The growing momentum of the “Stop Cop City”  movement was evident by Wednesday, May 14th, the third day in a week of action against the construction of a military-grade police training facility in the South River Forest, when sixty-plus people showed up mid-work-week in Midtown Atlanta, to protest AT&T’s sponsorship of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which funds the $90 million project, through corporate and private donations.

Entirely unforeseeable, however, was the imminence of police violence, that Community Movement Builders organizer, Kamau Franklin, warned of, as protestors gathered to march the short distance from the North Avenue MARTA station to the AT&T building.

Franklin said of the police, “I don’t care if they’re kind to their spouses, I don’t care if they pet their dogs, I don’t care if they smile at you, I don’t care if they give you directions. When it comes down to it, when they are told to move, they’re told to move on you, when you march in the streets.”

Franklin continued, “They are part of a militarized force. And this training complex, Cop City, is part of a militarized force, to learn better tactics to destroy our communities. They are the public army of the city of Atlanta.”

By Saturday, May 17th, that so-called army, more specifically officers from the Atlanta Police Department as well as Georgia State police officers, according to a spokesperson for the Atlanta Solidarity fund, did, in fact, move “with extreme force” on peaceful protestors, as witnessed by this bystander, following a march through Little Five Points.

A member of Standing Up for Racial Justice, one of the organizing groups for Saturday’s Stop Cop City march, Ashley Dixon, was among the seventeen people arbitrarily arrested that afternoon, in a violent disruption of what she says was an otherwise “beautiful” event. Dixon alleged police were unprovoked and “out of control,” when they suddenly began using tasers and tackling protestors, who were attempting to disperse in Freedom Park, following the march.

Footage compiled from Saturday’s march, by Unicorn Riot contributor, Ryan Fantica, supports Dixon’s account of the attack and depicts a chaotic swarm of police, who appear in stark contrast to the people they descend upon, casually dressed for the sunny afternoon, one man holding a drum. The footage shows one angry officer having to be restrained by another, and perhaps the same officer screaming for the arrest of the person recording the footage, explicitly for recording the police, which is legal.

The following Tuesday morning, May 20^th, police more formidably moved, to borrow Franklin’s phrase, on an activist encampment inside the South River Forest, which has been growing over the past year.

Occupants of the forest, known as “forest defenders” amongst environmental activists, are a mix of part-time and full-time forest dwellers, who live in tents or self-constructed tree-houses, and whose efforts are widely celebrated by the Muscogee tribe, the original inhabitants of the land before their forced removal, as well as by local leaders such as Dr. Jacqueline Echols, President of the South River Watershed Alliance, whose opposition to the forest’s destruction is rooted in environmental justice for the predominately Black and Brown communities living within the South River watershed. 

According to Unicorn Riot, around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, police from multiple jurisdictions, some armed with rifles, along with a SWAT team, entered the forest encampment located near Key Road, destroying six treehouses and arresting eight people, who were accused of throwing Molotov cocktails, as well as charged with “criminal trespass,” and “obstruction of a law enforcement officer.”

The same article contains a police scanner recording from later that evening, where officers from Zone 3 Field Investigations Team discuss being “on the same page” about Molotov cocktails being a “deadly force encounter,” situations in which officers are granted permission to use deadly force against citizens.

Law enforcement’s release of a video in which an alleged Molotov cocktail exploded at the edge of the forest by Key Road, at least 15 feet away from where police were standing, along with the release of the home towns of the land defenders who were arrested, many of whom are from outside of Georgia, is, according to representatives of Stop Cop City,  a purposeful misconstruction of what is a local, grassroots movement, focused on rematriation of the land to the Muscogee people, tending to the land as a community, and resisting the expansion and further militarization of law enforcement.

Moreover, activists say, there is a showdown taking place between the diversity of tactics employed by Stop Cop City activists, and the singularity of militarization, utilized by law enforcement, a tactic that has failed to quell the year-long movement, which continues to garner local and national support.

After the police raid, Tuesday morning, activists and community members held a press conference that afternoon, in the Intrenchment Creek parking lot.

Devin Franklin, Movement Policy Council with Southern Center for Human Rights, said, “Any contention regarding the protestors not residing in or being from the Atlanta area is a red herring. It’s irrelevant. It makes no difference where a person is from when we’re talking about the police using violence to bring them under arrest. . . So to the extent that they brought that up, I caution everyone to consider the source and the motivation of the people giving that message.”

Mae Johnson, who lives in one of the neighborhoods surrounding the South River Forest, expanded on the reasons for Stop Cop City’s universal appeal, “This forest is a site of migratory birds- a place where animals make their homes, salamanders lay their eggs. This forest is a defense against flooding of all the nearby homes, across historically Black neighborhoods in South Atlanta and Southwest Dekalb. This forest is what prevents the urban heat island effect in Atlanta, the way that it does in other cities. This is why the movement has broad popular support from locals, and people across the country and world alike.”

While the future of the currently incarcerated activists remains uncertain, the Atlanta Solidarity fund is committed, alongside the Southern Center for Human Rights, to defend protestors’ constitutional rights.

Though police destroyed much of the forest encampment during the raid, forest defenders have not lost their resolve.

Amethyst, a movement organizer for Stop Cop City, read a statement on behalf of one of the land defenders whose treehouse survived the raid, and who currently remains in the forest.

“I am not afraid, I am angry. The police have exhibited their role in the Capitalist system. The state’s monopoly on physical force, and the illusion of legitimacy it must uphold, must be abolished. This forest does not only belong only to the rich and powerful, and it never will. When the people speak, and their voices aren’t heard, we all must act.”