Atlanta Community Press Collective

01/27/2025

This year, ACPC is keeping an eye on the Georgia General Assembly. Each week, we will highlight selected bills, report on selected critical topics, and preview what is scheduled for the upcoming week.

01/24/2025

Amidst the state’s well-documented aggression against the Stop Cop City movement, Georgia officials have built upon Atlanta’s huge surveillance infrastructure by quietly expanding the use of tools across the state, including a $83.5 million surveillance technology grant program administered by Gov. Kemp’s office in 2023.

The simultaneous investment in Cop City and surveillance systems signals an intensification of repression in the coming years through the marriage of these complementary counterinsurgency strategies.

Among the grantees, the Cherokee County Sheriff used its $518,787.50 grant to grow the agency’s automated license plate reader network with 35 more cameras from Flock Safety.

The DeKalb County Police Department proposed using the agency’s nearly $1 million grant to purchase a military grade surveillance camera to be installed on one of the agency’s helicopters along with a thermal imaging camera for its SWAT team.

Doraville proposed purchasing equipment from Cellebrite, a mobile forensics technology, which has questionable legal status as the technology is designed to extract information from smartphones without user permission to log into the device.

The growth of the surveillance apparatus in Georgia and beyond should be alarming as Trump takes office again. While this growth over the last 40 years has been a bipartisan affair with both parties at all levels of government supporting the adoption of police surveillance infrastructure, President Trump is constructing a team that is fully aligned with his desire to maximally punish dissent.

01/24/2025

Updated Post: Opinion — Police surveillance tech and Cop Cities are the State’s complementary counterinsurgency strategy https://buff.ly/4gaFUNH

01/23/2025

Opinion — Police surveillance tech and Cop Cities are the State’s complementary counterinsurgency strategy

A video surveillance camera in Atlanta, Georgia. (Nolan Huber Rhoades) Faced with organizing to Stop Cop City, Atlanta’s elite responded with the full

01/23/2025

Updated Post: What to know about the 2025 Georgia General Assembly https://buff.ly/3Ws3E8M

01/22/2025

What to know about the 2025 Georgia General Assembly

Georgia State Rep. Bryce Berry, who represents parts of Atlanta, is sworn in on the first day of the legislative session, Jan. 13, 2025. (Georgia House of

01/21/2025

Updated Post: On second anniversary of slain forest defender Tortuguita’s killing, hundreds march on for collective liberation https://buff.ly/3WtDMts

01/21/2025

On second anniversary of slain forest defender Tortuguita’s killing, hundreds march on for collective liberation

Belkis Terán, mother of slain forest forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, speaks at Saturday's demonstration commemorating

01/20/2025

Updated Post: “As damaging as one could imagine,” City Council introduces legislation to weaken oversight https://buff.ly/4aeorTi

01/20/2025

“We’re here today to celebrate the legacy of Tortuguita,” said Geovani Serrano, community organizer of Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights ( .ga ). “We are supposed to be fighting to continue their legacy each and every day, for ancestors and the people taken away by law enforcement. We’re in a community that understands the criminalization of our bodies, that understands we need to invest more in our communities to protect the environment, to protect our communities.”

“We are losing lives every day, whether Palestine or here,” said, Palestinian organizer Jawahir Kamil Sharwany. “We lost a life two days ago, Cornelius Taylor, to homelessness.” She and Housing Justice League ( ) organizer Matthew Nursey expounded on how greed from governments like Atlanta’s and corporations like BlackRock directly causes deaths like Cornelius’s and much more devastation, from longstanding global colonialism and imperialism to local street sweeps like the one that killed Taylor.

“Housing Justice League has its roots fighting corporations like BlackRock since the financial crisis back in the late 2000s,” Nursey said. “Corporate landlords have bought properties all throughout this city and put legacy residents out of where they’ve been living forever. Capitalism has failed us, and the ruling class — the people that make up BlackRock — they know this. And that’s why they use violence as their number one tool.”

01/20/2025

Updated Post: Ceasefire set to begin, Atlantans call for full liberation of Palestine https://buff.ly/4hcXSQy

01/19/2025

Ceasefire set to begin, Atlantans call for full liberation of Palestine

Demonstrators gathered in Downtown Atlanta on Thursday following the announcement of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. (John Arthur Brown)

01/19/2025

Protesters gathered in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta on Thursday in response to the latest ceasefire announcement in Gaza. Organizers called the rally
“Ceasefire Today, Liberation Tomorrow” because, despite the announcement of a six-week ceasefire, they said Palestine remains under occupation by the settler-colonial state of Israel, and everyone must continue to fight until Palestine is free.

Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire proposal on Jan. 15,
2025. In the four-day period between when the agreement was entered into and when it would go into effect, Israel has continued to bomb the Gaza strip, killing over 100 Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera.

The first phase of the ceasefire includes a prisoner exchange, a partial withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza, and the allowance of limited aid to enter the Gaza Strip. Although Palestinians support the release of their political prisoners, many also believe that Israel will continue its genocidal reign.

“I’m not naive,” Bisan Hammid, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, said Thursday. “A lot of people, myself included, feel as if Israel will not abide by the terms of the ceasefire agreement-that their hand will have to be forced.”

Organizers in Atlanta pointed to organizations like the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) and facilities like Cop City as the next step in the local fight against the genocide in Gaza.

Jena Jibreen, a Palestinian community member said, “[We need to bel protesting GILEE and protesting Cop City. That to me is the number one focus in Atlanta. There’s a direct link between cops here and the prison industrial complex. If you want to help Palestine in any capacity, you fight against the police here in Atlanta.”

01/19/2025

Protesters gathered in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta on Thursday in response to the latest ceasefire announcement in Gaza. Organizers called the rally “Ceasefire Today, Liberation Tomorrow” because, despite the announcement of a six-week ceasefire, they said Palestine remains under occupation by the settler-colonial state of Israel, and everyone must continue to fight until Palestine is free.

Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire proposal on Jan. 15, 2025. In the four-day period between when the agreement was entered into and when it would go into effect, Israel has continued to bomb the Gaza strip, killing over 100 Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera.

The first phase of the ceasefire includes a prisoner exchange, a partial withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza, and the allowance of limited aid to enter the Gaza Strip. Although Palestinians support the release of their political prisoners, many also believe that Israel will continue its genocidal reign.

“I’m not naive,” Bisan Hammid, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, said Thursday. “A lot of people, myself included, feel as if Israel will not abide by the terms of the ceasefire agreement—that their hand will have to be forced.”

Organizers in Atlanta pointed to organizations like the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) and facilities like Cop City as the next step in the local fight against the genocide in Gaza.

Jena Jibreen, a Palestinian community member said, “[We need to be] protesting GILEE and protesting Cop City. That to me is the number one focus in Atlanta. There’s a direct link between cops here and the prison industrial complex. If you want to help Palestine in any capacity, you fight against the police here in Atlanta.”

01/18/2025

Updated Post: Students stage sit-in at Board of Regents meeting, call for Georgia universities to divest from Israel https://buff.ly/3PF2144

01/17/2025

Students stage sit-in at Board of Regents meeting, call for Georgia universities to divest from Israel

Students from several Georgia universities staged a sit-in at the University System of Georgia Board of Regents meeting this Tuesday to demand that the

01/17/2025

People wearing keffiyehs around their necks and carrying signs reading “STUDENTS DEMAND DIVESTMENT” lined the halls leading to the University System of Georgia (USG) Board’s meeting room on Tuesday.

These people, about 25 in total, included students, alumni and those standing in solidarity with them — from an educator to a state representative. Together, they advocated for local change that would impact the residents of Gaza in light of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

“We’re here to demand that the USG fully divest from Israel and also that it compel all of its member institutions to divest, said Austin Kral, a computer science major at UGA. “That includes academic partnerships and research collaborations any universities might have.”

“We’re here to demand that the USG fully divest from Israel and also that it compel all of its member institutions to divest, said Austin Kral, a computer science major at UGA. “That includes academic partnerships and research collaborations any universities might have.”

Georgia State University has come under fire for its Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program, also known as GILEE. The GILEE program is notorious for sending American law enforcement officers, including those with the Atlanta Police Department, to Israel to train with Israeli police.

According to the Demilitarize Atlanta to Palestine Coalition, “The Israeli Occupation test out weapons and military tactics on Palestinians, then deadly exchange programs such as GILEE spread these tactics across the globe. … For over 30 years, GILEE has quietly advanced militarized policing, mass surveillance, and escalated warfare on marginalized populations in Atlanta and Palestine.”

“There are no universities left in Gaza and that’s why we’re here,” said Renee Alnoubani, a Palestinian student at Georgia Tech. “When numerous human rights organizations and countries all over the world and governments have established that what’s going on isn’t apartheid, it’s genocide and they don’t do anything about it? It’s very strange to think about a public institution not fighting for the worst crime against humanity that can be committed in the world.”