What happened to the promise of 2020?
Sure, Donald Trump was booted from the White House that year. But as his current status as the leading Republican candidate for 2024 indicates, that feeling of accomplishment was fleeting. The hope of real policy reform, at least as it relates to policing and justice, held out for just a bit longer. Three years after the brutal death of George Floyd, crushed under a Minneapolis police officer's knee, the dream of defunding bloated local police budgets look like it's been deferred and more like it's dead.
On Friday, a judge denied an effort by prosecutors in Atlanta to detain three activists who've been instrumental in protests against "Cop City," a planned multi-million-dollar police training facility. The activists were arrested earlier this week and charged under Georgia's domestic terrorism and critical infrastructure law. The three members of the Atlanta Solidarity Committee, a collective that has bailed out protesters and helped them find lawyers, were specifically cited for money laundering and charity fraud. Video of a raid on an Atlanta home where the three — Adele MacLean, 42, Marlon Scott Kautz, 39, and Savannah Patterson, 30 — were arrested on Wednesday shows an armored police truck and at least 10 officers wearing body armor, carrying ballistic shields and wielding semiautomatic rifles.
Audio recordings appear to capture officers on police radio describing Wednesday's raid on mutual aid staff as part of a larger strategy to "[put] pressure on [Stop Cop City activists] and [attack] them from all different angles." Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has described protesters as "violent activists." In fact, to describe anything the Cop City protesters have done as violent stretches the word beyond recognition.
In a statement issued after the arrests, Kemp said the state would "track down every member of a criminal organization, from violent foot soldiers to their uncaring leaders." Judge Shondeana C. Morris, a Kemp appointee, signed off on the arrest and raid warrants, which cite the use of PayPal as evidence of money laundering. Deputy Attorney General John Fowler told a judge on Friday that the activists present a flight risk because they harbor "extremist, anti-government views" and that money raised by the bail fund has gone toward "numerous violent acts." What did he mean? Various protests that occurred "across the country" following Floyd's 2020 death. As a defense attorney pointed out in court, one defendant's warrant cites her car repair reimbursements as evidence of charity fraud.
Friday's ruling granting bail to the three arrested activists appears be one of the first instances of Georgia's court system actively stepping in to restrain what looks like a coordinated effort to crush an organized protest movement. For months, anti-protest legislation has been wielded to quash the movement for police accountability in Georgia. In March, dozens of people, including a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney who attended a planned Cop City protest as a legal observer, were charged with domestic terrorism and initially held without bail amid protests. That same month, Manuel Páez Terán, a 26-year-old member of the Atlanta Solidarity Committee (he went by the name Tortuguita), was shot and killed by police at a protest against the construction of Cop City.
Lauren Regan, executive director of the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, issued a statement decrying the "extreme provocation" caused by Atlanta-area law enforcement.
"Bailing out protesters who exercise their constitutionally protected rights is simply not a crime," Regan said. "In fact, it is a historically grounded tradition in the very same social and political movements that the city of Atlanta prides itself on. Someone had to bail out civil rights activists in the '60s — I think we can all agree that community support isn't a crime."
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First proposed in 2009 by then-Atlanta Police Chief George Turner, construction on Cop City began in 2017. The planned center will include a variety of training facilities, including a mock city, a driving course and a shooting range for law enforcement agents to train in military-style weapons and tactics. Corporations like Wells Fargo, UPS, Home Depot and Coca-Cola have pledged millions to help fund the state-of-the-art facilities. While the facility was initially sold to the public in 2021 as costing the city $30 million to construct, the latest estimate approaches $51 million in public funds — in a city facing chronic budget shortfalls. The 85-acre center, opponents argue, would increase police militarization and train officers to quell dissent. Climate activists, meanwhile, argue that hundreds of trees will be cut down in a poor, majority-Black neighborhood.
"You would not have the sort of unrest that we've seen, and so much anger in the community, if Coca-Cola and other companies like that had not given millions of dollars to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build this cop city that no one wants," one activist told Salon, requesting anonymity.
"You would not have the sort of unrest that we've seen, and so much anger in the community, if Coca-Cola and other companies like that had not given millions of dollars to the Atlanta Police Foundation."
Last month, a federal judge ruled that the city of Atlanta must hold a public hearing on the project before it can move forward. The City Council is expected to vote Monday on whether to approve millions for the project, at a hearing that is now likely to be packed with protesters after this week's show of force by police.
So is this what a summer of protest gave way to?
It was easy to mock the kente-cloth-clad Democrats in Congress for their performative kneel-down after Floyd's murder, but there's no denying that many people felt more hopeful about the possibility of change in that moment. The protests against Cop City, in the face of a ferocious clampdown, is what that hope has turned into three years later. Determined activists, defiant as ever, remain determined to ensure that Cop City never gets built.
As for the legacy of George Floyd, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., a cosponsor of the Justice in Policing Act that was meant to address the demands of the 2020 uprising, is now running for president. His co-sponsor, Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democrat, left Congress and is now mayor of Los Angeles. Looking to D.C. for meaningful change in America's police culture was never remotely realistic. The promise of 2020, we might say was in returning the power to the people — one protest movement at a time.
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