In video coverage from Unicorn Riot, police can be seen walking into the festival-area with high powered automatic weapons and in videos posted to Twitter, people at the music festival, some with dogs and small children, are seen running from the police. “Cops were picking off random music festival attendees,” reported Jean, who also stated police were heard screaming, “We’re gonna fucking kill you motherfucker.”
“They came out in full force, [but] the crowd stayed together,” Jean stated, as police deployed pepper-balls and tasers on concert goers and rolled out a Bearcat unit along with an LRAD, a machine which uses a painful sound cannon against large crowds.
In the face of this violence, according to Tina, the several hundred people still at the festival self-organized to get people rides out of the park and shuttle them to safety. When police threatened mass arrest, people locked arms and chanted that they had children there and demanded to be released, to which police finally relented, allowing people to leave the area in groups. According to the Atlanta Community Press Collective, at least 35 people were arrested late Sunday, with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reporting that 23 currently are being charged with “domestic terrorism.”
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[A] police statement released late Sunday claimed (correctly) that those at the music festival were, “peaceful,” yet this did not stop them from brutalizing a crowd filled with families and even young children. The statement read, “A group of violent agitators used the cover of a peaceful protest of the proposed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center to conduct a coordinated attack on construction equipment…” If this is so, then why did police knowingly threaten hundreds of “peaceful” people with arrest and even possible violent death?
