Some words from a Stop Cop City defendant and eco-anarchist
The following is an excerpt reprinted with permission from Hannah Kass’s “Trees give life. Police take it”: Building and Fighting for Abolitionist Life-Worlds, from the Weelaunee Forest to Georgia’s Jails. You can read the whole article here—and support Hannah with her upcoming trial here.
On 18 January 2023, police killed an environmental activist and land defender named Tortuguita. Tortuguita had been occupying the Weelaunee forest in DeKalb County, Georgia when Georgia State Patrol officers murdered them in the midst of a multi-agency raid on the forest’s protest encampment. In the days and weeks that followed, police and news reports claimed without evidence that Tortuguita shot the police first, that their murder was justified. Police claimed that they had recovered a gun registered to Tortuguita at the scene, and upheld the gun as proof of an exchange of fire. The state’s narrative dovetailed seamlessly with what police had been claiming throughout the course of the then almost two-year occupation of the Weelaunee forest: that the occupants of the forest, living in treehouses and tents to physically prevent its destruction, were dangerous terrorists. Yet the forest defenders and their supporters saw things much differently. As bodycam footage from the Atlanta Police Department surfaced, forest defenders and their supporters raised questions about whether or not the police had shot their own officer in the hail of gunfire. Independent autopsies revealed that Tortuguita had been struck by 57 gunshots, including through their palms, which were free of gunpowder residue and positioned upwards in surrender when they were shot dead while sitting cross-legged (11Alive 2023; Anonymous 2023a; Medical Examiner’s Office 2023; Sperry 2023).
Contrary to the state’s “terrorism” narrative, the Weelaunee forest occupation comprised a collective effort to halt the terror of the state, making this forest a place where a life beyond the state and its violence had germinated. The occupation prevented deforestation by providing an antidote to what is slated to be built in lieu of the trees: a militarised police training facility. The state and the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organisation leasing the land to build the facility, call it the “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center”, with police and politicians insisting that its purpose is to keep Atlantans safe and police officers trained. Forest defenders, on the other hand, call the facility “Cop City” for its mock city design—eerily resembling the mock cities established by the United States military in the wake of the 1960s race riots, where police practised using military-grade weapons against fake street protests (Pettengill 2022). Forest defenders note that Cop City resembles a similar response in the wake of the militant uprisings against deadly, racialised police violence in the summer of 2020 (Anonymous 2022a; Defend the Atlanta Forest 2022).
The movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee forest has attracted backlash from the state in the form of heavy repression. While visiting Atlanta to join the movement in May 2022, Cobb County police arrested me near a protest at the headquarters of Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor slated to clear-cut the forest and build Cop City. The state charged me with felony property damage and terroristic threats alongside four others. The state’s crackdown only worsened; that year, the forest encampment would be raided by federal, state, and county police with increasing frequency. When the encampment refused to budge and the movement only grew in numbers and ferocity, police began to arrest whoever they could find in the forest and charge them under the Georgia domestic terrorism statute, a felony which threatens 5-35 years in prison. One of these raids resulted in police killing Tortuguita.
In March 2023, a music festival spreading awareness about the movement hosted on the public park side of the forest was raided. Festival goers were randomly mass arrested, charged with domestic terrorism, and denied bond for weeks to months. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund was the first bail fund in US history to be raided by a SWAT team and falsely charged with financial crimes. In April 2023, three forest defenders handing out flyers spreading awareness about Tortuguita’s murder were arrested and charged with felony intimidation, and kept in jail for weeks to months.
On 29 August 2023, the majority of arrestees in all of these repression incidents —myself included—were indicted on RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges on the basis of our original arrests. RICO laws were introduced in 1970 by the US federal government in its efforts to target organised crime. Rather than charging individuals for alleged crimes, RICO laws allow the state to group those crimes into one alleged organised enterprise and conspiracy. Since 1970, state RICO statutes have been introduced; Georgia’s RICO statute has accrued particular notoriety and challenges for its broad, loose, and potentially unconstitutional statutory language. It allows prosecutors to target large groups of people with nearly any level of association (Berger 2023).
Drawing on my autoethnographic research as a criminalised forest defender, I use participant observation, field notes, and document analysis to highlight two examples of “abolitionist life-worlds” (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022) forged by the Stop Cop City movement’s building and fighting strategy: the 2021–2023 Weelaunee forest encampment, and the solidarity communities created by criminalised forest defenders incarcerated in various Georgia jails. Both places represent abolition geographies which relied on an interdependence of building and fighting. In the forest, “radical place-making” (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022; Heynen and Ybarra 2021) took shape in destructive direct actions against Cop City’s construction alongside an encampment, which proliferated a wide array of mutual aid infrastructures, networks, and practices—including sharing food, water, shelter, gardens, festivals, and more. These practices worked in tandem with Stop Work orders brought by challengers within the South River Watershed Alliance. In this way, a mixture of insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist tactics worked together to defend the Weelaunee forest as a space where human and non-human life was nurtured and protected (Chua 2024; James 2005; Lang 2022).
A mixture of these approaches were also present in forest defenders’ fight for life within the jails in which we have been incarcerated. Some radical place-making practices while incarcerated included continuously demanding jail guards to meet basic needs for food, water, and healthcare; noise demonstrations which included subversive material support to prisoners; various forms of “uncivil obedience” (Bulman-Pozen and Pozen 2015), such as a collective turn-in including cheering, laughter, joy, and asserting rights; and emotional, spiritual, and material support. In these examples, I find a blend between insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist praxes, demonstrating how abolition geographies were made through a range of practices—a fight against carceral institutions which manifested abolition’s characteristic “fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” (Gilmore 2022:351).