PODCAST: Resisting Cop Cities and the Militarization of Policing

Episode Transcript

Chris Browne:

Hello and welcome to Radicals in Conversation, the monthly podcast from Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading independent radical publishers. I’m your host, Chris Browne. In this episode, we ask the question “what happens when the police become an army?” Since 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense has transferred more than $7.2 billion in military equipment to law enforcement agencies. The DOD is legally required to make various items and equipment available to local police and school police departments, from flashlights and sandbags to grenade launchers and armored vehicles.

This militarization has, unsurprisingly, been shown to unjustly impact on black communities and is associated with increasing killings by police. The Police Public Safety Training Center in Atlanta, more commonly known as Cop City, is just the latest manifestation of the militarization of policing. It’s a costly and controversial endeavor being rammed through by the local Democrat-run administration in the face of fierce, widespread opposition among local communities.

Resistance to the project has been met with spurious legal roadblocks, activist intimidation and violent repression. One environmental activist known as Tortuguita, was killed by Atlanta state troopers, shot repeatedly while they sat with their hands raised and their legs crossed. But Cops City is far from being just a local issue. Almost every U.S. state now has a Cop City project of their own in some stage of development.

And as we discuss in our episode today, the logic, structures, and ramifications of Cop Cities are truly international. It’s a real honor to be joined on the show today by three people who are deeply connected to the Stop Cop City movement, Liliana, Joy James and Kalonji Changa.

Liliana is an immigrant from Colombia based in Houston, Texas. She’s an abolitionist and has worked directly with prisoners on death row and their families. She’s the co-host of the radio show Voz de la Tierra on KPFT Pacifica, discussing the geopolitical effects of militarism, policing, imperialism and racism on indigenous, Black and immigrant colonized communities across the globe.

Joy James is an organizer and author. Her recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and The Afterlife of Erica Garner, and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. She’s the editor of Beyond Cops Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate Funded Armies and Prisons, which was published by Pluto in August 2024, and the forthcoming ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black and Afro-Indigenous Futures, which is out in December of this year, also from Pluto Press. Joy also works with the Guerrilla Intellectual University (GIU) Podcast Collective on Black Power Media (BPM), which listeners can find on YouTube.

Kalonji Changa is an organizer and founder of the FTP Movement. He’s the author of How to Build a People’s Army and co-producer of the documentary Organizing is The New Cool. Kalonji is founder of Black Power Media and serves as co-chair of the Urban Survival and Preparedness Institute.

Liliana, Joy, Kalonji and I discuss the history of the Public Safety Training Center in Atlanta; the links between US law enforcement and the Israeli police; the parallels between Cop Cities and the notorious School of the Americas; and the ways in which the tactics and logic of U.S. imperialism abroad, particularly in relation to Latin America, are being brought to bear on working class and racialized communities at home.

Finally, before we get underway, a reminder to listeners that you can get Beyond Cop Cities with 40% off through plutobooks.com. You just have to use the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

Kalonji, Joy and Liliana, I’d like to thank you all for joining me today to discuss Cop Cities and the book Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate Funded Armies and Prisons, which was published by Pluto in August. So it’s only last month, technically, although we’ve been trying to get this episode out for a little while. So I’m really pleased we’re all here. Now, I mean, as I probably should say, you know, we have an international audience on the show. Most of our listeners, I think, are based outside the US. So a lot of people at home might not be familiar, overly familiar with Cop Cities or they might have heard the term in passing. So I was wondering if someone could start us off with something quite basic. What does the phrase cop cities refer to?

Kalonji Changa:

Okay, I guess I’ll get it started. Cop cities. It’s supposed to be the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, and it’s commonly known as Cop City, renamed by a number of different activists, forest defenders. You know, the activists here primarily in the Atlanta area. It was started under the guise of being a police and fire department training campus, which is under construction in what’s known as the Weelaunee Forest – the Welaunee Forest, they renamed it South River Forest. And it’s over in Dekalb County Atlanta. Basically, this area, the city leased the 381 acres of it, and it’s basically stolen land, stolen Muskogee land from the Muskogee people. They lived there up until about the 1830s, and the U.S. federal government forced them off that land and into what is known as Oklahoma, during the Trail of Tears.

Later, it was purchased by the city of Atlanta, I believe in around 1867 or so, and it became a prison farm. And, you know, there’s been all types of different situations that have taken place on that particular land. But to kind of fast forward and just make it as basic as possible, it is a space in which the city of Atlanta, along with the police unions here, had been plotting and planning for probably a good 20 years.

And I think it was in 2021, September of 2021, where then Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, along with Dave Wilkinson, who was the CEO of the Atlanta Police Foundation, had decided that this site would be selected to house this particular training center. Now, again, we see it – folks who who understand police state and understand imperialism – we see it as a paramilitary training compound where these occupier forces receive instruction in preparedness on domestic urban warfare.

And we understand that it is an extension of the police state and is something that is corporate funded, corporate backed. Millions of dollars, we’re talking about $90 million plus at this time, has been allocated and delivered by a number of different corporations, including Amazon, U.P.S., JP Morgan, Coca-Cola, Chick-Fil-A, Microsoft and many others. So they’re looking at 85 acres of this former slave plantation turned city prison farm.

They’re looking at taking this to pretty much maintain hegemony and to continue the rise of a fascist state under the guise of proper training. We know that here in the United States, over 1500 people are murdered by police yearly. So, you know, we’re not quite sure what type of training they would receive other than maintaining what’s already been established.

Joy James:

Yeah. And hi, good morning. This is Joy. So, just going to echo a bit or build on what Kalonji put on the table and also my appreciation, Chris, for Pluto Press making time and also publishing this book, and my sister Liliana as well, because she’s going to share an international perspective. So when I think about Cop Cities, I see the concentric circles: there’s the city that Kalonji’s talking about in terms of Atlanta, right? Atlanta, Georgia. And it’s been like the marquee, like just flashing like ‘We are Cop City’. And mostly people think beyond this particular city and they think of additional cities. There may maybe 50, 70+ urban centers that are creating Cop Cities. I know based on what’s happening in New York City, even though Mayor Eric Adams, former NYPD leader, now under investigation by the feds for allegedly laundering some $2 million illegally, he’s talked about creating a Cop City in Queens, New York.

So it’s radiating out, it’s building out, but it’s beyond the cities as well. In my mind, the way I think about it, it’s a national attempt to make militarized policing the norm. And Kalonji mentioned 2021 and Keisha Lance Bottoms. And here I want to connect the local, you know, former mayor of Atlanta who supported Cop Cities. She also moves on to become one of the senior advisors to the POTUS (President of the United States), meaning Joe Biden.

So when I think of 2021, that’s one year after George Floyd. Knee on the neck. Horrific way to die. People yelling at the curb to like release him. But just taking cell photos because we don’t have or we did not have consistently a strategy to deal with police brutality and police murders. But 2020 was the height like globally.

I mean where you are, UK, around the globe, people protested police violence. But here we are at 2024 under a Democratic administration where the police have received more money and they’ve killed more civilians. So just echoing, you know, the community here, we can talk about it as a city endeavor, but it’s actually a national endeavor that radiates out as Liliana will point to, in terms of whole regions.

So it’s part of foreign policy, domestic policy, urban or city policy and what we tried to do with Beyond Cop Cities, Liliana was gracious enough to translate parts of it into Spanish. Kalonji has done incredible interviews that are transcribed here, also coauthored a couple of articles that we did for Harvard Law’s inquest. Like what we have to think of this is as the convergence of control, particularly control that will have the worst impact on working class people, indigenous people, Black people, urban people who do not have wealth and who do not see the government as functioning in their interests.

Chris Browne:

Mm hmm. Yeah. No, absolutely. Thanks, Joy. I mean, it’s, as you say, like, definitely not a local issue to Atlanta. Yeah. I mean, I think the isyourlifebetter.net website has an interactive map showing all the Cop Cities projects across the U.S., you know, each of which are in varying stages of development. And seemingly only three states do not currently or are not currently pursuing their own Cop City, so there’s an alarming proliferation. And I mean, talking about Atlanta, although of course, we know the opposition to Cop Cities is kind of beyond that. We’re recording this on the 30th of September. The hurricane, Hurricane Helene, has just caused all this devastation in parts of the south of America, including in Georgia. I think there’s been lots of flooding.

And so there’s a political choice to spend whatever the figure was, you know, these tens of millions of dollars on pursuing this Cop City when that money is clearly needed, you know, in order to respond to things like extreme weather events as part of this ramping climate crisis. So there’s a choice there that goes kind of fundamentally against what people want.

Could you speak maybe, Kalonji, a little bit to the local opposition or the local feeling? I mean, there has been a lot of opposition, hasn’t there? Yeah.

Kalonji Changa:

Oh yeah, absolutely, in Atlanta. And we appreciate you pointing out the whole Hurricane Helene. It’s just wreaked havoc. You know 4.4 million people lost power between Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. But also there was a chemical plant explosion right outside of Atlanta yesterday. So it’s a lot going on right now. You know, and it’s a lot of resources that can be utilized. The homeless population is at an all time high. Folks lack medical care. Folks are lacking food, adequate food, so on and so forth. There’s a possible longshoreman strike. So it’s a lot, as you mentioned, going on. But indeed, the people as a whole have had strong opposition against this whole Cop City situation because particularly, to be quite honest, folks in the Black community, many of them haven’t quite shown up to some of the protests in spaces because of the fact that it’s been business as usual.

So if you’re already being beaten, you’re already being attacked, you’re already being falsely arrested and accused, so on and so forth, it almost appears hopeless in many cases. But those who have organized on the ground, many who have great intent, while, being honest, others have come in sort of siphoned and then made names for themselves for nonprofit purposes to really get more resources and to gain notoriety, publicity, and so on and so forth.

So it’s it’s a sad situation of sorts because at the same time, you have RICO charges being launched against a number of different activists for quote unquote, funding, as little as $2 and some change for a roll of tape. So the government has cracked down really hard. They’ve been giving a lot of pushback. And we talk about RICO charges, of course, we talk about the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was primarily set up for the Mafia and organized crime.

But here we have 61 protesters indicted, charged for really nothing more than opposing militarized policing, opposing imperialism on a local level. You know, and as Joy pointed out, indeed Cop Cities, it is national, but I’m sure Liliana would take it even further and talk about how it’s international. And I think one of the issues we have here in this particular conundrum is that indeed even the activists here in Atlanta, many of them have looked at it as local, although they’re seeing now, as it’s been pointed out, you know, the national piece.

But, you know, it goes so much further. And we can tie this from Atlanta to Palestine without interruption because of some of the players that are involved. When we talk about Cop City, we’re also talking about GILEE, which is a Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, which is an exchange between Israeli soldiers and Atlanta police, which has been going on for the past 31 years. But I’ll stop there and let…

Joy James:

Yeah, Can I say one more thing before Liliana gets on? ‘Cause that’s such an important bridge, like, the first page of the introduction, right, we talk about – there’s a quote or, you know, a citation at the bottom, Jewish Voice for Peace. And it, you know, reflects what Kalonji just put on the table, the quote is here: ‘For decades, the IDF has trained with U.S. police, sheriffs, border control and FBI agents.’ Right. And you can find that citation. It was published March 17, 2022. But everything’s interlocked. And so then the question becomes, how do we struggle? And I want to just say a little bit more, build on what Kalonji put on, and then the sister Liliana has a lot to share.

The way we approach this is fragmented. Like different sectors. Folks say, “Oh, it’s just one city.” Okay, well then we’re just going to multiply it and it’s more cities. No, it’s it’s deeper than that. Like when we talk about MOUT or when we talk about the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, also known as School of the Assassins by pacifists, right, and people who want to end war and torture. We would collectively need to deal with the fact that we’re highly frightened and intimidated, some of us, by the aggression of the police and their qualified immunity or their ability to harm and kill people and still walk. Right. But also we would have to think about federal policies and foreign policies.

And that’s where I see there’s some hesitancy. And this is why what Liliana can share is so vital.

Liliana:

Okay. Well, thank you for having me. Can you guys hear me okay? I’m so grateful for this. So grateful for Joy and Kalonji. This book has opened the door to so many talks that people haven’t talked about in so many years. Cop City is not ‘Cop City’, it’s Cop Cities. And is not a local issue, it’s an international issue.

Just like I keep saying, immigration is not a Mexican issue; it’s way more than that. So again, I’m so grateful, this book opens the door to a lot of talks and I cannot talk about Cop Cities without talking about School of Americas. That’s the first thing came to my mind when I learned about Cop Cities. I was shook for a minute and I was surprised of being surprised.

Of course, there has to be a Cop City and there has to be a Cop City everywhere in the U.S. and historically, the U.S. has always viewed Latin America as an open market, as a cheap labor and natural resource. That’s all we are for the U.S. and most of the time they don’t even know where we are, where are our communities, if we speak any other language besides Spanish, they don’t know anything about culture, but they do know about a resource that, again, we are an open market for the U.S. They fear of the U.S. of losing this control, losing these open markets has taken them to coups d’etat, death squads, all kinds of crimes against our communities in fear of losing that control. And really the U.S. doesn’t see their own citizens much different as the way they see Latin America. The same way the US sees Latin America, the same way the US sees their communities: Black communities, immigrant communities, just poor people in general. And the School of the Americas has been like the most powerful tool that the US has against our communities.

And it’s been the tool that has been used to have all these coups d’etat and death squads. We don’t even know how many people graduate from the school, they’ve been able to keep it very secret. We have an idea, maybe 100,000 students, but we don’t really know. It’s been open for so many years. It started in Panama in, I believe, 1890, something like that; it has been many, many, many years that we have all kinds of dictators, police officers, military. They’ve been trained at the School of the Americas in every single major crime in Latin America, either a massacre, a coup d’etat, anything big – if you dig in, it was either by someone trained at the School or Americas or someone who trained with people that were trained in the School of the Americas. Every single massacre in Latin America, Central America, if you dig in, is connected to the School of the Americas, from the Banana Massacre in 1928 in Colombia, there were thousands of people were killed that were on strike. Who were the soldiers who committed these crimes? We don’t have to go too far. In 1981 in El Salvador – that’s not too long ago – a whole village was wiped off the map, over a thousand people were killed in three days. Most of them were children or women. Who was the soldier in charge of this? Monterrosa. Where was he trained? School of the Americas. So every major crime in Latin America, always, if you dig in, takes you back to the School of the Americas one way or another. And why is there secrecy? Why is there secrecy with the School of the Americas? The same thing with Cop City. Because it’s all connected. The same people they’re going to train, these officers in Atlanta, are the same people training in the School of the Americas, the same people that killed people in these little villages in El Salvador, are the same people that are going to kill our students that are rallying in the streets against the genocide. It’s all connected. In Colombia, we have in 1999, we had this agreement signed by Bill Clinton and the Colombian government, this package of financial aid to Colombia to help the Colombian government to combat the drug trafficking.

It was a package of $5 billion, $5 billion in 1999. It was a lot of money; it’s still a lot of money right now. And what was that money used for? To train death squads who were trained by soldiers that went to School of the Americas. Some of them were from Israel. And we had a hundred people disappear. We have mass graves all over the country.

Colombian rivers are mass graves. That’s what the rivers are. Yeah, it’s very pretty. The mountains are very pretty. But if you go and you talk to the people, you go to the little villages, they tell you the rivers are mass graves. And this money was used to finance all of these killings. We even have a political party completely wiped out. It was a genocide.

The UP – over 7,000 people were killed because they were part of the opposition. It was part of a leftist group. In 2010, not long ago, there was a mass grave with 2000 bodies. It was found right behind a military base. All these bodies, once the government was questioned about it, the reason they gave, and they explain, they say all of them were guerillas. Well, even guerillas, they need to go through prosecutions. You don’t kill people just like that, and throw them in a mass grave. But most of the people in the mass grave, those 2000 bodies were farmers, were indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and people that were working in their communities trying to just keep up with their land.

But we had these military groups going all over this little village, and the government knows, of course, they know what’s happening. They pay for this. Plan Colombia finances all of these groups and all of these people, again, if you dig in, were trained at the School of the Americas or they were trained by people that trained in the School of the Americas.

And I think the School of Americas and Cop Cities is everywhere in the world because these soldiers, when they go to a little village, a little community, they bring all that knowledge they get in the School of the Americas. Then all of the soldiers and many of the police officers, they didn’t go to the School of the Americas, because the school isn’t that big, but they had the same knowledge from the people that trained there.

So they bring that School of the Americas or Cop Cities with them every single where they go. And we have right now coups d’etat taking place, now when we’re talking, the president of Colombia has been sending emails. He’s been pretty much crying. There is a coup d’etat taking place any time. We know it’s happening. It almost happened not long ago in Venezuela, happened a few years ago in Bolivia. It’s been happening all over the place. And again, when you dig in, who are the soldiers? Where did they train or who trained them? And people talk about the School of the Americas like it’s something from the past. Like it’s something from 20-30 years ago. It’s very relevant right now. It’s very strong and it’s even more dangerous because they’ve been able to keep it very secret.

Years ago you were able to find a lot of information about School of the Americas. You don’t find that much information anymore. We don’t know who’s really the graduates. We have a few names, but we don’t really have every single name. One of the most bloody coups d’etat that took place in Chile how many years ago. And even now we don’t know for sure if Augusto Pinochet, whatever, went to the School of the Americas.

There are a lot of rumors. We know for sure that his picture is mentioned as somewhere in the building. And they have this name, you know, someone very respected with a lot of honor, but we don’t really know where he went. So they’ve been able to keep a lot of names in secret, back then, and they’re doing it now.

So this book, it has opened the door again to talk about these things, How connected it is. We are having a huge immigration issue and a lot of the immigration agents were trained in School of the Americas. In the last seven years, 100 people been killed by immigration agents. But that number is well, you see it online, the papers, but most of the immigrants, undocumented immigrants, they don’t report crime; they don’t report rapes. They don’t report beat ups. And a lot of the killings, these agents, there’s evidence of they’re going to Mexican territory and doing all these killings. And there’s a lot of these killings and a lot of the crimes have never been reported. Again, the undocumented community is very vulnerable and they’re afraid. So most of the crimes committed by these immigration agents are never reported.

So that number is not true. It’s way, way bigger than that. And you don’t have to kill someone to destroy them or to destroy their family. The amount of rapes is crazy. We have a mass grave in Falfurrias, it’s about a hundred miles from the border and is in the US. They just found a mass grave of people that were found in the desert in the Mexican border, or it was already in the US, and these bodies were thrown in a mass grave without any protocol.

They didn’t care. When these authorities find bodies in the desert, they assume they’re going to be an undocumented immigrant. So that body doesn’t mean anything; it’s like a dog. They don’t even check if they have any ID. They don’t save the clothes. They don’t take pictures like they’re supposed to do. They just throw them in a mass grave.

I think that the main thing is the amount of impunity. They get away with so much. How can you have a mass grave and you just, well, we just found in the desert, so we just threw it over there. That’s not how it works. But again, it is happening because they get away with these things. I’ve said before, the way the US views Latin America is pretty much the way they view some communities – poor communities, Black community.

But we in Central and Latin America and with the immigrant community, the only difference is they can get away with a little more. But the feeling is the same.

Chris Browne:

Wow. Thanks, Liliana. That’s really enlightening. I mean, definitely you see the logic of colonialism being sort of practiced domestically through this kind of policing, right? And we know that the history of foreign policy strategies being deployed in domestic policing is very long, almost from the inception of policing in the mid-19th century. I wonder if Joy or Kalonji would like to pick up on what you were saying about how I guess the people in power view their own, you know, the working class people of color in these communities, the same way as they view ordinary people in Latin America?

Kalonji Changa:

Yeah, I think to Liliana’s point, and I’m grateful, thank you, Liliana, because I think that oftentimes places like Latin America are regions are overlooked, much like a number of different inner city neighborhoods throughout the United States. There’s been reports of murders inside of places like Chicago, New York, Connecticut, different places. You know, me growing up in Connecticut, I could just remember police corruption at an early age.

You know, there were cops who brought drugs into the community and it was well known, you know, it was cops who would take drugs from one particular project or whatever the case is, bring it to another. And forcing youth to sell. This isn’t something I saw on TV. This isn’t something that I heard about. This was going on in my neighborhood and we knew which cops were which and we knew which cops would take you and bang your head up against the wall. We would get attacked by police so much that I wouldn’t even tell my parents just because I wanted to go outside, because I knew that if I told them what was going on, then I wouldn’t be able to hang out. I wouldn’t be able to go with my friends or whatever the case is.

This is a reality. This is at 13, 14 years old, cops throwing folks on the ground. You know, this is a place where you talk about, especially with quote unquote, undocumented immigrants. And, you know, and we talk about immigrants, you know, as Liliana mentioned, the first thing that foolish Americans in particular think of is Mexicans.

They don’t know that when you talk about ICE and immigration, the Haitian population has been under heavy attack. When we talk about these ICE facilities, you know, you can find a lot of others. You know, you can find a lot of others, you know, besides quote unquote, you know, with these clowns, they talk about building a wall. There’s been instances in certain neighborhoods where police have literally stuck screwdrivers up the anus of individuals, talking about they were looking for drugs, you know, doing all types of things.

So when you talk about policing on an international level, we don’t have to go too far because we can look at the US military and look at the over 900 bases that exist across the planet. No country can set up shop outside of the U.S. or pretty much in the Western Hemisphere. However, the U.S. has domain, dominion. Israel and the US. You talk about the US being 5% of the world population, controlling 25% of all resources. You talk about the U.S. being 5% of the world population and housing over 25% of all prisoners on the planet, but yet they reign supreme, They hold dominion over the globe. They can set up shop wherever they want to, and when they can’t get their way, they will set up these proxy wars and it will get folks like the Ukraine in a jam because they want to move into those particular regions.

They want to control these resources. So we have this false sense of patriotic love for our nation and so on and so forth. When the reality is the policing, home and abroad, is literally to maintain the gangs. And we talk about the gangs being the quote unquote, founding fathers who stole this land, who murdered these people. I mean, just look at Weelaunee Forest alone, where this whole Cop City is. You’re talking about a place where they massacred and ran off natives of that particular land, the original victims of gentrification here in the United States. Then they turned it into a prison farm. Now they want to turn it into essentially the local establishment of the military. They want to turn it into a base so they can play cops and robbers.

And these corporations are funding it. They’re in cahoots because they benefit from it. At the end of the day, it’s all about capitalism, it’s all about imperialism. And people will suffer. And as Liliana pointed out, yes, there’ll be more coups. Why are there coups? Because it’s about domination. It’s about control, it’s about debt. It’s about keeping folks in servitude.

So at the end of the day, it’s like, you know, collateral damage.

Joy James:

I mean, I’m thinking of what you all at Pluto put on its digital platform. There’s a box with a question in it which echoes what Liliana and Kalonji have put on the table. So the question is from Pluto: ‘What happens when the police become an army?’ I mean, I think that’s to the point. I don’t know who wrote that question, but it’s like, it works for us, right? From that question, ‘How do we resist an army?’ There are different kinds of occupations and death squads, as Liliana has put forward and Kalonji has put forward as well. I see there’s contradictions that we’re still grappling with. And even being able to comprehend that this has become or historically has been an army, as Kalonji says, first it was indigenous land. Then it’s a plantation, then it’s a prison farm, and now it’s the training, you know, area for predatory behavior against all lives, not just civilian like two legged walking folks or not, you know, wheelchair, whatever; not just human life, but in taking over that territory, they poisoned the water, they’re poisoning the land.

And no environmental organization is going to see or collect the data on these forms of destruction. Once you start shooting of this kind of militarized presence, you’re going to poison the air. It’s going to have an impact of sound on the families, the Black working families. So we need clean air, clean water, clean land. You know, Kalonji was talking earlier about the storms, the hurricanes.

And so I think the way in which we agree to organizing by accepting the reality of varied occupations and militarized aggression, that will take us out of the liberal zone. And I think that’s one of the things we were trying to do in Beyond Cop Cities, to the extent that we were able to translate part parts of it into Spanish or Portuguese, the contributions that are made by multiple people, including Black Power Media’s interviews. We would have to give up the fairytale that you could vote your way out of an occupation.

Nobody else is managing to do that around the globe. Like why would we be able to do that? And so it seems to me that at least acknowledging the structured violence against communities but also against all populations that are seeking healthy autonomy, that would be a start. But I think in a lot of ways when people want to like frame this struggle into a sort of narrow corridor that is aligned with conventional liberal politics, I think that’s how we, we’re actually not just taking our eyes away from, you know, the struggle, but we’re actually changing the narrative of this struggle, as if you can fix this without having a major endeavor to confront all predatory acts by the state. And I guess I want to add one thing. I mean, this is personal for all of us on different levels, but I just have one thing: we’re compromised. All our communities are. This definitely has a heavy impact on indigenous, working class, poor people, undocumented people. But there are a number of people who are Black mayors, a number of people who are Black cops, then a number of people who are Black military running the Pentagon, or the woman who’s at the UN who keeps refusing to allow a call for a ceasefire to happen.

So I think decades ago there was a kind of racial solidarity that we would say, we’re on the outside and we’re oppressed. And now there’s so many compradors, we would have to let go of a certain kind of sentimental affiliations based on what we look like and definitely focus increasingly on what war resistance is.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, Thanks, Joy. That really kind of speaks to I think there’s a quote in the book which is referring to Atlanta from Reverend Matthew V. Johnson. He says that Atlanta is the Blackest city in America, you know, with a Black leadership class. And yet it also has the largest racial income disparity in the country. And you really kind of get the sense that the limits of electoralism as a political strategy are being felt there.

Haven’t there been something like 116,000 signatures delivered for this public referendum to put the brakes on it? And yet every sort of cynical legal challenge has been kind of thrown in the face of that, the kind of intimidation of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. I mean, those charges, I think, were just dropped this week. But yeah, it actually also puts me in mind of another Pluto book which has just come out from Peter Gelderloos, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements.

Yeah. When there is this sort of asymmetry of power, as you say, when you’re trying to resist and organize against militarized aggression, there is nevertheless been this kind of insistence on nonviolence as an organizing principle. Yeah. What would you say to that? Do we need to move beyond nonviolence as a sort of matter of principle?

Joy James:

Well, I would say and then I’ll let my community, you know, say their thing. At least the language that I use is war resistance, because I don’t want to get caught between this like, oh, are you for or against… I believe that, you know, we’ve also talked about the language of revolutionary love. Black Power Media has in this book. Actually, it’s a transcript of, I think the title is, Attempted Assassinations against Mumia Abu-Jamal, Political Prisoners, right? Kalonji and BPM worked on Marcellus Williams’ case.

He was executed by the state of Missouri. There are other executions. I mean, there are different ways to kill people in the U.S., right? And so it’s a comprehensive struggle. I think in a lot of ways, we’re still fighting for the narrative of clarity because, again, people are kind of painting it as something else, you know, just conventional politics.

Well, no, conventional politics is what created the war zone because it’s empire and it’s colonialism. So one of the things and then I’ll stop about the book when we say Beyond Cop Cities, we’re also talking about the prisons. So we have Kevin Rashid Johnson talking about how gangs were organized by wardens and guards, right? When Kalonji was talking about the violence in our communities is not always internal.

There are external factors and actors who come into the communities, right, and who bring the violence, who bring the drugs, you know, bring guns, etc.. So it’s complicated. Obviously, on this podcast, we can’t like solve it. But what I’m trying to do is move beyond fairytale narratives of comfort, like bedtime stories that you would, you know, give for your five year old to reassure them.

I think the issue of clarity and accepting the reality of a war machine is the first line of self-defense. And then what you do later in terms of security apparatuses becomes something else and sometimes private to your community.

Kalonji Changa:

Yeah, I think that what has to be done is that we have to look at all victims of genocide. We have to look at all victims of police terrorism as actual family members. I think that the way propaganda works and the way we have been desensitized, it has us as Malcolm X would talk about, being lulled to sleep.

It’s like we’re breathing Novocaine, so we hear about it and it doesn’t, as the young folks would say, it don’t hit the same, when you don’t feel that pain. The fact is we are numb, numbed by so many different distractions, everything from a phony electoral process that would have us arguing over, pardon my English, bullshit. We are arguing about whether the warmonger Kamala Harris or the convicted felon should be president, when in fact it’s like arguing over whether you want to worship Lucifer or Satan. I don’t know about changing our strategies as far as from nonviolent to violent. I know that there’s no preparation for any of that. But I do know that self-defense is not a violent act. And I do know that until we decide to be organized and almost go on strike as a people and say, this is not what we signed up for, we will not pay you to brutalize us, we will not pay you to terrorize us. We’ll not pay taxes for you to treat us worse than animals. I would never advocate violence, but I would certainly support self-defense. I don’t think anyone should be a victim. I don’t think anyone should have to live their lives under tyranny and oppression and not at least, at the very least be vocal about it.

We live in a nightmare while believing that we have some type of dream that we can manifest. So again, to answer your question, I think that there’s so much fear, courtesy of this propaganda, that even the thought of resistance brings thoughts of pain and suffering. I think we should have a strategy. I don’t think we have a strategy for the most part.

So, you know, whether we should change it or not, I think we should develop one that’s coherent and cohesive that we can stick by. We talk about the referendum. The referendum was to vote to see if you can vote against Cop Cities. If we’re going to have a referendum on the table, it needs to be about community control of public safety.

If we’re going to have a referendum on the table, it should be about decentralization. It should be about decertifying police unions. Those are the only referendums that are going to make sense. A referendum to vote on if you can have something on the ballot, it sounds about as ridiculous as possible. So, of course, I mean, you’re asking, you know, it’s like someone asked me recently how to get a permit.

I’ve been organizing for 39 years, so someone me, they said, well, how do you get a permit to protest such and such? I said, I’ve never gotten a permit. Why do I have to seek permission to protest? Seek permission to tell you that I don’t like how you treating me, you know. Can you can you give me a permit so I can, you know, resist that?

That is illogical. So resistance has to be at the top of the list.

Liliana:

Oh, this is… this hits hard. I grew up in the middle of a civil war. I was in Colombia when Pablo Escobar was hiding, and there were so many American soldiers just on the hunt, and they weren’t using uniforms. They were you know, we kind of knew who they were because they were tall, white, blue eyes. So it wasn’t too hard to know who they were.

And we have a bomb every night for months. And I remember every time we hear the boom, the windows shaking. We didn’t have cell phones at the time. It was like the early nineties. My mom would walk in the kitchen very slow. She’ll grab the phone and she’ll call all her kids just to make sure we were fine.

And we were having so many massacres all over the country: twenty here, fifty here; everywhere. And I moved to my sister’s house because we lost our home. So I had to move to my sister’s house, and just in that one street, the kids that I played with, they were taken by the cops. Then they disappeared. We never saw them again.

And that was in a two year period, and we saw the media talking about the guerrillas, the guerrillas, how cruel there were, and they’re making the country look bad. And they’re doing this and they’re doing that. And the whole country was experiencing a lot of violence. But in my particular case, I was lucky enough to be in a home in the city with family, But most of the people in the mountains, the guerrillas, there were displaced, most of them witnessed their mothers being raped and killed by soldiers, many of them. Saw their little sisters had their head cut out right in front of their. So, yes, a lot of the rebels, a lot of guerillas did a lot of stuff that I’m sure they’re not proud of, but what I say, I wish I was able to talk to these people in the media like it’s so easy to criminalize and to judge when you are on the other side of the river. And Colombia has been… now the country has so many graduates from the School of the Americas.

And I think Colombia’s been one of the, if not number one, one of the countries who gets more financial aid, military aid from the US. We’re still every single year, we’re still number one when it comes to the amount of organizers killed. We have at least 200 killed every single year, and that number is the number in records.

But we know the number is way bigger than that. But we have so many people missing, disappear every single day. These people never make it to the record. We don’t know because since there’s no body, they can’t put these people as deaths. But we know that 200 is a very small number. We know. So every single year we had the most organizers killed every year. And we have environmentalist killed every year. We’re always, number one. And we’re still number one producing cocaine. So all this money that Colombia gets from the US is going to pay death squads, police, military, and it’s not doing anything against the cartels. No, it’s making things worse and worse. So to me resistance is a beautiful word, but we’ve been paying a big price for it.

But I don’t think resistance is a right. I think resistance is our duty and it’s necessary, it’s our duty by any means. Resistance, we have to.

Joy James:

You know, I really appreciate everybody here. I mean, you’re just so clear, even though it’s so painful, right? I would note, it’s like in part two, there’s an article or chapter six, like Combat Police Terror, authored by Dhoruba bin Wahad and Kalonji Changa. I just want to read just a little snippet from it and then say a few things.

Under decertification and recertification of police unions, they write: ‘to reform or rethink policing in America without a full appreciation and understanding of the actual danger militarized policing poses to legitimate democracy is impossible. Meaningful reform of policing cannot be achieved without an appreciation given that America is controlled by armed state agents posing as, quote, civil servants, end quote, who are controlled by corporate donors, but yet are funded by taxpayer dollars while remaining beyond public accountability.’

That’s on page 88. So they make us dance in a death cycle by taking our money to pay for this structured violence. And I know there are, you know, Veterans for Peace or different organizations over the decades that have challenged this. And again, will continue to challenge it. But when I hear Kalonji and when I hear Liliana speak, I feel that in part, this is a call for our people to come home.

Like we understand everybody needs some kind of job to pay the bills, put food on the table, maybe get some health insurance for family and kids. But this loyalty or devotion or the belief that, you know, if you joined the Army or if you join the police forces, that somehow you can be in community that has decency, that has love, that has honor rather than dishonor, that’s a fantasy, right?

And so part of… We’re all linked in different ways. My happiest years as a kid playing stickball, kickball was on the School of the Americas because my father was an officer and I’m pretty sure he worked there. And so how our contradictions embedded in family, embedded in our nonprofits, embedded in academia, embedded like there’s a whole freaking list that goes on and on.

We would just have to agree to the terms of reality. And I agree with what’s been put on the table: self-defense is not an act of violence. When I was in seminary and I met all these women who were like, we’re going to start these nonprofits against domestic violence, they were very clear after all these meetings that you have the right to self-defense if you’re being battered in the household or on the street. That is not an act of violence. That is an act of love. And I guess we would have to abide by that, a certain kind of spirit, despite the fear and the pain that we’ve been talking about. And I think this is one of those few occasions where we could start talking about a book and then end up really revealing that we’re talking about our lives and our desires and our fears, but also our commitments and our courage.

And that’s why the state doesn’t win, because we’re not predictable. If we love deeply, then what we do, you know, nobody’s going to say like, we’re not going to forecast the future or give you like a book, you know, play-by-play book. But what we do will be what is necessary, as Liliana said. And because it is necessary, then we have commitment.

Chris Browne:

Wow, thanks, Joy. I mean, that feels to me like a good place to conclude, unless anyone wants to add anything.

Liliana:

Something that happened just last week. And I think it was very interesting, the head of the Southern Command, the general, Laura Richardson, she went to Latin America and she was interviewed, you know, what was, you know, the U.S. concerns about Latin America, blah, blah, blah. And her main concern was the influence of China and Putin in Latin America.

And she was afraid they were going after Latin America’s resources. And she talk about Venezuelan oil, the water, all the resources. And she say “our water,” “our oil.” I guess she forgot that she was talking in public, but she was talking about her belongings. And I think that’s how the School of the Americas, American Army bases all over the world,

It’s like they own everything. That’s how they feel, the entitlement. They own everything. And that’s why Kalonji, Joy, you, we’re doing this.

Kalonji Changa:

Amen.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. Thanks, Liliana. It’s a great way to finish. Yeah. Liliana, Kalonji, Joy, thank you so much. I really appreciate all of you sharing what you’ve shared and taking the time to come and do this. Yeah, really appreciate it. So thank you very much.

Liliana:

Thank you.

Kalonji Changa:

Thank you.

Joy James:

Thank you. Stay well everyone.

Chris Browne:

That was Liliana, Joy James and Kalonji Changa on Radicals in Conversation. You can get 40% off the book Beyond Cop Cities on plutobooks.com. Just use the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

At Joy’s request, I’d like to make listeners aware of the following corrections to the text of Beyond Cop Cities. Firstly, the political prisoner Joy Powell was incorrectly cited as Joy Power.

Secondly, Tortuguita reportedly had over 50 gunshot wounds in their body, but likely was shot by Georgia state troopers several dozen times.

And finally, mainstream media attributes all October 7th, 2023 deaths to Hamas. However, recent critical journalism reports that Israeli military friendly fire killed an unknown number of hostages and noncombatants.

We’ll be back very soon with our next episode of Radicals in Conversation, as well as episode two of our Beyond the Ballot Box miniseries. Please don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already and do share the link or leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. So thanks again for listening and goodbye.