Cincinnati Socialists Statement on Cop City
On June 8, agents of the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided Teardown House, a well-known center for popular agitation against gentrification and state violence in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood. Heavily armed cops arrested three organizers—Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson—of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a group that provides bail and legal support for Atlanta activists. Recently, the ASF has been working to support the massive public resistance to so-called Cop City, a military training base for cops to be erected in southwest DeKalb County.
These three organizers were arrested under the pretext that, by soliciting funds for bail support, they were engaging in money laundering. Setting aside the questionable constitutionality of statutes criminalizing bail solidarity, it seems clear that the charges in this case were no more than cynical attempts at intimidating the Atlanta activist community. As the Intercept’s Natasha Lennard wrote,
[I]f any established legal standards and precedents are upheld in these cases, no financial crimes or money-laundering charges will stick. Yet even unsuccessful malicious prosecutions exact a painful toll on movements, especially when a resource hub like the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is targeted.
Police in Georgia know that the Cop City police training complex is unpopular. They are aware of the worldwide anger over the police murder of Cop City activist Manuel Paez Terán earlier this year. In response to the people’s legitimate outrage, Georgia and Altlanta police have unleashed a wave of state terror against their own citizens, hoping that through sheer brutality and mayhem, they can suppress any organized expression of the popular will.
As a Marxist organization, Cincinnati Socialists points out that the events in Atlanta confirm the increasingly obvious fact that the capitalist state is at war with the broad masses of people, and that the people need a new kind of state—a workers’ state—that will defend and cultivate the common good instead of violently upholding the privileges of the ruling class. We stand in unequivocal solidarity with the people of Atlanta and with the defenders of the Atlanta Forest. We call on all working and oppressed people, along with all socialist and communist organizations, to monitor the events in Atlanta closely and to announce publicly their opposition to Cop City. Cincinnati Socialists demands justice for Manuel Paez Terán. We demand that the trumped-up charges against Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson be dismissed immediately. We demand that work on Cop City be halted and that the project be permanently abandoned.