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Trigger Warning: This email discusses police violence.

John, I write to you with a heavy heart. Atlanta police
yesterday murdered Manuel Teran, known to comrades as Tortuguita.
Tortuguita’s "crime" was defending a forest in the heart of Atlanta — but
not just any forest, one that is being destroyed so that the police can
have more space for their "Cop City" training the police using
military-grade facilities.

If you have not been following this critical campaign, the Atlanta Police
Foundation — a private entity — received governmental clearance to begin
destroying Weelaunee Forest to build [ [link removed] ]Cop City over the objections of
local Atlanta residents. The Cop City project threatens the forest, along
with the expansion of Blackhall studios—slated to bulldoze another section
of the Weelaunee Forest to build movie production sound stages. After
exhausting legal channels, organizers moved into the forest, occupying
trees and slowing down construction, while running a campaign targeting
the Police Foundation and private contractors. You can learn more about
the perniciousness of police foundations in this [ [link removed] ]report. Yesterday,
police moved in full force to evict the encampment, using their usual
litany of brutal tactics.

As we’ve seen all too often with police brutality (especially when waged
on Black communities), we can expect the usual false claims of
"self-defense," coupled with an attempt to smear the victim. We will also
likely hear a lot about "appropriate" and "inappropriate" forms of
protest. I assure you, we stand with the Atlanta Forest Defenders and all
of those who defend the land, the water, and the planet. Unfortunately, we
also fear — given what we have seen at Standing Rock, in Atlanta, and
during the uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — that
police violence will increasingly become the norm, not the exception to
protest movements here in the U.S.

We will continue to track these threats and we promise to keep you
informed about what you can do to support the frontline activists at Stop
Cop City.

Even with heavy hearts, our movement carries on with determination and
radical joy(e): tomorrow, we honor another hero who passed away too soon,
Joye Braun, the first camper at Standing Rock, who spent decades on the
frontlines defending Indigenous lands. [ [link removed] ]We hope you will sign up and
join an event in honor of Joye if you haven’t yet — we need all of us in
this fight.

With rage and determination,

Jeff Ordower
North America Director
350.org


 




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