The Battle Over Cop City

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:57 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1161. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and we've got another really good interview for you. This one is something that folks have been wanting us to cover for a very long time. I can't believe we're only just now getting to it, but there's so much in the world, and that is Cop City. Something that, though you might not believe me, is worse than it sounds. But we've got a guest, Micah Herskind, who was there, who was on the ground and is going to take us through the basics and talk about this fight that got really authoritarian and fashy, to put it mildly. But it's a really interesting story. So much to it and so much to learn from the fight over Cop City. So with that said, we'll take our usual break and then get on over to our interview with Micah herskind about Cop City. If you'd like to support the show and it's really important these days, please go to patreon .com slash law. You can skip the ads you can get the warm fuzzy feeling and you can get High Court which was just recorded today all good reasons thank you so much patrons after this break we'll be on with Micah

0:02:04 Matt: So our guest today is Micah Herskind, who's a law student and activist, best known for his work with Stop Cop City Movement, and the author of No Cop City, No Cop World, Lessons from the Movement. So we've got a lot to talk about today. Thanks for joining us.

0:02:15 Micah: Thanks for having me.

0:02:16 Matt: You've been doing this a while. You've done a lot of work on the law, and you've been working on activism and advocacy in abolition spaces. So what got you there? What brought you to abolition?

0:02:23 Micah: Yeah, I would say I really came to abolition in undergrad through student organizing that I was doing. I got to school and joined a group that was writing to folks who were in solitary confinement, working on a private prison divestment campaign, which was sort of my window into some of these issues. And I pretty quickly moved from thinking that private prisons were bad because, you know, maybe they have this like profit motive to seeing how really like the violence and punishment of the prison system underpins our our capitalist system more broadly and really moving to abolition. So that happened in undergrad, but then I would say it was really through organizing and being involved with movements that has just taught me so much about what abolition actually is and could be.

0:03:07 Matt: Just because I think a lot our listeners, it's going to be a new perspective. What does abolition mean to you?

0:03:11 Micah: Big question. I would Say broadly, abolition is an idea and a movement and a set of practices that recognizes that our system of prisons and policing is not producing safety. It's not making people better are off. It's not keeping people safe. It is actually causing an enormous amount of harm. It's underpinning a system that keeps a really small group of people really well off at the cost of the masses, really. I think that maybe the term can sometimes feel a little misleading, because yes, it is about getting rid of police, getting rid prisons, getting rid of surveillance. But it's also about identifying what it is that people need to be safe, to thrive, what resources they need, like all of the things that people could actually be made safer and better off by and building those things in their place. So it's, you know, both about dismantling our current system, but then also building up new systems.

0:04:01 Matt: Yeah, I've been kind of going through a similar journey myself as an attorney for the past 20 years or so. You know, I've been doing immigration work for a long time, seeing this side of the removal system. And what you said really resonated right there about how, you know, you saw the evils of private prisons, but maybe some of the rest of it could work. And I've, I'm feeling the same way about realizing sort of the evills of the immigration detention gulags and then sort of seeing, you know, through the criminal system, how everything else is, it's all the same thing. It's really not that much different.

0:04:24 Thomas: Realizing the evils of the gulags is a weird yeah it took me a while came to notice that yeah well

0:04:27 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Not very long. Just a visit or two, really, to the gulag.

0:04:33 Thomas: I feel like we could talk about that topic a lot but I want to let's save it to the end just in case because I want make sure we have enough time to talk about cop city because people People have been, honestly, people have been asking us to talk about this for a long time. And I want to make sure we get to it. Can you give us the basics on Cop City? Two words that if you don't know what it is, already sounds bad.

0:04:52 Micah: Right. What more do you need? So Cop City is the name that organizers in Atlanta have given to this basically proposed police militarization compound that a group of forces in Atlanta has sort of come together to try to build. A couple like key features of it, just sort of the basics for people. One, organizers have referred to it as Cop City because the plans for it, and now we'll probably talk about it has opened, include like a mock city within it. So it came about after the 2020 uprisings. And one of the sort of like the key parts of this proposed police compound was that they were actually going to have a fake city in it where police could, you know, train in various tactics of crowd control. They saw how unprepared they were for the 2020 uprising. So this is in some ways a response to that. Another sort of of major feature of it is that it's the original proposal was like 385 acres, it ended up being about 170 acres, but that is all on forest land just outside of Atlanta city limits. And so you know, not only has it, you know, brought in all the folks who oppose policing, but it's also brought in people, you Know, who care about the environment in any way, shape or

0:06:00 Micah: Form. This is in, it's like a majority black, working class neighborhood, there's a river that runs through the forest, that's already one of the most polluted in the nation. And, you know, in the midst of climate disaster, the city thought that it was a good idea to tear down forest land in order to build this, you know big concrete playground for police. So, you Know, there's so much more to it, but those are like the basic contours, sort of a bad idea in every way.

0:06:24 Thomas: Have to ask because if you were to tell me after those protests that cops needed a lot more and better training, I might say, well, yeah, yeah. No, no, that's true. But I'm wondering if they mean it in a different way than I would mean it. Do they mean like, yeah, we did beat the shit out of a lot of people and harm a lot of people, but not enough people. So we need to know, like, I don't, in what sense did they mean that? Do you think?

0:06:40 Micah: I think that they would tell you that they mean it in the sense of like, well, we want police to, you know do a good job and keep people safe. And, we know we want them to have the diversity training and the sensitivity training. That's the rhetoric that they put on top of it. I think what it actually is about is about trying to prepare this meaner, leaner police force. I don't know however you want to say it. And one of the key, I think, critiques that a lot of organizers made was that the reason that police kill people and mostly Black people is not because they're not trained. The officer who killed Rayshard Brooks in 2020, one of The Victims of Police Murder that that sparked the uprisings, that cop had over 2 ,000 hours of training. The issue isn't that they're not being trained. The fundamental purpose of the police force is not to keep people safe. It's to protect the interests of capital and of the ruling class. And so training to do that is going to keep on leading to murders. It's not going to make the police better or friendlier.

0:07:47 Matt: You from Georgia, from Atlanta originally?

0:07:49 Micah: I'm not. I'm from Buffalo, New York, actually.

0:07:51 Matt: So what got you into this fight?

0:07:52 Micah: So I moved down to Atlanta after undergrad and And originally was working as a paralegal at the Federal Public Defender there and then switched to a civil rights nonprofit where I got involved in various Atlanta organizing spaces, one of which was the campaign to shut down the Atlanta City Jail. I won't go like too deep into a tangent, but it's connected to Cop City in the sense that this is like a 1300 bed jail in the heart of downtown that was built in preparation for the 1996 Olympics, where they like tore down a bunch of public housing, created this jail basically to round up. Mostly poor Black homeless people so that visitors wouldn't have to see them.

0:08:30 Micah: And so I was part of a campaign led by formerly incarcerated women of color with this organization Women on the Rise to not only shut that jail down, but to replace it with a community resource center so that all the people who would be rounded up into that jail simply because they're poor or homeless or having some sort of crisis could receive services instead. And so that's obviously connected to Cop City in a lot of ways. And that, I think, connects to the point of abolition, which, again, is not just to close the jail, but also to open the centers, open community centers, like open resources, get people what they actually need. And so, yeah, just being involved in organizing spaces in Atlanta, there's no way to not see what's going on with Cop City, just given its presence.

0:09:10 Matt: Sure. Was that Atlanta City Jail connected to the Fulton County Jail that Fannie Willis was getting criticized for, or is that a different jail?

0:09:16 Micah: Yes, it's not the same jail ,but it's similarly a disaster. And the city and the county have done a lot of like partnering to basically move people between those two facilities. Disabilities. Big surprise, the same Atlanta Democrats that opened Cop City were also the ones who refused to shut down the jail, even though they had promised to just a couple years earlier.

0:09:35 Thomas: Wait, Atlanta Democrats opened the jail or?

0:09:37 Micah: Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a Democrat run city. They were the ones who championed the legislation to build Cop City. They Were the ones Who funded it $67 million in public funds. You know, it'S our majority black Democrat city council that has, you know, spearheaded this project?

0:09:51 Thomas: Well,

0:09:53 Matt: Do you think they expected the fight they got?

0:09:55 Micah: I don't think so.

0:09:57 Thomas: Let's talk about the fight they got.

0:09:58 Micah: Yeah, let's talk about it. The fight that they got has been going since spring of 2021. So I mean, a little more background on the project is that it was built on city owned land, but that land is outside of city limits in this forest. And the actual like legislation that authorized Cop City was the city council leasing this land to this private nonprofit called the Atlanta Police Foundation. The Atlanta Police Foundation is this nonprofit that has like all of the Atlanta corporations on its board, sort of like all Atlanta's ruling class actors, like Home Depot is a major one, Wells Fargo, Invesco, Loudermilk companies, it's all of sort of like Atlanta's power players who come together through the Atlanta police foundation. They fund this citywide surveillance network, they do a ton with policing in the city, and they're the ones who actually leased the land in in order to build the facility and then run it. And so that's sort of the background. It's this really shady, completely untransparent organization. And so as soon as organizers got wind of this, people started mobilizing. That sort of first summer of 2021, people were canvassing, doing petitions, showing up at city council, working really hard to show that the public was against this project. And eventually that culminated in 17 hours of public comment, which was, you know, completely record

0:11:19 Micah: -breaking of Atlanta residents saying, don't build this thing with our public funds. The movement has continued from there. You know, we can talk about it, but yeah.

0:11:27 Matt: This does seem like just a real model of a coalition movement. Talk a little about kind of who got it going and what kinds of organizations were coming together for this.

0:11:34 Micah: Yeah. So I think the cool thing about this movement is that it has been really decentralized. So it's not like a typical campaign where there's like an organization or a coalition of organizations who are like setting strategy, making decisions. It's been like a super multi -tactical, diverse movement. And so, you know, there have been people doing like the more traditional things that you think of, of, you know, going door to door, canvassing, mobilizing people, getting them to call their representatives. But then there's also been like really sort of radical, militant, direct action. So for over a year, there were people actually living on the forest land, repelling construction machinery, you Know, engaging in strategic sabotage of the contractors who were coming in and trying to start to tear down the forest.

0:12:19 Micah: Besides that, there's a network of preschools that's been really engaged in trying to stop it. They come to city council every so often, and the kids are adorable. They're engaged, so the families are engaged. A couple summers ago, there was a ballot initiative effort to try to put this on the ballot that collected over 116 ,000 signatures, which was almost double what our mayor actually got elected with. And the city fought really hard to keep us from voting on it. So yeah, every tactic you can think of has has shown up in the movement. And there's no like one single party calling the shots.

0:12:51 Thomas: It's not George Soros. Okay. All right. Sure.

0:12:52 Micah: It's not George Soros, believe it or not.

0:12:56 Matt: So you've talked about Cop City as an example of what abolitionists call organized abandonment, And it's such an important concept. I'd wonder if you could flesh that out.

0:13:04 Micah: Totally. So I mean, it goes to the question of like, why do they care so much about building Cop City? It was on the heels of the 2020 uprisings, you know, you have this mass nationwide movement against police. And so like, Why in that moment? Are they trying to do And so organized abandonment is a term, in my understanding, coined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that basically refers to the extreme austerity that the state has engaged in, the slashing of all sorts of, you know, community and social services, paired with the organized violence of policing in order to maintain a system that has so much misery. And so I think that, you know, Atlanta has been a prime example of organized abandonment. Like I said, this jail that was built in preparation for the 1996 Olympics was built while they were tearing down public housing to make way for the creation of these new stadiums that, you know then people would come and visit and see. And so Atlanta for over two decades has engaged in this pattern of tearing down all of the things that I think many people would agree. People need to be safe housing, you know, most centrally in the service of this really like rapid development. Atlanta has given massive subsidies to various corporations and developers in order to build, you Know, fancy new high rises and high income housing, all at the expense of the working class. And so like Atlanta used to be a majority black city, it's no longer it's less than 50 % of the city's population is black now.

0:14:31 Micah: And that's because black working class folks have have been pushed out of the city over the past decades. And so, you know, as Atlanta has had this organized abandonment, which it's, you know, torn down and destroyed so much of what people need, it's built up. It's policing apparatus because, of course, you know, when you take away the things that people need to survive, that's going to lead to a lot of precarity. That's goingと lead to а lot of social problems. And, you know, I think the abolitionist analysis is that the police are there to sort of control for those effects of abandonment.

0:14:58 Matt: That's really important context. As somebody who's not from Atlanta, doesn't really know the place. Because I was wondering for a while about how this one development, which, I mean, it was being styled as an office park. I know it was a lot more than that. But how it became such a flashpoint, not just for Atlanta, but for the country. It became like a national movement, something that every leftist knows. It seems like a real credit, obviously, to the work that everybody's doing on the ground. But what were your thoughts kind of on the bigger picture here?

0:15:20 Micah: Totally. I mean, I think that in some ways it, you know, back to the question of did they see this coming? They should have because, again, we're in the midst of complete climate disaster impending and we're seeing it in a lot of ways already. This is already in an area that is prone to flooding and they think it's a good idea to tear down this forest land. And so I think it brought in the environmentalists, it brought in anti -policing folks, it even brought in people who just care about government transparency and zoning and all of these more wonky issues where they're like, if you're going to spend our money, you should at least do it in a way that we have some input over. And a lot of people are just mad that they don't even get to have a say. And so that's, I think, why it blew up in Atlanta. I think that there was nationwide focus on it, in part because I think a lot organizers made efforts to really tour the country and share about what was happening. Cop City was built and proposed on the heels of Cop Academy, which is a similar

0:16:12 Micah: Project in Chicago.

0:16:13 Thomas: This is a sequel. Okay.

0:16:14 Micah: Yeah, this is the sequel, and there are many more sequels planned now. And so, you know, already people were making the connections of, well, they did this in Chicago, they're doing this in Atlanta, and now there's all these various facilities planned elsewhere. And then I think the other thing that made it, you know, go so big is the repression that the cops and the prosecutors have cracked down so hard on the movement in such an egregious way that, you know, people take notice. And again, I think that it's resonated as sort of a blueprint for repression. That we're seeing happen, you know, in the Trump era.

0:16:45 Micah: I think that one of the biggest things is obviously what's happening right now is so awful. And also, it's very similar to what Atlanta Democrats and Georgia Republicans have been doing to the Stop Cop City movement for years. Lots of repression, lots of state violence against Stop Cop city protesters. When folks were occupying the forest and, you knows, engaged in forest defense, there was a series of raids by the police that sort of got more and more intense. Tents. This is winter of 2022 into 2023. And eventually in January 2023, a huge joint task force of police marched into the forest and they murdered a protester, an anarchist abolitionist protester known as Tortuguita. While Tortugaita was sitting in their tent, an autopsy suggested that they were sitting in Their tent with their legs crossed, and they were shot dozens of times. And so, you know, they've literally killed a protester who was engaging in an occupation of the forest. But then they've also been, you Know, using the courts in a really extreme way. So back in August of 2023, they released, it was actually the same grand jury that indicted Donald Trump on RICO charges, also passed down this 61 person indictment of stop cop city activists alleging that they form this dangerous, violent anarchist conspiracy. Conspiracy. And this was years ago. There's been no evidence put forth. They haven't even tried to take it to trial yet. They're just trying to ruin people's lives in the process while fabricating this conspiracy.

0:18:13 Matt: I've read that indictment a while back.

0:18:15 Micah: It's bonkers.

0:18:15 Matt: And it really seems like a literal indictment of anarchism. It seems like

0:18:17 Thomas: Sorry. Sorry. Can we go back to the part where they committed a literal murder and somehow got away with it? No, we definitely want to talk about the Rico stuff, but how did they commit a murder? Because I've looked at like a lot of the bullet point list of this stuff, but I haven't been immersed in it at all. Just reading a basic summary of what has happened is so, even that is so outrageous.

0:18:36 Thomas: I have a hard time, not my blood, not boiling. How is this happening? And how with such impunity, like what in the world?

0:18:41 Micah: I mean, it's what they do. They go in and they kill, and then they always absolve themselves.

0:18:43 Thomas: So there was no punishment punishment whatsoever for this obvious murder like no like no consequences

0:18:52 Micah: No, no, they investigated themselves and they found no no wrongdoing, you know, as, as is always the case. And yeah, almost immediately after they killed Torchigita, they began the same campaign that they always do showing about, you know, they claimed that they were shot at first, which, you know, we don't know what happened in the forest, but like, you know, They immediately started trying to not only assassinate the person Torchgita, but also assassinate their character and say why they were this dangerous, violent anarchist who deserved to die. You know, they did what they do every time after they kill someone. And then, yeah, like I said, had investigated themselves and magically found, you know, they were all above board.

0:19:26 Matt: That's a real catalyzing moment, obviously, to have it escalate that way. What was kind of the feeling after that? What was going on in the movement?

0:19:32 Micah: I mean, it was devastating. You know, it Was completely devastating to see a comrade, you know murdered in cold blood by the state. I think it made clear just how high the stakes were. It made clear, you Know, that the state was willing to kill in order to make this project happen and not only kill, but then explain why it was an act of justice that they had murdered somebody. It was devastating and then it was also catalyzing in a lot of ways And, you know, I think that after Tortuguita was murdered was when a lot of national attention poured in and, you know, there was a lot focus that came to Atlanta. And so, yeah, it was both devastating and catalyzing.

0:20:09 Matt: And the indictment was later that year, because they were killed in January of 2023.

0:20:13 Micah: Yes. And then it was late August 2023 that the indictment came down.

0:20:17 Matt: And from what I remember, this indictment, it was essentially a literal indictment. It was essentially an indictment against anarchists, of just being an anarchist, more or less.

0:20:24 Micah: Yes. I mean, I like interrupting criminalization is an organization that did sort of like an annotated version of the indictment that I would encourage people to look at because it spends pages and pages and pages just talking about how evil and scary anarchists are, but then also saying things like, like it describes anarchists as like, and then they were posting bail for each other to get them out of jail, you know, and they were doing food giveaways and they were, you know, yeah, they were tweeting and they were telling the press to come.

0:20:49 Matt: Mutual aid. Yeah.

0:20:52 Thomas: Yeah but if you say that in a scary voice then it's scary though is the part you're missing yeah

0:20:56 Micah: Exactly. Terrifying. Terrifying, right.

0:20:59 Matt: It's also the organized part of RICO against the anarchist part of anarchism. I never really understood that, how they're saying this.

0:21:05 Thomas: Oh yeah it's like when they're gonna get like you know antifa headquarters and stuff and they're all talking about like the president of antifa and all that I love

0:21:11 Micah: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Both decentralized and somehow enormously centralized, you you know, according to them.

0:21:21 Matt: Yeah, it's really just an extremely overbearing indictment from what I remember. Even for a RICO indictment, it seems like it was really over the top.

0:21:27 Micah: Yeah, completely. I mean, one of the lines is, you know they talk about mutual aid as a term popularized by anarchists to describe individuals who exchange goods and services to assist other individuals in society without government intervention. Like can you imagine?

0:21:42 Matt: Yes. Wow, that's a felony right there. Yeah. No, I remember there was a line item for something like $12 in reimbursement for kitchen materials or something. That was a stated item on the indictment. I mean, it's so much. Yeah.

0:21:54 Micah: Yeah. And I mean that was part of the basis for money laundering charges. They're saying that people are doing money laundering and they actually dropped those charges because I think even they realized after, you know, a year that those were so ridiculous. But yeah, I mean, it's a nonsense indictment. But I mean I think this is actually the important point is that the point of the indictment is not to convict a bunch of people. It's to scare people. It's to intimidate people.

0:21:59 Thomas: It what this is insane oh

0:22:20 Micah: It's ruin the lives of these 61 people who have done nothing wrong. You know, they don't have like a specific piece of evidence that you know this person did this thing for anything. No, I I mean, like, sure,

0:22:29 Thomas: Really I was gonna ask because like like let me ask the question not not like oh is there any truth to the subpoena per se but like I don't know what tactics people are using I know a lot of times people when they're protesting stuff might do things that are illegal and they might even do so you know realizing they're gonna get punished for it but that's the protest that they're doing versus there might be tactics that don't necessarily cross that that legal threshold.

0:22:52 Thomas: What kinds of things were being done and what kinds of claims are they making here in this indictment? I mean, you're already saying there's like nothing specific, but that's crazy.

0:23:01 Micah: I mean so, so this is, this is the thing is that it's true. It's been widely covered. Many of us have talked about it, that there have been many acts of, you know, sabotage and property destruction of construction machinery. You know, there's been across the country, actually, people have done strategic sabotage of banks who are involved in financing the project. Like certainly there are acts that have happened that qualify as property damage in some form. They don't have any evidence showing that anyone in this indictment is related to any of these. This is why they are alleging this conspiracy is they're saying, you know, this is this criminal conspiracy that you're all involved in. And so we can all hold you accountable, even though, you know, they can't point to anyone doing any specific thing. And then when they do point to specific things, you know, the point to reimbursements for someone who was allegedly living in the forest. Again, not saying that that person engaged in a particular act of, you know, throwing a Molotov cocktail or whatever it it was, but just saying that they say that that person lived in the forest. A couple of the folks on the indictment are there for flyering the information in a neighborhood of one of the cops who murdered Tortuguita.

0:24:07 Thomas: Jesus.

0:24:07 Micah: Classic First Amendment protected activity. And that's one of the discrete acts that they're homing in on. And so when it comes to things that, sure, even though I think many people would say that we support them happening, are granted granted considered crimes, they can't tie anybody to any of those things. I mean, and, you know, there was actually just an article that came out today in Associated Press, where some former prosecutors are saying, like, yeah, it's kind of funky that they haven't pushed to go to trial yet. It's likely that these charges are, you Know, eventually going to be quietly dismissed. Because again, you knows, they just don't, they don't have the evidence for it.

0:24:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Really? Wow. Wow, but that causes absolute hell, right? I means, for these people's lives.

0:24:49 Micah: Exactly. So I I mean, people have lost their jobs. People can't get housing. You know, some people are or were students and were kicked off of their college or law school campuses. People have had their bank accounts closed. Like their goal is very much to destroy people's lives and to scare other people from joining the movement.

0:25:06 Thomas: That is the most unjust, corrupt thing.

0:25:08 Matt: And that goes right to what you were saying about our moment. That's what DOJ and federal government want to do right now, is just to bring as many charges as possible to scare people with even just completely frivolous things. And just looking through this indictment again, as we're talking, I mean just things like literally filming the police. There's an overt act.

0:25:23 Matt: One of them is just filming the police doing things to protesters. It's outrageous. It really is.

0:25:26 Thomas: Is that a crime?

0:25:28 Matt: No, it shouldn't be. It That's just because they post it on their social media. Because that's the thing. We learned a lot actually covering the election interference case in Atlanta. We learned about RICO in Georgia. It's very popular. It seems like it's more popular even than most places.

0:25:39 Micah: Oh, they love it. Yeah.

0:25:39 Matt: It seems a bit, yeah, a

0:25:40 Thomas: You know who should maybe be the subject of that kind of thing is the people who murdered and got away with it and now are organizing a way of ruining people's lives. That sounds like a conspiracy to me.

0:25:52 Matt: Bit.

0:25:52 Thomas: That sounds sort of like a controversy with more serious crimes.

0:25:52 Micah: Yeah, I mean there was actually it's funny you say that because if you go to the peoplesrico .org, you know, it's this like parody project that points out the conspiracy is the Atlanta Police Foundation, all these corporations, the Atlanta City Council, even the universities are in on it. These are all the ruling class actors who have come together to push forward this project, to destroy a forest, to kill a protester, to charge all these people. That's the conspiracy, but it's just, of course, legal under capitalism? Yes.

0:26:17 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. I promise I hadn't seen that. And I wasn't. But it's an obvious thought. And that's an awesome website. And I would like to go to there. Outrageous. Talk about, did we talk about the signatures and that whole thing?

0:26:31 Micah: So in summer of 2023, this is after police had raided the forest a bunch of times and sort of really blocked off that tactic. People weren't able to do the forest defense anymore. A coalition of organizations focused on this new tactic that they were going to try to basically try to put Cop City to a direct vote by the residents of Atlanta. And so, of course, there's all these complicated procedures for how you actually get it on the ballot. They had to collect about 58 ,000 signatures in order to put it on the ballot, started collecting them. The city threw up all these roadblocks, tried to stop certain people who weren't residents of the city from collecting them, the coalition had to sue and they got a good ruling basically saying, yes, under the First Amendment, anyone can collect these signatures. So collected signatures all summer, facing a lot of police surveillance, by the way, of course, and intimidation, and then submitted them to the city. Again, this is like our Democrat mayor, Andre Dickens. And this is Georgia, where of course Democrats talk about how 2020, they delivered Georgia. We love voting rights.

0:27:26 Thomas: Oh, I bet. Yeah, yeah.

0:27:41 Micah: Everyone go vote. Then when the people of Atlanta want to vote on something in their backyard, the city has now spent millions in legal fees to stop us from voting in court in a case that has gone all the way up to the 11th Circuit. Not only are they, you know, they put this legal barrier up, they also published the names and contact information of everyone who signed the petition in order to, you know, expose anyone who might have opposed Cop City. And so, you know, they've done everything they can and they were ultimately successful. The vote has never come to pass.

0:28:13 Micah: It's basically seems to have died in the 11th Circuit and they stopped it. Again, in the city that, you know, loves to talk about voting rights.

0:28:20 Matt: This was on signature verification? Was that the issue?

0:28:22 Thomas: I think it was about a deadline, wasn't it?

0:28:24 Micah: Yes, it actually didn't. I mean, they would have litigated that too if they lost on the earlier issue. But the earlier case was actually about who could collect signatures. And they basically appealed up the district court ruling saying that these people shouldn't have been able to collect them, that the timeline to collect signatures shouldn't Have been restarted. So I mean yeah, even if they lost that one, they were definitely planning on suing over the actual substance of the ballot initiative too.

0:28:51 Thomas: And that's all an effort to have, like, the actual people decide something like this. Who is actually the people who made this decision to begin with? How did this come about?

0:29:00 Micah: So it was legislation passed by the Atlanta City Council to lease this city -owned land to the Atlanta Police Foundation in order to build it. So I mean, the ultimate say is with the Atlanta city council and the mayor. The mayor actually right now could still cancel the lease. That's like written into the lease agreement. The Atlanta Police foundation has pushed the project, but the power ultimately does rest with the Atlanta County Council and the Mayor.

0:29:25 Matt: And you're saying at the beginning of all this, there's 17 hours of testimony to the city council. And I assume the kinds of letter writing and door knocking and the kinds of democratic measures that you'd expect in this kind of thing. Did you ever felt like you're being hurt? Did anybody ever indicate that this was something they would hear out?

0:29:39 Micah: No, I mean, for one, after, in the beginning, when they first realized that people were going to, you know, make a stink about this, they set up these, you know, community listening sessions in which they talked at the community. And I think it was, you know, still COVID, it was over Zoom, comments were off.

0:29:55 Thomas: Yeah, community listening, where you, the community, listen to us.

0:30:00 Micah: Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, they like did a couple things like that. I think that they realized pretty quickly they weren't going to win anyone over. And so instead, they decided really to just sort of like blunt force, push it through. At every stage of the process where they've passed new legislation, approved new funding, whatever it's been, there have always been people who have shown up for hours and hours to speak against it. And they just could not care less.

0:30:23 Matt: When did the occupation of the forest begin?

0:30:26 Micah: The occupation of the forest began, I would say, in fall 2021, I think is when it started. So the final vote to actually lease the land to build Cop City was in September 2021. It was supposed to be a month earlier, but because of all the pushback, folks actually got it delayed. And there were some small victories there where like the acreage for the facility went down.

0:30:46 Thomas: Oh, that's something.

0:30:46 Micah: They claimed, well, we're going to plant some trees also. And like, you know, that's bullshit. But, you know, and so it was after that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was after that, that some people pivoted and said, like, okay, you can say that you're going to build it, but you still need contractors who are willing to do it. You know, you still need to actually physically go into the forest to do it. And because of the forest defense, the project was massively delayed. They originally said it was supposed to open in like April 2023, and a smaller version of it just opened in April 2025. So I mean, it's been years delayed, millions and millions more expensive than it was supposed to be. And a lot of contractors pulled out throughout the process.

0:30:50 Thomas: Those trees are cops, though.

0:31:24 Matt: Yeah, when you lay that timeline out, it really shows the necessity of direct action in the face of injustice and in the case of the city obviously just not willing to budge on any of this. I mean, there's so much criticism of that kind of thing, but it just makes sense. It's where things are going to go.

0:31:37 Micah: And I mean I think at every stage of the process, Atlanta's leadership has said things like, you know, well you all need to protest the right way and you know let's do dialogue. And And it's like, well, we couldn't have done more of that. We've, you know, hours and hours of public comment, all the petitions, all of the call -ins to lawmakers, you Know, and they just blow right by it. And so I'm like, of course you saw people.

0:31:44 Thomas: Yeah, of course, yeah? Yeah. Isn't that weird that no one ever protests the right way? Isn't that weird? There's always a problem. Yeah, there's always a problem with it. I want to point to the examples.

0:32:01 Micah: No one. No such thing as a proper protest. Right. Right.

0:32:07 Thomas: I want to know like, okay, what do you mean? Who protested well and got what they wanted?

0:32:11 Micah: Exactly. Famously, the civil rights movement faced no repression, and that's because they protested the right way.

0:32:16 Thomas: They sat quietly and asked and that's what happened.

0:32:18 Matt: Never gotten in the way of anybody. Yeah, that's the way. This work took you to law school. How'd that come about?

0:32:24 Micah: You know, I think in, I was trying to decide whether to go. And one of the things that ultimately really pushed me is that I definitely don't think we need like tons of lawyers, but I think we do need lawyers who are committed to movements, who are submitted to movement defense. You know, I was part of a big effort. You know anything that I'm talking about, there are so many people involved, but an effort to match people up with attorneys who could represent them in these criminal cases. Cases and it was really really hard to find attorneys who were you know willing to take cases either pro bono or low bono who you know were politically aligned and

0:32:55 Thomas: Yeah. I bet. Low bono. How have I never heard that before? I love that. Thank you. Low Bono.

0:33:00 Micah: Low bonо we love low

0:33:01 Matt: I use that all the time.

0:33:02 Micah: Bono happy

0:33:03 Thomas: You've never said that on the show, Matt. I would remember. Yes. Yes.

0:33:07 Matt: Wow. Okay. Okay, fair enough.

0:33:11 Thomas: Love it.

0:33:10 Micah: To introduce the pod to it and I mean and that was even true in 2020 when you know there were there were mass arrests in the streets and we were trying to find attorney's to represent people for you know often much smaller charges disorderly conduct that sort of thing and so yeah yeah, I think definitely the law is not like the solution and lawyers aren't saviors. But I do think we need, you know, lawyers who are committed to protecting movements.

0:33:31 Thomas: Yeah, in a generic sense. No, the world does not need more lawyers. But in a specific sense, we've been talking about it a lot lately, like the world, the country needs more of the right kind of lawyers. Really does. Really does. Like, it's just so much of this. Matt talks about this all the time. Like so much of this requires the bad guy lawyers. And once they get going, that requires the other side to use the law. It's all fought in the courts. You know, it's all thought in these legalistic ways that are often very silly and not actually justified, but you still need the people fighting it to be qualified to do so and to navigate the courts. So that actually inspired your decision to go to law school?

0:34:07 Micah: Definitely, definitely played a major role. You know, I had been thinking about it and was sort of in the process of deciding what am I going to do? And definitely that that and 2020 informed the experience. And also, I mean, I Think the other this is after I'd already decided to go but like with the referendum, again, it never went to a vote because they you know they worked so hard to block it. But organizers gathered 116 ,000 signatures, which is so many conversations that were had with Atlanta residents. So many more people in Atlanta know about Cop City because of that effort.

0:34:39 Micah: And the reason that that effort continued throughout the summer was because they got that initial favorable ruling in the district court that allowed people from all over to gather signatures. And so even though they didn't win that legal case, that was something thing that opened the door to have way more canvassing conversations. And so I think that's, you know, that's the other thing that the movement has shown me is that there's so much, there's much that can come of lawyering in conjunction with movements, even if you don't get like the ruling at the end of the day.

0:35:07 Matt: So you ended up at Harvard Law School, which is not really known as a hotbed of anarchism, usually.

0:35:11 Thomas: So you just picked one at random, just picked one to just go to just easily. Just like draw it out of a hat. I'll just, hey, I'll go to this one.

0:35:14 Matt: Yeah, just the best one. But I understand that there's a solid abolitionist core there. How's it going at Harvard?

0:35:21 Micah: Yeah, right.

0:35:23 Matt: I'm trying to be optimistic here.

0:35:24 Thomas: Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. This is news to me. I'm happy if true.

0:35:25 Micah: And no, I mean, there's, there's definitely a great cohort of radical legal students who are down for the cause in many ways and have great politics. It's definitely an institution that hoards a lot of wealth and should not exist as it is, and has this massive endowment that it's doing everything to defend, basically. I think that's the only reason that they're putting up this fight now against the the administration.

0:35:55 Micah: But they've been, of course, awful to all pro -Palestine protesters. They've fired pro -Palestine faculty. It's all in defense of the endowment and the massive amounts of wealth that are swirling around this place.

0:36:09 Matt: I guess just because I've been at a law school for 20 years, and we didn't really talk about abolition. And I went to a very corporate law school too, so I wasn't really surrounded with the right kind of people. But it was on my mind. What are those conversations? I mean, how's the feeling right now among law students about what we're doing?

0:36:15 Micah: I mean, it's such a weird time to be in the legal world, as I'm sure I don't have to explain to you all, because what is the rule of law? I mean I think that was true in a lot of ways before Trump also, but I mean it's been radicalizing. For a lot of people to see how much of the law is fake. I think people are, you know, of course, like shaken by the administration, you know, ignoring or subverting judicial orders. And I think that that's actually like clarified things for a Lot of people in terms of like, what the law actually is and is not.

0:36:54 Thomas: Mm -hum.

0:36:54 Micah: And so you know I think that people are scared in a lot Of ways, of course international students are terrified. But I also think that in the same way that I think repression always does. It's also brought people together and it's you know shown people people that we do need to be able to fight both outside of and within, you know, legal systems.

0:37:10 Thomas: Hey, do you want to talk more about the book No Cop City, No Cop World? I already love the title. You want to take a look at it? Do you want me to talk about that?

0:37:16 Micah: Yeah, so it's a collection of essays and contributions, basically from a wide range of organizers in the movement. And so yeah, Kamau, Mariah, and I edited it, but there's like 30 chapters, and maybe like 40 contributors total, sort of in recognition of the fact that one, our movements don't often do a great job of documenting, you Know, our tactics, our strategies, our lessons learned, things that we won and things that we lost. And so in part, it was an effort to say, like, while this is all fresh, like let's sit down and talk about like, what did you do? What did you learn? What happened?

0:37:48 Thomas: Right.

0:37:49 Micah: I think it's a really cool sort of like snapshot of a lot of different moments of the movement and a lot lessons that people have learned from, you know, the most militant direct action to the most sort of, like above board ballot initiative voting rights tactics. And it was, you know, in part an effort to document what's come of the movement so far. And then I think it's also our hope was to, given that there are so many cop cities proposed across the country, including like a massive one in Baltimore that's in development right now. The goal is to say that, you know, the Stop Cop City movement learned a lot from the No Cop Academy movement in Chicago. And, you Know, I think we want to pass those lessons on. And we know that cities across the county are going to be able to are doubling down on policing, doubling down on police budgets. And so let's share what we can with the world.

0:38:33 Matt: What are the biggest takeaways for you from this book?

0:38:35 Micah: So many, you know, I think that as I've, as I read it back, a couple things come to mind. The first is that there really is so much power in a decentralized movement that does pursue so many different tactics. It's really been across the board, sort of like the most visible nonprofits, and then, you You know, like the most underground anarchists who no one knows their names, no one knows who they are. And, you know, things are happening. And so for one, I think that what's shown through is that at various moments over the past four -ish years, different tactics have come into play. So, you Know, when the legislative campaign against the funding failed, that's often a time when, you Now, movements fall apart and OK, well, we lost this at City Hall. But instead of the movement ending, people took to the forest and they breathed new life into the movement and, you know, gave it this whole new energy and really kept it alive. And I think that sort of feeds into a second theme, which is that even though it feels like in a lot of ways, we lost and in a big way, we did lose, you Know, Cop City did open, there were wins within that. And every step of the way, if people had not continued to fight, then we definitely would have lost it would have

0:39:40 Micah: Opened years ago. And who knows what it would've looked like it would have taken up even more of the forest, you know, how much more money would have gone to the police. And so, you know, I think that that is what it's driven home for me is that it's always worth it to fight because you don't know what's going to come of the fight, but you do know that if you don't fight, you'll definitely lose. Yeah.

0:39:55 Matt: Love that. Love that, and that I think we're in a moment right now where so many people are asking, what can I do? How can I stop what's coming or what we have now? And I think there's so many lessons I'm sure we can learn just from this one movement, and really good to hear you say that.

0:40:07 Matt: So for people who are kind of new to abolition or trying to understand it or get their hands around it, where would you start?

0:40:02 Micah: You know, I think where I would start is something that we actually talk about in the book is that, again, 116 ,000 signatures, an enormous amount of people in Atlanta are against Cop City being built, right? Probably many or maybe even most of those, probably most of those people would not identify as abolitionists. But so many of those people have shown up to City City Hall or have shown up to Canvas or have done a million different things to oppose Cop City and to save the forest. And I think that's because at the end of the day, even though a lot of those people wouldn't call themselves abolitionists, they see the proposal to pour more money into policing and to destroy a forest, and they know that they don't want that. And what people have spoken to at City Hall again and again is all of the things that they do want. And that's, I think, what's been maybe most moving to me is that people have shown up and they talk about, well, we want housing and we want well -funded schools and we Want the pools to stay open in the summer when it's really hot so that kids have a place to go. We want the parks to stay Open. We Want street lights. You know, we Want to actually have mental health crisis centers because we don't have any that are 24 seven in Atlanta. We Wont all of these things that will actually make people safer. And to me, that's the starting point of abolition is what do you individually need to feel safe to feel feel like you're healthy and whole and can thrive and can be in community with people? And is a big army of stormtroopers what's doing it? Or is it all of the different things that make up the social fabric and that give you stability and the ability to have an income and live a good life and enjoy yourself? What are those basic building blocks? And in Atlanta, because of this organized abandonment, as in so many other cities, we don't have those things. Instead, we give over a third of our budget to the police, and then we complain that crime is high, even when we're giving all this money to the police. And so, yeah, I think it's about saying, what is it that's going to actually make people safer? And police have had decades and decades and decades to prove their case, and they haven't done it.

0:42:10 Thomas: Yeah, we've tried that. It blows my mind. I'm near San Francisco and homelessness is such a big issue and it blows my mind how much people tend to think. I feel like there's basically two kinds of people. There's people like, I assume the three of us, where you're like, wow, homeless people, we need housing then. Sounds like housing would be a good, you know, like houses would probably, that'd be good.

0:42:28 Thomas: Other people are like, we needs more fascists to be able to yell at those people, imprison them, and make them go to a different area and be homeless. Like it doesn't, I don't even understand the short -term thinking of it. And it's that issue. And so many other kinds of things, too, where it's like, all you want is someone to be able to abuse these folks. And then they move to the next city over what you know, it's not a solution to anything. Whereas creating long term solutions is exactly what you're talking about utilizing our government, and realizing that we actually can make demands of our government. And that's what it should be. It should be like the people being able to do those things. That's really cool. I also, I love that what you said about the book, about it being sort of a chance to, it's almost like a debrief after what happened because we don't get to make anarchist city. And then we do like, you know, they get to be like, well, 2020 protests didn't go well. We'll spend $140 million about it or whatever.

0:43:23 Thomas: You know, it's like, we don't have that where we get to be like, well, our protests didn't maybe go how we wanted to in this way. If only, you know? If only we could have like our own protester city, you know? We wouldn'T destroy a forest for it, I'm sure. But yeah, no, it's really, really cool to think about. Like there's so much I imagine, and I'm Sure you saw it firsthand. There's so much ingenuity in these spaces. And these these kind of folks who are doing these things. I don't know if you have any examples offhand. But just the grit and ingenuity that you often see is just really cool to behold.

0:43:33 Micah: Yeah, completely. And I mean, I think that sort of along those lines, one of the one of the really cool things about the movement is seeing how, you know, it's people came to Cop City with their ideas about what what should or shouldn't happen, but also the process of struggling against it has also changed the way that people think about policing, incarceration, the way we use our municipal budget. In the beginning, there was a whole group of people who really didn't care about police at all.

0:44:17 Micah: They were just like, this is a forest where people engage in recreation and kayak on the river and walk through the paths, and it's really not a good idea to tear that down. A lot of those people over the next years saw, oh, if I want to protect a forest, I'm actually going to have to take on the police because the police are the people who show up to dismantle.

0:44:35 Thomas: Yeah, they're the bad guy from FernGully.

0:44:37 Micah: Right, right. They are the bad guys. They're the stormtroopers who march through the forest and take people out. And so I think that there's been so much creativity of tactics in the movement. And then it's also been something that has drawn people together in a lot of ways. And I've learned so much more about environmental justice organizing and environmental racism. And I think that a lot of people who came in through different lenses have learned a lot about abolition. Again, even if they wouldn't call themselves abolitionists, I think there's been a real unifying effect in a lot of ways.

0:45:06 Matt: I love the intersectionality of it, just everything that I've read. And I think there's a lot we can learn in the current fight with immigration enforcement, too. There has to be in here. But, you know, I think that, frankly, the kind of baby -brained critique of abolition has always been, well, these people just want to eliminate police and prisons and replace them with nothing, which is obviously not true. And you've done a great job of articulating that. And I've been on this kind of understanding myself of evolving, trying to understand it. Seeing the way, though, that so many people are willing to come together to fight for a world they may not see and for a better society that we may not live to see. It's inspiring. It's important. But there's so many ways that we can actually be here and see the change now. And I just really, I don't know, the singularity of vision here is really impressive. Yeah.

0:45:46 Thomas: So in the end, Cop City is there though, but it's smaller. And we're still waiting for what's going to happen with that RICO indictment, but your guess is that it might just be dropped eventually. Is there anything else pending to keep an eye on or any other in that ending of the movie where you say like, and Cop City went on to be super fascist and you know, all the other stuff that happened.

0:46:04 Micah: Right. Yeah, I mean, I definitely don't want to like sugarcoat it or make it seem better than it is. It's awful. A bunch of the forest was was clear cut, a

0:46:14 Thomas: A person was murdered. Jesus. Yeah.

0:46:16 Micah: Like completely like torture Gita can never be brought back. They've built this, you know, big, concrete playground now. So like, it's, it is really awful in a lot of ways. And also, yeah, I do think that a lot of lessons have been learned. A lot of capacity has been built. The city has, you know had this complete nightmare on its hands for years. They caught contractors were pressured out of the project for lots of different reasons. There's this one video where an executive with one of this, I think it was Atlas Construction, was like, yeah, we pulled out of the project because you guys are nightmares. I don't know if we're allowed to swear on this podcast.

0:46:50 Micah: But you know, like, like there have been, there have ben, you know, there's been a huge, I think there have been a lot of successes. But again, it's Yeah, it has been really tough. In terms of the indictment and the case. I think one of the most important things right now is showing up for the people who are facing charges. I do think that given the lack of evidence that they're not going to be able to prove this case against the protesters, but that doesn't mean that, you you know, they're not being successful in the meantime and really damaging people's lives. And so there are regular court hearings that folks get people out to pack the court for, to show the support. We're calling on the attorney general to drop the charges. So there's definitely still a lot of work to be done in terms of supporting those facing repression. I mean, and then also like Cop City was a focal point, but policing and police violence in Atlanta is like the broader, like, you know we weren't trying to just stop Cop City and then leave everything else intact, right? So people are still fighting policing. They're still fighting the fact that Andre Dickens, our mayor, just proposed a massive increase in police funding for the next year's budget. And so, yeah, there's still a ton of fight to be had. Had.

0:47:53 Matt: So I'm going to ask you every law student's favorite question. What's next? What are you doing? What's your plan?

0:47:57 Micah: What's my plan? My plan is to learn how to be a lawyer that can defend criminalized protesters and sue cops. Yeah, right. Yeah. Contracts, torts, you know, I did just take my evidence exam. I can't say how well that went.

0:48:06 Thomas: Yeah, contracts, evidence, Civ Pro.

0:48:16 Matt: Awesome.

0:48:16 Micah: But yeah, I'll be back in Atlanta this summer. Super excited to be there. And then yeah, just gonna try to keep on what I've been doing, which is try to work with other people against the violence of a police state and in service of, you know, real solutions for people's lives.

0:48:15 Thomas: Yeah love it so much.

0:48:31 Matt: That's, yeah, great.

0:48:31 Thomas: Really inspiring. Yeah thanks for taking the time and speaking with us.

0:48:34 Micah: Yeah, thanks for having me.

0:48:35 Thomas: We always ask if there's anywhere you want to send our listeners, anywhere at all. Of course, the book, No Cop City, No Cops World. Anything else you'd like to direct people to?

0:48:44 Micah: Yes, I would love to direct people to the Free Speech Forest Fund, which is a fundraiser to support the folks who are facing these RICO charges would definitely encourage people to go there and support them.

0:48:53 Thomas: Awesome.

0:48:54 Matt: And I just wanted to ask, after they've read No Cop City, No Cop World, and they're getting excited about abolition, what's the one book that you'd recommend to start with for somebody who's new to this?

0:49:02 Micah: Oh my goodness. That's a terrible question. No, it's a great it's A great question.

0:49:06 Matt: So many good books, I know. Yeah.

0:49:07 Micah: I know. If they're still needing just a little bit more on abolition to really drive the case home. No more police by Mariam Kaba and and Andrea Ritchie is a great read.

0:49:16 Matt: Great.

0:49:16 Thomas: Well, thank you so much.

0:49:17 Matt: Thanks so much, Micah.

0:49:18 Micah: Thank you guys. Really enjoyed this.

0:49:20 Matt: Yeah, thanks for your work, and good luck to you.

0:49:21 Micah: Thank you. Take care.

0:49:41 Matt: No Cop city, No cop world.

0:49:42 Thomas: Let me get a clean take. No Cop City.

0:49:47 Micah: Lo Bono. We love Lo Bon.