it’s just kind of surreal the way Georgia’s various governments have been reacting to Stop Cop City, particularly in a post-George Floyd era. police (and the legal mechanisms they have at their disposal) continue to act with complete impunity to try and prosecute anybody even tangentially supporting the protesters. if it were happening in another country, this would be decried as genuinely authoritarian–because it is.
It really does make my blood boil. The Stop Cop City protestors have done nothing wrong. I wonder if perhaps the George Floyd protests made police departments double down on suppressing protests of police. Couple that with a happily complicit Republican-led government and you get this.
Have they misrepresented what the donations they are soliciting were going to be used for?
i think based purely on the rhetoric of the police and the state of Georgia, you can already pretty reasonably assume these are politically motivated arrests in search of a crime. they run a bail fund, and yet this is the quote:
“These criminals facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism with no regard for others, watching as communities faced the destructive consequences of their actions.” the [Governor] said. “Here in Georgia, we do not allow that to happen.”
outside of that, the probability of this being more political than anything is supported by protesters in the Stop Cop City movement facing exceptionally punitive consequences to this point. there was the murder of an activist earlier this year by cops who lied about it being self-defense, but even past that 40 people have already been charged with “domestic terrorism” related to the protests and it’s just… really dubious that more than a handful of those people even committed crimes at all, much less the specific and very severe charge of domestic terrorism. the warrants for a lot of them don’t even mention violence, injury, or vandalism!
I also highly doubt they’ve broken the law. My point was, unless they misrepresented their intended use of the funds, I don’t see how a crime was committed.
ah, my mistake–most people only kind of vaguely know all the shenanigans here. the state doesn’t seem to be super quick to divulge what the crime here is either, for what it’s worth. it doesn’t seem like the three’s lawyer knows what they’ve been arrested for or what they’re accused of.
