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THE CRIMINALIZATION OF SOLIDARITY: THE STOP COP CITY PROSECUTIONS  
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Tadhg Larabee and Eva Rosenfeld
May 20, 2024
Dissent Magazine
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_ Georgia’s sweeping, political application of conspiracy law
echoes tactics that shattered the left a hundred years ago, when the
government targeted socialist parties and militant unions with laws
against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition _

Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) demonstration, Union Square,
New York City, April 11, 1914., (Bain News Service photograph; George
Grantham Bain Collection; Library of Congress)

 

Just after sunrise on November 13, 2023, hundreds of protesters
gathered in Gresham Park on Atlanta’s outskirts. As they zipped up
painted jumpsuits, a police helicopter circled overhead. It was the
start of the latest action in a sprawling, decentralized campaign to
stop construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better
known as Cop City.

A two-year occupation of the Weelaunee Forest, the site of the
proposed complex, ended in early 2023 after police killed a forest
defender known as Tortuguita and, over several months, charged
forty-two people with domestic terrorism. The majority of those
charged were attending a protest music festival in March while
property destruction occurred nearly a mile away. In April, three
activists distributing fliers about the police murder of Tortuguita
were arrested and jailed for almost three months. It was unclear
whether any of the prosecutions would go forward until September, when
Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, brought a single case
against sixty-one protesters, using the state’s exceptionally broad
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to paint the
Stop Cop City movement as a criminal syndicate akin to the Mafia. The
sprawling indictment accused them of a conspiracy to spread
“virulent anarchist ideals.”

Amid this campaign of state repression, one segment of Stop Cop City
put out a national call to action: Meet in Atlanta. March onto the
construction site. Issue, through nonviolent direct action, what
organizers called a “people’s stop-work order.” Render absurd,
through widely publicized mass participation, the notion that this is
a conspiracy and not a broad-based political movement.

“It’s vital to make sure everybody knows . . . that there are
people in Atlanta that want this to stop,” said Lorraine Fontana, a
seventy-six-year-old activist who was arrested days before the march
for blocking the entrance to the construction site. “We’re holding
saplings,” a young protester said. “To replant the forest that the
police have destroyed in trying to build Cop City,” another added.
Papier-mâché puppets and protest signs sat in the grass, collecting
dew; one sign, shaped like a dragonfly, read, “This is what a
domestic terrorist looks like.” Hours later, as the tear gas
dissipated and the protesters retreated to Gresham Park, a riot
policeman was photographed removing the same sign from nearby
Constitution Road. In the hands of the officer, it seemed to turn this
charge back on the state.

The Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a jail support network established in
2016, was prepared to coordinate bail and legal representation for
detained protesters, and to notify their families and workplaces in
the event of arrests. Its organizers were taking a big risk, too. In
late May 2023, a SWAT team broke down the door of the Solidarity
Fund’s office, seized its records and electronics, and arrested
three of the fund’s organizers. They are now defendants in the RICO
indictment, which charges them with money laundering and charity fraud
for their organizational support of Cop City protesters. The raid and
the indictment made the Solidarity Fund’s partner organizations
afraid to work with the group, and as a result its citywide mutual-aid
programs collapsed, interrupting food access for hundreds of families.
When a separate group of activists launched a campaign to put the
future of Cop City to a referendum vote, the Solidarity Fund heard
concerns from numerous people that merely signing the petition could
expose them to legal risk.

“My speculation is that the authorities understand that their
political objective is to discourage a political movement,” said
Marlon Kautz, an indicted Solidarity Fund organizer. That goal
effectively requires targeting not only protesters but organizations,
such as civil liberties groups and bail funds, that empower protesters
to carry on in the face of intimidation, brutality, and aggressive
prosecution. It’s an attempt, according to Kautz, to create “a
blueprint that can be applied to solve the problem of social movements
as a political force in the U.S.” What is ultimately at stake, he
said, “is the notion of solidarity within a broad social
movement.”

The criminalization of a left-wing movement comes as no surprise. But
Georgia’s sweeping and openly political application of conspiracy
law is a particularly concerning case. It was this tactic that
shattered the left roughly a hundred years ago, when the U.S.
government targeted growing socialist parties and increasingly
militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and
sedition. Now, as then, conspiracy stands in as the evil double of
plain solidarity—the tool we need to fight repression, and what
makes protest possible.

Paranoia about violent, left-wing conspiracies has appeared throughout
American history: in the labor-conspiracy laws of the nineteenth
century, the Smith Act prosecutions of the 1940s and ’50s, the
McCarthyist purges, and the trials of Vietnam War protesters. Yet it
was never more damaging than during the antiradical panic that gripped
the country between 1917 and 1920.

The First Red Scare channeled a feeling of national crisis that began
in the late nineteenth century, fueled at first by industrialization,
immigration, and inflation, and later by the First World War, the flu
pandemic of 1918, and the Great Migration. After the Bolsheviks seized
power in Russia in 1917, the U.S. government found two targets for its
anxieties. The first were the Galleanisti, a small group of Italian
anarchists who carried out a failed bombing attack on John D.
Rockefeller in 1914 and became a nationwide scourge by the late 1910s.
The second was the Industrial Workers of the World, which by 1910 had
risen to national prominence as an openly revolutionary union. “The
IWW’s links to anarchism were minimal,” the legal historian Ahmed
White said, but exaggerating those links “gave the air of
credibility to the claim that these people were extremely dangerous .
. . in a very immediate, criminal sense.”

The IWW, whose members were called Wobblies, had faced legal and
extralegal repression since its inception, in 1905. The government’s
justification was stopping the sabotage of industrial equipment—a
once-used tactic that the union had distanced itself from but
struggled to expunge from its public image. The pressure on the IWW
intensified in 1917, after a little-known Idaho lawyer named Benjamin
Walker Oppenheim drafted the first statute prohibiting “criminal
syndicalism” in the United States.

Idaho lumber interests wanted the IWW gone, but this objective
presented them with a legal dilemma. Their loyal state legislators
couldn’t target sabotage because it was already illegal, and only
small numbers of Wobblies engaged in it; they also couldn’t ban the
union outright, which would likely have been unconstitutional.
Oppenheim’s draft law threaded the needle by making it a crime “to
belong to an organization that _advocated_ industrial or political
change by means of sabotage, crime, violence, or other criminal
behavior,” White said. Over the next few years, twenty other states
copied Idaho’s model.

These laws made life easy for prosecutors. Wobblies were stopped on
the street, snatched off picket lines, and rounded up by the hundreds
in raids on their union halls, especially when local business owners
knew they were planning a strike. If any members tried to help their
comrades in court by testifying that their organization was neither
violent nor criminal, they could be seized on the spot, having just
admitted under oath that they belonged to a group presumed violent and
criminal. On one occasion, police stormed into an IWW hall in
California during an ongoing criminal-syndicalism trial, arresting
members who had assembled to coordinate the defense.

Criminal-syndicalism laws did not cite the common-law conspiracy
doctrine, under which two or more persons can be held liable for
agreeing to break the law together. Instead, they gave prosecutors
something even simpler to prove, what an IWW lawyer described at the
time as “constructive conspiracy”: a doctrine that treats mere
association with an organization that is deemed to be criminal as an
implicit agreement to commit a crime.

The Red Scare hysteria burned hottest in 1919. That April, thirty-six
bombs were mailed to well-known politicians, businessmen, and
law-enforcement figures. On May Day, riots broke out across the
country, turning bloody in Cleveland, where the IWW cofounder Eugene
V. Debs was imprisoned. Steelworkers, coal miners, and Boston police
officers went on strike; segregated black communities revolted in more
than two dozen cities. Ten more Galleanisti bombs, far larger than
their predecessors, exploded in June. “For many elites and much of
the public, all of the unrest of that year was the work of a perilous
amalgamation of anarchism, bolshevism, socialism, IWWism, black
radicalism, and feminism,” White wrote in his 2022 book _Under the
Iron Heel_.

The panic began to lift the following May Day, when the attorney
general predicted a national uprising that didn’t take place. The
IWW never regained its former strength, and the laws created to
destroy the union remained on the books. Communists and socialists
sometimes faced criminal-syndicalism charges into the 1930s and
’40s, but the doctrine gradually fell out of use. In the 1960s, a
few prosecutors rediscovered criminal syndicalism (along with its
close cousin, criminal anarchy) and applied the charge to black
radicals such as John Harris, who was indicted in 1968 for handing out
leaflets condemning a police murder. A year later, the Supreme Court
effectively ended the doctrine in _Brandenburg v. Ohio_, which threw
out the criminal-syndicalism conviction of an Ohio Ku Klux Klan leader
on First Amendment grounds.

Yet parallels with the legal and political tactics of the First Red
Scare are everywhere in Georgia today. Property crimes, whether
industrial sabotage or vandalism of bulldozers, are described as acts
of terror aimed at people and society at large. Anarchism, a minor
current in the IWW and a far larger one in Stop Cop City, eclipses the
movement’s other ideological tendencies, serving as a ready-made
signifier that its cause is antisocial. The movement suddenly
resembles a conspiracy, its objectives reduced to violence and
destruction, its positive social vision erased. The more organized it
gets, the more sinister the conspiracy appears. Acts of solidarity put
everyone at risk of arrest.

In April 1969, amid a different season of political crisis, President
Richard Nixon announced an ambitious plan to crush organized crime, an
effort that culminated in the passage of the federal RICO Act the
following year. RICO’s main framer, G. Robert Blakey, faced the same
problem as Oppenheim before him: the Constitution doesn’t permit the
government to outlaw membership in a specific group. His solution—to
allow prosecutors to mass-indict individuals who have committed two or
more acts of “racketeering” on behalf of a shared
“enterprise”—invited wider application of his new statute.

By Blakey’s own admission, the legislation was based on concepts
from early twentieth-century antiradical law, and RICO was soon seen
as a solution to problems beyond organized crime. Massachusetts
Senator Edward Brooke had ominous words for the Weather Underground,
campus protesters, and other “misguided radicals” in the fall of
1970, when the act was signed into law: RICO, he said, would “bring
a number of these lawless acts under federal jurisdiction with
penalties appropriate to the seriousness of these offenses.”

There is no reason to doubt that most of RICO’s early supporters saw
it as a tool to fight the Mob. Yet, according to the legal scholar
Benjamin Levin, “growing the police state or growing a prosecutorial
state in a moment of state conflict with radicals means growing the
arsenal of weapons that can be used against those radicals.”

More than fifty years after the act’s passage, plenty of Mob bosses
and a few executives have gone to jail because of RICO, which allows
judges to impose sentences of up to twenty years on figures whose foot
soldiers have done the dirty work. But the law also facilitates the
prosecution of large groups of low-level alleged offenders. RICO has
been applied in controversial crackdowns, especially on poor, black
neighborhoods, where police can tenuously link many people to
small-time gang activity. In an operation in 2016, law enforcement
swept up 120 residents of a housing project in the Bronx, almost half
of whom weren’t even accused of gang membership.

Anti-abortion protesters and environmental activists have faced RICO
charges, too, though mostly when sued by their political opponents
under its civil section. Rarely have prosecutors brought criminal RICO
charges against protesters, and almost never with the wide scope and
explicit political intent of the indictment against Stop Cop City. It
is an exceptional case, at least in recent history—one that marks a
stunning revival of America’s long, ugly tradition of criminalizing
left-wing organizations.

Levin said that these types of prosecutions tend to come at moments
when elites “sense what we might think of as an existential threat
to capitalism, or to the state, or to whatever the dominant ideology
or political economy may be.” The Stop Cop City movement has its
roots in such a moment. In May 2020, Atlanta’s mayor responded to an
uprising over the killing of George Floyd by declaring a state of
emergency, and Governor Brian Kemp sent more than 1,000 Georgia
National Guard troops to the city. When Atlanta police murdered
Rayshard Brooks the following month, protesters returned to block an
interstate highway and set fire to the Wendy’s where Brooks was
shot. Huge crowds chanted formerly marginal slogans such as “abolish
the police,” and many began to link the issue of systemic racism to
the broader failings of capitalism and the American state. Meanwhile,
business leaders pressured the city to crack down on property crimes
and rioting, and residents of the wealthy neighborhood of Buckhead
threatened to secede from Atlanta, taking their tax dollars with them,
unless the city invested more in policing.

The following year, the city announced a plan for a $90 million
police-training center developed by the Atlanta Police Foundation, a
private entity helmed and funded by politicians and corporate
executives. Nicknamed Cop City because it is set to include a mock
city for urban-warfare and riot-suppression training, the facility
would be among the largest police-training centers in the country.
Building it required cutting down large swaths of a public forest in
unincorporated DeKalb County south of Atlanta. In an age of ecological
catastrophe, Cop City threatened a major climate buffer, one of the
area’s critical defenses against extreme heat, air pollution, and
flooding.

A broad refrain of the movement against it is that the stakes are
global—that the struggle over Cop City is a battle over the future
of policing, the fate of the climate, and the right of ordinary people
to control the cities they live in. The combative response from police
and prosecutors has made it clear that Cop City’s backers also
sensed these high stakes.

The RICO indictment against Stop Cop City opens with a rambling,
historically illiterate passage in which the state attempts to define
its political enemy. Anarchism is an “anti-authority” philosophy,
the prosecutors write. “Violence is part of the anarchism in some
anarchist beliefs,” they add. “Violent anarchists often engage in
violent activity towards law enforcement.” According to the
indictment, such violent individuals started infiltrating Atlanta
during the protests that followed the “justified” killing of
Brooks, eventually establishing Defend the Atlanta Forest as a front
for attacking police, capitalism, and the government. The indictment
does not claim that the majority of the defendants committed any such
attacks; it alleges that, by appearing at a demonstration, receiving a
reimbursement, or writing a post, they supported an organization that
subscribes to an ideology that calls for such attacks.

As the IWW and other leftist groups found out a century ago, these
tactics are chillingly effective. Whether you consider yourself an
anarchist or not, to be denounced as one by the police and mass media
is to be branded with one of the state’s most damning scarlet
letters.

Because the defendants have not hurt anyone but the police have, the
indictment relies on rhetorical leaps to illustrate an association
between anarchism and violence. It describes the George Floyd
uprisings as a movement “centered around a message of anti-police
violence,” rather than a movement calling to end police violence;
likewise, it claims that the high-profile police killing of Brooks
caused “anti-police violence tensions to boil over.” The
indictment links Tortuguita, the forest defender killed at Cop City,
with an “extremist ideology” that justifies the police shooting
them fifty-seven times as they sat in their tent with their hands
raised, according to an independent autopsy. (As evidence, the
indictment twice quotes an anonymous, uncited blog post that reads,
“Tortuguita died trying to kill a cop in defense of the Weelaunee
forest.”) The most overt acts of violence committed by police are
not swept under the rug, as one might expect, but severely contorted
into instances of victimization.

The indictment blames the violence on “outside agitators,” a civil
rights–era dog whistle, and provides paranoid interpretations of
terms such as “mutual aid” and “social solidarity.” For Levin,
the language paints the movement as “another world and another group
of people, and they almost have their own vocabulary.” RICO requires
that defendants be charged with two “predicate” acts of
racketeering that further a criminal enterprise. The presumption that
anarchists speak in code thus has high stakes: by implying that
reimbursements for, say, “glue” and “bins” are actually
euphemisms for illegal transactions, the prosecutors create acts of
racketeering for some defendants who would not otherwise have the two
necessary to be indicted.

The stigmatization of social solidarity and mutual aid carries
consequences not only for individual defendants but for left-wing
political organizing more broadly, as the police raid on the Atlanta
Solidarity Fund office shows. Once the basic values and tactics of
left-wing politics become criminal, “effectively any political
organizers or organizations which can be accused of assisting or
empowering this organization are just sort of presumed to be
inherently criminal themselves,” said Marlon Kautz, the Solidarity
Fund organizer. Defining a movement as an ideological conspiracy
doesn’t just prevent it from acting as a movement—it deters others
from lending support.

For Levin, this is the distinctive feature of American conspiracy law:
how it can be wielded against collective action itself, eliminating
the need to separately prosecute people for breaking laws in service
of the collective. Georgia police demonstrated how far they were
willing to press this doctrine when property destruction at Cop City
led to twenty-three arrests at a nearby music festival in a public
area of the forest. In the RICO indictment, the concert became “an
organized mob of individuals designed to overwhelm the police force .
. . and cause property damage”; the attendees, many of them
peripheral to the movement, some in Atlanta for the first time, became
domestic terrorists.

“It’s really hard to actually understand what the proper way,
under that framework, would be to protest this,” said one Atlantan
in Gresham Park in November. “Individualist democracy?” said
another. “What is that?”

Another point of the indictments is to make it harder and harder for
those named to maintain their original struggle: legal bills pile up,
protesters return from jail traumatized, and sympathizers keep quiet
to avoid the same fate. During the First Red Scare,
criminal-syndicalism laws “devastated the lives of people, wrecked
them, left them ravaged in body and mind,” White said. The threat of
repression must be overwhelming.

In their rhetoric, officials have tried to justify force and
repression by distinguishing between good and bad forms of protest. In
practice, even the most orthodox channels of democratic dissent have
been suppressed. The coalition working to put Cop City to a vote
submitted more than 116,000 signatures in early September 2023, but
the city has appealed to invalidate the referendum and, failing that,
plans to check the petition using a controversial signature-verifying
technology associated with voter suppression. Elected officials seem
unlikely to defy powerful police interests and affluent voters;
hundreds of critical comments at city council meetings have not shaken
their support for the project. And the threat of criminal charges
hangs over all who engage in the Stop Cop City movement, no matter how
lawfully they behave.

The logic of conspiracy seems to turn every way forward into a trap:
when the criminalized movement fights back, it risks furnishing the
state with more material to make its case. This is as true today as it
was during the First Red Scare. For one group of Stop Cop City
organizers, the way out of this bind was the action on November 13.
Activists toured more than seventy cities to get the word out, hoping
call the state’s bluff by “massifying” the movement: if we’re
all conspirators, lock us all up. Fueling the action was the belief
that a political prosecution requires a political response; the
movement and its participants were not going to be vindicated by the
legal system, which had been cynically weaponized to indiscriminately
charge activists and jail them for months without evidence. “What is
on trial is a set of ethics and values and beliefs,” said Sam Beard,
a spokesperson for the action.

During its multiyear occupation of the forest, the movement created
“a massive political crisis for the city of Atlanta,” Beard said.
However, “through the domestic-terrorism charges, the assassination
of our comrade Tortuguita, and the RICO charges, the state of Georgia
had created an even bigger political crisis for the movement.” Now,
he said, “the only way that the movement can win is to create once
again an even larger crisis for the city of Atlanta.” Part of the
movement’s national strategy is to make Cop City politically toxic
and bad business, driving contractors and insurers away from the
project.

On the day of the action, protesters set out from Gresham Park holding
puppets, banners, and saplings to plant. A drum circle representing
several Native American tribes set up alongside the march. At the edge
of the forest, the crowd approached scores of riot police. Behind them
stood rows of cruisers, dogs, snipers, and a hulking armored vehicle
labeled “The Beast.” Helicopters circled overhead. Almost
immediately, officers fired tear-gas canisters—first into the press
area, then into the crowd. Rubber bullets soon followed. The tightly
knit crowd of marchers decided to retreat rather than push through the
police line toward the construction site. It could hardly be called a
decisive victory, but many departing marchers reported feeling
mobilized: they had kept each other safe and the police hadn’t
arrested anyone, proving that, with sufficient numbers and support, it
was still possible to come to Atlanta without being branded a
coconspirator.

State legislators moved to close that possibility in subsequent
months, by writing the anti-solidarity premises of Chris Carr’s RICO
indictment into the criminal code. In January 2024, ten Republican
state senators introduced a bill to expand the Georgia RICO Act,
explicitly stipulating that acts such as trespassing, littering,
loitering, and flyering fall under its mandate. If passed, the bill
would add hate crimes to the statute’s purview—a sinister revision
considering that, in January, Georgia officially incorporated into its
hate-crime law the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s
definition of antisemitism, which cites criticisms of Israel as
antisemitic speech. Meanwhile, the Stop Cop City movement has ramped
up its pro-Palestine activism, protesting a Georgia law enforcement
program that sends officers to receive “anti-terrorism training”
from the Israeli police.

The RICO-expansion bill is still being debated, but both houses of the
Georgia legislature have already passed a bill that would expand cash
bail while severely curtailing the activities of bail funds. Federal
law enforcement also came to Carr’s aid in February, with agents
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives launching predawn, SWAT-style raids
on three homes linked to the movement.

But the struggle in Atlanta continued the evening after the November
13 march. A smaller group of protesters convened outside the DeKalb
County Jail to hold both a vigil for Tortuguita and a press
conference; among them were members of the Muscogee (Creek) people
from Oklahoma, for whom the Weelaunee Forest is ancestral land. They
had been arrested while visiting the forest over the weekend. “We
wanted to say hello and goodbye, just in case,” said one young
Muscogee, just released from Fulton County Jail. She and her friends
had been kneeling at the site of Tortuguita’s death, sharing a
cigarette, when they were surrounded by a SWAT team and arrested
without explanation.

Earlier that afternoon, Atlanta Chief of Police Darin Schierbaum had
described the march as a gathering of “professional protesters and
anarchists.” He identified a row of gardening tools intended to
plant saplings as “makeshift weapons.” Holding up a gas mask, he
added, “You bring these because you know that you are going to craft
that action and prompt that action from law enforcement.” Protecting
yourself from police violence, in other words, was evidence of violent
intent.

The evening vigil was disrupted when police confronted someone
projecting an image onto the jail. People at the vigil flooded across
the street to surround the protester. The police retreated without
making an arrest, and the protester then started projecting “Fuck
the Police” onto the opposite side of the street. Voices from the
jail joined the chants, shouting “Viva, viva Tortuguita” and
“Stop Cop City.”

With so many protesters spending time inside, other inmates at the
jail have grown familiar with their struggle. When the demonstration
moved to the sidewalk below the jail, they shouted from their cells
about conditions inside: “We’re hungry.” “No hot water.”
“They killed an inmate.” They lowered bags from windows, into
which demonstrators stuffed pizza, water, and cigarettes. “We love
you,” the protesters shouted. “Free them all.”

_[TADHG LARABEE is an assistant editor at Jacobin magazine._

_EVA ROSENFELD is a writer from Michigan.]_

* repression
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* Cop City
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* Police
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* policing
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* criminal syndicalism
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* espionage
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* Sedition
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* Red Scare
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* Anti-Communism
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* McCarthyism
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* Racism
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* IWW
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* Industrial Workers of the World
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* Wobblies
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* The Wobblies
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* anti-union
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* South
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* Atlanta
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* Georgia
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* Solidarity
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* conspiracy
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