Daniel Hanley said in a complaint filed Tuesday that two Cobb County police officers, Thomas Bolin and Tiare Crawford, were ordered by their superiors to arrest a group of six or so demonstrators who opposed the project, officially called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
The suit says the department and now-retired Police Chief Stuart VanHoozer instructed officers to make arrests of protesters based on perceived ideological affiliation, even if demonstrators were not breaking any laws.
Hanley said the two officers named in the complaint arrested him during the June 2024 demonstration and charged him with "loitering and prowling" and a misdemeanor obstruction charge, with police seizing his cell phone as part of the arrest.
According to the suit, the Georgia Supreme Court has interpreted the state's loitering statute to apply only in circumstances where "peace and order are threatened," and that the demonstration did not meet that criteria.
"By definition peace and order cannot be threatened (or the safety of persons or property jeopardized) by protesters doing nothing more than espousing a particular ideology or sharing particular values. In this case all that plaintiff was doing was peacefully standing on the side of the road holding a sign," the complaint read.
The charges against Hanley were ultimately dismissed following his successful completion of a pretrial diversion offer from prosecutors, but law enforcement kept his phone and have refused to produce a search warrant or reason for holding the device, he said.
Hanley and the other protesters were arrested in a business park in Cobb County, Georgia, during an early-morning protest near the site where the compound was set to be built, according to the complaint.
He and the other protesters were holding signs reading "Stop Cop City," and "Abolish GILEE," he recounted. GILEE is a reference to the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, a program through Georgia State University to train new law enforcement officers, according to its website.
Law enforcement encountered the group around 4:20 a.m. After consulting with their supervisors at the Cobb County Police Department, the officers were told to arrest the group and any protesters who "share the same values as the group," the complaint said.
The suit asserts that law enforcement premised their arrest based on a complaint they say they received from a nearby business, Hudson Technologies, which the police said made claims about possible vandalism connected to Cop City protesters.
In an email sent Wednesday to Law360, Drago Cepar Jr., an attorney representing Hanley, referenced a police report as evidence that police arrested his client and the other protesters based on their "values."
Cop City is a controversial 85-acre training facility in rural Cobb County on land purchased by the Atlanta City Council in 2021. Construction on the facility, designed to train law enforcement and first responders, was completed in December 2024.
Protests have been ongoing since the project was announced, with 61 people being indicted on racketeering charges for their involvement in demonstrations. A Georgia state court said last year it planned on tossing the state's racketeering charges against the defendants, as well as other charges associated with the protests.
Hanley is suing Cobb County and the officers, asserting that they denied his First Amendment rights and violated his Fourth Amendment rights by taking his phone without a warrant and refusing to return it to him. He is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and the return of his phone, the lawsuit said.
The instant suit is not the first time Hanley and Cepar have brought actions against the police in Georgia. The pair sued the Atlanta Police Department in 2021 for an arrest related to a vigil following the officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin in 2020.
The case against the Atlanta Police Department was consolidated with other protesters' suits against the department and is still pending in Georgia federal court, according to court records.
An attorney representing the Cobb County Attorney's Office did not respond to requests for comment.
Hanley is represented by Drago Cepar Jr. of The Law Offices of Drago Cepar Jr.
Counsel information for Cobb County and the officers was not immediately available.
The case is Hanley v. Cobb County et al., in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. A case number was not immediately available.
--Editing by Covey Son.
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