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In Stop Cop City RICO Prosecutions, Chris Carr Shows His Office Is For Sale [1]
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Date: 2023-11-20 16:30:00+00:00
Blog Post | November 20, 2023
On November 7th, Georgia saw nearly 60 people arraigned on an assortment of charges, including racketeering. The arraignment is the next step in the legal process begun last month when Georgia’s Republican State Attorney General Chris Carr filed racketeering charges against 61 people, most of whom were or are associated with the 2020 George Floyd protests in Atlanta and/or the Stop Cop City movement in the city.
This latest indictment is a continuation of charges previously filed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation which saw 42 activists charged with domestic terrorism last spring in the months after police executed climate activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán. That investigation saw Sherry Boston – the DeKalb County District Attorney – remove her office from participation over Carr’s intent to charge a legal observer with domestic terrorism, among other concerns with the investigation.
Despite Boston’s withdrawal, Carr went ahead with an exceedingly frivolous slate of charges, one that seeks to establish “mutual aid,” “collectivism,” and “anarchism,” as prosecutable offenses that are also intrinsically terroristic. Jacobin aptly called the charges, and the tinfoil-esque indictment which attempts to justify them, outright “cartoonish.”
Yet, cartoonish and manufactured as the charges may be, the folks named in the indictment face incredible consequences for activities that reflect the exercise of their right to free speech. If convicted, activists could face 20 years in prison for the simple act of handing out flyers naming and criticizing police violence, and those separately staring down domestic terrorism charges face up to 35 years. The individual consequences of these charges are terrifying and extreme; the precedential consequences of the indictment are perhaps scarier still.
In truth, the indictment itself represents a vicious oppression of democratic rights, one funded by corporations, fueled by a racist and utterly unaccountable policing system, and resulting in a well-financed violent state crackdown on ideological and political dissent.
Indeed, what Carr is pursuing with these charges is not just a criminalization of constitutionally protected action – as if that isn’t concerning enough – but also the overt criminalization of any anti-police (or police accountability) sentiment whatsoever. Not to mention that these charges fundamentally seek to establish that virtually any kind of protest activity (including those guaranteed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments) can be hereafter re-classified as intrinsically part of a “violent” crime, something attractive to both cops and their corporate benefactors.
Corporations have long invested huge resources into violent policing systems, and corporate donations to police and police foundations are often structured to “curry [them] favor with a force that exists primarily to protect property and capital.” Corporations, also, of course, have a vested interest (financial and otherwise) in the disenfranchisement of protestors broadly.
While corporations have endeavored over the past three years to publicly profess their commitment to anti-racism and to tout their pursuit of some abstracted sense of “justice,” they have utterly (albeit unsurprisingly) failed to actualize those commitments in any real sense. Many of these corporate commitments ostensibly included a dedication to invest corporate dollars in the pursuit of racial justice and to divest from systems that perpetuate racism. Companies like JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Home Depot and more spent 2020 racing to denounce George Floyd’s murder and to voice their public support for Black Lives. 2020 even saw Jamie Dimon take a knee with staff at a Chase bank in an apparent performance of solidarity with racial justice organizers and the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, according to a Post study conducted in 2021, most of these companies’ facial commitments to solidarity began and ended with “loans or investments they could stand to profit from.” And, despite these companies’ public posturing, they have actually spent their time and money in the years since 2020 continuing to back anti-protest bills, supporting the Atlanta Police Foundation – the funding and ownership interest in the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, otherwise known as Cop City – and other police organizations like it, aiding the indemnification of police from responsibility for their racialized and classed violence, and otherwise sustaining systems of racial and environmental terror.
In fact, many of these same corporations, JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Home Depot, all included, have spent the past few years supporting APF and Cop City, while also ushering funds to Chris Carr’s own campaigns, a fact that also calls into question Carr’s personal motivations in his pursuit of this extreme prosecution.
All of the following corporations sit on the APF board and saw donations to Chris Carr in 2021 or 2022:
With this indictment, Chris Carr is functionally selling the broad authorities of his office, and mortgaging Georgians’ democratic rights, to these same deep-pocketed corporate oligarchs with vested financial interests in the maintenance of systemic racism, violent policing systems, and the vicious suppression of the climate movement and protestors.
Chris Carr and his corporate cronies are attempting to use and abuse the Georgia State Attorney General’s office for their own financial and political enrichment, while simultaneously stripping citizens nationwide of their democratic rights to protest and making Georgia’s own taxpayers foot the sure-to-be-enormous bill. Those fundamental facts are at the core of this indictment, and Chris Carr – in his office and in his actions – must be contextualized within the rot that is inherent to all that he does, and, as he gears up for a 2026 gubernatorial bid, all that he hopes to.
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“Cop City (52668033224)” by Chad Davis is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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[1] Url:
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