Update Dec 15: Bond DENIED to the five arrestees but treesits still holding out! Raids are another failure.
On the 13 and 14th of December, cops staged a major raid on the Atlanta Forest Defense/Stop Cop City treesits. Under a blizzard of pepperballs they only managed to arrest five people according to reports in the corporate press. They charged all five with bullshit, state-level “domestic terrorism” charges. In response the fight was carried to the Dekalb County Jail, where in response to a solidarity noise protest detainees smashed windows and lit signal fires outside the smashed windows. Fireworks, smoke flares, and lasers were deployed by protesters at the jail. There is NO place this fight cannot reach.
After the raids ended, many treesits were still holding out, with the cops having again abandoned the forest as they do after every raid regardless of the results
(from https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2022/12/15/windows-smashed-at-a-noise-demo-outside-of-dekalb-county-jail/ )
Windows Smashed at a Noise Demo Outside of DeKalb County Jail
Posted on December 15, 2022
On Tuesday December 13th there was a raid in the forest where five were arrested after police brutalized them with tear gas and pepper balls.
Forest defenders swiftly called for a noise demonstration at the DeKalb County Jail in solidarity with the five people arrested during the raid. By 8pm protesters began to amass near the facility.
Sheriffs on foot lined the perimeter of the jail as a choir of twenty five voices, a dozen drums, 2 guitars, a cello, and various handheld noisemakers approached. Jail administrators peered down from office windows as protesters tossed smoked bombs in the road and chanted “1312, we are all here for you!” and “no forest, no peace”.
With our flashing lights, lasers, and binoculars we gazed up, scouring the prison walls for evidence of folks inside hearing our call. We were quickly greeted by prisoners waving, frantically scrubbing the dust from their windows, and straining to peer down at the raucous below. We saw a few dozen of them throughout the demonstration.
We heard sounds of the prisoners banging back to us from inside their cells. Fifteen minutes in, one rowdy prisoner was spotted lighting a fire outside their cell window, which appeared to have been smashed out for the occasion.
Peering through binoculars, one noise-maker noticed an arm waving a sheet out of a third story window that also was smashed. After quieting the band, protestors and the two unknown prisoners shouted back and forth. “I love y’all” yelled the prisoners, “We love you too”! And all in agreement, “fuck the police!” “1,2,3,” the prisoner led the forest defenders in a chant — “fuck! the police!”
“There’s nothing that evokes such a feeling of solidarity— all the people at the windows —even though we are strangers to one another, we felt united in our determination against crude imbalance of power and systematic injustice” – a forest defender
This is not the first time a noise demonstration at DeKalb County Jail got rowdy. We and those locked inside who smashed their windows are part of a multiyear tradition at DeKalb County Jail. In 2019 at one noise demo protesters went inside the jail, fought the police and at another soon after prisoners smashed over a dozen windows throwing down mold to the protesters revealing the horrific conditions they are trapped in.
The fight to Stop Cop City is a struggle not just for a world without a police training facility in the Weelaunee Forest but also for a world without prisons.
Submitted anonymously over email