naked intimidation with plausible deniability attached to it
May 30, 2024 1:08 PM Subscribe
Atlanta police surveil people opposing Cop City. Police have been carrying out continuous surveillance and harassment of protestors, their families, and neighborhoods for months now.
The civilian oversight! It does nothing!
posted by Artw at 1:25 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
posted by Artw at 1:25 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
Defund the police.
posted by tovarisch at 1:27 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
posted by tovarisch at 1:27 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
One thing that's often not clear in national stories about Cop City is that it's intended to be a revenue generator for the cops: they plan to have different areas on the site that they can rent out to movie studios—the film industry here in Atlanta and the rest of Georgia is HUGE. So the cops have extorted something like $100M from the citizens to build them this "training center", and they're going to keep all the revenue from the rentals.
I'm in two different baseball leagues, and we all have to go out once a month and fix everything with the fields, because the city "has no money" to maintain them. So endlessly frustrating, that the government ignores the clearly expressed priorities of the citizens.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:31 PM on May 30 [35 favorites]
I'm in two different baseball leagues, and we all have to go out once a month and fix everything with the fields, because the city "has no money" to maintain them. So endlessly frustrating, that the government ignores the clearly expressed priorities of the citizens.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:31 PM on May 30 [35 favorites]
Defund the police.
People will argue against that, but… what else is there? There is literally no other thing that can be done to control them other than to stop feeding them.
The money can be spent better elsewhere and you don’t lose anything because there isn’t a police force anywhere actually doing the parts of their job that might actually be useful (ie all the shit you see on TV that they pretend to do).
You’d get less traffic stops, that’s it.
posted by Artw at 1:34 PM on May 30 [9 favorites]
People will argue against that, but… what else is there? There is literally no other thing that can be done to control them other than to stop feeding them.
The money can be spent better elsewhere and you don’t lose anything because there isn’t a police force anywhere actually doing the parts of their job that might actually be useful (ie all the shit you see on TV that they pretend to do).
You’d get less traffic stops, that’s it.
posted by Artw at 1:34 PM on May 30 [9 favorites]
And, like, in Toronto, you don't even get traffic stops! They just don't bother.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:53 PM on May 30 [6 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:53 PM on May 30 [6 favorites]
In fairness, the Atlanta police don't do traffic stops, either. I've been teaching Daughter 1 how to drive for the last few months, and I'm like "assume that everyone is high as hell and will run red lights". Nobody's hit her yet.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 2:09 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 2:09 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
This is the shit that's been going on in Atlanta, in Chicago and LA and Minneapolis and New York, pretty much out in the open, for decades. If the federal government had cared to do something about it at any point, they could have. There's a reason they don't.
posted by jy4m at 2:10 PM on May 30 [12 favorites]
posted by jy4m at 2:10 PM on May 30 [12 favorites]
Adam Federman, In These Times: "The War on Protest Is Here."
Accompanying these laws is increasingly harsh rhetoric from political figures to demonize protest movements, characterizing activists as rioters, mobs, violent extremists and terrorists. Protesters face other threats too: During the summer of racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the Trump administration openly discussed deploying military force to clear demonstrations, and protesters in Portland, Ore., were snatched from the street by federal law enforcement officials in unmarked vehicles, a troubling episode still shrouded in mystery. More recently, pro-Palestinian activists say they’ve faced home visits from police and the FBI. This week, Cotton urged people who end up stuck in traffic due to protest actions to “take matters into your own hands” and “put an end to this nonsense.”posted by audi alteram partem at 2:51 PM on May 30 [13 favorites]
The fun thing in Atlanta is that Cop City is in unincorporated DeKalb County, but it's being built for the Atlanta Police Dept, and so both the DeKalb and Atlanta cops are directly involved in the harassment, and sometimes as noted in the article, for fun, cops in neighboring jurisdictions help out.
As an urban stream ecologist here, it is really really terrifying. These people are allowed to bulldoze our urban forests and completely destroy the water quality in our urban streams to build a police playground, bypassing all regulations through various loopholes: it's privately financed by the police foundation so that the public has no say in it even though they're using millions of Atlanta taxpayer funds, but because it's on city owned land in an unincorporated area of DeKalb County they don't have to follow city laws or get the kind of oversight by the county a private property owner would. And everyone from the municipal and county governments to the state Environmental Protection Division and Attorney General's office to the frickin federal US Geological Survey is complicit.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:58 PM on May 30 [24 favorites]
As an urban stream ecologist here, it is really really terrifying. These people are allowed to bulldoze our urban forests and completely destroy the water quality in our urban streams to build a police playground, bypassing all regulations through various loopholes: it's privately financed by the police foundation so that the public has no say in it even though they're using millions of Atlanta taxpayer funds, but because it's on city owned land in an unincorporated area of DeKalb County they don't have to follow city laws or get the kind of oversight by the county a private property owner would. And everyone from the municipal and county governments to the state Environmental Protection Division and Attorney General's office to the frickin federal US Geological Survey is complicit.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:58 PM on May 30 [24 favorites]
Fascists gonna fasc...
posted by Pedantzilla at 3:03 PM on May 30 [7 favorites]
posted by Pedantzilla at 3:03 PM on May 30 [7 favorites]
The same Lakewood resident who was a passenger in the followed car was stirred from bed one morning in March at 3:30am, when a police car blasted its siren for about 10 seconds.
“[T]he problem is, abuse and harassment are usually harder to define … and there aren’t great external laws to say, ‘You can’t do this.’”
Get some protesters to start doing this same stuff outside officers' homes at 3:30 am and watch the, uh, legal ambiguity miraculously disappear.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:27 PM on May 30 [21 favorites]
“[T]he problem is, abuse and harassment are usually harder to define … and there aren’t great external laws to say, ‘You can’t do this.’”
Get some protesters to start doing this same stuff outside officers' homes at 3:30 am and watch the, uh, legal ambiguity miraculously disappear.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:27 PM on May 30 [21 favorites]
That’s where selective application comes in.
posted by Artw at 3:53 PM on May 30 [6 favorites]
posted by Artw at 3:53 PM on May 30 [6 favorites]
Abolition is the only way forward.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:02 PM on May 30 [8 favorites]
posted by ob1quixote at 5:02 PM on May 30 [8 favorites]
There will be no federal inquiry that has any teeth. FBI was part of the fucking raid back in February.
Muscling up for the currently accelerating collapse is a both parties thing, 100%. Liberals have always had a base function of defending property rights. This is just what that looks like when more (local) people have to die for it.
posted by CPAnarchist at 5:46 PM on May 30 [5 favorites]
Muscling up for the currently accelerating collapse is a both parties thing, 100%. Liberals have always had a base function of defending property rights. This is just what that looks like when more (local) people have to die for it.
posted by CPAnarchist at 5:46 PM on May 30 [5 favorites]
It is the Atlanta police department that beat the protesters at Emory and Georgia State, as well. They are a mob of thugs who are emboldened by never facing consequences.
posted by corb at 10:23 AM on May 31 [4 favorites]
posted by corb at 10:23 AM on May 31 [4 favorites]
“We Can Have Cop City, or We Can Have Democracy,” Benjamin S. Case , Jacobin, 23 June 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 7:14 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]
posted by ob1quixote at 7:14 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]
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posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:13 PM on May 30 [7 favorites]