Atlanta Police Monitoring of 'Cop City' Opponents' Political Activity
brennancenter.org
brennancenter.org
Why does a city police department even have a "homeland security" department? Isn't this just finding what they are looking for?
It looks like it's mimicking the NYPD's counterterrorism group [1]. The point of that group is to interface internationally. (It presumably also gets more leeway with surveillance.)
Maybe this is the team that interfaces with the DHS's fusion centers [2]?
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/countert...
This seems like a silly thing to call for. What is the problem with the police monitoring what was, in this case, public first amendment protected activity? There isn't any reason to prohibit government officers listening to public speech.
The racketeering charges sound much more concerning and are a problem in line with the absurdist lawfare we've seen at the Federal level. The RICO Act abuse seems to be a problem. Maybe at some point the US public will cotton on to excess laws being a bad idea due to selective prosecution, but unfortunately if the mass public were going to acquire a case of principles we'd have seen more of it in the voting patterns of the last few decades.
The police acting on their intelligence gathering in the sense of interfering with the lives of others is something that can be prohibited, but making a list of people isn't threatening enough or easy enough to detect.
You may not like some specific list. The mafia may not like some specific list. The police must be protected from interest groups objecting to specific lists or the whole system won't work.
These aren't lists of people to get Christmas hampers, these are lists of people the police expect to charge with crimes. Even if the police in this instance are, for the sake of argument, irredeemably corrupt there may be literally nothing they are going to do with these lists except call people criminals. Otherwise they'd keep them in a private capacity. It isn't reasonable to preemptively declare that the police can't suspect people of being criminals.
These aren't matters that can be preemptively dealt with by adding rules or restrictions on the police reading public information. It has to be done in review.
Yes, crimes like having mud on your feet or a lawyer's phone number written on your skin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Cop_City#March_2023_prote...
> these are lists of people the police expect to charge with crimes.
Yes, that's the problem. These people aren't criminals. These are people that went to study groups, sometimes for unrelated reasons. It's politically motivated. The surveillance happened before any alleged crime. It's indefensible.
The way this works, and the only way it can work, is the police decide who they think are criminals and then there is a review afterwards of whether the police were reasonable or not. If you think they're doing a particularly terrible job then the review might result in all sorts of actions but it isn't a reasonable position to say that the police can't use public evidence when deciding who they think the criminals are. That is a view that will lead to silly results.
I would know, this is exactly what happened to me, as I mentioned in another comment.
An example of police organizations surveilling groups of people who are against a gas pipeline running through their lands:
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/surveillance-state-des...
Are they criminals for organizing and petitioning the government to relent?
Example, from my own city, of how police organizations routinely fabricate evidence, typically against minorities and those the police have decided they "do not like" and "could be criminals". Unfortunately, my own hometown was not included in this investigation and my conviction wasn't overturned.
https://www.wbrz.com/news/nakamoto-how-corruption-in-brpd-le...
What you fail to take into account is the average academic and emotional intelligence of the type of person who finds themselves working in a US police force, given the low pay, high stress and allure of wielding soft power. There aren't just a few bad apples; The entire bunch is rotten and we find this corruption as far back as we find State police forces. Now it's just more apparent because we also surveil the police.
I've accounted for all that though. I even said in the comment "even if the police in this instance are, for the sake of argument, irredeemably corrupt" just to highlight that I'm very open to the idea that these police are actively engaging in corruption.
This issue I'm raising is that the call to action in the article is observably stupid. They're arguing that if a Mob boss is publicly racketeering on facebook then that shouldn't be used by the police as evidence to raise their suspicions. And there is no way that makes sense. They should be calling for something that will actually help their cause.
Shutting your brain down and panicking isn't going to get you to a good place - there are a bunch of problems outlined in the article and the call the action addresses none of them. You really need these people to focus on doing things that will help, rather than doing things at random. In this case like - reigning in RICO abuse, replacing the police leadership or a demilitarisation strategy for the training facility. Trying to ban the police from using public information to inform their policing is remarkably foolish.
> I would know, this is exactly what happened to me, as I mentioned in another comment.
Well, you probably need to hear this although it is a bit brutal: you're going to lose more if you make stupid arguments. Try to avoid doing that, the justice system responds to it really badly. It also make a difference politically although not as much. If you score a win, you need to be fighting for something that actually helps your position, not arbitrary demands.
You still fail to take it into account. When creating policy, one has to consider all ways in which a policy might be used or abused.
Any sociopolitical structure which confers power to individuals over others must be designed to protect innocents against worst-case scenarios. If there is even the possibility that the wrong person in the driver's seat could do significant or irreversible damage to innocent people, then it's bad policy. Because organizations and their policies often last longer than any one individual within the organization. This is the very basis on which the US Constitution was written.
> You're going to lose more if you make stupid arguments. Try to avoid doing that, the justice system responds to it really badly.
What on earth are you referring to?
> What on earth are you referring to?
You're claiming you were stalked, harassed and the police fabricated evidence against you. Your response is to advocate that they can't read your Facebook posts. That response is stupid, it is a stupid thing to advocate for. You should be calling for something more like people to be fired. Based on that stance, I'd assume you're going to get rolled by the police strategically. Over the long term you're going to get nothing if you think calling for a reading-public-information-ban is going to get you anything.
If there was such a ban in place, it wouldn't even start to protect you from the problems you're describing. They'd just read your posts in their lunchbreak and keep the list at home on a stickynote outside of an official capacity.
> You still fail to take it into account. When creating policy, one has to consider all ways in which a policy might be used or abused.
Yeah, you do. And when you do that with a policy like "The police can't read public information" the consideration will come to "this policy is moronic, the police should be able to read publicly available information and act if they feel it is appropriate".
I'm not sure how you are thinking that policy of restriction is a good idea and your argument is unpersuasive. You'd either end up with situations like people actively inciting murder on social media and the police are powerless or no change from the current state. The entire idea is silly. The police have to, as a matter of principle, have the power to read public information and act on it if they think it is evidence of a crime. Particularly if they're planning RICO charges. And you can't overrule their judgements on whether something is a crime while their still in an early investigative phase as they would be if they are drawing up lists. It can't possibly work.
> Your response is to advocate that they can't read your Facebook posts. That response is stupid, it is a stupid thing to advocate for
> Over the long term you're going to get nothing if you think calling for a reading-public-information-ban is going to get you anything.
> And when you do that with a policy like "The police can't read public information"
When did I say that? When did I advocate for that? Absolute straw man.
My comment, which began this particular thread of conversation, was:
"Should the police maintain a list of every individual with a public social media account that speaks out against any policy which the police support?"
Read that sentence carefully and please point out where it or any other question/statement I've made supports the argument you claim I've made to ban cops from using OSINT or browsing public posts on social media, or any public information at all. Again, total straw man. You even put it in quotes, implying, intentional or not, that it was a direct quote/paraphrase of my words!
> You should be calling for something more like people to be fired. Based on that stance, I'd assume you're going to get rolled by the police strategically.
You have no clue how small town and police corruption work. The entire town was captured. The district attorney was the mayor's son. The mayor was also the town's bail bondsman. It is a racket from top to bottom, and the whole town is in on it. There is no one within the town to complain to.
The woman who arrested me smokes, manufactures and distributes methamphetamine openly. I personally witnessed her smurfing for Sudafed using an old toothless woman at a grocery store whom she drove to the store in her police unit. Her brother was incidentally murdered by some folks I know over a meth dispute and they found a big meth lab at his home. I have photos of her conversing with and delivering pallets to a trucker. This runs deeper than you could possibly know. The full details of the situation and my trial would astound you.
This was a decade ago. I made tips to the FBI. Tried to involve a few journalists. No one would touch it. And my arresting officer did get fired, after she got drunk and methed out and decided to speed down the highway while shooting her gun in the air from out the window and yeehawing at the top of her lungs. I'm not even joking. And guess what... she was back on the force 3 months later after her timeout.
I also find it extremely alarming that you would in one breath encourage unwarranted police surveillance and targeting, and then say "I'd assume you're going to get rolled by the police strategically". It's like you recognize the issue and yet attempt to justify it. We should not be cheering
> You'd either end up with situations like people actively inciting murder on social media.
In many cases that's already a crime and reason for suspicion, and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
If you'd like to actually debate the argument I made, be my guest, otherwise let's end this discussion now before it gets even more out of hand. Because I agree, "The police can't read public information" is an absolutely stupid argument to make, but you're the one who presented it.
If the Wikipedia article is the whole story, you are correct. That said, as I noted in another comment [1], it appears to be badly sourced.
Do we have any primary evidence? Presumably there are charge sheets and statements from the university and cops, too.
> people that went to study groups
The Guardian article quotes the university claiming that the protesters were trespassers and not students [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41188054
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/emory-univer...
It happened in my city and and several of my friends were there, beaten by police and arrested. I was not around at the time or I'd have been there as well, and likely shot and killed.
https://19thnews.org/2023/05/baton-rouge-police-violence-pro...
https://www.youtube.com/embed/IwK-E1iC2v8 (footage of the assault)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alton_Sterling
> Police alleged that Sterling had reached for the loaded handgun in his pants pocket ... The owner of the store where the shooting occurred said that Sterling had started carrying a gun a few days prior to the event as other CD vendors had been robbed recently. He also said that Sterling was "not the one causing trouble" during the situation that led to the police being called.
I personally had an incident that led to almost a dozen police officers pointing their guns at me and detaining me just for visiting a convenience store that had recently been robbed. I shudder to think about what would have occurred if I were black.
Separate events. Some of the people under surveillance for attending Stop Cop City had simply attended study groups. They don't have to be students, or even study groups at a school. This also includes people who attended meetings with Stop Cop City on the agenda. So you could have gone to a neighborhood meeting with four items on the agenda including Stop Cop City and a new parking zone in front of your house and been on the local PD homeland security watchlist as a suspected political opponent.
Of course there is. Foiling terrorist plots is a critical component of policing.
Uh, what? Is this sarcasm?
No. I'm not saying it should be the job of local police. But when a terrorist plot goes through, one of the first questions asked is why it wasn't stopped. (DHS and FBI are police inasmuch as they are not military or strictly IC, i.e. they can make arrests.)
Similarly, police seize guns before they've been used to commit a crime and arrest dealers before they've sold drugs. In this case, the crime they're investigating would presumably be conspiring to do terrorism.
On what basis do you make this assumption? The indictment is for racketeering and makes no mention of terrorism.
I think the top comment about this being Atlanta's homeland security department or whatever threw me off.
Conspiring to do something. The something isn't important for my argument so long as it's a crime. That conspiring is the crime in progress or already done. For all intents and purposes, it's preëmptive to the actual thing we want to prevent. But that's why we criminalise, in addition to the crimes per se, possessions, intents, et cetera.
Police are not a purely reactive security element.
Not even a local branch of DHS. Atlanta Police Department's Homeland Security Unit. I think that's the danger here. Regardless of the justifications or even the current legality I don't think it is reasonable to expect local police departments to carry out dragnet surveillance in an attempt to find crime because that's exactly what they will do.
Maybe I'm naive and there really are so many impending terrorist attacks that we need every medium sized city PD to have a homeland security unit. I don't think that's the case.
I think it is more likely the militarization of the police has expanded their scope so far they can no longer effectively police. When you have regular "intel reports" coming out of your "homeland security unit" the content isn't really important anymore. Everyone is a potential threat. If you dig deep enough you'll eventually be right.
> Conspiring to do something. The something isn't important for my argument so long as it's a crime.
When you view the world through the lens of "homeland security" any gathering looks like a criminal conspiracy.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41186953
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Cop_City#Domestic_terrori...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230228223918/https://1010wcsi....
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20230301050800/https://www.foxne...
We live in a world where putting the right ball cap in the back window of your car can get you out of a lot of trouble. Knowing the local PD is scanning social media for objectionable (to them) content and doing god knows what with it has a chilling effect on speech.
And you'll leave a trail of broken lives behind you.
They are law enforcement. They are not police, and this distinction must be made to avoid this exact situation wherein state police are de facto granted more privileges and duties than specifically mandated.
That’s absurd. That’s not their mandate. They aren’t kings. They’re supposed to serve us.
The police are not inherently justified. They receive their power from We the People and have no business deciding what they "do" and "don't" like. That is our legislators' jobs. The police do not get to arbitrarily decide threats outside of specifically mandated enforcement policy, and they do not get free reign to surveil and act on such information.
As someone with reasonable OSINT experience, I recognize that eventually tracking data like this will be part of a routine, automatic dragnet. However, that does not mean we cannot police the police, that doesn't mean police get to actively build cases using this information, or even consider the information at all while making decisions about who to target.
> requirement that the police need the power to investigate things they do not like
Who required this? I don't remember signing off on anything of the sort, and I do not recognize the authority of any State organization or public servant which fails to follow the rules that We the People have set forth.
> making a list of people isn't threatening enough or easy enough to detect
I grew up in a very small town. I was on such a list, purely by association, and it led to me being stalked by a police officer who ultimately planted cannabis on me at the scene of an accident, and lied in court. I tried fighting it, but the judge and prosecutor were part of the conspiracy, going as far as to switch my public defender to someone they controlled. They also denied my right to a jury, and my defender denied my right for a motion to quash or an appeal due to mistrial, saying, "the judge is my boss and I'm not making my life difficult."
I was convicted, on my first criminal offense, to 6 months in jail. Would have been longer but that was the maximum for a first cannabis offense in my state. I ended up getting denied jobs and it exacerbated my homelessness.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, because you're lucky enough that the policies you're advocating for have not specifically impacted you. You do not understand the depth of corruption that runs through our system, and how police surveillance and "lists" are just the tip of the State oppression iceberg. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a part of the protected class.
> You may not like some specific list.
That is correct. And as a citizen, it's my opinion that ultimately matters, not my local police chief's.
The history of police keeping lists of people to round up isn't terrific.
Some vandals, robbers, and arsonists are affiliated with Stop Cop City. That correlation does not imply causation. You cannot transfer blame or infer approval through Stop Cop City to nonviolent citizens.
Attending a meeting is not a crime. Attending a meeting is not cause for suspicion. Expressing an opinion is not a crime. Expressing an opinion is not cause for suspicion.
Fraud. Perjury. Violent threats.
> Internal Atlanta Police Records Reveal Monitoring of ‘Cop City’ Opponents’ Political Activity
The number of protests involved here that turned violent is rather large. It would be silly to insist that local police not monitor public channels where protestors are organizing. We don't even get from this report if this was necessarily more work compared to a counterfactual where sit-ins or violent protests were against local schools or other government agencies.
I get where people are skeptical, but that's why an outside agency could potentially be useful in doing the same exact work (if not more) while making it more clear there is no impropriety.
>On March 6, 2023, it was reported that 23 people who had thrown large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police, as well having set buildings and equipment on fire, had been charged with domestic terrorism. Only two of them were from Atlanta. One was from France, and one was from Canada.
>On January 18, 2023, Georgia State Troopers and other agencies launched another raid. During the raid a trooper was shot in the leg, and a protester, Manuel Terán, known also as "Tortuguita", was shot and killed by police.[24] Police stated that Terán fired on them without warning.[25] Multiple groups, including other protestors, two independent journalists who had previously interviewed Terán, and Terán's family, have questioned whether Terán fired first, pointing to the lack of body camera footage of the shooting and calling for an independent investigation.
Not to mention there should be holding a much higher standard of "propriety" of those that we arm and give power to. The systemic abuse of power here affects all of us members of this society. Not just these specific protestors
If a person is throwing Molotov cocktails and lighting buildings on fire to advance a political cause, that's technically terrorism and should be pursued in the way we pursue domestic terrorism. (Though I'm unclear how one differentes riots from terrorism under this framework.)
We can, at the same time, be critical of Atlanta's policing methods. But that isn't both sidesing the problem. They're orthogonal issues. (I have difficulty believing someone torching buildings is seriously invested in police reform.)
Just because you think your side is just, it does not give you the right to overrule the will of voters.
Constitutional rights cannot be trampled on, but otherwise it's counterproductive to give extra care to the losing side of a political fight simply because they trespass and start fires.
How is voting supposed to address that?
These are what the article is referring to when it talked about police monitoring the signature collection protests.
As far as I can tell they generate a report like this for every single protest in the city and send to police so they know what's going and how many people they expect to be a different public place.
It is the issue. A local PD should not be surveilling innocent people for any reason, especially a political one. This is a clear abuse of power.
> The arrest warrant for the festival attendees stated that domestic terrorism charges were brought against those based on probable cause, such as having had mud on their feet, and that those with legal aid phone numbers written on their bodies were considered suspicious. According to The Intercept, there is no information contained in the warrants that directly connects any of the defendants to illegal actions. Atlanta police chief Darin Schierbaum refused to comment when confronted by journalists about this allegation.
> In May 2023, three activists were arrested and charged with felony intimidation of a police officer and misdemeanor stalking, with penalties up to 20 years in prison, for posting fliers and identifying the officer that shot Manuel Terán. That same month, three more activists were arrested and charged with charity fraud and money laundering for organizing a legal bail fund. Regarding the arrests, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr pledged to “not rest until we have held accountable every person who has funded, organized, or participated in” the protests.
Hmmm seems like systemic abuse of power to me
Wikipedia cites two sources for this claim. The first doesn't appear to make it [1]. The second cites "a video posted online" by "a person who identified themself as Bella" [2]. This isn't credible evidence.
Followed it through because there is obviously a massive difference between Emory calling in the cops because stuff was being destroyed and the cops teargassing a peaceful protest.
[1] https://www.wabe.org/pro-palestinian-cop-city-protesters-arr...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/emory-univer...
There is no source that backs up your claim that "stuff was being destroyed"
Retaliation from police is a real and documented fear (I mean look at harassment of women who accuse a police officer of domestic violence) and incidents like not having any body camera footage is sadly much too common to believe the police can handle these situations in good faith themselves and ensure that first amendment rights are respected.
The trust between them and the populace is broken and, at least the cities I've lived it doesn't seem like they are going to repair it any time soon (specifically the police in Chicago were a dumpster fire when I lived there. I knew someone whose dad was on the force who described the Chicago police as simply "bad people").
What reason is that?
Edit: to be clear in the case of the BLM protest I went to the organizers coordinated with the police so I'm not aware of any particular surveillance for it.
Atlanta PD even agrees with me on that last point:
> Moreover, throughout its intelligence reporting, the department acknowledges that public engagement with online postings does not necessarily correspond with the likely size of an event, suggesting that this monitoring is hardly useful for resource allocation.
If event organizers want to request police presence that's fine. But I see no reason police should be expected or even allowed to use surveillance to predict the needs of such an event.
I have no idea what monitoring they should do, just that they do have an interest in knowing major protests in their area.
Edit: put yourself in the shoes of a policeman trying to do your job in the best way you can then ask yourself "should I know when protests are happening in the area I work in and what the general situation is during one?" All I'm saying is that the answer to that question, to me at least, is yes. I don't think police need to entirely stick their heads in the sand in regards to protests. This argument is all stemming from a throwaway line in my original comment and I neither know enough to coherently argue nor care enough to argue specifics of implementation.
Nobody does things correctly all the time, so if I read an article that lauds one side and has crickets as to their failings... it's clear the author's intent was spin. In which case, why would I trust what they say?
It's statistically unlikely that any one side has a monopoly on righteousness and good ideas.
Cops can abuse surveillance authorities and protestors can be violent. There's no requirement that only one party does bad things.
There is no reason to withhold it or turn off cameras in a situation like this.
Doesn't pass the sniff test. There's no guarantee that any relevant impropriety took place on the part of both parties and even if it exists there is no requirement that it justifies the other's actions. This false balance just serves to blame victims and excuse abusers.
Consider: Is it important to note that a robbery victim also received a parking ticket in her past?
> Cops can abuse surveillance authorities and protestors can be violent. There's no requirement that only one party does bad things.
Ok but where is the evidence that both parties did something bad? And that the response of the cops was justified and appropriate?
The real problem here is that this is bad policing. They aren't improving public safety, they're harassing their political opponents.
Just wrote that typically anyone with power abuses it. And that includes both sides.
I've seen too many movements convinced of their own righteousness and neglect keeping their house in order.
Or have you never seen a group who tolerates problematic individuals (and keeps silence about them) because they're "one of the group"?
It proves a source has an editorial department that is either fine with the piece as written or didn't do due diligence.
Rarely is there really just an innocent victim. Reality is messy.
It's statistically very likely that a "side" with power (economic, monopolies on violence, etc) is more likely to abuse power than a "side" without power...
Would you look at the Stanford Prison Experiment and say that the prisoners are just as likely to be doing "the bad stuff" as the guards?
Maybe both sides have an even distribution of shitty people, but that's not what matters. What matters is the shitty things that are being done. Its statistically much more likely that a side that has more power is doing more of the shitty things
Isn't this tautology? Only the side with power can act on its abusive impulses.
That's human nature, and there's power everywhere.
It feels as if something critical has changed in the zeitgeist. It felt like it was a point of pride, honor, integrity and courage to share with the wider public information about the abuse of power. It felt like, even if the organization might come after you, ultimately the backstop of reasonable public opinion (and the justice system) would have your back. I no longer believe that is the case, and it is a great loss. We despise our own heroes, now.
Post 9/11 (And even before) the US government began a widespread campaign against US citizens themselves under the guise of the "War on terror". People became so brainwashed that what we were doing was unequivocally "right" and what the other guys were doing was wrong. And it's continued to the point where the general public now thinks that we're the good guy's no matter what, without questioning authority. At the time the Pentagon Papers were leaked, it was the first time in a long time (In my opinion) that the general populous woke up and saw that we were doing some pretty horrendous things. The 3 letter agencies took this to heart, and learned from it. People haven't been taught to think critically in a long time, and that's on purpose.
Do you mean Ellsberg? Gravel's contribution was reading the Pentagon papers into the Congressional record.
What? We're in a period of peak civic cynicism.