STATE VIOLENCE IN THE CITY OF TREES

Kamau Franklin

interviewed by Kathryn Gruszecki

Kathryn Gruszecki Hi Kamau, you are the founder of the Community Movement Builders, which aims to serve Black and working class communities through activism and programs working against gentrification, displacement, and over policing. For example, Community Movement Builders has a program called the Black Panthers Veteran Fund, working to distribute funds to those who were once active in the Black Panther movement. More recently, CMB has been a significant voice in opposing Cop City. Prior to CMB, you were a practicing attorney in New York City. Would you care to share more about your personal background and what led you to founding the Community Movement Builders in Atlanta?

Kamau Franklin One of the things that first got me thinking about being an organizer was just thinking about how the world works—hearing my mother tell stories about growing up in Jim Crow’s Charleston, South Carolina. My mother had a scar on her back until the day she passed from when she was chased out of a Whites’ only playground. She was too slow and was hit in the back. And hearing those stories about the South, and then growing up in Brooklyn projects in the seventies and eighties, it just gave me a certain perspective about why this poverty exists, where it exists, how it exists. It got me into reading, watching documentaries. I read a lot in the eighties, you know, about Malcolm and organizing in the sixties and seventies. It really started getting me involved in different organizing groups.

G: Who are some of your contemporary or historical political influences? I know you mentioned Malcolm X. I'm also curious how their teachings have influenced your political practices in opposing Cop City.

Franklin Well, historically, like you said Malcolm X. Also historically, members of the Black Panther Party, members of the Republican New Africa, when I was younger and still today. But, when I was younger, being in New York, I got to meet a lot of the veteran panthers, when they were in their forties and fifties. Also, we did a lot of visits with folks who were political prisoners in New York state prisons. You got to hear about the politics, about the times, about the conversations they were having, and I think that was extremely influential for me—to understand the struggle for power in Black communities. You know, it’s not just about voting. It’s not just about being allowed into certain institutions which are mostly White. It’s really about fighting oppression through having power and fighting for power. And that means having control over institutions in the community, having control over the politics of the community. All of that stuff has continually influenced me when it comes to the work I do today, in particular.

By my reading, and the meetings with people I’ve had, that really helped me think about what the roles of the police are in our community. The issue is never about whether or not the police officer individually is a nice person or a bad person, whether or not there’s a bad apple, whether or not you can cure things through training. The issue is really about the role of the police in the larger Black community. The role of the police has been, and continues to be, to control that community, to harass that community, to use that community in terms of excess labor, for jail and prisons, to criminalize that community.

This all comes out of the historic role of slavery in America. But, the police, in addition to that, are protectors of private property. Combining those two things has helped me see that this is not about bad apples, but this is about how policing is used. Basically it is a public army that is used for private interest against our communities.

G: You once mentioned the implications of Cop City being international, can you elaborate on that? Why should those outside of Atlanta be concerned with Cop City?

Franklin Well people have to remember that this will be one of the largest police training facilities in the country, if not the largest. Atlanta is no bigger than the twentieth police department in the country. They’ve already shown in their own documents that part of how they plan to use this center is to train police from across the country…43 percent of the police officers they plan to train will be out of state. And in addition to that, Georgia/Atlanta police already have a working relationship through an organizational apparatus called GILEE, in which they receive and I guess give training to Israeli police. So, Israeli police come here frequently to do training exercises with the Atlanta Police Department. There is no doubt in my mind that this huge facility will be a place where that training continues, and again we already know that some of this training is going to happen with police outside of Georgia.

In my estimation we’ve already had militarized police in this country, but this is a step further. Not only is it gonna be militarized, but there’s going to be a sense of a nationalized police ethos—where police are coming to train together, they’re coming to learn tactics together, they’re coming through a similar ideological lens that will not change in terms of how they think about movements and uprising that have challenged police power and police violence but also how they think about everyday citizens.

So, I always stress with people when I talk about this: What we’re seeing is the Israeli police, who we know use certain tactics against Palestinians, and the Georgia police, who use certain tactics against Black people, they are exchanging information. This is not about crime. This is about population control.

G: Many of those in support of Cop City politicians like Brian Kemp are using the rhetoric of an outside agitator. And a lot of the activists seem to not be from Atlanta, especially those who have been arrested on domestic terrorism charges. What does this mean for the movement using that rhetoric to describe the activists, and what are the consequences of this phrasing? Should that [outsider agitators] even matter?

Franklin Yeah, I think it doesn’t matter where the organizers and activists come from. I think the language of outside agitators is the historic language of southern segregationists who were defending Jim Crow laws. So for me, when I hear not only Brian Kemp say it but Black politicians, elected officials, and the police department captain use the language of outsiders, people coming in for Atlanta, it harks back to the day.

Dr. King was criminalized and constantly called an outside agitator, constantly called “somebody who doesn’t belong here,” who’s stirring up our local population. Dr. King, freedom riders, civil rights activists, and organizers continually went everywhere in this country where oppression was at work with local populations to organize. And just to be clear, it’s a false narrative. Many if not most of the organizers and activists who have been opposing Cop City have come from and do live in and around Atlanta. But if folks want to come in from outside, we welcome that. We think that there is no stigma whatsoever from folks expressing their so-called First Amendment rights by coming here and protesting what they see as an illegal law, an immoral law, something that will oppress people the same way the civil rights workers, the freedom riders did in the fifties and sixties. We’re proud to have people come here and help support a struggle against Cop City.

I think the meaning of the language is to create a narrative where protesters and organizers are criminalized, and that has to do with the language that’s used. And obviously the charges of domestic terrorism against nineteen organizers and activists—this is meant to be a scare tactic, not only to the organizer’s but to criminalize the very nature of the work that folks are doing and to make the general public scared of those organizers, even though the overwhelming majority, if not everyone who’s been arrested, particularly those in the forest. But even at the demonstration that happened a few nights ago in Atlanta, those folks who were arrested were doing nothing but sitting in trees in the forest, or in camps. They were not engaged in any activity whatsoever other than what would be considered civil disobedience at the time of their arrest. And there’s no information that the police have provided or have that can suggest that they were involved in any other activities other than that. And so this is a scare tactic that the governor is using, that the mayor is using, that the country is using in conjunction apparently with Homeland Security and the FBI.

G: It's often used to make the claim that the outside agitator is infringing upon the democratic decisions that have been made by the people. Which, again, doesn't follow through when the political system is very undemocratic and when this proposal came about in a very undemocratic way.

Franklin Yeah, this proposal came out of nowhere, and again, it came out of the Atlanta Police Foundation. They expected this to sail through. They were supposed to have public hearings on this at first. They scheduled no public hearings—only when organizers and community folks started to hear about these plans, they scheduled one hearing. And at that hearing, they wouldn’t even take questions from the audience except for the ones that were written down.

Also, they got to choose what they would respond to. Organizations on the ground immediately started organizing against Cop City.

All data taken at that time period showed that over 70 percent of Atlanta was opposed to Cop City by the day of the vote. And 70 percent of the constituents who called in said they were opposed to Cop City, and yet the city council went ahead anyway and passed it. Current polls show that over 90 percent of the residents adjacent to the forest (a working-class Black community, over 70 percent Black) have said that they are opposed to the building of Cop City on forest land, which was actually promised to that community for recreational use with a playground, hiking trails, a creek. All of that is now being wiped away so that they can build a hundred-acre police training center, a militarized police training center in the backyard of a working-class Black community.

G: For those who do not know, can you provide a summary of the history of how Cop City came to be in Atlanta, within this forest, and at this particular time period?

I'm thinking especially about the close proximity of this proposal to the Black Lives Matter movement, mostly a time period of opposition to an increase in policing.

Franklin Yeah, you’re exactly right. In 2020, when George Floyd was killed and, here in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks was killed, the call in the streets was for defunding the police. The call in the streets was for finding another way to provide public safety to the community. Because using the police to solve issues of homelessness, folks who are having a mental breakdown or in some way are needing some mental health services, stopping folks in their cars, all of those things were leading to not only violence by the police but even the arrests that would take place. Over

90 percent of those arrested in Fulton County, which is the county Atlanta is in, are Black, even though Black folks no longer represent over 50 percent of the population here. So we see that the idea of policing in these communities was something that was being challenged. And what the police did instead, because of the uprising, because of the way folks were starting to have a conversation about police, they wanted a morale booster.

They decided to sort of sweep off these old plans and to make this a huge dramatic event in terms of building the site that, again, they at first did not want the outside public to really know about, but they thought it was going to be a gift to the police.

Once these plans were found out in late 2020 and early 2021, there were immediate reactions to them from the community—from organizers and activists—that this was something which was not on the path of reforming or changing police behavior, changing how policing is done. This was actually doubling down on the efforts to militarize the police.

I think that, again, the safest communities are the most wellresourced communities in this country. It is communities that have resources for afterschool programs or good education or parks or other activities that people can engage in. It is not the communities that have police on every corner. We have to understand that the only way to solve issues of public safety is to bring resources to communities. No one asked the city to give $30 million dollars of the city’s money to put towards a militarized police base, where at the same time there is no affordable housing.

In Atlanta, public housing was destroyed by mayor after mayor after mayor. Democratic, liberal, so-called liberal, mayor after mayor after mayor. Their voucher program is something that can be rejected by landlords, and so it’s not working. And so if Atlanta really cared about issues of public safety, it would find a way to put resources there, as opposed to something like this monstrosity of a police militarized center that no one asked for in the first place.

G: Can you summarize and synthesize how the development of Cop City in this particular location develops any possible connections to environmental racism?

Franklin Yeah, I think this is a matter of the city itself—the city not caring about those Black constituents again in a neighborhood that’s over 70 percent Black, not caring about its promises that were made to the larger Black constituency. And instead, deciding that it would sort of run over those concerns and build something that will basically destroy the first hundred acres of the 300 acres of property. And there’s nothing in the lease that prevents them from tearing down the other two hundred acres. In addition to that, there’s a movie studio that’s also being built, which I believe is also a hundred-acre facility.

This forest is considered one of the four lungs of Atlanta, and in terms of climate change, it is protecting the community from flooding. Southwest Atlanta is one of the heaviest flood zones in the city, and without this forest, the water during the storms will only get worse as it helps with drainage. Not to mention the noise pollution from explosives and shootings that are going to be happening in the five firing ranges, the traffic running through that particular community from Cop City.

G: I'm curious about the escalation of police actions, particularly in recent months, which includes the trumped up charges on activists of domestic terrorism, the killing of Tortuguita, and the declaration of a state of emergency and bringing in the National Guard. Why is this level of escalation happening in your opinion, and how do you interpret this escalation?

Franklin To me, this escalation continues to happen every time we continue to get media attention, every time we hold a rally or demonstration, any time there’s a report that more people are against Cop City. I think they thought that this movement would go away. The fact that this movement hasn’t gone away, they continue to up the ante. They have been arresting people ever since we first started organizing against Cop City—when we would have demonstrations on sidewalks, in city hall. The police at the end of those demonstrations would come in and arrest multitudes of people. The charges at that point would be disorderly conduct or obstruction. But at that point, the police were using violent tactics against organizers, and they’ve only stepped those up.

In December, when the police started raiding the forest from time to time, they started actually charging people with domestic terrorism. Then, after that, of course a week and a half ago now in another raid of the forest in which they used violence, they actually killed a protester. In addition to those tactics, they’ve used rubber bullets and pepper spray, tear gas, throwing organizers and activists on the ground, ripping apart their campsites. These are all violent tactics that the police have used since the beginning, but now have stepped up their tactics and their narratives and their own cohesion to try to stop this movement from happening.

G: What is the proper response to these escalations by activists?

Franklin I think it’s to expose the police violence. It is to push back against the police violence. I actually think the tactics of disobedience and direct action are worthy tactics and tactics that should be used in movement building. I think, when the state itself decides to act in an undemocratic process, it forces the hand of community people and organizers to fight back even more. And so I think organizers and activists cannot just relent when the police try to tell you, all the powers that be try to tell you, what time to show up, what time to end your protest, how you can protest, what signs you can have, what’s acceptable and what’s not. Because they know there’ll be certain types, certain times that they can actually ignore the protest because the media won’t cover it.

The only time the media became interested in the idea of Cop City was when they could try to portray the organizers and activists as violent of some kind. So the fact that the police are continually trying to tell us and the powers that be how we organize means that we have to use other strategies, other tactics to fight back against this police violence.

G: Why do you think the mainstream media is adopting a narrative in support of the police, and that being the case, what needs to be done to elevate this to a broader audience?

Franklin I think that’s the role of the mainstream media. Corporate media is a parrot to what the police say.

I think they take whatever the police say as if it’s the truth, even if later on, we find out that the police report was a lie or videotape evidence comes out through body cameras, other things that can clearly demonstrate that what the police claim happened was not how it happened.

In fact, the 2020 uprising is really based on the fact that the police put out a report about George Floyd that didn’t mention anything about a cop who was on his neck for nine minutes. It was only because somebody videotaped that incident that we had the explosion that we did. So I think the role of corporate media, and they are corporations, is to side with, for the most part, the police and to talk about bad apples.

But what we need is to break through by using media like you have, other media, that can reach folks who are not necessarily strictly paying attention to corporate media, to what’s happening in those airwaves, because we have to reach people to create the narrative of what’s really happening in the streets. The role of the police in particular communities, the role of the police in stopping movements—we have to continue to get those narratives out. We can only do that, in one part, by creating our own media platforms and reaching the people that we can to let them know that there is something else that’s happening here that’s not being reported by the corporate media.

G: How do you envision this ending? Both ideally and realistically if they do not coincide?

Franklin You know, for us, it’s about continuing to fight. We think we’re in a position to stop Cop City from happening—with public pressure, with the truth coming out. We think the idea of these charges and the killing of organizers are ways in which, as tragic as they are, have uplifted the movement to another level. So we will continue to fight.

We are under no disillusion that the police obviously have the tool of violence and weapons. They have the political establishment, the resources, and they have the corporate media to back the narrative to most of the people. So we know it’s a continual struggle. But that has never stopped us before. And so we think realistically we can stop Cop City from being built, and we think we’re going to proceed as such. We’re gonna fight, we’re gonna organize, we’re gonna base build, we’re gonna let people know, we’re gonna try to do everything that we can within our power to stop Cop City from being built.