“This is a global struggle against fascism, it’s a global struggle against the militarization of the police and state violence against folks whose dissent is being oppressed.”
for; over who is welcome to live and enjoy life here, and who is expected to simply labor here for low wages and under constant surveillance.” That piece came up in my conversation with Alex Vitale about how we should understand the ongoing struggle to stop the construction of Cop City, and its larger context.: Part of what’s so important about Micah’s analysis is that it doesn’t try to understand policing in some kind of self-contained vacuum.
And so the whole move towards Cop City, the whole move towards framing opposition as an act of terror, the escalation of violence is really a kind of act of desperation by elites in Atlanta trying to head off any kind of broad-based democratic control over their vision of an evermore unequal Atlanta.
I think on the national or international side, there’s a few trends happening. One is simply we’re in the period after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of people in military and other security sectors have really just a need to find a new job or a new line of employment. I think there’s a kind of supply-side police and military-style police training glut. So these people are pushing for new ventures. Obviously, they know that there’s a lot of money available for police training.
I think that if we look at the past few months, beginning in January, certainly with the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, the killing of Tortuguita in Atlanta, the arrest of journalists who are trying to cover various environmental crises and incidents like the train derailment in East Palestine, we see an accretion of events. Now, any one of them on its own, of course, fits a pattern that we’re familiar with.
One of the most egregious examples of police power grabs in Chicago in recent years is also tied to one of the most memorable abolitionist organizing campaigns in recent history in our city: the struggle known as #NoCopAcademy. My friend Benji Hart was an organizer on that campaign. Benji is an author, artist and educator currently living in the Woodlawn neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago.
Or is the answer to these crises, will the answer to these crises be the mass redistribution of resources, the guaranteeing of housing, the guaranteeing of health care? Will we actually use the resources at our disposal to open access to the things that we know people need and will increasingly need as these many global crises continue to compound? Or will we do the opposite? Will we accept that these crises are inevitable and just police who has access to the basic things that they need as...
I think effective battles against policing, understand that policing, militarization, incarceration, surveillance are a global issues. While the bodies or the names of the organizations or offices that target our communities might be different, fundamentally the same thing is happening in Black and brown, immigrant, non-immigrant, poor working communities, again, all throughout the globe.
But it’s all the more reason to do that work, to create those relationships and overcome those barriers because you never know in the future when those might be life-saving relationships and connections and shared understandings. And I think this is something that the Stop Cop City organizers are doing really incredibly. Creating coalitions or even just working with groups and demographics that you might not have previously or that it might not have even have made sense to previously.
That was a very intentional erasure of, A, the fact that Atlanta organizers were putting out the call for solidarity and asking folks to raise this call around the country and to show up in solidarity with Black folks in the city of Atlanta.
Just this past Monday, which was May 15th, there was a city council meeting in which there was over seven hours of public comment, over 200 people signed up and a hundred percent of those people were speaking out against Cop City. And so, despite this overwhelming opposition since the beginning of public awareness about the project, it’s continued to move forward.
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