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police violence
The Conversation Black Parents Perfected—That All Families Now Need
Recent violent and fatal encounters involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have forced families across lines of race, ethnicity, and immigration status to confront the reality of their precarious existence in America—and start talking to their children about how to stay safe.
Feb 28, 2026
It is 1955 and the hot Mississippi sun is blazing overhead. Miles away in Chicago a Black mother is having a conversation with her 14-year-old son. She tries to impress upon him the often subtle but dangerous realities of what it means to be Black in America, and how one misinterpretation, one lie, could result in his death. That boy is Emmett Till, and in her memoir, Death of Innocence, Mamie Till-Mobley reflects on “The Talk” she delivered to her son before his historically tragic trip to Mississippi.
This version of The Talk dates back to American chattel slavery and has been passed down for generations in Black families, shaped by ongoing racial violence and unequal treatment. But recent violent and fatal encounters involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have forced families across lines of race, ethnicity, and immigration status to confront the reality of their precarious existence in America—and start talking to their children about how to stay safe. Black families’ experience on how to have these conversations is now, tragically, something many families can learn from.
The Talk has always carried more than one meaning. For many families, it refers to the conversation about the birds and the bees, the discussion parents have with their children about dating, puberty, and sex in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. That version of The Talk is often framed as universal.
But for Black families, The Talk has long meant something entirely different. In addition to conversations about puberty, Black parents have used The Talk to prepare their children for the realities of race and how to stay safe in a society shaped by racism.
In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation.
Both conversations typically happen around the onset of puberty, but only some families have had the privilege of needing just one version of The Talk. In a 2024 study conducted by Dr. Conial Caldwell, Black fathers reflected on whether other communities also have The Talk. The consensus was clear: Some groups have long had the luxury of avoiding it, while others have their own versions shaped by identity, history, and perceived vulnerability. However, that distinction is beginning to blur.
Because of recent ICE actions, many immigrant and mixed-status families are foregoing everyday liberties out of fear, like grocery shopping and going to work. In Connecticut, Minneapolis, and other locations school attendance stymied by ICE-related anxiety is widespread. Recent deaths linked to encounters with federal immigration enforcement, including those of Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Preti in Minnesota, have sparked national outrage and renewed scrutiny of ICE’s training practices, accountability, and use of force, including against white Americans. These incidents follow the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by ICE agents, showing that not even young children are safe.
Families who once felt insulated from normalized and state sanctioned violence against Black Americans, are now asking the same questions Black parents have asked for generations: How do we keep our children safe? How do we prepare them for interactions with law enforcement? What do we say and when?
The fathers in Caldwell’s study offered simple but powerful guidance.
Parents should have The Talk early and revisit it often, adjusting the conversation as children grow. As children grow and become part of new environments outside of the home, so too do the risks of danger increase. Parents’ protective conversations should reflect their children’s developmental stage and level of maturity. At the same time, they should be mindful of social media and television, recognizing that children are exposed to images and narratives that shape their understanding of safety and belonging. Social media has become of one the major spaces of youth interactions; thus, the risk of exposure is not only heighted but as consistent as their internet access. Beyond one’s immediate family, communities must work together to protect all children, not just their own. And children must be consistently reminded that their lives have value, regardless of how they look or where they come from.
From chattel slavery to emancipation, from reconstruction and the civil rights period to post civil rights, The Talk has had to respond to harsh prevailing societal realities for Black Americans. In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation. So, just as Mamie Till-Mobley may have agonized over her words as she gave her son some of her final attempts at guidance and protection, parents across the USA are weighing their words and conversations in their attempts to safeguard their children.
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You Can’t Train Away ICE’s Terror
Investments toward a more trained immigration force will only uphold and legitimize mass deportation, family separation, and state terror.
Jan 21, 2026
Video evidence of the brutality of the Department of Homeland Security’s agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, alongside agencies within the Department of Justice such the Drug Enforcement Administration, has become all too familiar imagery in our everyday lives.
Witnessing actions of terror—from neighbors being beaten and forced into unmarked vehicles by masked agents, to children being kidnapped as they are released from school, to observers being murdered—has sparked demands for change. Reformist demands, such as increased training for federal immigration agents, move us farther from, not closer to, dismantling these systems.
Transformative Solutions Versus Reformist Reforms
Since its very recent inception in 2003, funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agencies has ballooned. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received a budget of $27.8 billion in 2025, and other agencies whose on-the-ground presence support mass detention and deportation, such as Customs and Border Protection, have additionally seen increases alongside specific funding to the Department of Defense for border enforcement.
Transformative change demands have called for ending collaborations between local police and federal immigration agencies, ending 287(g) agreements, implementing and strengthening sanctuary laws, and the defunding and dismantling of ICE and similar agencies. Transformative models recognize the root causes and work to uproot harmful systems in order to invest in community-centered social programs.
A more trained mass deportation system is still a mass deportation system. A more trained agent of family separation is still an agent of family separation.
Reformist, yet system upholding, demands have also emerged, such as calls for improving hiring requirements for agents, increasing training for new hires, and crowd-management training in response to protests. Calls for more training for ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies means more investment in these systems and legitimizing the expansion of the role of the agent.
We saw a parallel of this direction a decade ago with increases in resourcing for local police. With the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives and community demands for transformative solutions to public safety, backlash and reformist demands in response to these calls led to strengthening the infrastructure of these systems of state terror. Thus, if this direction in response to state violence from immigration agencies is followed, transformative change will be severely restrained.
The Policing Parallel and Lessons Learned
After the murders of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice in 2014, and increases in public awareness of the pervasiveness of police killings and racial disparities that target Black people in interactions with police, reformist demands led to increased funding for policing and police training. We saw this trend of increased budgets repeat after the 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other loved ones by police.
“Solutions” for the problems of policing proposed during this time included increasing community trust in police, improving public perceptions of police, and investing in community policing. These “solutions,” which are removed from historic context, only strengthen systems while placing blame on communities and delegitimizing criticism of systems and transformative demands.
One study examining 15 pre-attack indicator police trainings showed that police are trained to recognize reactions to interactions with police, such as anxiety and arousal, as threats to their safety and justifications for use of force. A 2023 conference of police training exposed “instructors promoting views and tactics that were wildly inappropriate, offensive, discriminatory, harassing, and, in some cases, likely illegal.”
Since 2013, alongside increases in police funding and training, murders by police have only increased year to year. Calls for more police training and increased funding only strengthen the infrastructure of the very systems that we need to dismantle.
The Urgent and Necessary Need to Delegitimize and Dismantle Agencies of State Terror
Everyday community members are being kidnapped, families are being separated, people are dying in immigration detention centers, and community members are being shot at and killed at the hands of DHS. The very existence of ICE requires these events of terror, and its agency collaborators are strengthened by them.
You can’t dismantle a system of harm by increasing its resourcing and legitimizing its existence. Removing the harm means uprooting the source of the harm, not reforming it. A more trained mass deportation system is still a mass deportation system. A more trained agent of family separation is still an agent of family separation. A more trained armed stated terror presence in communities is still armed state terror.
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Cop City Is A Disability Issue, and Disabled Organizers Must Fight To Stop It
In a society that prioritizes profits over people, disabled people are frequently marginalized and disposed of. Incarceration and police violence underscore the ways capitalism fails its most vulnerable.
Jan 10, 2025
Snce 2020, plans to build militarized police training facilities, also known as cop cities, have erupted across the country in an effort to maintain the status quo and quell political dissent from abolitionist and progressive organizers. As of July 2024, there are 80 projects either already being built or in the process of negotiating contracts to begin construction. Ten states have plans for multiple police compounds. The creation of these training facilities marks a new chapter of policing in the U.S.
Disability justice and disabled community organizers must be at the forefront of the nationwide movement to stop cop cities because this movement is a disability justice issue.
The movement to #StopCopCity emerged in the wake of nationwide uprisings in response to police killings of Black people, sparking critical conversations around the role of policing, the limits of police reform, community safety, and alternatives to the criminal legal system. Along with other organizations, I organized on the ground in Atlanta, where multiple police agencies used militarized tactics against community members. This occurred even as we mourned the loss of Rayshard Brooks, a member of our community who was killed by the Atlanta Police Department. All of this unfolded as we grappled with the profound impacts of a global pandemic—a mass-disabling event affecting countless lives.
We must listen to and follow the leadership of disabled people, especially those who are formerly or currently incarcerated.
Our collective grief transformed into action, fueling demands to end state-sanctioned violence and redirect investment into our communities. Our displays of solidarity angered and alarmed corporations, as well as local and national political establishments. In collaboration with major media outlets, those in power obscured the focus, reframing the narrative around rising crime rates and once again positioning police as the solution to our social, political, and economic challenges.
As a response to our organizing efforts, the city of Atlanta decided to build a $90 million complex equipped with military-grade facilities and a mock city for urban police training. If completed, this would be the country’s largest police training facility. Other municipalities have followed Atlanta’s misleadership. Cop city proposals have surfaced in Baltimore, Maryland; San Pablo, California; Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and Nashville, Tennessee all in response to demonstrations that took place in 2020. Meanwhile, other facilities have completed construction and are currently in operation like the cop cities in Semmes, Alabama; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Decatur and Chicago, Illinois; and Madisonville, Kentucky.
In a society that prioritizes profits over people, disabled people are frequently marginalized and disposed of. Incarceration and police violence underscore the ways capitalism fails its most vulnerable. Disabled people are often excluded from discussions about the criminal legal system, resulting in limited and ineffective strategies for addressing the root causes of incarceration (e.g., poverty, racism, and capitalism).
The overrepresentation of people with disabilities in prisons and jails illustrates how victims of capitalism are locked up and harmed. Approximately 66% of incarcerated individuals in the U.S. report having a disability, while half of all people killed by police are disabled, with disabled Black Americans disproportionately affected. Even people without a disability who are locked up develop some sort of disability over the course of their imprisonment because the prison system is disabling.
Each year, an estimated 350 people with mental health diagnoses are killed by law enforcement, and individuals with psychiatric disabilities are 16 times more likely to be killed during police encounters. People like Anthony Hill, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Deborah Danner, Alfred Olango, Daniel Prude, Magdiel Sanchez, Freddie Gray, and countless others were all disabled people who were murdered by police.
These risks are even greater for people of color, women, trans folks, and LGBTQIA+ people. An alarming statistic reveals that by age 28, half of all disabled Black Americans have experienced arrest, underscoring the urgent need to address police violence and brutality as an intersectional issue that includes disability justice. These statistics will continue to rise as more Cop Cities are built, which will place BIPOC disabled individuals in closer proximity to police and increase their risk of harm.
The estimated budgets for these police training facilities are staggering; meanwhile police funding already consumes the majority of municipal budgets at the expense of essential social services. As police budgets grow, funding for education, direct services, infrastructure, and healthcare falls, leaving many—especially disabled individuals—without access to the resources they need. For example, Baltimore’s training facility is projected to cost $330 million; San Pablo, California estimates a $44 million facility, and Richmond, Kentucky, has a $28 million project budget.
Investing more in police departments does not create safer communities. Increased training does not address the root causes of violence. The safest communities are those that are well-resourced and have minimal police presence. Our communities deserve better.
The changing landscape of policing in the U.S. is increasingly characterized by international police exchange programs (also known as Deadly Exchange programs), which expose officers to new surveillance methods, military tactics, and forms of political repression from countries with notorious human rights abuses.
The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program in Atlanta sends U.S. officers to train with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), who are responsible for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The IOF conducts urban warfare training in a mock city called "Little Gaza," a replica of the Gaza Strip designed to simulate combat scenarios. These practices serve as the blueprint for cop cities across the U.S.
In Baltimore, an Amnesty International report found that the Baltimore Police Department’s participation in deadly exchange programs with Israel contributed to “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and a culture of retaliation.” However, more police departments are participating in deadly exchange programs. Police officials from states including Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Washington, and D.C. have also trained with Israeli paramilitary forces.
Israel, a nation responsible for the killing and disabling of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, serves as the model for these military complexes. These tactics will disproportionately impact marginalized communities domestically and amplify surveillance and repression in already vulnerable areas. Disability Justice involves liberating Palestinians from the disabling effects of genocide.
Climate change is deeply connected to the issues of cop cities and disability justice. Projects like those in Atlanta and Nashville involve clearing large areas of urban forest, causing severe environmental harm. For example, Atlanta’s urban forest, which protects communities from flash flooding, has already been compromised, leading to increased flooding across the city. Such environmental degradation worsens health conditions for disabled people, leaving them to face the consequences with little support, as we saw during disasters like Hurricane Helene. This situation will only deteriorate further.
What is to be done?
The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” reminds us that there is no single solution to combat social injustice in this country. Addressing these challenges requires a diversity of tactics and a shared commitment to building a better world. Everyone has a role to play in movement work—whether it’s cooking for comrades, taking meeting notes, providing childcare so others can participate, or conducting research on targets. Every action, big or small, adds up, creating momentum when combined with the efforts of others. There is a place for you; come find it.
We must listen to and follow the leadership of disabled people, especially those who are formerly or currently incarcerated. Those directly impacted by oppressive systems possess invaluable knowledge of how these systems function and must be at the forefront of our movements. Yes, that means building relationships with people currently incarcerated.
It’s equally critical to learn from past campaigns, both their victories and setbacks. For example, the 2017 #NoCopAcademy campaign in Chicago, which sought to stop the construction of a police training facility, illustrates how grassroots organizing can achieve tangible wins. While the facility was ultimately built, organizers succeeded in cutting $21 million from school policing budgets, a significant step toward redistributing resources.
A new world is emerging, whether we are ready for it or not. It’s up to all of us to prepare and take action to shape what comes next. Liberation is possible, but we need you to make it a reality.
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Rights Group Condemns Texas National Guard for Firing Pepper Balls at Migrants
"In separate incidents this summer, witnesses saw Texas National Guard members firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants who posed no risk to National Guard members or anyone else."
Sep 25, 2024
Human Rights Watch on Wednesday condemned the Texas National Guard for firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants, including women and children, who've presented no danger, citing multiple recent incidents.
"In separate incidents this summer, witnesses saw Texas National Guard members firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants who posed no risk to National Guard members or anyone else," Bob Libal, an HRW consultant, said in a statement.
New from @HRW and me: The TX Nat'l Guard has repeatedly fired pepper spray projectiles at arriving asylum-seekers, including women & children.
#TXLege should increase oversight of TX Military Dept & deny funding requests until this practice ends. 🧵https://t.co/AuXyAGcFbO
— Bob Libal (@blibal) September 25, 2024
Pepper-spray projectiles, which are often shaped like balls, contain chemical irritants similar to pepper spray. HRW documented several instances of their use by the Texas National Guard, which polices the border as part of Operation Lone Star, a right-wing state project that has already cost more than $11 billion and drawn opposition from rights advocates.
On September 7, a Texas National Guard member in a boat fired several projectiles at a migrant who had crossed onto the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, at Eagle Pass, Texas, according to three witnesses who watched from a park in Mexico. The migrant fell down, did not get up, and didn't receive aid, they told HRW.
"I saw a National Guardsman in the boat train his gun on the man and then he pepper balled him," said Josie Rodrigues, one of the witnesses, who is a resident of Eagle Pass. "He shot him four or five times. I saw the puffs of smoke and the man went down, and he didn't get up again. It looked to me like they were aiming at the person, not around him or at his feet. It was disturbing."
On August 5, a group of migrants, including children, alleged that projectiles were fired at them, causing their eyes to burn; U.S. Border Patrol said that the Texas National Guard was in control of the area where the incident occurred, according to HRW.
The Texas National Guard also fired pepper balls at a Venezuelan couple and their 1-year-old daughter in May, Newsweek reported, based on video from Border Report.
International human rights law has strict rules on the use of force—even sublethal force, as the projectiles are designed to be—by law enforcement.
"Chemical irritants should only be deployed where a law enforcement official has reason to believe there is an imminent threat of injury," according to United Nations' guidance.
HRW is calling for the state Legislature to deny additional funding to the Texas Military Department, which oversees the state's National Guard, until the use of projectiles against migrants ends. The funding was on the agenda at a budget meeting on Wednesday.
"The Texas Legislature should respond by increasing its oversight over the Texas Military Department and denying funding increases to the department until these abuses stop," Lidal said.
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The Criminalization of Tyreek Hill
The detainment of the Miami Dolphins star is an example of what happens when society refuses to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
Sep 14, 2024
In the old 1990s Nike commercials, Mars Blackmon, played by Spike Lee, asks basketball great Michael Jordan, “Is it the shoes?”
In a much more serious, disturbing incident, Tyreek Hill, star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, was taken down, handcuffed, kneed in the back, and manhandled by Miami-Dade police not far from the stadium where he plays.
I can guarantee you it wasn’t the shoes that got the attention of officers in a potentially deadly encounter.
It was the car, the constant criminalization of Black men, and a refusal to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Hill, a well-paid athlete, was driving an expensive car. He’s paid his dues, sacrificed, and should be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was a short distance from his Black job.
But “Driving While Black” has long been a crisis in America, and you don’t have to drive a fine car to be targeted.
“Almost every African-American or Latino can tell a story about being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason other than the color of his or her skin, especially if he or she happened to be driving in the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ or even driving the ‘wrong car,’” said the American Civil Liberties Union, citing cases stretching back to the 1990s.
Hill was born March 1, 1994.
“Victims of these racially motivated traffic stops rarely receive a traffic ticket or are found guilty of any violation of the law. It’s a practice called Driving While Black,” said the ACLU. “The U.S. Supreme Court established an open season on motorists in 1996 when it ruled that police could use any traffic offense as an excuse to pull a car over.” Black and White drivers engaged in illegalities “at about the same rate—28.4% in searches of Blacks and 28.8% in searches of whites.”
Yet, the ACLU noted, 41% of Black Americans say they have been stopped or detained by police because of their race and 21% of Black adults, including 30% of Black men, reported being victims of police violence.
Hill came before microphones September 8 saying he did nothing wrong and was confused about what happened and why. He calmly explained how his mother taught him to be respectful and cooperative, how he wanted to be a police officer and respected them. There are bad apples everywhere, he continued. But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Death.
“If Dexter Reed had not been stopped by Chicago police, he would still be with us,” Laura Washington wrote earlier this year about a controversial Chicago case.
Body cam footage of his killing, which many call an execution, captured the 26-year-old Black man sitting in his SUV. Five cops in street clothes jumped out on him in a city known for often violent, deadly carjackings.
“One demanded that Reed roll down his car window. At first, Reed complied, then rolled the window back up. Officers screamed and shouted more demands. Reed started shooting,” Washington wrote. A civilian oversight body said an officer was wounded in the wrist.
“The officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Reed staggered out of the car on the driver’s side and stumbled to the ground. The officers kept shooting. Three of those shots came while Reed was lying ‘motionless on the ground,’ according to Andrea Kersten of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability,” wrote Washington.
“This tragedy leaves us with so many questions. For example, the police say he was being stopped for not wearing a seat belt. How did the officers know he wasn’t wearing the belt, since his car had tinted windows? On the video, the officers, wearing street clothes, drive hard and fast, jump out, and surround Reed’s car.”
“Did Reed shoot out of terror?” she asked in a Chicago Tribune piece.
Organizing around Reed’s death has been going on in the Windy City with many outraged and demanding justice.
“Chicago police officers reported making more than a half million stops last year on the city streets, continuing to stop Black and Brown motorists at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the driving population,” the ACLU reported in 2024. “In 2023, CPD officers stopped Black drivers at a rate 3.75 times that of white drivers and stopped Latino drivers at a rate 2.73 times that of white drivers. These disparities are similar to racial disparities reported in prior years in Chicago. CPD has never explained why it disproportionately stops Black and Latino drivers.”
There are bad apples in every system. But when institutions fail to act to correct wrongs—especially with folks having guns, handcuffs, and badges—the whole system is rotten.
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How the War on Terror Helped Cause Us to Turn on Each Other
It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
Aug 22, 2023
Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don’t just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. (“Stand back and stand by!”) But in this country, in this century, violence has become as all-American as apple pie. In these years, it’s been violence and more violence all the way, literally in the case of the Pentagon. But let me start a little more personally.
Having lived several years in rural Maryland along the Virginia border, I’ve watched the local political landscape gain ever-deepening fault lines (as is true in the United States at large).
In election season 2020, in my enclave of largely well-educated political liberals, many with at least one public servant in the family (like my military spouse), you saw a sea of blue “Biden/Harris” signs as you drove among fields of corn and grazing cattle. However, as you approached the Virginia border, a smattering of black, white, and blue pro-police flags—like so many photographic negatives of the American flag—began popping up in response to growing protests elsewhere in the country against police brutality and violence toward communities of color. And the farther you traveled into Virginia, the more likely you were to see former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs, as well as occasional Confederate flags, on houses and lawns. After President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, those Biden/Harris signs disappeared or were occasionally replaced by American flags, but the pro-police flags and MAGA signs remained, signaling an increasingly split nation.
In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country.
Such changes in the landscape are still all too visible. A newcomer to our region might even assume that such a split between those still dreaming of a country reminiscent of the Old South, or perhaps a future Trumpland, and American democrats like me (who would generally rather ignore the existence of the first group than grasp why they came into being) was how it had always been.
America the Violent
These days, it’s anything but surprising to note that this country has become remarkably polarized. According to a recent Pew survey, 63% of Democrats view Republicans as immoral (up from 35% in 2016), while 72% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats (up from 47% seven years ago).
In truth, there’s nothing that new about an American tendency to reduce our fellow countrymen to their political leanings. According to a 2014 Vox article citing sociological research, in 1960, just 5% of Republican parents said they would be against their children marrying someone who supported a different political party. By 2010, nearly half of such respondents reported that they would be displeased.
Such an atmosphere of increasing division is reflected in recent trends in gun purchases. In 2020, more firearms were sold than in any previous year on record and, in the years that followed, those sales would only increase. By now, almost 1 in 5 American households have a weapon, nearly 400 million of them, and that weaponry is only growing more deadly. In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country. And indeed, he responded (as he never thought he would) by purchasing a gun, fearing a future militarized coup the likes of which almost arrived on January 6, 2021.
While we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.
Even some of our youngest citizens have caught this fever of fear and violence. At a recent neighborhood party, a young child reported that if Donald Trump were ever to go to jail, she would bake a giant orange Trump-shaped cake, cut off the head, and eat it to celebrate. I had to laugh and then, instead of saying what first came to mind—that it would feel great to do so!—I found myself piously telling her that we probably shouldn’t dream of that kind of proto-violence, even when it comes to leaders who have caused as much suffering as Trump.
Over the past two decades, however, it’s a fact that Americans have grown ever more violent, as have our police. Mass shootings are spiking, for example. And despite the government’s longstanding preoccupation with Islamist militants, over the past decade more than 75% of politically related murders in this country have been committed by far-right extremists, just like the ones tending their fields in my region who, being white, the police would never assume to be “not from here” and so, by definition, dangerously sympathetic to extremists.
America’s Forever Wars Turn Inward
How did we get to this point of violence at home?
If you held a gun to my head (no pun intended) and demanded an answer, I’d say that our decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the military invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, as well as the launching of a “Global War on Terror,” played a major role in shaping the sort of worldview that’s now become all too American.
Since those initial invasions, after all, Pentagon spending has ballooned almost beyond imagining, being now about twice the 2000 budget in inflation-controlled dollars. Meanwhile, spending on healthcare, education, job creation, and infrastructure has increased so much more slowly. And don’t forget that, in the same years, our police became ever more strikingly militarized (on which more to come). In other words, while we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.
What Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another.
Another subtler reason is that most of us don’t get what violence is until we suddenly find ourselves caught up in it. In January 1973, after all, the government ended 25 years of the draft, turning our military into an “all-volunteer” force. So many decades later, most Americans don’t know anyone who’s served in our armed forces.
This, in turn, has meant that our 21st-century war on terror, the most prolonged set of U.S. conflicts since the Vietnam era, has been handled by volunteers who experience both longer and more frequent deployments and return home to ever fewer people who have the slightest idea what they’ve been through. As a result, many Americans are now unfamiliar with what killing people professionally does to you. Most have no idea what it’s like to see a family member return from a military deployment in the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa completely changed—with a 1,000-yard stare that makes eye contact hard, a tendency to startle at loud noises, and possibly a formidable temper. For many privileged Americans fortunate not to live that life or dwell in crime-ridden neighborhoods, violence is something left to Hollywood movies until, at least, someone opens up with an automatic weapon in your local supermarket or dance hall.
No wonder it’s been so easy for Donald Trump and many others to cast blame locally rather than on the effects of the omnipresent war on terror and so many related global forces of terror that are hard to capture in political slogans. In response to his recent Justice Department election interference indictment, Trump told his supporters, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”
In a sense, he was right when it came to the government in this century. Until recently, when President Biden led the way in injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into growing a clean-energy economy domestically, American policies had overwhelmingly been directed at fighting unsuccessful wars abroad rather than creating job (or life) security here at home for the high-school educated men to whom Trump unfortunately appeals so strongly.
The War on Terror Comes Home
Yet what Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has focused on just such policies. Most notably, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein has shown how the Pentagon’s 1033 program, begun in the 1990s, funneled startling amounts of excess military equipment (sometimes right off distant battlefields), including armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles, to thousands of federal and local law enforcement agencies, including park, campus, and school police throughout the U.S.
That program grew dramatically with the post-9/11 buildup of the military-industrial complex. Police departments applying for such donations needed to explain that they would help them in the fight against drugs or terror. Chillingly, as Katzenstein notes, if police departments don’t have an obvious use for such weaponry, equipment, and vehicles, they have to find one fast, including quelling protests or executing home searches, which have increased significantly in communities of color in these years.
Under such circumstances, it becomes easier to imagine why, according to the assessments of some combat veterans, our police can now look more heavily armored than U.S. troops in foreign war zones. Officers wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests typically showed up in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014 with K-9 units, pointing sniper rifles at peaceful protesters and using tear gas, stun grenades, and smoke bombs to disperse crowds in that small Midwestern city where an unarmed black teenager had been shot and killed by a police officer several days earlier. And in the years since it’s only gotten worse nationwide.
Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone.
At the same time, law enforcement of all stripes adopted a new approach called “intelligence-led policing.” The massive Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the war on terror, has also been training police from across America in counterterrorism tactics, theoretically based on preventing crime rather than responding to it.
While such a focus may sound positive, it’s helped bring the war on terror home by ensuring that the FBI and local police monitor particular ethnic, religious, and political groups—most notably, Muslim citizens and legal residents. Under far more lax standards for surveillance ushered in by laws and policies like the 2001 Patriot Act, many Muslims have been targeted without the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI even hired Muslim Americans to act as informants in their own communities, in certain cases encouraging young men to profess their sympathy for Islamist extremist groups and acts of mass violence. In such a world, it shouldn’t be surprising that hate crimes, incidents of racial profiling, and discriminatory comments by public figures spiked in the years after 9/11 and only continue to rise.
Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone. And that’s just what’s happened. Civil-rights groups have documented cases in which, for instance, the FBI used sting operations to infiltrate, surveil, and target left-wing racial-justice activists during the summer of 2020 as America erupted in protest over the police killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd.
A lawsuit filed this summer by the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, alleges that a young Colorado police detective went undercover with a local racial justice organization and tried to enmesh one of its members in an entirely fabricated gun-running operation. In a related case, the FBI reportedly hired as an informant a convicted felon who encouraged two Black racial justice activists to assassinate the Colorado attorney general.
Now, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security and related law enforcement agencies are focusing their surveillance more on anti-government and white supremacist groups. If terror is a hypothetical rationale for the police getting more weaponry, then anyone can manufacture it. If, on the other hand, it’s about real plans to commit acts of violence, then the overwhelming perpetrators during the Trump years were our government and the president’s right-wing extremist collaborators. In other words, you could finally say that the “terror” of the war on terror had come home to roost.
War and Nationalism
Though the start of a war may cause people to rally around their leaders, wars against something nebulous like terror or, in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s case, “Ukrainian Nazis,” tend to prove short-lived in their ability to unify. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country to avoid having to fight their Ukrainian neighbors who often constitute part of their extended families, while their president has called them “flies that we spit out of our mouths.”
As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s—as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.
This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.
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The Raid on the Marion County Record Was an Attack on the Free Press
The case is a reminder that the United States is no stranger to local powers using their authority to silence what is left of critical journalism.
Aug 16, 2023
As the police raided Marion County Record editor and publisher Eric Meyer’s home August 11 (Committee to Protect Journalists, 8/12/23; AP, 8/13/23; New York Times, 8/13/23), his 98-year-old mother was aghast, watching the cops rummage through her things. “She was very upset, yelling about ‘Gestapo tactics’ and ‘where are all the good people?’” Meyer told FAIR. He said that after the raid she “was beside herself, she wouldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep, and finally went to bed about sunrise.” Meyer’s mother, a co-owner of the paper, eventually told her son that the whole affair was “going to be the death of me.”
And it was. She died the next afternoon. And Meyer blames the police (Daily Beast, 8/12/23).
By that afternoon, Meyer had been fielding calls all day with lawyers and journalists, as the raid on the paper’s offices and his home suddenly made his small-town Kansas paper world-famous. He spoke to FAIR from his office line, because his cellphone had been seized, along with other equipment.
Meyer explained that current town police chief Gideon Cody—a retiree of the Kansas City, Missouri, police department—has harbored animosity toward the paper ever since it started asking uncomfortable questions about his hiring.
The raid was “authorized by a search warrant that alleged identity theft and unlawful use of a computer,” The Guardian (8/12/23) reported, leading authorities to take “publishing and reporting materials that the newspaper relied on to publish their next edition.”
The reason, according to news reports, seems fairly petty, sparked by the complaints of local restaurateur Kari Newell, who had demanded that Meyer and a reporter be removed from an event with area Congressmember Jake LaTurner (R-Kan.). She alleged later that the paper had unlawfully obtained personal records showing that she, according to The Guardian, had allegedly been “convicted of drink-driving and continued using her vehicle without a license,” but that “the paper never published anything related to it.”
But that’s not what Meyer thinks this is really about. Meyer explained that current town police chief Gideon Cody—a retiree of the Kansas City, Missouri, police department—has harbored animosity toward the paper ever since it started asking uncomfortable questions about his hiring (Handbasket, 8/12/23; Washington Post, 8/13/23). Meyer’s paper, after hearing anonymous allegations about his tenure, questioned town leaders as to whether they vetted Cody before hiring him (the paper never published any of the allegations, Meyer said). This led to a confrontation between the paper and the chief, and Meyer believes that the restaurateur’s antics were merely an excuse to exert power over the paper.
Silencing Critical Journalism
When an anti-corruption newspaper in Guatemala gets shut down and its publisher is thrown in jail (Washington Post, 5/15/23), or a Hong Kong publisher known for opposing the expanding powers of police is imprisoned (AP, 10/25/22), Americans might be outraged but figure that these are the tribulations of less open and democratic societies. The Marion County Record case is a reminder that the United States is no stranger to local powers using their authority to silence what is left of critical journalism.
Consider how officials in Delaware County in the Catskills region of New York reacted to the critical reporting of a local paper, the Reporter. “The county stripped the newspaper of a lucrative contract to print public notices,” The New York Times (6/18/23) reported, noting that the county admitted to the Reporter that the “decision was partly based on ‘the manner in which your paper reports county business.’” This hit the paper where it hurts, as the “move cost the Reporter about $13,000 a year in revenue.” This kind of retaliation has occurred in several states, the Times said.
Missouri has seen several attempts to intimidate or impede journalists. In St. Louis, a judge forbade “the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing material from the mental health evaluation of a man accused of killing a police officer” (Riverfront Times, 5/25/23), an apparently unconstitutional prior restraint on the press. Missouri’s then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a Republican senator, “filed a request in June [2022] asking for three years of emails sent and received by… professors while they worked at the Columbia Missourian” (AP, 9/2/22), a clear intimidation tactic towards journalists whose publications are attached to public universities. The state’s governor also pursued a criminal investigation into a Post-Dispatch reporter who found security breaches on a government website, although no charges were ultimately filed (USA Today, 2/12/22).
Officials rationalize many of these actions against news outlets by the fact that journalists received information or witnessed something they weren’t supposed to. But that is, in fact, what journalism is.
The city of Los Angeles sued both a Knock LA reporter and a police accountability group for publishing information about Los Angeles Police Department officers (KTLA, 4/6/23); the LA Times (5/7/23) and other outlets came to the reporter and group’s defense.
And FAIR has covered the prosecution (and an eventual acquittal) of a Des Moines Register reporter who was covering a Black Lives Matter protest (FAIR.org, 3/16/21), and the trespassing convictions of two Asheville Blade reporters who were covering the police clearing of a homeless encampment (FAIR.org, 6/8/23).
National Bad Examples
Officials rationalize many of these actions against news outlets by the fact that journalists received information or witnessed something they weren’t supposed to. But that is, in fact, what journalism is. The point of reporting is not to rewrite press releases or glue official statements together, but to cultivate a trusted network of sources within government agencies, businesses, civic organizations, and other halls of power who pass on the real story because the public deserves to hear it.
Meyer sees the raid on his paper as part of the current moment when “respect for the media is at an all time low.” A lot of that has to do with Trumpism’s hatred of a free press and the branding of all journalistic criticism as “fake news”; Republican voters now use Nazi phrases to attack the free press (Time, 10/25/16) and even attack reporters physically (Guardian, 5/24/17). Trump’s election was followed by a spate of assaults on journalists who had the temerity to ask questions of elected officials and politicians (FAIR.org, 5/25/17).
But this sentiment within state power predates the Trump administration. The “War on Terror” gave the second Bush administration an excuse to threaten whistleblowers, and the Obama administration escalated those threats into prosecutions of leakers (Extra!, 9/11). Corporate media often took the side of the government when it silenced leaks to protect state power, especially after Edward Snowden revealed evidence of widespread National Security Agency spying on the US public (FAIR.org, 10/6/16).
The urge to silence high-level, national security leakers like Snowden or Manning is the same impulse that led a police raid into Meyer’s home and his paper’s office.
It might seem quaint to equate the predicament of the Marion County Record with the case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (New York Times, 12/21/20), whose reporting based on Chelsea Manning’s leak exposed potential U.S. war crimes. But the Kansas case shouldn’t be dismissed as provincial. Small local newspapers really are the main source challenging the sheriffs, county executives, and business leaders who call the shots in a great deal of the United States.
As The Kansas City Star (8/12/23) said, Meyer and the rest of his paper “represent one of the green shoots sprouting in a nation of expanding news deserts.” They are the “watchdogs of communities too small or too remote to attract the attention of big metropolitan dailies or TV stations.”
The urge to silence high-level, national security leakers like Snowden or Manning is the same impulse that led a police raid into Meyer’s home and his paper’s office. And the ability of police in prominent news settings like Washington, D.C., to arrest journalists for covering protests without provoking widespread condemnation from media power centers (FAIR.org, 9/26/17) sends a signal to authorities in less-visible venues that critics in the press are fair game. The temptation to swat the gadfly is so powerful at every level that journalists and press advocates have to constantly fight to keep from losing ground.
Meyer is doing just that, and promises to bring litigation. “We’re suing, not to get our stuff back. We want it back, but it’s not crucial,” he told FAIR, noting that this fight was about principles. “The big thing is, I don’t want to set a precedent and fold on this.” He added, “I don’t want anyone to go through this crap.”
When asked what he hopes will come out of this case, he laughed and said, “I’d like to see some people lose their jobs.”
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We Live in the Sunlight: End Permanent Punishment Now
I am an elected representative of my community, and I have been removed from an office I was duly elected into, because of a prior conviction.
Aug 11, 2023
One thing I know: Corruption only withers under the sunlight.
In Illinois, 3.3 million adults have been arrested or convicted of a crime since 1979. Right now, there are 1,189 permanent punishment laws and regulations in Illinois that restrict people with records. Often these restrictions are permanent punishments. I am an elected representative of my community, and I have been removed from an office I was duly elected into, because of such permanent punishments.
“How did this happen?” you might be asking. I’m sharing my experience, because it is indicative of a much larger problem of corruption in Joliet Township and it exposes a longstanding injustice in our state. Let’s start at the beginning though.
In a state where many of our elected officials, including governors, have prior convictions, this is a clear double standard. It also means that, even after serving time and being released, we are not fully free.
I began community engagement and organizing in 2020. That year, alongside other dedicated community members, I co-founded Will County Democratic Black Caucus and BLM Will County. In April of 2021, after many years as an activist and community leader, I was elected as Trustee of Joliet Township. It was a day of celebration and community pride. Soon after the election, we got to work.
In the face of police violence and impunity, we called for a citizens oversight board. We were engaging the community and responding to their calls for more accountability from law enforcement. We started a gun violence prevention program. Of course, responding to the needs of the community is the job of a duly elected trustee.
When Eric Lurry needed care and support, officers who took oaths to protect and serve their community instead hastened his death. Mr. Lurry, suffering an accidental overdose, was treated with such blatant disregard and violence by police that the city launched an investigation into their behavior. How can this kind of racist and inhumane behavior go unaddressed, or worse, defended? Joliet police not only refused accountability in the role they played in the death of Eric Lurry, they withheld information from the community. Without the vigilance of Nicole Lurry (Eric’s widow), they would have swept his death under the rug. I began working with organizers to call for real accountability.
It is the job I was elected to do—to make sure that people with power do not harm the people they are there to serve. I helped to found the Black Caucus, knowing that in order to achieve the change we want we must be strong.
On July 18, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the SAFE-T Act. The court rejected the “uneven reasoning” and reversed Judge Thomas Cunnington’s earlier ruling in the 12th Judicial Circuit Court. Cash bail will be abolished on September 18 of this year. This law will make our community safer, and lower the rate of recidivism. Ultimately, it intervenes in a profoundly unjust system, which allows people with money to walk free, and keeps poor people behind bars.
We need people in politics to pass this kind of legislation, we need changes in our economic policies, we need social programs that care for all of us. We need political, social, and economic change, at the core of all our structures. And we each have a role to play in this work. As a trustee, I was playing my part alongside others who share a vision for racial justice in our community.
Doing this work made me a target of those who want to protect the racist status quo. James Glasow, the longest sitting state’s attorney in the country, threatened by our growing people power, started a campaign to remove me from office due to a prior conviction. In a state where many of our elected officials, including governors, have prior convictions, this is a clear double standard. It also means that, even after serving time and being released, we are not fully free.
But we keep working for freedom.
The criminal legal system targets and oppresses Black, Indigenous, queer folks, and people of color—especially those who are poor—at every turn. Poor people of color are often sentenced the longest and the worst. Then, if we are able to return to our families, communities, and lives, we are faced with laws that create barriers for us at every turn.
Recently, I spoke at a press conference about the PIECE Act at the Joliet Township Government Building, where I was once elected to represent my community. I also joined the township meeting at the Joliet Township Government Building to help our community know what is at stake. Because corruption only withers under the sunlight.
Many have worked tirelessly to prevent me from fighting for my community in the halls of power. But I refuse to concede the fight, and want to tell my story, in hopes that others will join in the fight against corruption, no matter where it happens.
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No, the ADA Did Not Fix Ableism in America
Disabled people have waited and struggled for decades for another round of legislative and cultural justice—and we are fervently organizing for it with renewed energy.
Jul 31, 2023
Every year in July, like clockwork, many Americans repeat the myth that one law passed three decades ago—the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA,—cured America of ableism.
I’m not just talking about former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) saying that “under the ADA, we are all winners” in 1990. Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) tweeted two years ago in celebration of the ADA’s “equal access and opportunity for all,” and Minnesota State Rep. Liz Lee said last year that the ADA “ensured that all people deserve equal respect and treatment in all aspects of life.”
Many disabled people can also rattle off stories about bosses and colleagues telling them how the ADA fixed ableism.
“ADA is only the beginning. It is not a solution. Rather, it is an essential foundation on which solutions will be constructed.”
The truth: the ADA, passed on July 26, 1990, isn’t enough to defeat ableism—and it never has been. Disabled people have waited and struggled for decades for another round of legislative and cultural justice—and we are fervently organizing for it with renewed energy.
The ADA established crucial protections for many people with disabilities, but always provided the most protection for those with time and money, especially the means to hire a lawyer. Accommodations in schools and workplaces, accessibility in businesses and on public transportation, and the overall right to exist in public spaces has increased exponentially since the ADA was passed, but it is still spotty and unequal across the United States and often dependent on your disability and access to wealth.
The frequent necessity of hiring a lawyer to access ADA protections has restricted many benefits of the law to the most privileged disabled people from the very beginning.
The ADA was never supposed to be the end. As Justin Dart, Jr., considered by some to be a father of the ADA, said when it was passed: “ADA is only the beginning. It is not a solution. Rather, it is an essential foundation on which solutions will be constructed.”
The ADA mirrored the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in many ways and was a win for disability rights activists because it promised basic protections against discrimination that didn’t exist before. But just as the Civil Rights Act fails to adequately protect Black Americans and other people of color from things like racial bias, voting restrictions, violence at the hands of law enforcement, or wage and wealth gaps established through decades of government-backed plunder, the ADA also falls short.
This is why I recently co-founded an organization called New Disabled South. Our mission is to fight for liberation, justice, and fundamental rights for all disabled people in the South—and in doing so, all disabled people across the country.
It’s a big fight, because disabled people in the South are under attack—and the ADA isn’t enough to protect us. So we are fighting to expose the depth of the problems and for brand new legislative solutions. We are fighting against impossible voting barriers, like the restriction of access to absentee ballots and the criminalization of assisting disabled voters.
Our main struggle and campaign is to pass five disabled voting bills of rights over the next five years in state legislatures across the South.
These disabled voting bills of rights will protect disabled voters’ legal right to vote. We need these protections because without them we simply can’t access the polls in the ways voters should be able to easily access the polls. Given our physical restrictions, that means we need a low administrative burden right to vote by mail, to accessible polling locations, to get assistance with our ballots, and to drive-through voting—all methods of voting under attack across the South.
We have also seen extreme state violence against disabled people across the South, particularly over the past decade with high-profile cases like Ethan Saylor, Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, and the fatal shooting of Magdiel Sanchez.
Those tragedies unfortunately aren’t exceptions. Nearly half of people killed by police in the United States have a disability—and these are frequently disabled people of color. Meanwhile, 55% of Black disabled men have been arrested at least once by the time they are 28, and 40% of the current prison population is disabled. Police, prisons and courts are a disability justice issue because they are hurting disabled people.
That’s why at New Disabled South we are also fighting to end such criminalization with targeted campaigns and grassroots organizing to educate disabled people around the harms of policing and to mobilize our communities to dismantle these systems. The ADA doesn’t address the dire need for systemic changes in how we are treated by cops, courts, jails, or prisons.
Our people, across every single issue you care about, need you to care about disability—because at the margins of every issue you care about you will find us.
Poverty in the disabled community, especially across the South, hasn’t been solved by the ADA. Despite supposed equal access to jobs and housing—our people are living in poverty at twice the rate of non-disabled people. And we are seeing disabled people forced out of communities and into nursing homes, at all ages. A staggering 655,000 people are on state waiting lists to receive Medicaid waivers to receive care in their homes, and parents with disabled children are often separated from their kids or forced to live in poverty because they themselves have to stay home and provide critical care. We are fighting across every single one of our states to end this inhumane backlog, investing nearly $100,000 in ad campaigns calling on state leaders to fund waiver slots. We won’t stop until every single Southern disabled person waiting to come home is home.
Everything progressives fight for is bound up in disability. Racism, environmental injustice, climate change, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism, colonialism, xenophobia—all of these are disabling forces. Our people, across every single issue you care about, need you to care about disability—because at the margins of every issue you care about you will find us.
The ADA simply doesn’t account for our multi-issue lives. We need you to be on our side.
It’s time for our political and cultural leaders to do better for disabled people. Let’s stop racist police and courts and prisons from killing Black disabled people, let’s fight for our right to vote, and let’s ensure our people come home and can afford our bills. Let’s allow all disabled people to live and thrive.
The time is now to make the lives of all disabled people better. If you’re celebrating the ADA this month, transform your celebration into action for a better future for disabled people. The ADA isn’t enough, it never was, and we need more.
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Cop City Crackdown Reflects Broader Criminalization of Environmental Protest
The first step in fighting back is to develop a shared understanding of militarization of law enforcement, stigmatization of protest, and corporate capture of government as an intertwined strategy to undermine democracy.
Jul 17, 2023
The fight in Atlanta over Cop City, a massive police training facility, has turned into ground zero for overlapping crises facing our country: the climate emergency, vast political and economic inequality, ever-militarizing police forces, and systemic racism.
If we want a democracy healthy enough to solve these crises, it’s worth paying attention to what is happening in the South River Forest.
On May 31, in a disturbing move shortly before Atlanta’s City Council approved more funding for the facility, Georgia law enforcement arrested three members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provides activists with legal support and bail money.
Organized bail support for activists is a longstanding tradition, exemplified by the historical precedent of churches and community groups raising funds to bail Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders out of jail. Now, however, the authorities are deeming such acts “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”
In reality, the fund was targeted for supporting the Stop Cop City movement, which opposes the police training facility.
“When private corporate donors are able to fund militarized training facilities for the police, they are essentially buying off the police. They are making it clear who the police work for.”
Many in the community fear the Cop City facility will be used to train police in counterinsurgency, further militarizing an already armed and equipped force. In a city with wide wealth and income disparities, more militarized policing fits into what community activist Micah Herskind describes as “the state’s retreat from the provision of social welfare and the interrelated build-up of policing and imprisonment to manage inequality’s outcomes.”
The facility is largely funded by the corporate-backed Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), whose donors include Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, and Wells Fargo. Militarized policing is a growing concern in the United States, and corporate-funded militarized policing raises further unease about law enforcement becoming directly beholden to corporate interests.
As local resident Brad Beadles put it, “When private corporate donors are able to fund militarized training facilities for the police, they are essentially buying off the police. They are making it clear who the police work for.”
Cop City also has adverse environmental justice effects. Building the facility will require cutting down part of an urban forest adjacent to a majority-Black, working class community.
Urban forests provide critical environmental benefits for nearby residents. They filter pollutants from the air, store carbon, and mitigate floods and the urban heat island effect. Destroying community access to nature and outdoor recreation also negatively impacts mental health, as individuals with less access to green spaces have higher prevalence of mental distress, anxiety, and depression.
Cutting down forests anywhere in an age of climate crisis is a bad idea, but doing it next to a working-class Black community is particularly egregious when there are already nationwide racial disparities in urban heat island exposure and access to greenspaces. By 2050, summer high temperatures in the Atlanta metropolitan area are predicted to be 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they are today, making preservation of Atlanta’s tree coverage all the more imperative.
Repressing the Popular Will
The arrests of the bail fund organizers are only one example of state repression against the Stop Cop City movement.
In a January raid on a protest encampment in the forest, police killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an activist also known as Tortuguita. Police claim Tortuguita shot first, but have refused to provide proof. Results from two independent autopsies contradict the official story, raising the possibility that this was a cover-up of a “friendly fire” accident between police officers—or worse, an assassination.
Activists in the movement have also been arrested on “domestic terrorism” charges for having muddy shoes or having legal support numbers written on their arms—prosecutorial overreach with clear intent to intimidate.The state is using violence and terror to try to stamp out a movement opposing a facility meant to train law enforcement in violence and terror.
Residents of Atlanta have spoken out against Cop City. A September 2021 City Council hearing on the subject received 17 hours of testimony, with about 70% against the project. The Council approved the project regardless.
In June 2023, the Council held a hearing on approving more public funding for Cop City. This time, they heard 13 hours of testimony, with the overwhelming majority in opposition. Once again, the Council approved the funding anyway.
Criminalizing Protest
The criminalization of protest in Atlanta is part of a years-long trend.
In a 2020 Institute for Policy Studies report called Muzzling Dissent: How Corporate Influence over Politics Has Fueled Anti-Protest Laws, we examined state repression of oil and gas infrastructure protesters with so-called “Critical Infrastructure Protection” laws.
Similar to the Cop City project in Atlanta, the communities impacted by the oil and gas projects we studied had high levels of economic insecurity and were overwhelmingly Black, Indigenous, or poor white people. We examined pipeline resistance struggles in three different states—a Black environmental justice community in Louisiana with the highest rates of cancer in the country, an Indigenous nation fighting to protect their cultural resources in Minnesota, and impoverished Appalachian communities in West Virginia.
The fossil fuel industry is weaponizing the term “critical infrastructure protection”—which is historically associated with safeguarding infrastructure that serves a vital function for communities, such as roads and bridges—to restrict the ability of communities to protect themselves against destructive oil and gas projects.
Versions of “Critical Infrastructure Protection” legislation in Louisiana and West Virginia (which have the laws on the books), and Minnesota (where the legislature passed a bill that was subsequently vetoed by the governor), all included similar language that identified varying types of fossil fuel infrastructure as “critical infrastructure” and criminalized entering these sites with the threat of felony charges.
Many versions of the bill also held supposed “co-conspirators” of such activities liable. These types of charges criminalize participation in a group or social movement involved in protesting, which parallels many of the police repression tactics against Stop Cop City, also known as the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.
Forest defenders who were arrested in Atlanta have often faced “domestic terrorism” enhancement charges in addition to “felony trespassing” due to their association with the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement, which prosecutors claim is a “criminal organization” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
In Muzzling Dissent, we identified how the fossil fuel industry is weaponizing the term “critical infrastructure protection”—which is historically associated with safeguarding infrastructure that serves a vital function for communities, such as roads and bridges—to restrict the ability of communities to protect themselves against destructive oil and gas projects.
Similarly, the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are now weaponizing RICO, a 1970s law to prosecute violent mafia activity, against an autonomous and decentralized environmental justice movement.
Corporate Capture
“Critical Infrastructure Protection” laws are most successful in states with the most concentrated fossil fuel industry power at a time when domestic oil and gas production is at a record high.
In all three of our case studies, the “Critical Infrastructure Protection” bills were led by state legislators who took large campaign donations from oil and gas companies. In fact, the original model text for the bills was drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a nonprofit heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry and closely tied to many of the policy makers who passed the bills.
Muzzling Dissent was ultimately an illustration of how unfettered corporate power leads to the criminalization of community resistance against wealthy, private interests. Similarly, it’s no coincidence that Cop City is being built in a heavily corporatized city.
Atlanta is also home to Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta Airlines and Home Depot—each of which are represented on the APF’s Board of Directors, with the recent exception of Coca-Cola.
Atlanta has been dubbed the “Silicon Peach” because of its position as one of the fastest growing urban technology hubs in the United States. In addition to a booming technology sector, recent tax cuts for the film industry have made Atlanta a new hotspot for high-budget entertainment studios.
Atlanta is also home to Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta Airlines and Home Depot—each of which are represented on the APF’s Board of Directors (with the recent exception of Coca-Cola, which stepped down after Color of Change exposed the corruption and controversies surrounding the foundation).
The unwillingness of the majority of elected officials in Atlanta to acknowledge the widespread opposition to Cop City is a testament to the power of the corporate-backed APF.
Undermining Democracy
The recent Congressional intervention to force construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is also consistent with the trend of powerful corporate interests promoting militarized state repression to protect their interests against the popular will.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), the architect of the provision benefiting MVP in the debt ceiling bill, gets the most oil and gas industry money of any federal legislator. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who made the back-room deal with Manchin to force the pipeline’s approval, has received more than $300,000 from MVP developer NextEra Energy.
While the MVP deal does not directly criminalize dissent, it closes off regulatory and legal tools for project-impacted communities to fight back, making protest and direct action even more indispensable. It requires regulatory agencies to issue all permits for the project without going through the customary review process that projects usually have to go through, cutting communities out of intervening in permitting processes by filing comments in regulatory dockets. It also exempts permits issued to the MVP from judicial review, closing off the courts as another venue for communities to fight back.
Despite their opponents’ best efforts, Atlanta Forest Defenders have not given up on democracy.
When the so-called “proper channels” for communities to resist harmful corporate projects are made inaccessible, protest tactics are sometimes seen as the only choice left for those fighting to defend their communities. And as the crackdown in Atlanta shows, such protest tactics can lead to activists being locked up, creating a chilling effect for those engaging in dissent.
This trend is a serious threat to social movement organizing. The first step in fighting back is to develop a shared understanding of militarization of law enforcement, stigmatization of protest, and corporate capture of government—not as isolated evils, but as an intertwined strategy to undermine democracy.
In the meantime, Stop Cop City organizers are circulating a petition to put the issue before voters on the ballot for municipal elections on November 7. If the organizers collect enough signatures to put the decision on Cop City question on the ballot, voters will get to choose whether or not to lease the city-owned land for the project. Despite their opponents’ best efforts, Atlanta Forest Defenders have not given up on democracy. They are taking their case against Cop City directly to the people of Atlanta, asserting organized people power as the antidote to concentrated corporate power.
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