Read our editorial on Cop City here, and the increasing reactionization of the US here.
After a two-year-long effort to prosecute 61 alleged “Stop Cop City” activists in the largest racketeering case ever filed against protesters in American history, all RICO charges have been dropped. Had the defendants been convicted, they could have each gotten up to 20 years in prison.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a federal law passed in 1970 as part of the Organized Crime Control Act, which allows the federal government to prosecute individuals they claim are involved in criminal enterprises even if they are not directly engaged in illegal activity. The government has increasingly been testing this law against activists as a way to use the allegedly illegal activity of a few to indict large numbers of people, broadening and intensifying repression.
“Cop City”, officially the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, is an 85-acre, $118-million police training center that opened in April this year in the South River Forest near Atlanta. Announced in 2021 in the aftermath of the 2020 anti-police terror May Uprisings, it has been met with fierce waves of resistance from the people, who have in turn faced intense police repression through waves of arrests, tear gas, and the assassination of Tortuguita by Georgia State Troopers in 2023.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kevin Farmer made the decision to dismiss the racketeering charges as well as arson charges against five of the defendants on September 9 based on the fact that Republican Mafia Attorney General Chris Carr lacked the authority to file the RICO charges without written order from Governor Brian Kemp. Those five defendants, however, still have domestic terrorism charges held against them, stemming from a 2023 protest in Atlanta where a police car was burned and rocks and fireworks were hurled at a skyscraper housing the Atlanta Police Foundation, a major funder of Cop City.
Deputy Attorney General John Fowler, the lead prosecutor, was found to have violated attorney-client privilege by leaking emails between defendants and their attorneys, and claimed that police did not send messages about Cop City through the encrypted messaging platform Signal—when in reality police leaders had gave directives to install Signal to do just that.
The trial had been drawn out and stacked against the defense, with the prosecution flooding them with terabytes of last-minute evidence and minimizing allowed preparation time. The legal victory comes as people took to the streets and spoke out in defense of the freedom and rights of the 61 defendants and against Cop City.
Image: Protesters showing support for the 61 persecuted individuals on September 10, 2025. Credit: @stopcopcity on Instagram.
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