Georgia criminalizing post-George Floyd protests is a new blow to democracy

If you watch cable TV news, you’ve probably learned a lot over the last month about Georgia’s racketeering, or RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law, and understandably so. If your views are on the left side of America’s political chasm, you probably applauded when Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis indicted Donald Trump under that RICO statute — alleging that the 45th president oversaw a criminal enterprise to overturn his 2020 election loss that included pressuring state officials and election workers and convening fake electors.

With hours and hours of coverage of Fulton County inmate No. P01135809, you’ve probably heard nothing about another man charged in recent days under Georgia’s RICO law — a 20-something from Maryland named Geoffrey Parsons. According to a recent grand jury indictment steered by the Peach State’s Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, Parsons committed an “overt act” in a criminal conspiracy when he signed a document with the acronym “ACAB,” which stands for “all cops are bastards.”

This absurd allegation against Parsons — courts have ruled, after all, that it’s legal to give the finger to a cop — might almost be funny if it were not part of the most serious threat to American democracy that not nearly enough people are talking about.

» READ MORE: Cop City in Atlanta is the future of America | Will Bunch

Georgia’s RICO charges against 61 people involved in the protest movement against “Cop City” — the uber-controversial $90 million police training center under construction on Atlanta’s outskirts — are a full-frontal assault on citizens’ right to protest. Despite the lack of fanfare, it means as much for the future of the American Experiment as our obsession over whether Trump will be president or prisoner in 2025.

The specifics of Carr’s criminal case against the nearly two-year protest movement that has consumed metro Atlanta are appalling. In addition to signing “ACAB,” the indictment alleges that “overt acts” of racketeering include an $11.91 reimbursement for buying glue, passing out flyers depicting a police officer who shot and killed a demonstrator, trespassing on the Cop City site, and soliciting donations to pay bail for protesters arrested in the civil disobedience campaign. One of the alleged racketeers was a lawyer and legal observer for the Southern Poverty Law Center. The lawyer, Thomas Jergens, is also one of dozens previously charged with “domestic terrorism.”

Even more troubling, though, is the bigger argument laced through the 109-page indictment. It seeks to reframe a protest movement with broad support in the Atlanta community and beyond as a criminal enterprise — especially any connections to the philosophy of anarchy and, even more disturbingly, the protests that began in May 2020 when Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd.

According to the Orwellian language of the Georgia RICO case, ideas that are fundamental to the notion of dissent — mutual aid, solidarity, and “collectivism” — are felony crimes. New York Magazine’s Sarah Jones righteously nails it when she calls the indictment “an artifact of political repression” and writes that the case shows “Georgia cares more for Cop City than for civil liberties and is determined to quell dissent by whatever means it can.”

“It’s a shocking and deliberate overuse of prosecutorial power meant to criminalize the movement,” Kamau Franklin of Atlanta’s Community Builders Movement, a leader of the city’s Stop Cop City efforts, told me on Sunday. He noted that other cities planning their own “Cop City”-style projects to amp up militarized policing are watching closely.

Even from nearly 1,000 miles away in America’s birthplace of Philadelphia, I’ve come to see the fight over Cop City as a battle for the nation’s soul. For one thing, the training center — which would include a “mock city” where officers will practice crushing urban protests — has become kind of the last stand for the remnants of the protest movement that motivated millions in the spring of 2020, which is seeing the dream of radical police reform slipping away.

What’s more, the battle — opponents are still hoping to block Cop City, now mainly through a drive to get a referendum before Atlanta voters — will also define whether working-class and low-income urban residents, squeezed by rapid gentrification in the booming capital of the American South, have any say in the future of a city dominated by a long-standing alliance between mostly white business elites and a Black political class willing to work with them. A big chunk of the money for Cop City comes from the nongovernmental Atlanta Police Foundation funded by the city’s corporations, from Home Depot to Waffle House, and even the owners of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which supports the project.

That alliance has seen the city’s liberal-branded Democrats, led by Mayor Andre Dickens, supporting Cop City despite substantial public opposition. In June, Atlanta’s city council heard 14 hours of mostly negative testimony and then voted 11-4 to move forward with the training center. On Monday, Franklin and other organizers plan to turn in more than 100,000 signatures — a stunning number, well over the legal requirement of roughly 70,000 — for a voter referendum to cancel the Cop City lease and kill the project.

But city officials — most of them Democrats who’ve complained for years, justifiably, about Republicans in Georgia conducting voter suppression — seem determined not to bring Cop City before the people. The Dickens-led City Hall has threatened to use rigid “signature matching” — again, a move sharply criticized when GOP election officials did it — and even legal action that would question the validity of a voter referendum.

You can smell the hypocrisy all the way up here in Philly.

But the RICO charges that double down on the notion that Cop City protesters are “domestic terrorists” are an even more existential threat to democracy. The idea that anarchism — linked, sometimes in reality and sometimes in political spin to anti-fascism, as branded on the political right as “antifa” — is a criminal conspiracy feels ripped from a Fox News highlight reel of demagoguery, with the goal of boosting a Republican talking point on the eve of 2024′s elections.

But the worst thing about the Cop City RICO rap is that the indictment alleges a criminal conspiracy began on May 25, 2020 — the date that Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck and murdered him. Tellingly, the GOP’s Carr chose this date even though details of the Cop City project were not made public until more than a year later. The gobsmacking implication of this date is a brazen attempt not just to criminalize the Cop City protests, but the massive, multiracial coalition for police reform and social justice that millions marched for in 2020.

“They’re trying to say that the whole movement against police violence in Black communities is a criminal conspiracy,” Franklin said, adding that Georgia authorities wanted to send a message that “any time you organize against police, that you must be a criminal, that you must be terroristic in your actions.”

Have crimes been committed during the Cop City protests? Of course. Many of them are not “domestic terrorism” but misdemeanor acts of civil disobedience like trespassing, of the kind that one Atlanta civic hero — the late Congress member John Lewis, who has a boulevard named after him — called “good trouble.” Other acts, like vandalizing construction equipment, are more serious — also morally wrongheaded and counterproductive, in my opinion — and perpetrators should be charged with those specific crimes. What’s happening instead is much more insidious, with the goal of chilling the kind of dissent supposedly protected by the First Amendment.

Atlanta’s moral center — the Eternal Flame where the city’s patron saint, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife, Coretta, are buried — must be flickering under this brazen assault on the very values that King, Lewis, and the other civil rights heroes fought for. King, after all, was jailed 29 times for nonviolent civil disobedience. But authorities in his native Georgia and across the South — who, correctly, saw King as a threat to the white supremacy they called their “way of life” — never charged him or his broader movement with racketeering, or as a domestic terrorist. The fact that this is happening now, in 2023, should make you very, very alarmed.

I’ve made it clear that the resurgence of Trump — and the modern, American strain of fascism propelling his movement — is a life-or-death threat to U.S. democracy. But the Cop City arrests aren’t a weird 90-second distraction from that story, but rather an essential part of the plotline. Top Republicans — with the lame acquiescence of craven Democrats — want to establish anti-fascism as a crime before a Trump 47 can implement a fascist agenda in 2025. They want to backdate as felony racketeering the protest movement that started with George Floyd because they know that mass protests by the same folks may be our last defense against autocracy.

The only good news here is that the heightened contradictions of an American police state could backfire. On the day after the RICO indictment was announced, protesters flocked to the Cop City construction site, and five were arrested when they chained themselves to the bulldozers. “The more of us that are willing to take this risk and come out here and put their bodies on the line to save this forest,” one of those arrested said in a video posted by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, “then we will win.” The stakes are too high to contemplate the alternative.

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