While in America the protests against the successive victims of police brutality do not stop – Tyr Nichols is the latest example – there are States where protesters are at risk of being accused of “domestic terrorism”.
That’s exactly what has happened in the state of Georgia, where there has long been a major movement against plans to build a large $90 million police training center on wooded land near Atlanta as part of broader plans to increasingly militarize the country police work. The reactions are particularly intense as they focus simultaneously on the problems of police brutality, on issues related to racism and on the destructive negative imprint.
In fact, this movement against Cop City, as the training center has been called, has proven to be particularly effective and the plans have not progressed much.
At the same time, however, it has been treated in a particularly authoritarian manner by the authorities of the State, which has a Republican governor, Barry Kemp. The highlight was the murder on January 15 of one of the people who defended the forest by living there, 26-year-old Manuel Teran, better known by the nickname Tortuguita (little turtle). Police claimed that Teran fired first at the officers and that they have evidence, but several of the other protesters insisted that Teran was not armed.
This event caused great reactions, while the response from the State authorities was for Governor Kemp to issue an executive order declaring a state of emergency due to “unlawful assemblies, open threats of violence, disturbance of the public peace and danger to persons and property”.
Prosecutions for terrorism
But, apart from these moves, the decision was preceded by two different moments of protesters who had been involved in the demonstrations against the police training center and who were accused in one case of throwing stones and bottles at police officers and in the other of burning a police car and they broke windows, to be prosecuted above all others for “domestic terrorism”. A total of 18 protesters face such charges.
Terrorism as a crime in the US has traditionally been covered by federal authorities and corresponding federal legislation, and usually such prosecutions have been initiated by the US Department of Justice. However, since 9/11 34 States have passed laws making acts of terrorism or aiding and abetting terrorism a felony at the State level. The State of Georgia passed the relevant law in 2017 and according to it the crime of “domestic terrorism” (domestic terrorism) was defined as the commission of any felony with the purpose of “intimidating the population” or attempting to “alter, change, or force the government’s policy”.
This very broad definition meant that throwing rocks at police cars or occupying a tree house wearing a mask and camouflage could now be considered an act of terrorism.
As Atlanta Police Chief Darrin Shirbaum said, “It doesn’t take a scientist or a lawyer to tell you that breaking windows and setting fires is not protest — it’s terrorism.”
The authoritarian escalation
Such incidents underscore the overall authoritarian turn in the US on which there appears to be a cross-party consensus.
Traditionally, in recent years it has been mostly Republicans who have mostly tried to get even tougher on protesters culminating in how they have dealt with protests against police brutality. At the time, Democrats tended to react and defend the right to protest and civil disobedience, reacting to efforts to criminalize participation in protests.
But things seem to have changed with the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters attempted to storm the Capitol. This fact also pushed the Democrats to become followers of the view that dynamic demonstrations should also be included in “domestic terrorism”. It is against this background that President Biden formulated a particularly broad definition of “domestic terrorism” starting with mass racist hate crimes and the action of various far-right “militias” and ending with those who “violently oppose capitalism, the corporate globalization and the institutions that govern it”.
And it is possible that the effort of the Democrats to pass a relevant law that would expand the scope of action of the federal security authorities in relation to “domestic terrorism” was blocked by the Republicans in the Senate, but at the same time, as the example of Georgia shows at the State level , Republicans had no problem using such legislation to label protesters as “terrorists.”
However, the US has a fairly long tradition of treating vigorous protest as “terrorism”, most notably how the federal authorities have treated vigorous animal rights movements that have been used as laboratory animals, as well as other parts of the environmental movement. .
However, the Georgia example shows the problems that arise when the definition of terrorism is broadened to include practices such as throwing rocks at police.
