Garrison Davis

What followed was a period of high-octane intensity.

Let's call this the revenge phase.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, you get this kind of like trading blows with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March 5th, unquote.

During the South River Music Festival on March 5th, a few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site.

The crowd repelled police, and construction equipment was set on fire.

The cops retaliated quick, swarming the area with all available units in Atlanta, kettled the festival, and eventually arrested 23 people, charging them with domestic terrorism.

After the events of March 5th, the movement entered an odd limbo phase with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City Coalition on the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions.

During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest.

Entry became heavily restricted.

Following this denial of operating space, the forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear-cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement.

About a month later, the bail fund and legal defense nonprofit, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud.

Just a few days after the raid, the city council approved a $67 million Cop City funding package.

The next day, organizers announced a referendum campaign to gather petition signatures to put the Cop City land lease ordinance on the upcoming November ballot.

Despite setbacks, there was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before.

There was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement.

Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked by an organized week of action, which was a convergence of people from all around the country or even the world who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions, and protests against Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and contractors hired to build the facility.

The summer of 2023 saw the sixth organized week of action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase.

And without the forest as an operating zone, the week of action struggled to find its purpose despite the surge in movement participation around the city hall budget vote earlier that June.

The next phase was the first to be positively determined by the police, the repression phase, which really sets in around August of 2023 with the RICO indictment charging 61 people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism.

State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which leads to the current trial phase.