American Thinker

by Janet Levy

    In January 2025, customs agents at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport stopped activist Samuel Tunick upon his return from the Dominican Republic. During the search, they demanded access to his cellphone. He refused, but when pressured, he used a duress password to wipe all data and protect his privacy.

    During the arrest, Tunick was not advised of his Miranda rights. He was also denied the right to call a lawyer, despite four requests. He has no criminal record, yet the FBI and DHS became involved in his case. Officers said they suspected he had child pornography on his phone, a claim later retracted. Indicted by a federal grand jury for destroying digital content to impede an investigation, he faces five years in prison.

    Tunick and his lawyers believe he is being harassed for protesting the recent completion of the Weelaunee (or South River) Forest in Atlanta. He is active in the Stop Cop City movement, also known as the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. Many others involved in these protests have been arrested or charged.

    The crackdown has been disproportionately severe. In 2023, 61 people were indicted under Georgia’s RICO Act, which is meant to combat organized crime. One protester, 27-year-old Manuel Paez Teran, was shot 57 times. Police alleged he was wielding a firearm, but the autopsy found no gunpowder residue on his body or clothing to suggest he had used a gun. There was no police footage of the encounter.

    Defendants who established a bail fund were accused of money laundering and charity fraud, and activists who distributed flyers labeling a trooper who shot Teran a “murderer” faced felony intimidation charges. Others were charged with domestic terrorism: prosecutors labeled them “militant anarchists” or “domestic violent extremists.” The DHS had been monitoring online posts critical of the facility.

So, what are “Cop Cities” and why are people opposing them

    These are large training centers for police, firefighters, and other civil defense personnel, featuring mock streetscapes, villages, firing ranges, and more. The term “Cop City” gained currency during the Atlanta protests. Across the political spectrum, protesters describe the 80-odd “Cop Cities” nationwide as hubs for creating a police state through surveillance, crowd control, and militarized policing.

    The following are some prominent facilities, one operational and the rest still under construction:

•     Chicago completed the $130 million Joint Public Safety Training Campus in 2023. Among other training areas, it features a $33 million “tactical village scenario” with a burn tower, a car-crash area, and a mock city block. An 18-month campaign by the No Cop Academy coalition failed to stop the project, which the city council approved 38-8 in 2019.
•     “Cop City Dallas” is a proposed $250 million training academy on the University of North Texas campus. The academy building complex will be sited on five acres, with 20 acres nearby reserved for a simulated urban environment. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next month.
•     Dallas is raising funds for another site near the airport—the Public Safety Training Complex, which includes a driving track and a gun range. The two projects could cost $400 million.
•     San Pablo, CA, is building a $44 million facility for law enforcement training and operations. The Stop Cop City Bay Area coalition is organizing protests.
•     Pittsburgh’s “Cop City” is an $86 million facility planned for 100 acres.

    Concerns about the militarization of police are not unfounded. A 2017 study found that law enforcement agencies with military equipment were more likely to have violent encounters with the public. Another study found that the militarization of police failed to reduce local crime or enhance officer safety; it only worsened the reputation of police departments.

    Like many experts and similar groups, Right on Crime, an organization that supports conservative criminal justice reforms, believes in a clear line between police and the military. It has flagged legislation such as the Law Enforcement Support Office program (a.k.a. the 1033 program), a Department of Defense initiative that transfers surplus military equipment to state and local law enforcement. Policing, the organization states, must preserve citizens’ freedoms and rights and must not, under any circumstances, override them.

    To return to Atlanta, the “Cop City” there was built despite strong opposition: 70% of residents who responded to a call-up survey opposed the project. But in September 2021, the city council voted for the facility, then billed as the country’s largest and backed by major corporate interests such as Amazon, Wells Fargo Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, and Waffle House.

    On September 11, 2023, the Stop Cop City coalition presented the city council with 116,000 signatures supporting a referendum, representing a fifth of the city’s registered voters and an unprecedented number for Georgia. But the council refused to verify the signatures, claiming activists had missed the August 21 deadline. A federal district court had extended the deadline to September 25, but the city obtained a stay from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. In January, the appeals court ruled that city ordinances, such as the one authorizing the police facility, cannot be repealed by referendum.

    Meanwhile, the facility opened on April 29 last year and is fully functional.

    After being indicted in November, Tunick was released in December after posting $10,000 in bail and remains free while awaiting trial. An evidentiary hearing in July this year did not rule on the legality of the search or on whether the evidence should be excluded. A post-hearing brief is scheduled for September 18, and responses from the government and Tunick are set for October.

    His attorneys state that government reports do not indicate “any suspicion whatsoever that Mr. Tunick was in possession of child porn but, rather, that their purpose in detaining Mr. Tunick and seizing his belongings was to investigate his ties with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.” They claim Fifth and Sixth Amendment violations: failure to read Miranda rights and failure to provide legal counsel.

    The court will decide whether federal agents may demand the contents of a person’s digital life without a warrant and whether protecting one’s privacy constitutes a federal felony. If allowed, this would represent a massive expansion of government authority.

    ALPR and CCTV networks, the widespread use of facial and gait recognition technology and biometric scanners, and the proliferation of AI data centers to process those inputs—already, these are a major concern because their data is being accessed freely by corporations and the government. With warrantless access to what is on personal digital devices, the last privacy barrier will be crossed.

    This has profound implications for our constitutional freedoms. Tolerance for dissent has sharply declined. In 2020, the DHS and the FBI published a document defining “domestic violent extremism (DVE)” and covering all kinds of protests, including those like the one Tunick participated in.

    Such an approach, along with the militarization of the police, makes it easier for the government to suppress opposition to any project, even when many citizens oppose it, as with Atlanta’s “Cop City”. Unless we stop it, America risks becoming no different from communist-era dictatorships, where dissenters quietly disappeared and peaceful protests were crushed by battle tanks.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.