“Democracy is Alive and Well in Atlanta”: Criminalizing Stop Cop City.

• In Event: 41014 - Cop Cities and Abolition: Law and Order Backlash Politics and Urban Resistance

Abstract

While corporations and state actors have previously attempted to stifle labor and other social movement organizing via Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges, the role of RICO as a tool for state repression of social movements is undertheorized. This is dangerous, given the deep and broad dragnet that RICO is able to cast onto any group of people its sights are set upon. Enter Stop Cop City (SCC): a non-hierarchical, decentralized movement dedicated to the halting of the largest police training center in the U.S. alongside broad support of abolition, indigenous sovereignty, Palestinian freedom, and more. In August of 2023, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr filed RICO charges against 61 Stop Cop City activists, some of whom were also charged with domestic terrorism and money laundering. These charges came after a year of heightened suppression and violence against SCC activists, including repeated raids, surveillance, and the police execution of queer, Venezuelan anarchist Manuel Terán, also known as Tortuguita. Stop Cop City activists have been raising the alarm for over a year: the success of the Georgia RICO case against them would mean the success of criminalizing collective organizing itself. How is a RICO case successfully constructed against both activists and collective organizing? To heed this call and answer this question, I theorize the rhetorical-legal use of criminal contagion, citizenship via compliance, and magical-abductive profiling as key mechanisms that make the RICO charges themselves legally possible and socially legible. This theorization is made possible through the unification of social movements theory, literature on the politics of exception, critical terrorism scholarship, and critical gang scholarship. By conducting systematic content analysis and coding of dozens of archival state documents, I address the ways that the state is able to rhetorically transform activists, social relations, tools, thoughts, and beliefs into whatever images, symbols, and descriptors best serve the success of the RICO case.

Author

• Soleil Smith, University of Illinois-Chicago