Atlanta Protest Movement Reportedly Described as “Militant” and “Far-Left” by DHS Agency
A report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Office for Bombing Prevention, a Department of Homeland Security agency, about the Atlanta protest movement “Stop Cop City” has been accused of lifting a sentence almost verbatim from an article published on a far-right news website. The report describes protesters opposed to razing a forest for a new police facility as “militants” comprising a “violent far-left occupation,” phrasings identical to an article written by right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo. The report was posted to the Technical Resource for Incident Prevention, or TRIPwire, a resource sharing portal for “expert intelligence analysis” in order to raise “awareness of evolving Improvised Explosive Device (IED) tactics,” according to its website. In March, activists involved in the movement were accused of using Molotov cocktails, but there does not appear to be any record of IED allegations before the December CISA report.
The term “militants” used by federal agents in December reflects the escalation: a catchall for targets of the U.S.’s so-called global war on terror, the buzzword not typically used to describe domestic actors. That it has filtered into DHS reporting on protest movements is reflective of the new focus on domestic terrorism, particularly after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In March, prosecutors began hitting anti-Cop City protesters with domestic terrorism charges for alleged attacks with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Since then, the trend of terror allegations has continued, ensnaring a growing group of actors in the movement, with more than 40 now facing terror charges.
On Monday, Atlanta City Council will vote on the budget for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, the law enforcement training facility at the center of the controversy. The facility is expected to take up over 85 acres, replete with a mock city for “urban police training.” Cop City, expected to cost $90 million, was announced in 2021 by then-Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Since then, protesters have taken up camp in the forest where the facility would be built, in an effort to block its construction.
The Atlanta protesters are being prosecuted under the same domestic terrorism law that was expanded after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. While the law originally only applied to criminal acts intended to kill at least 10 people, the Georgia legislature expanded the law to include property crimes intending to intimidate or coerce the government – of which the Atlanta protesters stand accused.
This type of intelligence reporting is of dubious utility because it doesn’t contain enough detail for law enforcement to assess the credibility of the information provided so they can develop a proper response. It includes no citations so it doesn’t even provide an avenue for law enforcement to follow up for more information or link events to understand a larger pattern. There doesn’t appear to be any attempt to put these three events in context so police officials could determine whether the events are part of some larger issue of law enforcement concern.