Riotsville, U.S.A. spotlights the surprising tactics that were used to help police forces militarize in the 1960s. | Magnolia Pictures
How the director of an astonishing new documentary used old government footage to shed light on the present.
In fuzzy, grainy footage,a crowd of protesters on Main Street clamors, shouting, signs in their hands. Toward them moves a group of police officers, armed and ready to put down an uprising. Men dressed in 1960s-style shirtsleeves and slacks run in and out of buildings with law enforcement in hot pursuit. It looks stilted and unreal, like they’re rehearsing a scene. Like something from a movie.
While it’s not a movie set, it’s not real life, either — or, well, not exactly. These are scenes from Riotsville, U.S.A., a new documentary made entirely from archival footage, much of it shot by the US government in the 1960s. It shows something extraordinary: As uprisings became more common across the country and the turbulent decade wore on, the government constructed “Riotsvilles” on two military bases. There, they staged protests and rebellions using soldiers from the US Army to play both protesters and police, then allowed police forces from across the country to learn from the military how to put them down.
Riotsvilles became rehearsal stages for swatting down dissenters whom law enforcement deemed out of hand — striking, because the more than 150 riots across the country in the summer of 1967 mostly were in response to police brutality.
As the staged combat at Riotsville plays out, audiences of fellow law enforcement and military looked on from the stands, observing their efforts and comparing notes. In the footage are tactics and weapons usually reserved for warfare, used against ordinary citizens on the streets. Riotsville, U.S.A. shows the same methods used to quash unrest that occurred, for instance, in the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City during the 1968 Republican National Convention. The film shows the birth of the militarization of police in America.
Magnolia Pictures
Soldiers play both sides at the Riotsville training demonstrations.
The Riotsvilles were built at about the time that the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, released a 1968 report that found that white racism, rather than Black anger or “outside protesters,” was behind instances of unrest in American cities. At 708 pages long, the commission’s report was a doorstopper, but that didn’t prevent it from becoming an instant bestseller. The report called for funneling money toward fostering equality between Black and white populations in cities. Yet LBJ backed away from the report, and its insights were ignored by the government — all except for one: increasing funding for police forces in major cities.
All of this sounds like an exaggeration, but as Riotsville, U.S.A. works poetically but damningly through the footage and the story, it makes its case keenly. Yet if this was a matter of such interest 60 years ago, why do so many of us not even know it happened?
I was eager to speak with director Sierra Pettengill about the film, making old footage alive to today’s viewer, our horrendous historical amnesia, and why she sees glimmers of hope in it all.
It would be tempting to say you are “exposing” something, but you really aren’t. The existence of Riotsville was well known. The government filmed its own footage. It was on TV.
That’s the point, to me. This is under-known, but not because it was covert or classified. If you put “Riotsville” into any historic newspaper database, you get coverage as if it’s a lark of some sort. I think the [New York] Times headline was “Army Defeats Hippies.” It was covered; a lot of the footage in the film comes from ABC and BBC. I find that much more pernicious.
What the film documents to me is a historical amnesia that feels much more telling. That the Kerner Commission report was bestselling is wild. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, particularly during the Trump administration — what it means to watch a narrative be re-formed or hidden in real time. The film, I think, is a documentation in some ways of that process.
So you got the footage of Riotsville, and you watched it, and it’s amazing. What’s the next step in turning it into a film that people in 2022 are going to watch?
[The existence of Riotsville] was on public record, but there weren’t really any secondary sources covering it, contextualizing it. So [the research process] took a really long time. Stuart Schrader, who came on as an adviser for the film, wrote a really incredible book in 2019 called Badges Without Borders, which was just really gratifying. He had done a lot of the same research, and much more. But when I started, there was very little. So I worked with a researcher, Jonathan Rapoport, and we started by screen-grabbing some of the slates and trying to track down people based on their names, the people who shot the footage. We went to the National Archives and pulled text records. I did a lot of phone interviews with anyone we could track down. We figured out which military police battalion was pictured in the footage, found their reunion group. A lot of minutia of research and tracking things down, Googling any person we found mentioned in any article.
And so that part of the research was figuring out the basics. Did this come out of the Kerner Commission? Where does this fit in to a historical context? I know very well that this is just one of an endless number of disturbing programs, covert or public, that the US government and military have carried out.
When you have a piece of footage like this, it’s like getting access to some sort of fantasy imagination of the government or the state, which feels rare. They made a moving picture and a cinematic image. We had to take that in its larger metaphorical and emotional possibilities. It felt like a big opportunity.
So the research really was two tracks, and hopefully what the film feels like: laying out a historical narrative and also trying to understand what this means in the larger sense, as citizens of a country. What to think of it, as the narrator asks a lot.
You steer away from footage of the “real” uprisings in the film, which seems extra significant since you were making it partly during a summer when those images were flooding our TV screens and social feeds.
There is one uprising in the film at the very end, in Miami. Originally, I had thought for years I didn’t want to show them at all — for many reasons, one being that we are oversaturated with those images.
One of my main goals in archival filmmaking is to show images that either feel new, or that are recontextualized, so you’re actually looking at them. When something feels familiar, you just store it in the part of your brain where the shorthand for that image lives. Images of rebellions have been used to justify police repression against Black communities, against protesters.
Magnolia Pictures
Invented riot posters held by “rioters” (played by soldiers) at one Riotsville.
We used the images in Miami for a lot of reasons. On the one hand, the story of [Miami’s] Liberty City protests and what happened around the 1968 Republican National Convention is a really under-known narrative, especially when compared with the Chicago DNC. There’s very little footage of Liberty City. I think the most famous chronicler of the ’68 RNC is Norman Mailer, and he writes, in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, just something like “Oh, whoops, there were some protests outside and I didn’t go.” So it’s a really under-told story.
Then also, once we started looking at that footage — which had to be pulled from a very local archive — you can really see what has been developing in the Riotsville re-creations play out. It was much more literal than I would have assumed earlier in the process.
Like Riotsville was a dress rehearsal.
Yeah, a dress rehearsal.
So we put Miami at the end. That reverses the typical [assumptions we have of] causality: that people are protesting in the streets, or at the airport, and the police and the military have to come in. That is utterly backwards. The Kerner Commission at the time even found that what they call “riots” are in response, usually, to police brutality. So by putting that footage at the end of the film, you see — I think in a correctly contextualized way — that what’s happening in Liberty City is a response to what you’ve seen develop over the course of the film up until that moment.
We put a lot of time into figuring out how and when and what images of unrest to show. That section of the film, I think, took as long to cut as a prior hour.
Did you find any hope in making the film?
Where I find the hope in the film, counterintuitively, is that the crises we’re in are not a failure of imagination. We’re watching the same conversation. Police abolition is on the lips of everybody in this film, in different words, but you’re seeing the same tone of people are already weary of explaining this over and over again … So it’s a political failure. We’re continuing to choose the wrong thing. The solutions are there, and they are well documented and well established. And I find some faith in that.
Riotsville, U.S.A. is playing in select theaters. See the film’s website for details.
Reps. Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, and Josh Gottheimer, D-NJ, walk together between votes on Capitol Hill on July 20, 2022, in Washington, DC. | Jabin Botsford/Washington Post/Getty Images
House Democrats used a recent vote to show voters they are for the police.
Democrats tried to strike a delicate balance with this package: While it includes more grant money for police, it also contains bills that would invest in reform efforts activists favor such as community-based violence interventions and first responders who are trained specifically to address mental health crises. By tackling both, they hope to show their commitment to law enforcement while also acknowledging progressive concerns about the need for alternatives and accountability.
“There’s a lot in there, it’s not just more funding for police,” says Insha Rahman, a vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice.
Still, the measure marks Democrats’ latest retreat from their more aggressive critiques of police violence in recent years, a reason several progressives balked at advancing the package, which seeks to push back against Republican attacks. As certain crimes like homicides have increased in 2020 and 2021, Republicans have suggested that Democrats’ support for police reforms was behind the uptick. House Democrats’ legislation — which is a byproduct of negotiations between centrist lawmakers like Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), progressives including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Congressional Black Caucus leaders including Chair Joyce Beatty (D-OH) — is the latest attempt to neutralize these claims.
For now, the bills are predominately a messaging effort and unlikely to be taken up by the Senate, where passing legislation would require 10 Republicans to sign on. Although one of the bills in the package, the Invest to Protect Act from Gottheimer, has had strong Senate support, it’s uncertain whether the upper chamber will take it up on its own given everything else still on its docket. Regardless, Democrats argue the bills are a significant statement that show where they stand going into the elections, and that could broaden their voter appeal.
“I think there’s been a lot of give on both sides,” Beatty told Vox.
What the public safety deal contains
The package contains four bills that boost investment in policing and other public safety interventions. They are:
Invest to Protect Act:Sponsored by Gottheimer, this legislation would enable the Justice Department to award $250 million in federal grants to police departments with 125 officers or fewer over the next five years.
According to a statement from Jayapal and Omar, progressives were able to secure a few concessions, including the targeting of these funds to smaller police departments, the use of the money for de-escalation training, and the use of the funds for data collection on police departments. Progressives hoped these changes would ensure new spending goes to departments lacking the personnel to complete basic tasks, reduce police brutality incidents, and allow Congress to better assess individual departments’ efficacy.
This bill passed 360-64.
Break the Cycle of Violence Act:Sponsored by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), the legislation would require the Department of Health and Human Services to award $5 billion in federal grants for community-based violence intervention programs over eight years.
This bill passed 220-207.
VICTIM Act:Sponsored by Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), this bill would set up a new DOJ-run grant program that provides funding for detectives to investigate homicides and violent crimes as well as resources for personnel to support victims in these cases. Currently, a high proportion of these crimes go unsolved, an issue this bill attempts to address.
This bill passed 250-178.
Mental Health Justice Act: Sponsored by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), this legislation would establish a DOJ-run grant program that’s dedicated to providing funding for hiring and training of mental health first responder units who would address mental health crises in lieu of police.
This bill passed 223-206.
Three of the four bills have strong consensus support across the caucus, while the Invest to Protect Act has garnered progressive pushback due to the funding it provides law enforcement. Gottheimer’s bill “would add nearly a quarter billion dollars in police funding over the next 5 years without addressing the crisis of police brutality,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), a proponent of criminal justice reform, said in a statement arguing that the legislation should be decoupled from the rest of the package.
Beatty acknowledged that many activists may not support the bill, but noted that their input was vital to strengthening the protections in the legislation. “I’ve talked to the activists and said I’m not asking them to endorse it because they have a role: to be activists,” she said. “But for their persistence, we wouldn’t have had as many guardrails.”
The shortcomings of this public safety package
The House’s vote on public safety bills comes after past talks on police reform imploded, and as Democrats have begun to shift away from many members’ stronger condemnations of policing in 2020.
Previously, Democrats’ Justice in Policing Act, which would have limited the qualified immunity protections the police have, failed to advance in the Senate due to Republican opposition. Since then, members of the party have distanced themselves from a focus on reforms due to fears that rhetoric around “defunding the police” hurt lawmakers in battleground districts in the last election.
That’s led to the sorts of compromises that are evident in the latest package, which has disappointed many activists.
“The policing bills on the table right now do nothing to address police accountability,” said Color of Change president Rashad Robinson in a statement. “Encouraging more ‘training’ without any real accountability measures is a fake solution that will not make our communities safer.”
Some of the measures activists are calling for, such as policies that would divest federal funding from police, don’t yet have the congressional or executive branch support needed to become law. Their critiques about Democrats’ new bills are also backed up by research, which has found, for instance, that actions such as increased data collection have run up against problems like underreporting.
At this point, these incremental measures are likely the most House Democrats could do with the narrow margins they have and the tight timeline they face ahead of the elections. With less than two months to go until the midterms, this could well be their last chance to pass anything on the subject. For many moderates, doing so was important to send a message, even if it’s the wrong one for activists who’ve long supported the party.
“Today, we will witness with our own eyes who actually wants to fund the police,” Rep. Demings, a former Orlando police chief and Democrats’ Senate candidate in Florida, said in a floor speech on Thursday.
A Trump-inspired think tank has reportedly unveiled its secret “Sheriff Fellowship” revealing the far-right’s level of investment in law enforcement.
According to Slate magazine’s assessment, the Claremont Institute’s curriculum “reveals a program that presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those “real” Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”
“Public information requests and other reporting have provided insight into the stated and unstated reasons behind the Claremont Institute’s recruitment of county sheriffs, and revealed the curriculum of the fellowship,” Slate’s Jessica Pishko wrote.
Pishko’s report also offers a brief breakdown of the curriculum.
“The first day was focused on policing and heavily featured the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, a lawyer who has written dozens of articles arguing that law enforcement in America does not have an implicit or explicit racism problem,” she wrote. “The supplemental readings for this section included articles and books by Mac Donald with titles like War on Cops, The Diversity Delusion, ‘The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,’ and “Black Lies Matter.”
She also added, “Day Two involved a series of history lessons, including New York Times Magazine’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein’s essay about the 1619 Project, of which Claremont Institute scholars have been deeply critical. (Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One” was assigned as a supplemental reading.)”
According to Pishko, days three and four focused on a broader spectrum that detailed dealing with “one’s enemy.” “Day Three was focused on heady philosophical pursuits, while Day Four broadened the discussion to include various progressive movements and projects, largely, it seems, from the angle of learning about one’s enemy—or ‘countering the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary Left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda,’ in Claremont-speak,” she wrote.
Pishko also noted the perspective of the far-right and how the curriculum could influence the latest regime of law enforcement officers.
“The intellectual far right also clearly sees the utility of an army of sheriffs who are able to put these ideals into practice. Prior to the last presidential election, the Claremont Institute’s 79 Days Report outlined how Donald Trump could take over the federal government by force, specifically naming county sheriffs as important to recruiting militia members and civilian posses to prevent ‘hostile crowds of outsiders’ from protesting a MAGA takeover.”
The curriculum also appears to have the approval of sheriffs. Offering his take on the fellowship, Sheriff Kim Cole of Mason County, Michigan, wrote: “I never saw this day coming to America. A time when Sheriffs are placed in a position to stand in the gap between citizens’ rights and a government that seems to reach further and further over that line. Sheriffs must have a knowledge of where that line is and how to address the overreach with confidence.”
The Border Patrol has largely avoided the scrutiny that police have come under in recent years. That should change: the Border Patrol’s powers are increasingly authoritarian, with few legal checks, and expanding throughout the United States.
A US Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022, in Yuma, Arizona. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Inspired by the violent culture of the Texas Rangers, the US Border Patrol was established in 1924 as a relatively small agency with little oversight and limited domain. Existing only along the US-Mexico border, the agency’s early goal was to enforce immigration restrictions.
On July 1, 2020, former acting secretary of Customs and Border Patrol Mark Morgan tweeted that the agency was working alongside local law enforcement across the nation to protect cities amid protests of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. “As a federal law enforcement agency, it’s our duty and responsibility to respond when our partners request support,” he asserted on Twitter.
Soon after, videos surfaced online of armed men with few official markings other than the word “POLICE” written across their clothing hauling away Black Lives Matter protesters from the streets of Portland, Oregon. As later evidence would show, these mysterious agents came from the Border Patrol. Far from the border and with authority beyond the confines of the Constitution, including the power to carry out unwarranted stops and interrogations, the Border Patrol’s presence in Portland represented a further advancement of the agency’s mission to become a national police force.
In his recent book Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, political geographer Reece Jones tells the story of how the US Border Patrol developed into the powerful, lawless agency it is today. While historians have previously provided excellent historiography of the Border Patrol, the narrative in Jones’s book urges an imperative question for immigrants’ rights activists and all Americans alike: For how long are we willing to allow the Border Patrol to exert and expand its extraconstitutional power?
In the following interview with Jones, he lays out the story of how a number of landmark but little-talked-about Supreme Court cases shaped the Border Patrol’s current powers, the role of race in the rise of the Border Patrol, the post–September 11 “border-industrial complex,” and why all Americans should pay attention to the dangerous possibilities of the Border Patrol’s expanding powers.
Conner Martinez
Race plays a major role in the development of the Border Patrol throughout your book. Could you explain how?
Reece Jones
The Border Patrol was established in 1924 to enforce the Immigration Act passed that year, often referred to as the National Origins Quota Act. That act was a law based on racial exclusion. The people who wrote it were drawing on eugenics and race science, and it was meant to prevent nonwhite people from entering the United States and to orient immigration toward Northern Europe. The Border Patrol was established two days after that law went into force, so the original purpose of the agency was as a racial police force whose job was to locate nonwhite people entering the country and remove them. This role has continued through the present.
In Nobody Is Protected, I talk about how some key Supreme Court cases defined the parameters of what the Border Patrol can do. In two of those cases, United States v.Brignoni-Ponce in 1975 and United States v.Martinez-Fuerte in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the Border Patrol can use race as one of the primary criteria to stop individuals while on patrol. So we can see that the Border Patrol was founded as a racial police force and is allowed to continue racial profiling today. This has always been a key part of its ethos.
Conner Martinez
You just mentioned two Supreme Court cases. Multiple such cases play a prominent role in your narrative of the Border Patrol’s extraconstitutional power. What are these cases, and how did they shape the Border Patrol’s authority today?
Reece Jones
One of the interesting things about the Border Patrol is that upon its establishment, it was given really expansive authority. Agents were allowed to stop people without a warrant inside the United States. Eventually in the 1940s, this power was set within a hundred miles of borders and coastlines, allowing agents to both stop and search people without a warrant in this area.
This law was not put in front of the Supreme Court until the 1970s, when finally the contradiction between the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure were weighed against the Border Patrol’s authorization to stop and search anyone in the border zone. In the 1973 case Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, which was about whether the Border Patrol could carry out searches anywhere in the border zone, the Supreme Court came within just a few weeks of deciding that yes, it could search any vehicle, but a justice switched his vote at the last minute, and the court decided searches needed probable cause just as in the case of the police.
In 1975 and 1976, the Supreme Court had two more cases dealing with making stops in the Border Zone. Something additional to note about the Brignoni-Ponce decision in 1975 is that it established that the Border Patrol could stop virtually any vehicle if they had at least two facts justifying the making of that stop. Race was one. In the Martinez-Fuerte case in 1976, it was then established that race alone can be used at a border checkpoint to send someone to a secondary inspection.
Conner Martinez
What exactly is the border zone?
Reece Jones
The original idea of the Border Patrol was that it would only operate at the border line. But the agents started to encroach into the United States in order to make apprehensions. So, in the 1940s, Congress revised the Border Patrol’s authorization to say that it could operate at a reasonable distance from the border. However, it didn’t specify how far.
Later in 1947, the Department of Justice released a simply routine interpretation of the laws in the federal register, and without any input or public debate, they set the reasonable distance as one hundred miles from any borders and coastlines, which is an extremely vast area that includes around two-thirds of the US populations and many of the largest cities in the country. New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago are all within that one-hundred-mile zone. Even a number of entire states are within that zone.
And what makes the zone significant is, again, the lower standards of evidence that the Border Patrol has in terms of stopping vehicles without probable cause and without a warrant. It can even set up checkpoints on roads deep within the United States.
Conner Martinez
During the protests of the police killing of George Floyd in Portland, Oregon, a series of videos came out showing mysterious detentions of protesters by heavily armed agents with few official markings. As it turns out, these were Border Patrol agents. What was the Border Patrol doing so far from the border in Portland? And is this something we can expect more of in the future?
Reece Jones
Something I highlight specifically in my book is that the Border Patrol has all of this sophisticated military gear and almost 20,000 agents in the field, but it has relatively little work to do when it comes to immigration. This makes it available to be deployed for other purposes.
During the protests, Donald Trump’s administration decided to use a “war on terror”–era law that says that the secretary of homeland security could assign federal officers to protect federal buildings. But the regulation is actually quite broad, because it says they can do investigations on-site and off-site for any felony cognizable under the law. This allowed the agents to police social justice protests and also grab people off the street in the middle of the night in unmarked vans in things that have nothing to do with immigration work.
The major concern then is that these laws are still on the books. And the Border Patrol is eager to do this kind of work. One of the alarms I’m trying to raise in my book is that these laws need to be fixed before a future authoritarian president comes into power and uses them even more expansively.
Conner Martinez
Part of this shift in the Border Patrol’s work has been about rebranding. In the years after September 11, the war on terror led to a rebranding of the Border Patrol as an agency focused on terrorism. Has this rebranding worked, and does the Border Patrol actually prevent terrorism?
Reece Jones
The Border Patrol will often issue press releases where it says that it has arrested someone at the border who is on the terrorism watch list, but often the people it finds have nothing to do with terrorism. It also tends to release press releases when it arrests someone with the same name as someone on the terrorist watch list, even when in reality it’s not the person who is on the watch list. So the Border Patrol claims that it does make a number of terrorism-related arrests at the border, but no significant prosecutions have happened based on arrests by the Border Patrol.
What we do see in the post–September 11 era is that the Border Patrol is doing a kind of repositioning. Prior to September 11, the Border Patrol was primarily focused on immigration and drug enforcement. But after the attacks, the atmosphere of fear allowed the Border Patrol to reposition itself as primarily a front line against terrorism. This resulted in a lot of money flowing to the Border Patrol, giving it access to more agents it could hire and access to much more military gear it didn’t previously have. This also coincides with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the procurement of military gear that also ends up eventually in the hands of security services within the United States.
After September 11, we can see that the agency has transformed into a much more aggressive, violent organization, even though in practice it’s interacting with the same kinds of people as before. And who is it finding at the border? It’s encountering people who are coming to the country to work and increasingly finding families who are trying to apply for asylum. So instead of trying to evade the Border Patrol, these people often turn themselves in after they cross the border.
What the United States should then be investing in is aid to people who are on the move — social workers and others who can handle asylum claims and families in need, instead of the militarized force we are currently spending on. This leaves us not equipped in any way for dealing with what is actually going on at the border.
Conner Martinez
Where is support for the militarization and growth of the Border Patrol coming from?
Reece Jones
There has become a border-industrial complex. What we saw with the military — corporations donating to members of Congress, setting up factories in congressmembers’ districts that provide jobs and foster a cycle of military spending — we’re seeing with border security. The whole security industry has become extremely lucrative for corporations.
Additionally, the border is one of the main issues for the Right. This fear of immigration is often depicted in the racialized terms of the white-supremacist “great replacement” theory. It has become a motivating force for right-wing voters, with politicians on the Right then becoming more supportive of higher spending on border security, even if the crisis at the border they’re depicting doesn’t exist.
Conner Martinez
Why do you think the Border Patrol’s activities away from the border often fly under the radar of the US public?
Reece Jones
For a long time, the Border Patrol simply wasn’t that big. With so few agents, its work within the interior of the United States wasn’t able to affect many people’s lives. But after the rapid growth in the agency, it can now operate in many of the places they didn’t in the past. So I think more people are actually running into the Border Patrol in their daily lives.
A recent report on checkpoints has shown that from 2016 to 2020, 250 million vehicles passed through an interior checkpoint. That’s 50 million a year, which is a huge number of people who are subjected to a violation of their rights to be stopped and have their vehicles briefly seized in order to ask them questions about immigration — even though they’re driving on an American road in between two American towns.
We’re seeing more people come into contact with the Border Patrol and becoming aware of it. But the question is also in many ways why I wrote this book: to raise attention to these exceptions the Border Patrol has to the Constitution and the impact the Border Patrol has on both immigrants and, increasingly, US citizens alike.
Conner Martinez
Is there any constitutional authority within the border zone?
Reece Jones
Of course, the Constitution exists within the boundaries of the United States. But what we have seen is that Congress has authorized exceptions to it and the Supreme Court has decided to defer to Congress on those exceptions, providing the Border Patrol special authority to circumvent the law and make stops without a warrant or probable cause and to stop vehicles at checkpoints and ask anyone about immigration.
These exceptions have an impact on US citizens and immigrants. They are directly related to the increases in deaths at the border, where border crossers have to go past the one-hundred-mile mark to get out of the border zone, and they result in many drug-related citations for American citizens at interior checkpoints. What they don’t serve is any deep immigration enforcement purpose.
Over 50 percent of the Border Patrol’s immigration apprehensions happen at the border. We need to reconsider this vast authority that has been given to the Border Patrol’s expansive zone at the border before the power expands even further. We’ve seen a dramatic expansion of its activities over the last fifty years, and it only makes sense to ask what it will look like in another fifty years. How far into the United States will it be operating? How will it be setting up its checkpoints? Because right now, it can do all of this in an area that includes two-thirds of the nation’s population. All of this needs to be reconsidered before it expands those powers.
In the midwestern city of Columbus, Ohio, 20-year-old Donovan Lewis was shot to death while lying in his bed during the early morning hours of August 30.
Police claimed they were serving an arrest warrant on multiple charges although there was no threat from Lewis who was unarmed.
The police in Columbus say that Lewis raised his arms and therefore this justified the bullet fired into his body causing him to die at a hospital shortly afterwards. The officer involved in the killing of Lewis, Ricky Anderson, a 30-year veteran of law-enforcement, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal and judicial investigation.
This act of blatant police violence represents a continuation of the legacy of law-enforcement brutality and killings across the United States. Although the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police more than two years ago sparked widespread demonstrations and rebellions demanding the defunding of law-enforcement agencies, the current administration of President Joe Biden, who pledged during his campaign in 2020 to address the concerns of the African American people and other oppressed communities, has increased monetary resources for cops while still seeking the electoral support of people of color.
Police in their public statements have said that two other people in the apartment with Lewis had already exited the residence. Anderson, the police shooter, was also a member of the K-9 unit which had a dog on the scene of the raid.
According to a report from the Columbus Dispatch which quoted the lawyer for the Lewis family,attorney Rex Elliot:
“There’s no indication he (Lewis) was aware of what was happening outside. The two individuals were handcuffed very quickly. There’s no indication there was violence in that apartment or about to happen. He was asleep before officers arrived and had no warning that CPD would burst into his apartment. Donovan was alone in his room, in his bed. He almost immediately shot as Donovan was trying to get out of bed. He was abiding by police commands to come out of his room when he was shot in cold blood by officer Anderson. There was no justification for officer Anderson to shoot an unarmed man trying to get out of bed as police officers were instructing him to do. I’d like to know why in the world they’re executing warrants at two in the morning. The reality is felony warrants are executed every day in daylight hours. There’s no reason for it to be served in the middle of the night.”
In response to the outrage exemplified by the community and the legal counsel for the Lewis family, the police have attempted once again to shift the narrative from the 20-year-old African American being a victim of law-enforcement personnel to suggest that this young man was somehow responsible for his own death. The police in every single incident of unprovoked brutality and killing call upon the public to view the situation within its “totality.”
Nonetheless, there is no reasonable excuse for someone who is unarmed to be killed in their bed. People in Columbus have rejected the police version and are demanding the firing and prosecution of the officer who carried out the execution.
There was a rally held outside the Columbus police headquarters on September 2 where the father of Donovan, Daryl Lewis, and the mother, Rebecca Duran, spoke to a crowd of protesters. Later there was a march through the downtown area of Columbus demanding justice for the family and people of this municipality of 905,000 people.
A coalition which organized the rally presented a series of demands for the City of Columbus to adopt. The Justice, Unity & Social Transformation (JUST) formation wants the municipality to resolve the current crisis of police-community relations.
“In the aftermath of Lewis’ death, J.U.S.T. organizers are demanding the immediate firing and arrest of Anderson; the elimination of overnight warrants; a meeting between Lewis’ family and Police Chief Elaine Bryant, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther and Director of Public Safety Robert Clark; an independent investigation separate from the one the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting; the erasure of qualified immunity for police; more city funding for mental health and social services and less for public safety; and no K-9 teams unless warrants for drug-related offenses are being served.”
Columbus Cited in Study of Frequency in Police Shootings
This violation of the human rights and personal safety of Donovan Lewis and his place of residence is not an isolated affair in Columbus. The police are noted for their frequent and repeated use of lethal force.
“A study released in February 2021, showed Franklin County, Ohio — which encompasses Columbus — has one of the highest rates of police shootings in Ohio and in the nation. The study, conducted by the Ohio Alliance for Innovation in Population Health, ranked Franklin County 18th among the 100 most populous counties nationally on average for annual police-related fatalities. In Columbus, there have been 62 shootings involving Columbus police officers since 2018, including Lewis’ shooting. Of those 62 shootings, 19 have resulted in a death, according to data from Columbus police and the Columbus Dispatch.”
These statistics are reflective of the overall atmosphere in the U.S. There is no discussion within the halls of Congress or the White House in regard to curbing, let alone eradicating, the level of police violence against oppressed and working class people.
Failure of the White House and Congress to Enact Police Reforms
The demonstrations which arose over the last two years have served to create the political conditions for the election of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party dominance within the House of Representatives and the equally divided Senate. However, no guarantees within the law have been adopted to protect the rights of people most impacted by racism and national oppression.
A bill passed during August ostensibly to address the problems of runaway inflation related to energy and food prices not experienced in 40 years and the looming problems related to prescription drug costs and climate change were conveniently folded into a pre-election package to convey the notion that the legislative apparatus and the administration can work effectively to pass bills. However, these measures will not help the family of Donovan Lewis and the many other victims of police terrorism.
Earlier in the year, in the same state of Ohio, Jayland Walker of Akron was gunned down in a barrage of a hundred bullets, over 40 of which struck the young African American man. Since then the City of Akron has engaged in every effort to blame Walker for his own victimization.
During early September, the city leaders in Akron released more video footage of the June 27 execution. Yet there has not been any definitive action taken to rectify the situation and provide justice to the bereaved family and community.
Municipal officials have released video footage of the Walker killing in separate segments which can easily be misleading to the public. Much of the video has been edited and blurred making it difficult to piece together the chronology of events leading up to Walker’s death.
In a statement released to the public and media through their lawyer, the Walker family noted:
“Now, two months after Jayland’s death, we have received just hand-picked videos, which the City has also released to the media in an apparent effort to build its own narrative of Jayland’s death. We call on the City to stop re-traumatizing the Walker family with these repeated edited video drops and release all unedited videos to their counsel in one comprehensive collection.”
The silence on the part of the Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland, the White House and both houses of Congress on the persistence of police violence occurring across the country, comes at the same time when the Democratic Party is urging the African American electorate to go out in mass to vote for their candidates in local, state and federal elections. Neither the Republican or Democratic Parties are speaking directly to the concerns and interests of the African American people and all other oppressed and working people.
Irrespective of the outcome of the November ballot, if the questions related to racist violence and police brutality are not corrected there can be no genuine peace in the U.S. The Biden administration and other future presidents will continue to look very hypocritical in their attacks on other states and geo-political regions when they cannot provide just, safe and stable living environments for the ever-increasing minority communities in the U.S.
In an Atlanta forest slated for development, an activist movement has built a community — and they’re vowing to defend it by any means necessary
By Jack Crosbie, September 3, 2022
Whatever the excavator driver had in mind for his morning, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t this. It’s not yet 8 a.m. on a Saturday in late July, and he’s dodging rocks and full cans of rosemary-grapefruit seltzer being flung from 20 yards away, and screaming at the impassive DeKalb County cop next to him to intervene. “Pull your gun out!” he yells in desperation. “Pull your gun out!”
The driver is here in Atlanta’s South River Forest on behalf of Ryan Millsap, a real-estate tycoon who’s been granted permission to bulldoze a huge swath of trees and put up a soundstage for the city’s booming film industry — “Hollywood Dystopia,” as the band of masked protesters hurling projectiles have taken to calling it. Millsap’s plans cover 40 acres of parkland on the eastern bank of Intrenchment Creek, which roughly divides a 300-acre pocket of this forest that has become a battleground. On the western side of the creek, the nonprofit Atlanta Police Foundation has laid claim to 85 acres of woods, which the Atlanta City Council voted last September to flatten in order to build a $90 million police- and fire-training complex that’s come to be known as “Cop City.”
What the city didn’t expect was that the land would become home to a band of environmentalists and anarchists, loosely united under the banner Defend the Atlanta Forest, who are combating those plans at every turn. The “decentralized autonomous movement,” as they call themselves, consists of hundreds of local and out-of-state activists, several dozen of whom live full time in these woods, in a ramshackle network of tents and treehouses erected dozens of feet off the forest floor. By day, the group hosts meals procured through donated food and prepared via collective action, as well as teach-ins on resistance tactics and philosophies, skill shares, guided hikes, and other community events. By night, on the weekends, the scene often shifts to musical performances featuring local bands and DJs — a distinctly Atlanta mix of trap, hardcore, and electronica — plus a bar and substances of every sort, a chance to mosh for freedom and dance in defiance.
Incarcerations, brutality, and torture are common in the U.S. Activists claim that this amounts to a war waged against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people.
The very laws and government agencies created to protect the people in the United States are increasingly being weaponized against those who are often marginalized in society: people of color, the poor, and the working class. In just the last few months, there have been many incidents of this kind of violent abuse of power.
On July 28, the state of Alabama performed a “botched” execution on Joe Nathan James Jr., who journalists believe may have suffered medical malpractice akin to “torture” for hours before his death. On August 12, around midnight, a police officer threatened to kill a Black pregnant woman during a traffic stop in Florida. On August 18, far-right-wing Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis announced that 20 formerly incarcerated people would be arrested for the crime of voting, as the U.S. severely restricts the right to vote for the tens of millions of former prisoners. Within the same week, three police officers were captured on video brutally beating a homeless man in Arkansas on August 21.
“We’re in a state of genocidal war,” said former political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim to Peoples Dispatch. Muntaqim was and still is a fighter for Black liberation who spent 49 years in prison, which activists claim was due to his political work as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Alongside the label of political prisoner, Muntaqim also identifies himself as a prisoner of war.
The belief shared by many that the U.S. is at war with a subset of its own people is not a fringe idea. “End the War on Black People” is a policy platform of the Movement for Black Lives, a major organization within the Black Lives Matter movement. “Stop the War on Black America” was a popular slogan in several uprisings against police brutality, from the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 to Amir Locke’s murder in 2022.
In recent months alone, there has been enough evidence to support this belief that the U.S. is waging a war against its people.
Who Polices the Police?
According to the data project Mapping Police Violence, police killed at least 1,144 people in the U.S. in 2021, which is approximately three people per day. Every few weeks there is a police murder that triggers mass outrage, such as the killing of Jayland Walker who was found with more than 60 bullet wounds on his body, or Amir Locke who was killed seconds after waking up, or 15-year-old Brett Rosenau who was burned alive during a botched SWAT-team raid.
Two cases of police brutality have generated outrage most recently. In Florida on August 12, police officer Jason DeSue was driving in his car when he told Ebony Washington, a Black mother who was four months pregnant and driving with her three children, to pull over for speeding. Instead of following instructions immediately, Washington waited until reaching a well-lit area to pull over. “It was dark [and I was] with my kids. I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be able to not have anyone else around,” she said afterward in an interview.
DeSue reacted drastically to Washington’s decision. Body camera footage shows DeSue telling her over loudspeakers, “Pull the vehicle over, or I’ll put you into the ground.” Once Washington did finally pull over, DeSue pulled out his gun. He then handcuffed her roughly despite her pregnancy. DeSue eventually released Washington after giving her a ticket for speeding.
Nino Brown, a longtime activist against police brutality and a fighter for the freedom of political prisoners, said, “That this police officer came at her [Washington] ‘guns blazing’ with his weapon already drawn tells us everything you need to know about how the police treat African Americans in this country: the police operate as a Gestapo force in our communities—they shoot first and ask questions never.”
A video of three Arkansas police officers brutally beating Randall Worcester, taken on August 21, went viral. Despite being the victim of a brutal assault, Worcester was the one charged with “second-degree battery, resisting arrest, refusal to submit, possessing an instrument of crime, criminal trespass, criminal mischief, terroristic threatening and second-degree assault,” according to KARK.
DeSue resigned after drawing scorn for pulling a gun on Washington, and the three officers in Arkansas—Thell Riddle, Levi White, and Zack King—have now been suspended. This is the extent of their accountability thus far, even though some people are demanding criminal charges against the three police officers.
The fact that these officers are facing any punishment at all may be related to the existence of video evidence, which in past cases of police violence, such as in George Floyd’s murder, generated enough outrage to result in police accountability. Without video evidence, police often take charge of the narrative, labeling brutality with insidious neutral terms such as “officer-involved shooting” rather than “police killing.” Before the video of Floyd’s murder was released to the world, the Minneapolis Police Department press release of May 26, 2020 read, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”
Persecution of Prisoners Follows Them to the Grave
There is an untenable double standard of justice for police officers who act with legalized impunity and those they ostensibly protect and serve. Although police rarely face criminal charges for brutality, people who are convicted of a crime, many of whom are racially marginalized and are in deep poverty, are punished mercilessly by the state.
Such is the case for prisoners who face the death penalty, which in the U.S. is most commonly carried out by administering a lethal injection. Although this method appears to be humane, death by lethal injection has been increasingly proven to be a torturous process. As the death penalty comes under more scrutiny, major pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer are banning the use of their drugs in lethal injections. As a result, states such as Alabama are turning to lower-quality medications, like midazolam, which according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, “is not an inappropriate drug to be used for execution purposes.” As Dunham told the Independent, “Studies now show this three-drug process [of lethal injection] is the equivalent to waterboarding, suffocation and being chemically burned at the stake.”
Even beyond the pain and suffering caused by the contents of the lethal injection, corrections departments have botched executions. Journalist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in the Atlantic about how after prisoner Joe Nathan James Jr. was executed using lethal injection, an autopsy revealed that the Alabama Department of Corrections took hours to find an entry point for the injection, torturing James in the process. “My initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex,” Bruenig wrote.
Meanwhile, many of those who were incarcerated at one point may find that their state-sanctioned punishments are not over yet. This was the case for the 20 people, all formerly incarcerated, who were recently arrested in Florida for so-called voter fraud. As NPR reported, however, “According to court documents, though, some of the 20 individuals told law enforcement officials that they thought they were able to vote when they cast ballots.” (In Florida, voting rights were recently restored to felons except those convicted of murder or a sexual offense cannot vote—the latter point cited by Governor DeSantis in response to criticism of the recent disenfranchisement crackdown.) Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Democracy Now that Floridians “are now being dragged from their homes in handcuffs because all they ever wanted to do was participate in democracy.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bragged about the arrests, stating, “Today’s [August 18] actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
A Cruel Double Standard
DeSantis’ words are telling. The so-called “elections crimes” will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and yet there is still no word about criminal charges against officers Jason DeSue, Thell Riddle, Levi White and Zack King for the violent crimes of assault and battery they committed. Meanwhile, despite “cruel and unusual punishment” being prohibited as per the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are enduring torturous executions.
Some argue that torture, execution, imprisonment, and brutality against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people amounts to war. Some, like Muntaqim, have worked to hold the entire U.S. state accountable for genocide, and have sought to question the legitimacy of the laws and agencies governing the people in the United States. Muntaqim said, “It’s important for us to recognize that we, Black people in this country, must seek out other means of survival. Other means of prosperity. Other means from which we can govern ourselves.”
Author Bio: Natalia Marques is a writer at Peoples Dispatch, an organizer, and a graphic designer based in New York City.
Another day and another Black person gets shot dead while in their home while a warrant is being served. The African-American community in Ohio is still mourning the killing of Jaylon Walker, and yet another incident happens to get angry about.
Another day and another Black person gets shot dead while in their home while a warrant is being served. The African-American community in Ohio is still mourning the killing of Jaylon Walker, and yet another incident happens to get angry about.
This following report back and interview, written by folks at Spirit of May 28th, looks at the growing mass struggle to defend the Atlanta forest and stop construction of Cop City and beyond.
The South River Forest (also known as the Weelaunee forest, or the Atlanta forest) is a massive 3,500 acre wooded parkland in Southeast Atlanta. In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprising, local residents are actively defending this land from encroaching dispossession by the police and the film industry. The Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) is bulldozing the forest in order to build an 85 acre police training facility, which would be the largest in the country, and would include a mock city for training in urban policing. Next door, the film production company Shadowbox Studios (formerly Blackhall Studios) seeks to construct an airfield and a soundstage. In response to these developments, a movement known as Defend the Atlanta Forest, as well as coalitions like Stop Cop City, came together to disrupt and ultimately stop the plan to demolish the forest.
Since the first week of action in the Spring of 2021, this movement has grown into a broad, decentralized, mass struggle. Its openness allows for an independence of action which can be taken up by anyone who chooses to pursue the overarching goal of the movement: to stop the demolition of the forest. Anyone who takes the initiative towards this goal is welcome to do so, wherever they may be, and however they may choose to do so. Contractors involved in the plan have been targeted by protesters and vandals not just in Atlanta, but across the country. While for much of civil society there is a strong taboo against illegality and violence in social movements, the struggle to defend the Weelaunee forest has refused to dissociate the peaceful protester from the violent rioter. This flexibility results in a highly complex ecology of struggle, where property destruction, arson, and clashes with police happen alongside music festivals, raves, barbecues, film screenings, all of which are free.
Traveling to Atlanta and living in the Weelaunee forest for the most recent week of action, I was struck by the composition of the movement. You had working-class Atlantans who like to hang out in the forest. New age hippies and music fest kids. Indigo children from the hip hop scene. Queer and trans punks. Insurrectos and veterans of Earth First! Hipster grad students. Ex-frat bros turned anarchist militants. Parents and their kids. And lots of dogs.
“Now Leaving USA”: Arrival and Overview
I ended up parking at what is still considered the parking lot for the South River Trail Intrenchment Creek Trailhead on Google maps. Cretin shit-fucker Ryan Millsap supposedly acquired this land after a controversial land-swap agreement with the Dekalb County government, which gave 40 acres of public land to his film company, Shadowbox Studios. Millsap recently had workers block the entrance to the parking lot with concrete barriers and posted “private property” and “no trespassing” signs there. This parking lot is still used by locals as the entrance to what they consider to be a public park, where they take dogs for walks, ride bikes, go on hikes, and generally escape from the city. Luckily, forest defenders took down the “private property” signs, moved the barriers so that cars could get in, and even replaced the entrance sign that Millsap had taken down with an even better one, which read “Weelaunee People’s Park.”
Driving along the edge of the woods, you could see that forest defenders had barricaded any openings on the perimeter with old logs, spiked branches, used tires, old furniture, and random objects. It was quite a sight. After I parked, and entered the forest, I found what they called “the living room,” where meals were served each day and people tended to gather. From there, I found a spot with some privacy to set up my tent. There were about 150 people camping and living in those woods. Eventually, a friend led me and others deeper into the forest, into what they called “the other side,” the Old Prison Farm part of the land, where the police have a firing range and there is a smashed up, upside down pickup truck with “Defend the Forest” spray painted on it. The walking paths are less visible out there and it is a much more fluid and wild space. This is where the most committed forest defenders live, what we might call the front line. Some of them live in treehouses up to 30 feet above the ground. There were security cameras around here before, but they’ve been dismantled.
source: CrimethInc.
The dialectic between legal, above-ground activity and illegal, underground activity is developed to the point that the line separating the two becomes blurred. Sometimes the forest felt like a warzone, the site of a low scale insurgency, other times it felt like the site of a music festival, or a mutual aid hub, or a place of leisure.
No one is technically supposed to be in the Weelaunee forest right now. The APF has already begun to clear-cut part of it. Ryan Millsap wanted to start cutting down trees by this point, but the forest defenders are forcing him to postpone his plans.
Unlike most activist campaigns, the struggle to defend the Atlanta forest seems to be actually going somewhere. Maybe this is because it avoids many of the common trappings of activism and its endless uniformity. Notably, there was no assembly at the camp to stall the self-development of the movement. This allowed momentum to develop and change organically, although there was still a formal structure for coordination and communication. Every day there were morning meetings in the “living room” where people discussed the logistical needs of the camp, volunteered to get shit done, announced the schedule of that day’s events, and discussed any concerns.
On the way back from the “other side” I come across some old tear gas canisters near the Creek, which I am told is highly polluted and cannot be used for bathing. It was hot as hell, so I had to ask!
Interview with a Forest Defender
Q: Okay, so here we are in the Weelaunee forest of Atlanta. How are you feeling about how everything’s going so far with the fourth week of action?
A: I feel really good about it. There’s been a lot of people who have come from out of town for the first time and of course those who have come multiple times, and there’s been an influx of people from the city and the suburbs who have never been here before, especially because of the music festival.
Q: How would you break down the political-cultural composition of everyone who’s been coming out here? I know it’s very complex, with many different layers…
A: Yeah, so there’s the people who sleep in the woods and many of those people have been involved in land defense before, who want to experiment with new tactics, and who don’t want to be constricted by non-violence. So that’s one layer. But then there are also people who are getting involved in a land defense struggle for the first time, who lived in the city but have now stopped living in their homes, or quit their jobs, or only work a few days a week so that they can be here full-time. And then, there’s a larger layer that I would say I’m a part of, that’s made up of people who live close by, in the city, who are doing stuff inside the forest and outside of the forest. That involves organizing public pressure campaigns, strategy building, running the social media accounts, getting interviews with small and large publications, and making sure that supply runs happen here. And then there’s the autonomous political current, which can overlap with any of these layers.
See, Atlanta doesn’t really have a large institutional Left, because we’re in the deep south. Union membership is and has always been very low. So, the autonomist organizational left is not attached to the unions, nor the non-profits for that matter. Some of them are abolitionists, some of them are mutual aid anarchists, some of them are left-wing black nationalists, and the alphabet soup variety of authoritarian communists have not really involved themselves at all in this struggle, at least locally, from what I can tell. And then there’s the civic organizations, which predate the Defend the Atlanta Forest struggle, but which are about defending the land. Like Stop the Swap coalition, Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, and environmental civic groups like the South River Watershed Alliance and the South River Forest Coalition. These people use legal means through the court system and conduct folk history tours through the forest. And then, there’s all of the people who live outside of the city, who come in for the weeks of action and who have started to organize in their own locales around this and around other city-based land defense struggles, such as in Chicago where green space is going to be turned into the Tiger Woods golf course. And in Lincoln, Nebraska people connected it to an indigenous land defense struggle inside the city there.
Q: I wonder if more people will see what’s happening here as a kind of light post to help frame what they are doing in their own cities and towns.
A: Yes, I mean, until mass scale riots are happening again, that makes sense. This seems to be the largest land defense struggle happening in the US right now. From the autonomous, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian side of things, this would seem to be the light post, or the horizon for what’s possible when mass revolt is not happening.
Q: Right, the way I’ve thought about it is that this is the closest struggle happening right now that can help prepare us for the next large upsurge. Do y’all think about what’s happening here in relation to future uprisings?
A: Definitely. I know that the people who come here for weeks of action, or for an indeterminate amount of time, end up meeting people from other cities and end up forming connections with each other. So, networks of partisans are being built that will be able to share lessons learned over the years in other struggles and in this struggle. The organization and the affinities developed in the forest can be reapplied in the coming uprisings.
Q: Yes. And also, to what extent do you think the George Floyd uprising contributed to this struggle in Atlanta and gave it its political contours?
A: One of the first things that happened publicly to kick off the Defend the Atlanta Forest struggle in the mid to late spring of 2021 was a public barbecue that like 200 people attended. The next day there was a communique that stated that people had gone to a nearby site – 40 acres of clear-cut forest that they want to call Michelle Obama Park – people had gone there at night and set construction vehicles on fire. And no one who was involved in what was at that point a small movement condemned it. And no one has. Since then, there’s probably been 30 arsons (I’ve lost track) and countless other acts of sabotage. What’s striking is that none of this has been condemned by the wider movement, and I don’t think that would have been the case before the George Floyd uprising.
Without the burning of the Third Precinct and the hundreds of instances of property destruction and arson across the continent in 2020, these tactics would have been condemned. Someone in the movement would have been like, “That’s not okay!” I think the last time that arson was heavily featured in environmental struggles was in the mid-2000s before the Green Scare, and also in Standing Rock, but those instances were contentious. Today, it is not.
Right.
A: The normalization of those tactics during the George Floyd uprising allows what’s happening now to be possible.
Q: Even from more moderate activists, there’s no problem with the more rowdy, illegal tactics?
A: There’s no problem at all.
Wow.
A: The civic organizations haven’t denounced it at all. The autonomist left organizations haven’t denounced it. Perhaps the do-it-yourself style of the tactics has created a situation where the non-profit industrial complex and the authoritarian socialists do not want to involve themselves in this struggle. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been a problem, because those people are just not involved. We want as many groups and people as possible to be involved in order to create the chaotic flux, but those sorts of groups don’t get involved in chaotic flux. If that’s what keeps them at bay, then good.
Q: Totally. Okay, so there’s been no narrative about “outside agitators” within the movement?
A: Only from the police, and their mouth-piece, theAtlanta Journal Constitution, which is supposed to be Georgia’s paper of record, but it’s owned by Cox media, which is one of the funders of the Atlanta Police Foundation. They and the local news stations have pushed outside agitator narratives. And one of the members of the civic organization Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm got on the news and was asked directly, “What do you think of people coming here from out of town?” And he was like, “That’s great! We need as many people as possible and it’s amazing that they care so much about the forest that they would come here.”
Q: Given the way things have gone down this week, are you worried about repression this weekend, especially with this big music festival? I mean, there was already one music festival on Saturday with Raury, and some cops came by and didn’t do shit.
A: Yeah, a small group of about twenty people were able to get them to leave.
Q: Right, so how are you feeling about the potential for repression now?
A: There has been a pattern. Cops tend to come into the Old Prison Farm side to do scouting on Tuesdays and that’s when people go up in their tree houses. After the last week of action, they did a raid on a Tuesday, with over a hundred police officers. And that’s when two Molotov cocktails got thrown at them, allegedly. So we are anticipating some repressive operation next week, immediately following the week of action, because when we don’t have the numbers anymore, they try to come straight at us. So yeah, we anticipate that. Last time, the police were able to move in and destroy all but one treehouse. But it’s been two months since then, and now there’s even more treehouses than there used to be. So, part of it is just knowing that the structures of land defense don’t have to be permanent.
Right.
A: What I’m most worried about, for the short and medium term, is keeping Intrenchment Creek Park a public park and keeping the parking lot open and accessible to the public. This is crucial because a big part of the fight is about having a space where the general public can come in and out of here at any time. This gives the forest defenders a buffer against police repression. Or else we would have to shift to a more traditional type of land defense situation where it’s just you and the cops (and the workers).
Q: Do you think the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has a strategy for counter-insurgency, that is, for co-optation and working with protesters? Do they ever try to deescalate the situation through a “community-centered” approach?
A: I have a few thoughts on this. One, they only ever give comments in news articles and try to control the media narrative through the Atlanta Journal Constitution and through the local T.V. stations. Whereas our side has been featured in the Guardian, in Vice, in the New Yorker, and in other national and international news outlets. And the APD and the APF never comment. So they’ve ceded the non-local media to the movement. They don’t even try. In terms of de-escalation, I don’t think they’re trying to do that. To a certain extent APD does make attempts at community policing, or used to a lot more, but since 2020 that’s really changed. Like, until the police precinct was burned in Minneapolis, and the riots spread to Atlanta the next day, the police had not used teargas against protesters in Atlanta since the late sixties. But the mask came off the first day of the uprising in Atlanta. And after Rashard Brooks was murdered and the two cops who murdered him were fired and charged (they’ve since been rehired) there was a Blue Flue, a police sick out strike, and since then over two hundred cops have quit. APD is supposed to have 1,600 cops and they only have 1,200 right now. So they are a demoralized police force, they have that “no one loves us” mentality. Police usually fear people, but now they’re also just mad at people because they think that no one appreciates or respects them.
Right.
A: With Ryan Millsap from Shadowbox Studios putting up the barricades and private property signs at the Intrenchment Creek parking lot – and those were removed by forest defenders within a few days – I think with those tactics they’re trying to isolate the movement, like materially and structurally. But I don’t think they have a strategy for stopping the movement from gaining more cultural headway in the city, in the suburbs, and around the country.
After the last week of action they tried to start work, for two weeks they tried to put in silt fences to prevent the erosion that comes from flooding, which is exacerbated by cutting down trees. Out of two weeks of trying to do that, they accomplished less than two days of work, just from there being several dozens of people telling them to leave. They claim they want to start work in two to six weeks. I’m interested to see if they will be able to do that. Cuz there’s only so many police that APD and Dekalb County PD can send here when they also have to police society in general. At the most, they’ve only been able to muster around a hundred cops at a time when they try to come into the forest, but they can’t keep them there permanently.
And if the public pressure campaign can get the construction companies to back out, then that just delays their process even more. We’ve already caused delays by getting Reeves Young to drop his contract, we delayed the silt fencing from being installed, we delayed the project itself from being passed by city council for three months. We’ve caused a lot of delays to this project. This project has been talked about somewhat publicly since 2017 and our understanding is that they wanted to start it by late last year, and that clearly hasn’t happened yet. So they are more than half a year behind their original goal.
Q: Having been here for the first week of action, and seeing how it’s grown and taken off, it’s very inspiring. Any last words for people who aren’t here?
A: Come to Atlanta to defend the forest. If you can’t come, host an info night, the presentation we use will be made public, go to stopreevesyoung.com and see if there are companies that are trying to destroy this place in your city, and if they are, put some pressure on them to stop.
Word.
A: And fuck 12.
Epilogue
I wake up in the morning to distant gunshots from the nearby police firing range. A daily occurrence. There were also gun shots a couple nights before, but those were from a security guard who got scared and shot into the air after some people threw rocks at his van as he tried to replace a security camera in the forest.
A week of living in the woods was starting to take its toll on a city boy like me. My leg was covered in rashes from poison ivy, the sliced bread I brought to snack on had gotten moldy, and I was tired of sweating all the time. I had gotten an interview I felt good about, so I decided to call it quits.
After I hit the road, I heard that Ryan Millsap and his dickhead neighbor Anthony Wayne James came with an excavator to destroy a gazebo in the parking lot (while people were still inside of it). They came with a few cops to back them up, managed to dent the roof and smash part of the sidewalk, but people laid down in front of the excavator, and drove their attackers back with rocks, cans of sparkling water, and other projectiles, forcing them to leave the parking lot and abandon the truck that was used to carry the excavator. The truck was then thoroughly smashed, while a barricade was erected to prevent the enemy from reentering the parking lot. After his initial retreat, Anthony Wayne James reappeared, threatened to shoot all the forest defenders, and repeatedly motioned as if he had a gun. Undeterred, forest defenders held the barricades and drove this goon to the end of the block, along with the police and the cowardly Ryan Millsap, who sat in his car the whole time. The truck in the parking lot was then set on fire.
“Fuck around and find out, Ryan.”
From what I hear, even after all that, with the burned out truck smoldering in the parking lot, hundreds of people still came for the music festival that evening, the last night of the week of action.
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