In March, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation brought terrorism charges against people protesting Atlanta’s planned public safety training center — dubbed “Cop City” by its opponents. That was bad enough, but this week, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr unveiled a massive RICO indictment of 61 people that is so at odds with the First Amendment that it puts everyone’s rights at stake. With the indictment, the Republican attorney general is claiming that the movement known as Defend the Atlanta Forest is a criminal, “anti-government, anti-police, and anti-corporate extremist organization.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr unveiled a massive RICO indictment of 61 people that is so at odds with the First Amendment that it puts everyone’s rights at stake.
Named in the indictment are more than three dozen people who were already facing the domestic terrorism charges mentioned above and leaders of a bail fund who had been accused in June of money laundering. They also include three activists previously charged with felony intimidation after authorities said they distributed flyers calling a state trooper a “murderer” for his involvement in the fatal shooting of a protester.
The First Amendment guarantees our right to free speech, our right to peaceably assemble and our right to petition the government for change, but, with his indictment, Carr is promulgating a literal conspiracy theory that views “anti-police” anarchism as inherently criminal and views virtually any protest activity as contributing to crime. Lauren C. Regan is the executive director of the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, which, as its website explains, “supports movements that seek to dismantle the political and economic structures at the root of social inequality and environmental destruction.” Regan told me that Carr’s RICO charges are a “massive transgression” of free speech and free assembly rights.
Carr, of course, is using the same RICO law Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, is using to prosecute former President Donald Trump and 18 others charged with trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia. Liberals cheering what Willis is doing should be wary of the double-edged sword that the RICO law is. Written to target the Mafia, RICO laws are now being used to charge political enemies.
Carr’s persecution of “Cop City” protesters was already extraordinary, given that he, in a move condemned by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had pressed for domestic terrorism charges against dozens of protesters accused of minor crimes. Even so, the RICO indictment is an unconscionable escalation that harkens back to the darkest days of the Red Scare with its criminalization of political dissent and its equally problematic accusations of guilt by association.
In 2020, the same year that Minneapolis police killed George Floyd and protests erupted across the nation, Atlanta police were accused of brutality by multiple protesters and arrested a journalist who was recording an arrest. (The city later settled with that journalist for $105,000.) Also in 2020, an Atlanta police officer shot in the back and killed Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man whom police first approached after getting a call that he’d fallen asleep in the drive-thru lane at a fast-food restaurant. (In November, the Atlanta City Council voted 15-0 to pay Brooks’ family $1 million.)
The RICO indictment is better understood as part of the government’s ongoing counterprotest. It’s a counterprotest that’s been led in part by the Atlanta Police Foundation, a corporate-funded nonprofit that provides money to the Atlanta Police Department and helps run the department’s massive surveillance camera network. The proposed training facility, the so-called “Cop City,” is the result of a plan that was secretly created and politically fueled by conservative outrage over 2020’s crime spike and by protests against the police.
Liberals cheering what Wilis is doing should be wary of the double-edged sword that the RICO law is.
The training center, which would serve Atlanta police and firefighter recruits, is currently in a pre-construction phase on roughly 87 acres of what was woods, outside the city limits, in unincorporated DeKalb County, whose residents have no vote on the project. Not merely a training center, it was presented as a morale-and-recruitment-boosting thank-you to the police post-2020, explicitly likened to the shrinelike facilities of major college football teams, complete with a gift shop. In what was a blatant attempt at propaganda, documents from the Atlanta Police Foundation reveal that an earlier plan was to dub the facility “The Institute for Social Justice and Public Safety Training.”
The APF continues to ignore public-record requests and many basic details remain unknown, such as the construction budget and how much green space would be left. That has resulted in broad opposition rooted not only in concerns about police militarization and the environment, but also in concerns about the general absence of government transparency.
Vote to Stop Cop City, an effort to put a training-center referendum on the ballot, claims to have gathered more than 100,000 signatures, which, if true, represents massive mainstream opposition to the city’s plan.
The “Defend the Atlanta Forest” and “Stop Cop City” movements arose in opposition to this official form of demonstration. Some protest actions were undoubtedly violent or destructive, including the burning of police cars and rocks being thrown at police. Other actions were illegal but peaceful, such as the civil obedience tactic of refusing to leave the site of the proposed construction after being ordered to do so. Still other protests took the form of peaceful marches, and some of those charged with domestic terrorism in March say they were only attending a concert near the proposed training site.
But, like their predecessors from the civil rights era, state and local government officials have employed aggressive law enforcement responses and used rhetoric branding the opposition as “outside agitators” and terrorists. Imagine if prosecutors in the 1960s had had RICO charges they could bring. They may have been able to charge nonviolent civil rights leaders for crimes committed by people who weren’t as committed as they were to nonviolence.
Like their predecessors from the civil rights era, state and local officials have used rhetoric branding the opposition as “outside agitators” and terrorists.
In January came the momentous police-involved killing of a camping protester known as Tortuguita in an alleged shootout with the Georgia State Patrol. (We don’t know if there was a shootout because troopers do not wear body cameras, that most basic reform demanded in prior Black Lives Matter protests.)
In this context, bringing terrorism and RICO charges — which are too easy for prosecutors to prove and come with mandatory minimums of five years in prison — can be seen as an additional propaganda technique. Civil liberties experts tell me that the goal of the charges may not be to garner convictions as much as they are to frighten people out of protesting.
The RICO indictment is a particularly naked smear attempt. It contains basic factual errors. For example, it incorrectly reverses the City of Atlanta and the private Atlanta Police Foundation in their roles as owner and tenant of the site. It includes snide commentary about anarchism and reveals an obsession with graffiti and online gossip. The indictment claims that anarchist collectivism means individuals don’t get a choice in sacrificing their income, liberty or property and calls anarchy one of three “primary ideologies” that makes Defend the Atlanta Forest “extremist.”
In arguing that Defend the Atlanta Forest is a criminal organization conspiring to halt the training center, it attempts to link everything from arson to reimbursing protesters for glue and other campsite supplies to owning a book allegedly about criminal methods to reposting a news story.
Among those swept up in racketeering accusations is a representative of the National Lawyers Guild, who says he’s innocent and was only acting as a legal observer at a protest event. This is the problem with RICO charges more generally. They can connect otherwise innocent acts to crimes.
The demonization of anarchism’s collectives and their calls for abolishing government structures is no coincidence. Police and prison abolitionists in Atlanta formed a new media outlet called the Atlanta Community Press Collective. It’s because of that collective that we know, for example, that the public funding for the training center is already much higher than officials promised.
The silliness of the indictment only makes it more scary. The government’s willingness to label an entire movement criminal for dissenting from a plan or embracing unpopular politics has no obvious limits and cannot end well. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this in Georgia.
The government’s willingness to label an entire movement criminal for dissenting from a plan or embracing unpopular politics cannot end well.
There was the attempt during the civil rights era to unseat a state legislator for opposing the Vietnam War. There was also the Red Scare use of capital-offense insurrection charges on Angelo Herndon, a communist labor organizer who violated segregationist sensibilities.
While the “Cop City” and Trump RICO cases are very different in their details, in both cases prosecutors are going after political enemies, not the Mafia, and possibly inspiring copycat prosecutions across the country. That means, despite the existence of the First Amendment, if you’re moved to protest your city’s version of “Cop City,” your local or state prosecutor may accuse you of being a part of organized crime.
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