Slate: “Early on Wednesday morning, police officers from the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Teardown House, a hub for a constellation of organizing activity in East Atlanta. At least a dozen officers in riot gear, wielding assault rifles, arrested three organizers from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a nonprofit that supports people who are arrested for protest or activism. The Solidarity Fund pays bail, provides jail support, and refers people who have been arrested to available lawyers. In other words, the Solidarity Fund connects people who are still presumed innocent to things that they are legally entitled to: the ability to have others pay their bail and a lawyer to represent them in court.
As a collective of people who post bail for strangers, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is one of nearly a hundred organized bail funds around the country. These community bail funds share a sense that the state should not be subjecting people to the violence of jail simply because they cannot pay their bail. More essentially, bail funds understand that one powerful way to push back against the injustice of pretrial detention is to join together in the act of paying bail for strangers.
…The three Solidarity Fund organizers arrested this week—Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson—have been initially charged with the felony crimes of charity fraud and money laundering. Georgia officials are not hiding the underlying theory of these prosecutions: that to be part of a group supporting protesters is, itself, a crime. State prosecutors said as much during the bail hearings of dozens of activists who were charged earlier this year with state domestic terrorism charges—their “terrorism” being the alleged destruction of property or trespassing while engaged in protest. During these prior bail hearings, the state prosecutors made arguments that, were it not for the accompanying criminalization, might verge on comical: They used as evidence against the activists at their bail hearings the fact that some of those arrested had written on their arms the phone number of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in case bail was set against them. The activists were correct in their fear that the police might arrest protesters and attempt to hold them in cages because they could not afford bail. And for that prescience, they were labeled as terrorists. The state’s intention to criminalize dissent could not have been clearer, to both the prosecutors and those they were prosecuting.”