#cop city referendum

[everlastingrandom]

we interrupt shitposting for irl news

I've been doing some freelance journalism this summer and I recently wrote up a Q+A for Teen Vogue about the epic highs and lows of the ongoing Atlanta Cop City movement

Consider following my Journalist Twitter for more (it is highly localized to Atlanta, but I share stuff about the trump indictment, wga/sag-aftra protests, and articles that i think are neat)

[deermouth]

Local elections today in my state... I do feel like voting in these can occasionally mean something, so *walks to my local UU church*

[thatsleepymermaid]

(via @southriverforest on Instagram)

The City of Atlanta is refusing to count the 116k signatures on the Cop City Referendum petition, denying Atlanta citizens the right to vote on Cop City and the destruction of Weelaunee forest. On Monday, February 5th 2024 Atlanta will be voting on an ordinance for making referendum a clear and fair practice

If you can make it to Atlanta or if you're registered to vote, please show up and vote yes on Ordinance 34482.

[hedgehog-moss]

Update on May 1st protests and how the french goverment handled them?

^ The May 1st protests were pretty violent esp. in Paris; two cops were set on fire (they're ok, one has 2nd degree burns), lots of destruction in city streets, and hundreds of injured protesters. The French gov is sticking to its M.O. of denying any police violence against protesters, emphasising protesters' violence and portraying it as mindless anti-democratic savagery rather than the result of their own anti-democratic policies.

There were more people protesting in the streets on Monday than at any other May Day protest in the past 20 years (by a large margin—7 to 10x more people than usual.) And the numbers are still impressive in terms of this current social movement—there were about 1.2 million people at the first protest against the pension reform in January, 900K at one of the February protests, around 1.1M on March 7 and I think 1.2M on March 23rd... We're in May and there were 800K people in the streets on Monday (using the police's probably low estimate). The first marches earlier this year were peaceful; people started destroying shit in March after the 49.3 (=the gov not letting elected representatives vote on the reform); in the following weeks we saw a brutal escalation of police violence + suppression of just about any means of non-violent protest, which results in more violence.

The vast majority of protesters are still peaceful, but in terms of providing context for the increased violence, well—people protested peacefully, peaceful protests got banned. People banged pots and pans, pots and pans got banned and confiscated. People started a petition on the National Assembly website which got a record number of signatures, the petition was closed before its deadline and ignored. MPs asked (twice!) for a national referendum on the reform to be held, their requests were denied. Electricity unionists cut power in buildings Macron was visiting, now he travels around with a portable generator. Unions tried to distribute whistles and red cards (penalty cards) to football supporters before the French Cup finale last week, so the ones who wanted could use them if Macron showed up (he ended up hiding and greeting the footballers indoors rather than publicly on the stadium lawn); the police prefecture tried banning union members from gathering outside the stadium to distribute these items (although the ban was struck down by the judiciary as it was illegal, like most bans these days...)

Confiscating saucepans was already so absurd it felt like a gratuitous fuck you, but now they're trying to prevent the distribution of pieces of red paper. Cancelling petitions that would have had no real impact anyway. Prosecuting people for insulting Macron. Arbitrarily arresting hundreds of nonviolent protesters to intimidate them out of protesting (guess who's left then?). The French gov is systematically repressing democratic or nonviolent means of making your opinion heard, and when people get more violent they're like "This is unacceptable, don't these terrorists know there are other means of expressing dissent??" Where? This week a 77-year-old man was summoned to the police station and will be forced to take a "citizenship course" for having a banner outside his house that read "Macron fuck you" (Macron on t'emmerde). Note that he would have been arrested (like the woman who was arrested at her home and spent a night in police custody for calling Macron "garbage" on Facebook) but they decided not to only because of his age.

So that's where we're at; on Monday two cops caught on fire (well, their fireproof suit did) after protesters threw a Molotov cocktail at them. (The street medic who tried to help them with their burns ended up getting shot by a cop's riot gun a few seconds later—with French police no good deed goes unpunished!) The media talked a lot more about this incident than about the fact that the cop who got most severely injured on that day (broken vertebrae) was injured by an explosive grenade that a colleague of his meant to throw at protesters (you can see it at the end of the video below). If police with all their protective gear get so badly injured by their own weapons, no wonder the worst injuries have been on the protesters' side. (nearly 600 injured protesters on May 1st, 120 severely, according to street medics.) I'm not including images of these incidents in the video but on May 1st a protester had his hand mutilated by a police grenade + a 17 year old girl was hit in the eye by a grenade fragment, may end up losing it (during the Yellow Vests protests, Macron's first attempt at repressing a social movement, 38 protesters lost an eye or a hand).

What you see in the video: cops charging the front of a march to tear a banner off people's hands then retreating and drowning the street in tear gas when protesters throw paint bombs at them (protesters have umbrellas because of police drones); at 0:30, a journalist saying "They're not even arresting him, just kicking him when he's down—they kicked him right in the face!" then police spraying with tear gas protesters who try to fend them off; at 0:46 when a protester being arrested asks a journalist if he's filming and starts reading out loud a cop's ID number, another cop shoves the journalist and throws him to the ground; at 0:54, an Irish journalist runs away from the police tear gas grenades that you hear going off, at 01:08, the incident mentioned above when a cop drops a grenade he tried to throw, which explodes in his group, breaking another cop's vertebrae. There's a lot more I'm not including, like how CNN said "there's so much tear gas in Paris, our foreign correspondent can barely breathe", how another journalist was hit by a sting-ball grenade (he was also bludgeoned on the head so hard it broke his helmet—even though cops know the people wearing helmets are journalists...), and yet another journalist who was calling out a cop for aiming at people's heads with his riot gun (which is illegal) ended up having the guy aim the riot gun at his head from 2 metres away (getting shot with this "less lethal weapon" from that distance would be lethal.)

All of these videos are from May 1st (most of them from this account monitoring police violence.)

So yeah, nonviolent protests followed by violent police repression and bans of nonviolent means of protesting result in more violent protests. The French government responds by a) pikachu surpris, b) condemning violent protesters and praising violent police to the skies, c) continuing to ban everything they can think of. Confiscating saucepans didn't work but confiscating pieces of red paper will do the trick! Let's prosecute people for bashing or burning an effigy of Macron, because banning symbolic violence always works to prevent actual violence! And this week after the May 1st protests we learnt that the gov is thinking of making street barricades illegal, because that'll definitely solve everything. It's going to be interesting for history teachers to teach students about the 1789 revolution that allowed us to take down an absolutist regime and become a republic, under a government that banned barricades because they see them as terrorist anti-republican structures.

^ Statue symbolising the French Republic (on Place de la République in Paris) dressed with a 'Macron resign' shirt by protesters on May 1st.

[yellowhoothoot]

if you're in the city of atlanta a petition to get a referendum about cop city on the ballot in november was just approved, go sign it

https://www.copcityvote.com/petition

[catdotjpeg]

[Image ID: A large group of people are gathered in protest on a sidewalk. A purple banner reading “Stop Cop City” is centered in the front of the photo. End ID.] 

A broad coalition of groups in Atlanta has launched a referendum to give voters a chance to say whether they want the controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” built in a forest south-east of the city.

The effort requires organizers to collect about 70,000 signatures from Atlanta registered voters in 60 days. Then the question of the city canceling its agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the $90m center can be added to municipal election ballots in November.

The push comes after an estimated thousand people who showed up at City Hall on 5 June proved insufficient to stop Atlanta’s city council from approving about $67m for Cop City. Meanwhile, machines have already begun clear-cutting trees on the project’s 171-acre footprint in South River Forest.

The referendum faces what one organizer called “an atmosphere of repression” – including two activists being charged with felonies last week while putting up fliers, bringing total arrests since December to 50.

The largest group of arrests, on 5 March in a public park in the forest near where the project is planned, was followed by local government closing the park, in effect shutting off tree-sitting protests by “forest defenders” that had gone on for more than a year.

“We’re at the stage where they’ve pushed people out of the forest, they’ve arrested people … they’ve fenced off the forest, they’ve even begun clear-cutting,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of local group Community Movement Builders. “We’re at the stage where the most direct, legal mechanism to stop this project is by referendum.” [...]

...the movement opposing the project has drawn a wide range of people locally, nationally and internationally who oppose police militarization, urban forest destruction amid climate change and environmental racism. Most residents in neighborhoods surrounding the forest are Black.

Most of the organizations driving the referendum are also Black-led, including the regional chapter of Working Families Power, Black Voters Matter and the NAACP. Officials from the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, down to the mayor have consistently referred to opposition against the center as the work of white “outsiders”.

“That narrative is false,” said Britney Whaley, regional director of Working Families Power. “This has been national, but it’s also been community-grown for a few years now.”

Ashley Dixon, an Atlanta-area organizer, has led canvassing efforts to inform neighborhoods around South River Forest about the center for nearly a year. Her team has spoken to more than a thousand people. About 80% opposed the project once they knew about it, she said.

The only academic poll on the issue to date, from Atlanta’s Emory University, showed slightly more Black respondents opposed the project than supported it, with the opposite being true for whites. Atlanta’s population is 48% Black.

The idea for the referendum came from one that succeeded in stopping a spaceport from being built in coastal Georgia, said Will Harlan, founder of Forest Keeper, a national forest conservation organization. “To me, Cop City is the most important issue in conservation in the south-east,” Harlan said. “A referendum is the smartest, most democratic solution … [and] a way to find resolution and closure.”

Although the 2022 spaceport referendum affected a county of only 55,000 people, similarities between the two controversies point to the role voters can play when other efforts fall short.

In that case, local officials “dug their heels in” and stopped responding to press requests or providing transparent information to the public, said Megan Desrosiers, who led the referendum. In the case of Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation has stopped answering press requests for at least a year, and the city of Atlanta was recently discovered to be understating the project’s cost to taxpayers by about $36m.

The project is planned on land the city owns that is located in neighboring DeKalb county. Because of Atlanta’s ownership, only Atlanta voters can participate in the referendum. [...]

Organizers of the Cop City referendum pointed to the state’s heavy-handed approach to protesters as a primary concern. There have been 42 domestic terrorism charges to date. A bail and legal defense fund’s members were also arrested and the state added fundraising to its criminal description of the training center’s opposition.

In that context, it took about a dozen attempts at finding a legally required fiscal sponsor for the referendum, which may need as much as $3.5m to reach success, said spokesperson Paul Glaze.

Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter – one of two organizations that agreed to take the sponsorship role – said the recent Atlanta Solidarity Fund arrests were done “to send a message, in hopes it would have a chilling effect. We’re not naive about what the threats are – but we believe our community cares about this issue.”

-- From “Activists push for referendum to put ‘Cop City’ on ballot in Atlanta” by Timothy Pratt for The Guardian, 16 Jun 2023 

[tomorrowusa]

Trump is promising to be a dictator and his supporters are expressing support for crimes against humanity committed by the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Three years ago, the Intercept published an illuminating article about the rise of the “Hoppean snake” among far-right extremists, a meme which the Intercept labelled especially “disturbing for its frightening historical reference”. For the uninitiated, the Hoppean Snake in its various forms usually depicts a serpent wearing the military hat of the American-backed Chilean dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet in the foreground while figures are dropping out of helicopters to their death in the background. The meme specifically refers to Pinochet’s known strategy of kidnapping, torturing, killing, and – here’s the point – throwing his political opponents out of helicopters and into the ocean to dispose of them. The Intercept noted that many groups and individuals on the far right, such as the “Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer ‘free helicopter rides’.” and when they do so, “they are referencing a program of extermination.” It’s alarming to see such rhetoric from the far-right fringes; imagine seeing this kind of political violence being advocated by a sitting politician or someone seeking the highest office in the land. Well, you don’t have to imagine it any more. Last week, the Republican congressman Mike Collins of Georgia did just that. On Twitter/X,, Collins commented on a widely circulated picture of Jhoan Boada, a man who was recently arrested for allegedly assaulting two police officers in New York City outside a migrant shelter. Boada was one of seven men arrested, and multiple reports refer to him as a “migrant”. After leaving court, Boada was photographed raising his two middle fingers to reporters as he walked away. The picture prompted Republican congressman Anthony D’Esposito of New York to offer the racist riposte: “We feel the same way about you. Holla at the cartels and have them escort you back.” Collins then joined in. “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back,” he wrote. As HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias, who covers the far right, put it on X: “So we have a congressman joking or not joking about extrajudicially executing a migrant arrested for a crime (allegedly assaulting a cop) that tons of non-migrant citizens get arrested for too.” Mathias also notes that the “free helicopter ride” meme has been popular with white supremacists and neo-fascists for about the last seven years. [ ... ] Jews, Muslims, immigrants – everything is a threat. Violence is the solution. Opponents should be assassinated. Fascists are role models. Welcome to the Republican party in the year 2024.

Pinochet was a general who seized power in Chile in 1973. Very likely he had backing from the Nixon administration which was in the midst of Watergate. Pinochet immediately set about torturing and murdering his opponents. He remained in power until 1990 when he lost a referendum on whether he should remain as dictator. He actually expected to win that referendum or he wouldn't have held it; such is the self-delusion of the far right.

Once a dictator comes to power, there are few controls over when he or she leaves. People should believe Trump and his lickspittles when they talk dictatorship.

Snooty ideological purists who condone voting for impotent third parties or sitting out the 2024 election should be publicly scorned.

If Biden wins then you know there will be a free and fair election in 2028. If Trump wins, the best you can expect is a Russia-style election where Putin chooses who his opponents will be.

NOTE: Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who made that racist reply to Rep. Mike Collins, represents NY-04 which is a swing seat south of NY-03 which was formerly represented by fabulist George Santos. NY-04 has a Cook Partisan Voter Index of D+5; Joe Biden got 56.8% of the vote there. So in case you need it, here's the site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Join Our Campaign to Defeat Trump's Republican Agenda

[readingsquotes]

The Atlanta, Georgia activists organizing against the police and fire training facility known as Cop City are up against some powerful forces: the police industrial complex, government leadership, $90 million in funding, and the uniquely American commitments to demolish the environment, encroach on sacred Native American land, and further militarize the police. 

And make no mistake: city officials are deeply committed to pushing the 85-acre facility through on behalf of the Atlanta Police Foundation. Despite strident opposition from community members and a price tag that is now double what was originally proposed in 2021, after 14 hours of public testimony largely condemning Cop City on June 6, city council members voted 11-4 to approve $67 million toward the project. 

After the city council’s vote, organizers announced a petition drive to gather 70,000 signatures that would enable them to add a referendum on the November ballot, allowing voters to repeal the ordinance that authorized the lease of the city-owned land that would house Cop City. Organizers originally had until August 14 to gather the signatures, but late last month, U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen extended the deadline to late September. As of July 25, Paul Glaze, a spokesperson for the Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition, told the Associated Press that organizers have gathered more than 30,000 signatures.

In return, the state has used the full force of its power against organizers. On May 31, Atlanta police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested three activists with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, an organization that for seven years has provided jail support, bail, and access to legal representation to protesters experiencing repression—including those fighting to oppose Cop City. The activists were released on bond a couple of days later, but not without first being charged with “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”

[fancylala4]

“If a republican wins the presidency, we will lose our rights and america will become a police state!”

I guess you haven’t heard that they are building a cop city in Atlanta, where most of the public officials are democrats. A city that no one wants and the democrats blocked a referendum on the matter.

Also, you should see places like New York where most of the public officials are democrats and are just as bad as the republicans.

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: stop cop city

Atlanta’s “Stop Cop City” Movement Is Youth-Led Democracy in Action (Nov 2023, The Nation)

In July, the Georgia State University Student Government Association passed a resolution opposing Atlanta’s proposed “Public Safety Training Center”—also known as Cop City—to be constructed on 85-acres of land outside of city limits.

According to Ramirez, the ties between the university and the Atlanta Police Foundation further pushed students to act. “Approximately 20 faculty members and GSUPD personnel were identified as APF donors. Notably, GSU’s non-profit entity, The Georgia State Foundation, was also listed as a donor,” said Ramirez, citing documents obtained under the Georgia Open Records Act. “As an institution that prides itself on high Black student graduation rates and one of the most diverse student bodies in the country,” reads a statement from the GSU Student Coalition Against Policing & Militarism, “GSU’s participation in prison industrial complex expansion raises concerns.”

Mutual Aid and the movement to Stop Cop City  (Oct 2023, Shareable)

On August 29, 2023, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr filed an indictment against 61 members of the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City. The indictment alleges a vast criminal conspiracy on the part of the activists, weaving them together in a legal scheme so fantastical that one of the accused is cited for being reimbursed for Elmer’s Glue.

It’s a patchwork case with Carr — the announced 2026 Georgia gubernatorial candidate — creating a veritable Charlotte’s Web; scrawling words in the web in a desperate ploy for attention. Unfortunately, it also represents a brazen assault on social justice organizers reminiscent of the FBI’s surveillance and attacks on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s and 70s.

In order to justify the harsh charges, each carrying up to 25 years in prison, Carr attempts to link the protestors together based on their shared commitments to collective welfare and mutual aid. In other words, the State of Georgia is currently arguing that participation in mutual aid projects and practicing solidarity constitutes furthering a criminal conspiracy. If Carr is going to try to make a twisted image of mutual aid tantamount to terrorism, we should all get clear on what mutual aid really is.

How We’ll Know if Stop Cop City Won (Summer 2023, Hammer & Hope)

After the Atlanta City Council coldly rejected 15 hours of public comment against Cop City on June 6, a coalition of electoral groups and abolitionist mainstays announced a referendum campaign to bring the question of Cop City to the ballot citywide. Theoretically, if we are able to collect 58,203 verified signatures from Atlanta residents (representing 15 percent of registered voters), the people of Atlanta will get to decide whether or not the Atlanta Police Foundation can keep its lease for the South River Forest. On August 21, the coalition announced that it had collected 104,000 signatures — for scale, current Mayor Andre Dickens garnered only a little over 50,000 votes in the last election — but would continue the signature drive through September to ensure that the city’s onerous signature verification process does not invalidate so many that the threshold isn’t met. Still, it’s a risky strategy: the city could stall the vote long enough to build the facility. We could make it on the ballot and lose. And if we lose in these ways, what will endure?

A Weapon by the State to Silence Our Voices (Apr 2023, Bolts Mag)

The Cop City arrests near Atlanta show how a buildup of "critical infrastructure" laws across the country threatens to quell protests for environmental justice and police accountability.

[thatsleepymermaid]

On Monday, February 5th 2024 the Atlanta City Council voted to adopt a ordinance for signature match for referendum petitions. It's already difficult for referendum petitions in Atlanta since you have to be in person with a witness AND have been registered to vote in the last mayoral race. Now, on top of all that, your signatures have to be verified and an exact match.

This is despicable and makes it almost impossible to pass anything through referendum to ballot. With SB 63 essentially banning bail funds and not allowing anyone to bail someone out more than three times it basically makes it impossible to protest lest you be arrested and not be able to gain bail.

Be assured, Cop City will never be built. We'll keep fighting and writing. It ain't over until the Citizens of Atlanta say it's over!

[trashbirdthoughts]

Watch the video!

If you are living in Atlanta and are a resident please go vote and get this referendum added. You can outright get this project stopped.

People need to know this so it can get added to the 2024 ballot. Then it goes to a vote. If we know anything from the 15 hour hearing, PEOPLE DO NOT WANT THIS.

Fuck Cop City.

[progressivepower]

Voting Rights Groups Condemn Atlanta’s Verification Process for Cop City Referendum. On Monday, more than 25 of the leading voting rights groups in Georgia—including Fair Fight Action and New Georgia Project, both founded by former Georgia state... https://t.co/V5YIcc4Pre http://dlvr.it/Sv4cZP

[beardedmrbean]

ATLANTA (AP) — Activists announced an effort Wednesday to force a referendum that would allow Atlanta voters to decide whether the construction of a proposed police and firefighter training center should proceed, in a potential last-ditch effort to halt the project that its opponents refer to as “Cop City.”

A day after the City Council rejected protesters' pleas to refuse to fund the police and firefighter training facility, the activists returned to City Hall to file a referendum petition, hoping to take the fight to the ballot box. Under the proposed referendum, voters would choose whether they want to repeal the ordinance that authorized the lease of the city-owned land upon which the project is being built.

In order for the language to get on the ballot, though, organizers must first gather the signatures of more than 70,000 Atlanta voters over 60 days once the city clerk approves the petition. They would also have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay canvassers to help them do that.

“The exciting thing about the referendum is that it’s a silver bullet,” said Alex Joseph, a local attorney who is helping to lead the legal effort. “If we win, it shuts down the project.”

Joseph said the campaign is modeled after a successful effort in coastal Georgia, where Camden County residents voted overwhelmingly last year to block county officials from building a launchpad for blasting commercial rockets into space.

The Georgia Supreme Court in February unanimously upheld the legality of the Camden County referendum, though it remains an open question whether citizens can veto decisions of city governments.

Opponents of the proposed training center say they need to gather the signatures of 15% of the approximately 469,000 city residents who were registered to vote in the last election, which would be 70,330 signatures. Among the groups backing the effort are the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Working Families Party.

Construction crews have already begun clearing wide swaths of the overgrown, urban forest in unincorporated DeKalb County ahead of the planned construction of the 85-acre (34-hectare) campus. Project opponents said they plan to seek a court order to halt the work pending the outcome of their proposed referendum.

City officials say the $90 million facility would replace inadequate training facilities and would help address difficulties in hiring and retaining police officers that worsened after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice three years ago.

But opponents, who have been joined by activists from around the country, say they fear it will lead to greater militarization of the police and that its construction will exacerbate environmental damage in a poor, majority-Black area.

The “Stop Cop City” effort has gone on for more than two years and at times has veered into vandalism and violence, with protesters having been accused of throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers.

More than 350 people signed up Monday to deliver impassioned speeches against the facility, with testimony inside the City Council chamber lasting so long — more than 14 hours — that the 11-4 vote in favor of funding the facility did not take place until around 5:30 a.m. the next morning.

Having been unable to convince the council to halt the project, Joseph said it’s time for activists to make the case to the larger public.

“Hundreds of us have spoken and yet (city officials) have moved forward with this project,” Joseph said. “To me, in the face of being ignored like that, this calls for direct democracy.”

As approved by the City Council in September 2021, the land is being leased to the private Atlanta Police Foundation for $10 a year. The proposed referendum would seek to cancel that agreement.

Atlanta native and local organizer Clara Totenberg Green said gathering enough signatures in time will be difficult, but she thinks it's doable.

“There are hundreds, thousands of folks that are mobilized and ready to act," Green said. "We can absolutely get the signatures. The challenge is the fast turnaround, but we can do it. People are ready.”