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Janae Pierre: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre in for Melissa Harris-Perry.

Head with us to the summer of 1967, where there were over 150 riots against racialized state violence. Throughout this period, incidents of police brutality and harassment of African Americans were immediate triggers for most civil unrest.

Speaker 2: The report of the President's Commission on riots will tell white America whether United States is a racist country.

Speaker 3: That's what we do in this society. We appoint a committee and we investigate air goals. Something's being done. That's just something not true.

Janae Pierre: The new documentary, Riotsville USA on Hulu tracks the history of the prototype for places like the planned police training facility near Atlanta, that some community members have dubbed Cop City.

Sierra Pettengill: Riotsville is a series of mock cities, and this is part of a training course which brought in police officers, senators, officials of all sorts, but largely police officers from all over the country to be trained to watch these recreations, basically, that was loosely based on some of the inciting incidents from 1967. One that's featured in the film shows what happened in Watts. My name is Sierra Pettengill. I'm the director of Riotsville, USA.

Janae Pierre: I sat down with Sierra and asked what she wanted people to take away from her documentary regarding police militarization and repression.

Sierra Pettengill: What the film tracks is a process by which the United States decided at a turning point moment in time to pour massive amounts of funding into the police. Between 1963 and 1970, the amount of police officers in the nation more than doubled. Federal allocation to local police forces went from $0 in 1964 to 300 million in 1970. This is a very quick change, and it is a massive amount of money. Part of what I want the film to demonstrate is that these systems that we're living under at the moment were built and are the consequence of a set of decisions, and therefore they can be undone.

Janae Pierre: Tell me about the Kerner Report. Explain its significance to Riotsville.

Sierra Pettengill: The Kerner Commission was convened by LBJ in 1967 after the massive uprisings that hit nearly every American city at that time. He pulled together a very moderate group, mostly policymakers, some labor representatives, civil rights leaders, a police chief. He was mostly interested in having this commission. They were tasked with investigating what happened in the cities and what should be done.

He wanted them to find evidence of outside agitators, and this commission given, it was made up of largely white men was not expected to produce anything very radical. After many months of reporting within the cities that were affected, they turned around a report that said, the problem is white racism. We are living in a divided city.

In short, unless we pour massive amounts of money into writing inequality that has been historically developed, nothing is going to change.

The reason for the riots were a massive inequality in housing, employment, and living conditions in cities. They called for a huge amount of money to be invested into, what amount to reparations in some ways. Trying to write these inequalities, it was a shock. LBJ dismissed it. He didn't want to hear it. Buried in the back of the Kerner Report, there was a recommendation for professionalizing the police to try to at least prevent some of the violence that happened by law enforcement towards communities during 1967. None of the recommendations in the Kerner Report that called for financial investment were ever implemented. The only one was the investment into the police.

Janae Pierre: I want to talk a bit more about the money that goes into all of this. What is there to be said about how policy endeavors like Riotsville or Cop City are funded?

Sierra Pettengill: I know that's a private-public partnership through the Atlanta Police Foundation. Which just seems insane and egregious, and should be something that we're all talking about I think much more actively. Riotsville is-- I spoke to over the course of making the film a lot of people who were involved and one of the men who did the training said it was remarkable. We had a blank check for Riotsville.

At the time in 1967 and 1968, America was still fighting the Vietnam War. There's a clip in the film where a television anchor says the amount it would take to implement what the current commission is calling for, is the same amount we're spending per month in Vietnam. It's never going to happen. What's documented in the film is largely an allocation of federal resources. What comes with those federal resources, which are incentives for people to invest in military gear that is oriented towards police departments. There's suddenly a real incentive for private companies to be building tanks rather than going to the army to go to police departments and developing tear gas, that thing.

Janae Pierre: There's a really impactful moment in the film. We get to see documented footage of what took place in riots film. Dozens of people would sit in an audience and watch staged police intervention on fake riots. Can you describe that detail for our audience?

Sierra Pettengill: The camera swings and catches these white upper breasts men in the audience laughing at what they're watching. Riotsville in the building of these mock cities like what's happening in Cop City, the literal space and the architecture of that is ridiculous and egregious. Also, the film points out that these are places of the state enacting a fantasy. It's rewriting what they want the uprising to be. They're rewriting what Watts look like and then training, almost all of the US police pass through Riotsville. It can be estimated.

Janae Pierre: Sierra Pettengill is director of Riotsville USA on Hulu. Sierra. Thanks.

Sierra Pettengill: Thank you.

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Janae Pierre: Next up, we have an update on the current protest around Atlanta's Cop City. It's The Takeaway. In 2021, Republican state lawmakers introduced over 80 anti-protest bills across the country, some even making it permissible for truck drivers to hit protestors. Many experts describe these laws as backlash to the racial justice protest of the summer of 2020, following the police killing of George Floyd. Today, the issue is compounded for environmental activists by a growing number of anti-protest bills that criminalized demonstrators who protest near critical infrastructure and oil or gas pipelines.

19 protestors associated with the Defend the Forest Atlanta Movement have been charged with domestic terrorism. At least nine are accused of nothing more than trespassing. I spoke with Lauren Regan, an attorney and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, who's working to defend protestors of Cop City charged with domestic terrorism.

Lauren Regan: Back in 2019, the Georgia legislature passed this domestic terrorism law in the form that we are looking at today. The legislators at that time basically said that the reason that they needed to add this law to their arsenal of criminal statutes was because of act like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charleston Massacre of nine Black AME church members, and the Orlando nightclub shooting. By looking at those events, those were massive human casualties and overwhelmingly they were racist and homophobic motivated crimes. Fast forward to about two months ago now, there were a group of forest defenders in Atlanta, and this conglomeration of state and local law enforcement agencies raided the forest and arrested these land defenders. Some of whom were literally laying in hammocks asleep when this raid occurred. As a result of that they were all charged with this domestic terrorist statute. I think first, history repeats itself, and I think looking at Riotsville and comparing it to what's going on right now is really important because if we don't know our history, we're going to be bound to repeat it.

The other thing that really struck me when we became involved in these cases is, this was a Republican law proposal that has not been used-- This will be the first time that this statute is being used to prosecute people in the state of Georgia. It is not prosecuting racists or homophobic people who are killing human beings, but instead is prosecuting left-leaning activists who are defending public land from what is basically a corporate takeover. As Sierra mentioned, the funding of this is about one-third from the public taxpayers, and there's a $90 million price tag on this project.

The rest of the funding is coming from the Atlanta Police Foundation, but they are raising the money from corporate donors like Delta, and Waffle House, and Georgia Pacific. This is corporate Atlanta purchasing themselves this cop city in a community that has very little open space. This is definitely an environmental justice campaign and issue. There are lots of concerns about how this particular park was chosen as the site of it.

Now the community and folks that are trying to help protect this land while civil lawsuits are winding their way through the legal system are being charged with this domestic terrorist statute. The crime carries a mandatory minimum five-year jail sentence, and a maximum punishment of death or life imprisonment.

Janae Pierre: Wow. Throughout your time defending environmental activists, what have been some of the most egregious cases of institutional overreach you've tracked?

Lauren Regan: I think one of the most historic examples of this in 2005 was the largest roundup of environmental and animal rights activists in the history of the United States, what came to be known as the Green Scare. This is Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front activists that engaged in economic sabotage and property damage, which normally would have been prosecuted, and normally would have netted about a two to five-year jail sentence if they were convicted.

In this case, on the day that they were all arrested, the then US Attorney Alberto Gonzalez made a press conference and basically accused people who are presumably innocent until proven guilty, but labeled them as the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States. This was a mere four years after the 9/11 incidents, so to call people who burned a horse slaughterhouse facility down and whose literal philosophy was "Do no harm to any living thing." To label those people as domestic terrorists was my first experience at watching the power of media manipulation and rhetoric being used by the state to try and confuse and win the people over with an incredibly exaggerated and false narrative.

Janae Pierre: Lauren, what advice would you give to movement builders, activists, land defenders who are seeing all of this and may be worried about their own safety?

Lauren Regan: I think there are a lot of things that we the people can do to try to build resilience to state repression. An important note to make is often the targets of state repression haven't necessarily done anything unusually illegal or wrong. They're in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are targeted because they're involved in a campaign that is threatening to the state. In many ways, their hard work and their advocacy is what made them a target to state repression.

Many generations of activists have warned those attacks as badges of honor, that their work really made a difference, and that it was important and critical. I think that's very much the case right now down in Atlanta with the Atlanta Forest Defenders. Their work is an example for everyone in the United States who is watching the last of their public lands, or is watching these major oil pipelines and other really harmful industries bullying their way into the community, despite the fact that the community says no.

Janae Pierre: Lauren Regan is an attorney and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. Lauren, thanks for joining us on The Takeaway.

Lauren Regan: Thanks.

Janae Pierre: To catch all of our coverage of Cop City, you can head on over to our website, thetakeaway.org or listen to us on any podcast provider.

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