Is violence by the political right deplorable while by the left it’s defensible? That’s the question to ask after a violent assault on a planned law-enforcement facility in Georgia on Sunday.
Police say “a group of violent agitators” conducted a “coordinated attack” at the site on city-owned forest land outside Atlanta. Opponents claim they’re fighting “racialized violence and ecological destruction” at what they call “Cop City.” Never mind that proponents of police reform rightly call for better officer training.
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The mob armed with Molotov cocktails and commercial-grade fireworks attacked police and destroyed construction equipment at the site. “This was a very violent” incident that “was about anarchy and the attempt to destabilize,” Atlanta Police Chief
Darin Schierbaum
said this week.
Police detained some 35 people, including
Thomas Jurgens,
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a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center who was there as a legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild. The two groups regularly denounce conservative groups, and the SPLC is a media favorite. The latter group has said that its legal observers are “trained to monitor and document law enforcement behavior toward activists” to create a record “that can be used in defense cases, public statements, and litigation when cops act unethically.” Police charged 23 of those arrested with domestic terrorism, including Mr. Jurgens.
In a statement Monday the National Lawyers Guild claimed that “all of these arrests are part of ongoing state repression and violence against racial and environmental justice protesters.” The SPLC said the arrest was “not evidence of any crime, but of heavy-handed law enforcement intervention” that is “part of a months-long escalation of policing tactics against protesters and observers.”
In reality the disorder Sunday was the latest in a series of violent incidents involving the facility. On Jan. 18, as law enforcement sought to identify and clear occupiers from around the site, they came upon
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Manuel Esteban Paez Teran,
26, in a tent in the woods.
Authorities say Teran refused to comply with officers’ commands and instead shot and injured a state patrol trooper. Officers returned fire, striking Teran, who died on the scene, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The investigation isn’t finished, but the bureau says the bullet “recovered from the trooper’s wound matches Teran’s handgun.”
Days after Teran’s death, hundreds marched in protest, and not all participants remained peaceful. Atlanta Mayor
Andre Dickens
said some were carrying explosives and set a patrol car on fire. Police said some also broke windows at local businesses.
Democrats are hoping to change the public’s view that they’re soft on crime. If they mean it, they could start by denouncing the siege of Cop City by Antifa radicals.
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