The following article was written for Issue 42 of Critical Resistance (CR)’s cross-wall newspaper The Abolitionist. Written by CR’s Campaigns Director, Mohamed Shehk, and a comrade in the Demilitarize Atlanta to Palestine coalition, the article examines how we can resisting the expansion of policing as seen by two grassroots campaigns to end “deadly exchange” programs. Every issue of The Abolitionist is free to thousands of imprisoned people in jails, detention centers and prisons across the US and some internationally. Supporters outside of cages can sign up for paid subscriptions to sponsor free subscriptions for prisoners. Sign up now to receive your own copy of the limited edition issue with feature articles on anti-war organizing. Print copies are first come first serve, so subscribe today while we still have Issue 42 in store.
Deadly-Exchanges: Resisting Policing to Resist Global Repression & Warmaking
By “A” and Mohamed Shehk
The fundamental goal of policing is to control racialized and dispossessed populations through violent force. While policing has looked and operated differently over the years, its core function as an institution of repression has not changed. But in the last two decades since September 11, 2001, throughout the ensuing “war on terror”, police departments have become increasingly militarized while simultaneously developing closer collaborations across cities, states, and even international borders.
The term we’re using to describe the rising collaboration of police and military units is “deadly exchanges”, a term borrowed from Jewish Voice for Peace. The implications of deadly exchanges are grave and far-reaching. On the one hand, they facilitate police departments global capacity to share tools, weapons, tactics, and in- formation to more effectively control and harm our communities. In this way, the import and export of policing approaches and machinery are the latest fine-tuning of how imperialist powers are broadening and deepening their power and ability to wage war across the globe. On the other hand, these exchanges equip police departments to look, behave, and operate like military units. Policing is rooted in militarized counter-insurgency, which has been propagandized as “counterterrorism” post 9-11. Through the lens of deadly exchanges that increasingly militarize police forces, public spaces and neighborhoods become war zones; community members become enemy combatants. To say that deadly exchanges must be dismantled and defeated for the sake of our survival and our ability to resist is not hyperbole.
New proposals to develop more deadly exchange programs are proliferating across the US, but we draw hope from the powerful resistance efforts and lessons from community organizing campaigns that have abolished such programs. Two of these campaigns are Stop Urban Shield, which successfully abolished the largest SWAT policing exchange program in the world, and the Demilitarize Atlanta 2 Palestine Coalition (DA2P), an ongoing effort to dismantle the deadly exchange program known as the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE).
SITES OF STRUGGLE AGAINST DEADLY EXCHANGES: GILEE & URBAN SHIELD
In 1992, GILEE was founded by criminology professor Robert Friedmann at Georgia State University (GSU). Originally founded to train local police forces in Israeli “counterterrorism” tactics in preparation for the 1996 Georgia Olympics, its existence was only made public in 2009 and first challenged in 2011, when a Georgia Open Records Act (GORA) request was filed by GSU students. The state Attorney General, Sam Olens, then quickly led a political campaign that became emblematic of the state response to inquiries about GILEE: The students were smeared by the government as “terrorist sympathizers” and the open records request was denied on the same justification. Olens lobbied the Georgia legislature to pass an update to GORA, O.C.G.A. § 50- 18-70 (2023), which created “national security”- related exceptions that have been routinely used to deny the release of information or records re- lated to GILEE.
“In this way, the import and export of policing approaches and machinery are the latest fine-tuning of how imperialist powers are broadening and deepening their power and ability to wage war across the globe.”
Since 2011, Georgia activists have waged several campaigns with the goal of ending GILEE, including a revived campaign in 2023 under the banner of DA2P. Organizers in this fight face serious repression, especially in the wake of the fight to Stop Cop City, the student encampments in support of Palestine, and Atlanta’s on-going Operation Shield, the surveillance network that crowns Atlanta as the “most-surveilled city in the US per capita.” State forces in Georgia have attacked activist bail funds, used Zionist definitions of antisemitism to stifle and criminalize anti-Israel speech, and prosecuted 63 individuals on domestic terrorism charges in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) conspiracy. Despite these conditions, DA2P organizers see the strategic need to take up the fight again. While we are faced with a multitude of overlapping crises, we are also in a flashpoint moment of global support for Palestine and heightened domestic calls against militarized policing across the US. The conditions for our fight to end GILEE have never been more ripe.
On the other side of country, the San Francisco Bay Area hosted the largest militarized SWAT police training program in the world for over a decade, an urban warfare program known as Urban Shield. Made possible by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “counter-terrorism” funding program, Urban Shield was created and held annually by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. The program brought together police and military units from across the US and the world to train and exchange tactics, tools, and technologies of destruction. Notably, some of the regular participants in Urban Shield were police-military units from the apartheid state of Israel, among other participants from countries with notorious records of human rights abuses.
Proponents of Urban Shield claimed that the pro- gram helped bolster public safety, however, it was centered on the practice of war-games competitions and military training scenarios. Because it was funded by a DHS counterterrorism grant, Urban Shield was constructed around a “nexus to terrorism”, with most of the trainings based on “killing terrorists” and “neutralizing enemy combatants”. These trainings would transform schools, hospitals, train stations, and other public spaces into mock war zones to allow militarized police to practice their war-games scenarios. The violent goals of Urban Shield were clear: to create material links between policing institutions globally to teach and learn about how to repress communities worldwide.
At their core, GILEE and Urban Shield seek to justify giving police forces unprecedented militarized power and capabilities by criminalizing marginalized communities like Black, Brown, working class, and poor people in the US, and oppressed peoples internationally, including Palestinians resisting Israeli settler colonialism. For this reason, organizers can look to lessons learned from previous iterations of the campaign to end GILEE and the successful fight to Stop Urban Shield to inform how we strength- en our resistance in the fights ahead.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM PAST FIGHTS: URBAN SHIELD
As soon as Urban Shield came into being, communities resisted it. A network of organizations came together in 2013 when the NY-based War Resisters League alerted Bay Area organizations that police war-games trainings were taking place in their backyard. In 2014, with the goal of organizing a sustained campaign to put a complete end to the program, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) and Critical Resistance (CR), alongside former Stop the Injunctions Coalition partners Xicana Moratorium Coalition (XMC) with BAYAN USA and the American Friends Service Committee, formalized the Stop Urban Shield Coalition. From there, over 50 diverse organizations all united to bring an end to Urban Shield. The breadth and diversity of the coalition was a key strength of the campaign, demonstrating widespread commitment against the violence of policing and militarization.
Because policing and militarization are fundamentally violent and repressive, we did not seek to reform Urban Shield. Rather, we sought to understand how we could best build and leverage power to dismantle it. Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern, a tough-on-crime official with ties to far-right militias, was the mastermind behind Urban Shield. The sheriff wields a lot of institutional power; even the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, the highest decision-making body on the county level, had little power to dictate the sheriff’s decisions. However, they did have power over the county budget, which included the budget of the Sheriff’s Office. We determined that getting the Board of Supervisors to defund Urban Shield through the sheriff’s budget was our best pathway to win.
Our strategy to defund Urban Shield rested on our ability to drive a wedge between the Board of Supervisors and the sheriff. We used CR’s three-pronged campaign approach: A media strategy that challenged the idea that Urban Shield created safety while highlighting the violence and racism it promoted; a legislative strategy that used county hearings and task forces to build strategic relationships with decision makers to pressure them in our favor; and an outreach and mobilization strategy that brought in support from key cross-sector organizations in the community.
A crucial feature of our campaign was creating alternatives to Urban Shield that decision makers and the public could support instead. The sheriff had been deceitfully branding Urban Shield as a necessity to prepare for and respond to disasters. We researched and created alternative models for what real community preparedness and disaster response could look like—models that were not based on militarized policing, but on collective care and community resiliency. We amplified these alternative models to our communities and elected leaders, arguing that the millions of dollars going into Urban Shield could be better spent on models that would truly make our communities safer.
When growing support for the campaign through outreach, we left no stone unturned. We built with faith groups, youth groups, unions, medical responders, neighborhood safety networks, cultural organizations, survivors of man-made disasters, survivors of SWAT raids, and other community organizations of all stripes. Over five years we grew stronger and larger in numbers at county hearings while building power to sway county supervisors to our side. In 2018, legislation was put forward that declared that that year’s Urban Shield would be the last “as currently constituted.” The proposal passed by a vote of 4-1. We won.
This victory was not the last one we had to win, but it was a decisive one. The supervisors who voted to end Urban Shield “as currently constituted” wanted to make it align more closely with the county’s human rights values. Uninterested in reforming Urban Shield, we sought to propose “human rights-oriented” changes to Urban Shield that would disqualify it from receiving the grant money. To the dismay of the sheriff, we were successful in codifying those recommendations and 2019 was the first year in 12 years that Urban Shield did not take place. In what was truly a local and international anti-policing and anti-war victory, we dismantled Urban Shield. It has not returned since.
There is no one-size-fits-all coalition model, but for us, a Strategy Committee—which steered the participation of the collective while maintaining a clear strategy—was a powerful asset. Addition- ally, we sought to use all the tactics that we had at our disposal—from sitting on official county task forces to organizing disruptive direct actions, including blockades to the expo grounds. If a tactic worked, we used it; if not, we moved on. We didn’t have all the answers, and we brought in people to help us. We found that it’s crucial to have the best information to develop a strategy and a plan that are reassessed regularly.
CONDITIONS OF A SHIFTING STRUGGLE: GILEE
The present-day DA2P campaign to end GILEE must assess the Atlanta terrain as different from other successful demilitarize campaigns like Urban Shield. Protected and financed through the federal government (chiefly the Department of Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program and the Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant), GILEE represents the strategic relationship between the prison industrial complex (PIC) and the military industrial complex (MIC), as well as the cross-pollination of imperialism in the US and internationally.
GILEE’s role in the sharing of counterinsurgency tactics and strategy between Israel’s apartheid state and militarized policing in Atlanta is one that results in heightened levels of repression for our movements domestically and internationally. Police escalation and brutalization against protesters, expulsion and criminalization of university students, and swift measures by the state and it’s political actors to insulate apartheid Israel and ultimately the US empire from accountability represent the vast force and scope of a larger threat that distinguishes this fight against GILEE. Actively constructing greater levels of cooperation between local, state, and federal policing through its facilitation of training and knowledge sharing, GILEE is more than just a “research center” at GSU; it is an integral part of the US government’s “national security” strategy and apparatus.
For these reasons, any struggle against GILEE will draw the attention of the federal government. And it’s precisely GILEE’s relationship to the apartheid state of Israel that provides the biggest opportunity for us compared to previous fights. Public opinion towards the apartheid state of Israel has drastically shifted over the course of the last year, with greater opposition and awareness growing every day. This change in conditions fosters a space for unprecedented moral legitimacy which can be leveraged to build power against GILEE.
BUILDING POWER TO END GILEE FOR GOOD
The DA2P coalition restarted in a critical moment, assembling a few months before apartheid Israel’s escalated genocide campaign and on the heels of a challenging 2023 for Atlanta-based organizers. Given those conditions, a strategic first step in 2023 was to protect ourselves against state repression by building a security culture that protects both the individual and the collective as best we can. We also have been developing our media and outreach strategy, bringing awareness of GILEE to the GSU cam- pus and beyond. Given that Cop City, the 2024 student encampments protesting apartheid Israel’s genocide, and Operation Shield all have such salient ties to GILEE, there has been a lot of synergy in making international connections to everyday people around why GILEE must end.
Additionally, we have been researching campaign targets. In the university system, we are focused on the Andrew Young School of Public Policy, which houses GILEE, and GSU President M. Brian Blake. We also believe one of the main institutional levers with the power to shut down GILEE is held by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents. If GILEE can no longer be housed at GSU, it loses the position within a public university that enables its federal support, which will weaken the program and make it vulnerable to being defeated entirely.
The coalition is also exploring a divestment strategy as one of our campaign prongs. From a funding perspective, Atlanta’s corporate “usual suspects” are all donating to GILEE: The Home Depot, UPS, Delta Airlines—every major Georgian company we know contributes in some way. GILEE also works closely with the Atlanta Police Foundation and its front organization for training, the Atlanta Police Leadership Institute, which has a 5-figure allocation for GILEE in its annual budget. While attacking funding streams is important, many of these donors may not be integral to the day-to-day operations of GILEE itself. Maintaining trainings, workshops, and delegations to and from the apartheid state of Israel does not demand large capital expenditures and the program can collaborate with other organizations and nonprofits to diffuse its programming costs outside the boundaries of GSU. This is one of the most consequential points of interest for the coalition to consider.
Another campaign prong should be legislative. By legal statute banning requests related to GILEE, we have limited access to information via the Georgia Open Records Act. Additionally, in this past legislative session, the Georgia legislature successfully passed new laws related to suppressing protest. Given that Georgia, at the state level, is predominately republican, we’re not under the illusion that we’ll flip those legislative seats or compel enough legislators to change the laws; but we shouldn’t lose an opportunity to make the consequences of these bills clear to the people of Georgia, while attracting them to our base in the process.
Defeating GILEE will require a rigorous and dedicated coalition of individuals and organizations united in an anti-imperialist front against warmaking. GILEE is just one piece of the puzzle, but it’s an integral one. Defeating it demands a multi-year struggle with a diversity of strategies and tactics anchored to clear campaign demands. We must continue to synthesize, analyze, and advance the lessons of related struggles, like the fight to Stop Cop City and other campaigns to end deadly exchanges across the country. As the genocide in Gaza continues, we must urgently seize the opportunity to delegitimize any association between US institutions and the occupation. Building popular support against GILEE must emphasize the international call against the occupation, the legal right to resist genocide, and the direct consequences for people in the US being policed by militarized forces.
TRUE SAFETY AND DEADLY EXCHANGES CANNOT CO-EXIST
Over the course of 2024, we have witnessed one year and counting of one of the most vicious genocidal offensives waged by apartheid Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Yet if there is anything to draw inspiration from in the face of so much death and destruction, it is the continued resilience and steadfastness of Palestinians. Gaza has been given a new nickname in Arabic: “The Exposer”. It has exposed to the world the fundamental genocidal basis of Israel and Zionism, the hypocrisy and complicity of the US, and that systems of policing and militarism are centered on control, repression, removal, and violence against whole communities. It has exposed for us how imperialist forces collaborate, and how that collaboration only grows their appetite for warfare.
Communities in the US and internationally are learning from the lessons Gaza is teaching us. As the war rages on despite fierce opposition and outrage, police forces and the politicians that support them continue to move ahead with proposals to build over 60 “Cop City”-like projects across the country. And GILEE, almost 20 years after being made known, has yet to suffer any defeat or losses. They all must be defeated for the sake of our collective safety and survival.
“Building popular support against GILEE must emphasize the international call against the occupation, the legal right to resist genocide, and the direct consequences for people in the US being policed by militarized forces.”
We are learning to make stronger connections across our struggles. Urban Shield and GILEE reveal the ways that our foes work together across borders; it would be a severe mistake for organizing efforts to work in silos. Our resistance must be interconnected and internationalist—not just in theory, but in practice. The Palestinian who wants to see an end to the killing of his family members in Gaza, the schoolteacher whose school is facing closure, the overworked nurse whose hospital is facing budget cuts—we all have a stake in stopping the billions of dollars being wasted on policing and war used by those in power to target us. We all have a stake in organizing to build a better world, both for ourselves and for our future generations. As organizers, as communities in resistance, we have a duty to build with all those impacted by deadly exchanges, the PIC, and the MIC. And we have a duty to win.
About the Authors:
A is an organizer based in Atlanta with the Black Alliance for Peace and a member of the Demilitarized ATL to Palestine coalition, focusing on research. Their organizing work focuses on political education and drawing connections of the threat of US imperialism abroad and its impact in the states. As a Pan-African and scientific socialist, A is dedicated to discovering and building the next revolutionary movement for Black and African people in the US.
Mohamed Shehk is the national campaigns director of Critical Resistance (CR). He has supported CR’s campaigns and projects to shrink and end policing programs including ending Urban Shield, fighting against new prison and jail construction projects including stopping new jails in California, and closing down existing cages—most recently in shutting down three state prisons in California and working to end immigrant detention in New Jersey and New York. He has also been engaged in amplifying international solidarity with people’s struggles outside of the US and supporting the movement for Palestinian liberation.