger. So there’s movement there.
In general, the vibes were incredibly high after the indictment came down. It was the first time that, at least from my perception, you could feel that the movement felt empowered again in a way that the indictment had really left a lot of disempowerment: What can we do? The police actually tried to break up the after-party and said that they were going to arrest people if they didn’t move, if they didn’t leave outside of the courthouse. And people basically were like, “Yeah, we dare you.” And the police didn’t end up doing anything. People haven’t had the ability to stand up against the police in that way for two and a half years, because the courts allowed this to drag on for two and a half years, and the police felt emboldened by the fact that they could just arrest random people and try to indict them on racketeering, and that people were scared of that. So if they told people they needed to leave, even if they weren’t doing anything illegal, they would usually pack up their stuff and leave. I think that it’s going to be interesting seeing what happens moving forward. There have also been times when you fight really hard and you end up losing. I think that there’s been divisions in different groups, new groups forming, and things like that. I’m sure all of them have merit in their own ways and some pettiness in their own ways as well. But in general, Atlanta is stronger. Relationships are stronger. People know who they can trust, and they know who is going to fight alongside them for survival as things continue to descend in this country.
TFSR: Well, Nolan, thanks a lot for this conversation. You mentioned that ACPC can use support as an independent news outlet. Could you tell folks where they can find ACPC, the Atlanta Community Press Collective, and how they can support your work there?
NH: Absolutely. We have several ways to engage with us. We’re on BlueSky at Atlpresscollective.com. We are on Instagram at Atlpresscollective, on TikTok at Atlpresscollective, and on YouTube at Atlpresscollective, and our website is atlpresscollective.com. The thing that we need now, more than anything else, is monthly donors, people who recognize that the work that we do just takes a lot of time, and frankly, we are probably going to do it whether or not we have funding, but our capacity to do it is very much impacted by our ability to stay funded. We’re funded through several different ways, including large donors who have been divesting from either family wealth or their own wealth, and trying to fund projects like ours. And that has been great. And we have received some grants from foundations that support local news, but our biggest goal right now is to build up monthly supporters. If you can give $3, $5, $300, $500 a month, whatever it is, becoming a monthly supporter allows us both to receive regular income and be able to budget for the stories that we need to cover and the freelancers that we hire. And by the way, we pay our freelancers the best rates out of any freelance rate in local journalism in Atlanta, almost $1 a word, sometimes $1 a word, and that’s really important to us, and so we need other people to come alongside us, to be able to hold that that up for our freelancers and pay radical journalists what they deserve to make, so that they can live and do this work. Becoming a monthly supporter would be amazing. You can do that on our website, at atlpresscollective.com.
TFSR: What do you all have coming up?
NH: If people want to follow @ACityinTheForest, my co-director, Lev Omelchenko, and I, along with hundreds of other people, have been making a feature-length documentary covering the movement to Stop Cop City from the beginning of the occupation through the finishing of the project. And that movie will likely be coming out next year, so folks can follow along and keep an eye out for “A City in the Forest.” It’s going to be about a 90-minute documentary, very immersive. There aren’t really interviews in it. It’s a verité movie where hopefully people will just get to observe the movement in action and see all of these twists and turns that we went through in this interview on the big screen.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s really cool. I’m sure at some point, closer to the release date, people can start contacting you all also to talk about getting copies of it to be able to actually project for group showings and stuff.
NH: Absolutely. As of right now, our plan is to do theatrical releases and to go on tour. We’re gonna do the film festivals and things like that, and then theatrical release and then go on a tour and actually have an impact campaign, where we will screen it for communities, and also meet with those communities, figure out what their frontline struggles are and what types of support and resources that our film team and that Atlanta organizers might be able to offer them on the ground. So hopefully we will be able to use that as a vehicle to continue forging this solidarity throughout the nation.