In March, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation filed terrorism charges against people who protested 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 against 61 people that is so contrary to the First Amendment that it puts everyone’s rights at risk. With the indictment, the Republican attorney general alleges that the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement is a criminal, “anti-government, anti-police, and anti-corporate extremist organization.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has released a massive RICO indictment against 61 people that is so contrary to the First Amendment that it puts everyone’s rights at risk.
The indictment names more than three dozen people who previously faced the aforementioned domestic terrorism charges, as well as bail bonds fund managers who were accused of money laundering in June. They also include three activists who were previously charged with felony intimidation after authorities said they distributed leaflets calling a state trooper a “murderer” for his role in the fatal shooting of a protester.
The First Amendment guarantees our right to free speech, our right to peacefully assemble, and our right to petition the government to amend it, but in his indictment, Carr promulgates a literal conspiracy theory that calls “anti-police” anarchism inherent From a criminal and crime perspective, virtually all protest activity is viewed as contributing to crime. Lauren C. Regan is executive director of the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, which, as its website explains, “supports movements aimed at dismantling the political and economic structures that underlie social inequality and environmental degradation,” Regan said me that Carr’s RICO charges were a “massive violation” of freedom of speech and assembly.
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Carr, of course, is using the same RICO law that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, is using to prosecute former President Donald Trump and 18 others accused of trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory 2020 in Georgia to overturn. Liberals who applaud Willis’ actions should be wary of the double-edged sword that is the RICO law. The RICO laws targeting the Mafia are now being used to prosecute political enemies.
Carr’s prosecution of “Cop City” protesters was already extraordinary, as he had pushed for domestic terrorism charges against dozens of protesters accused of minor crimes, in a move condemned by organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Still, the RICO indictment is an unconscionable escalation that recalls 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 country, Atlanta police were accused of brutality by several protesters and arrested a journalist who was recording an arrest. (The city later settled with this 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 they met a received a call that he had fallen. I’m sleeping in the drive-thru lane of a fast food restaurant. (In November, the Atlanta City Council voted 15-0 to pay $1 million to Brooks’ family.)
The RICO indictment is better understood as part of the government’s ongoing counterprotest. It’s a counter-protest 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 vast surveillance camera network. The proposed training facility, called “Cop City,” is the result of a plan drawn up in secret and politically fueled by conservative outrage over 2020 crime spikes and anti-police protests.
Liberals who applaud Wilis’ actions should beware of the double-edged sword that is the RICO law.
The training center, which will serve Atlanta police and firefighters, is currently in preconstruction on about 87 acres of wooded land outside the city limits in unincorporated DeKalb County, whose residents have no vote on the project. In addition to being a training center, it was presented as a post-2020 thank you to police, boosting morale and recruiting, and was explicitly compared to the shrine-like facilities of major college football teams, including a gift shop. In a blatant attempt at propaganda, documents from the Atlanta Police Foundation reveal that a previous plan was to call the facility the “Institute for Social Justice and Public Safety Training.”
The APF continues to ignore public records requests and many basic details remain unknown, such as the construction budget and remaining green space. This has led to widespread opposition, stemming not only from concerns about police militarization and the environment, but also from concerns about the government’s general lack of transparency.
Vote to Stop Cop City, an effort to put a training center referendum on the ballot, claims to have collected more than 100,000 signatures, which, if true, represents massive mainstream opposition to the city’s plan.
The movements “Defend the Atlanta Forest” and “Stop Cop City” emerged against this official form of demonstration. Some protests were undoubtedly violent or destructive, including setting fire to police cars and throwing stones at police officers. Other actions were illegal but peaceful, such as the civil obedience tactic of refusing to leave the site of the proposed construction after being asked to do so. Still other protests took the form of peaceful marches, and some of those charged with domestic terrorism in March said they had simply attended a concert near the planned practice site.
But like their civil rights-era predecessors, state and local government officials have taken aggressive law enforcement measures and used rhetoric to brand the opposition as “outside agitators” and terrorists. Imagine if prosecutors had had RICO charges they could bring in the 1960s. They may have been able to prosecute nonviolent civil rights activists for crimes committed by people who were not as committed to nonviolence as they were.
Like their civil rights-era predecessors, state and local officials used rhetoric branding the opposition as “outside agitators” and terrorists.
In January, a suspected shootout with the Georgia State Patrol resulted in the fatal police killing of a camping protester named Tortuguita. (We don’t know if a shooting occurred because police officers don’t wear body cameras, the most fundamental reform called for at previous Black Lives Matter protests.)
In this context, the filing of terrorism and RICO charges – which are too easy for prosecutors to prove and carry a mandatory minimum sentence 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 so much to bring about convictions as to deter people from protesting.
The RICO charge is a particularly naked attempt at libel. It contains fundamental factual errors. For example, it incorrectly reverses the roles of the City of Atlanta and the private Atlanta Police Foundation as owners and tenants of the site. It contains derogatory comments about anarchism and reveals an obsession with graffiti and online gossip. The indictment alleges that anarchist collectivism means that individuals have no choice to sacrifice their income, freedom, or property, and calls anarchy one of three “primary ideologies” that make Defend the Atlanta Forest “extremist.”
Arguing that Defend the Atlanta Forest is a criminal organization conspiring to stop the training center, it attempts to tie everything together, from arson to compensating protesters for glue and other camping materials to possessing a book that purports to be about criminal methods to republishing a news story.
Among those implicated in the extortion allegations is a representative of the National Lawyers Guild who says he is innocent and was only acting as a legal observer at a protest. This is the problem with RICO charges in general. They can associate otherwise harmless actions with crimes.
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The demonization of anarchist collectives and their demands for the abolition of state structures is no coincidence. Police and prison abolitionists in Atlanta formed a new media company called the Atlanta Community Press Collective. Thanks to this collective, we know, for example, that public funding for the training center is already much higher than promised by the authorities.
The silliness of the accusation only makes it more frightening. The government’s willingness to label an entire movement as a criminal because it deviates from a plan or embraces unpopular policies 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 as a criminal because it deviates from a plan or pursues unpopular policies cannot end well.
During the civil rights era, there was an attempt to remove a state legislator for his opposition to the Vietnam War. There was also the Red Scare, which charged Angelo Herndon, a communist union activist who violated segregationist sensibilities, with felony insurrection.
Although the “Cop City” and “Trump RICO” cases differ greatly in their details, prosecutors in both cases targeted political enemies rather than the Mafia, potentially leading to copycat prosecutions across the country. This means that your local or state prosecutor can charge you with organized crime if you move to protest your city’s version of “Cop City” in defiance of the First Amendment.
