Global Policing in the Global City: GILEE, Olympification, and expanding the post-9/11 anti-terror apparatus

In 1992, Robert Friedmann, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University's (GSU) Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, established the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) ahead of the 1996 Olympics with the goal of providing counter terrorism training to the Atlanta Police Department (APD) and other U.S. police officers. Friedmann is a prolific author and internationally recognized expert on security, with works published in the Times of Israel, the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East blog, and published books on terrorism, A Diary of Four Years of Terrorism and Anti-Semitism (2005) and on so-called criminal justice, Crime and Criminal Justice in Israel: Assessing the Knowledge Base toward the Twenty-First Century (1998). He is a member of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police (GACP) and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and has written extensively on the topics of community policing, surveillance, law and order, counter terrorism, and what he calls "Arab terrorism." While terrorism seems to be the subject of most of Friedmann's writing, he has also published pieces insisting that Palestinian streets and schools are named after terrorists, and comparing the genocide in Palestine to the inconvenience of taking your shoes off in an airport. 

Community policing is another professional focus for Friedmann. Speaking to the Jerusalem Post in 2016, he boasted that he was "the one who wrote the first scholarly definition on community policing twenty years ago. No one was even talking about this back then." He went on to say that a local magazine "ranked all the police chiefs in the state and all the top names were graduates of [GILEE]. Our goal is for as few people as possible to be harmed by violence and terrorism." The year GILEE was founded, Friedmann published "Community Policing: From Officer Smiley to Inter-Agency Cooperation" for presentation at the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in New Orleans,  where he presented the idea that  policing will become integrated into other institutions of social control via a system of a "Super Agency." To Friedmann, policing and counter-terrorism are closely related, and GILEE would help to actualize this connection. 

Friedmann's conceptualization of a "Super Agency" was born in direct response to Palestinian resistance. Across his career, Friedmann has cited the events of the 1972 Olympics as the catalyst for his development of police training and police exchange programs. In 1972, a Palestinian Resistance group called Black September took the "Israeli" Olympic team hostage during the Munich Olympics. On the world stage, these resistance fighters highlighted the contradiction of Israel's participation in the Olympics, while committing genocide and settler colonialism in Palestine. The Israeli emergency response team refused any dialogue or negotiations, and five Palestinians were killed alongside 11 settler Olympians. Following the events of the 1972 Olympic Games, counter terrorism remained an ever-growing urgency for security and civic leaders: no focus on the violence of settler projects like Israel, South Africa, or Rhodesia; more giant events to flaunt Empire's will. 

For local Atlanta officials preparing for the 1996 Olympics, it felt exceedingly important that Atlanta's image as a "world-class" city was undergirded by the ability to properly protect a global event from "terrorism." For Robert Friedmann, who grew up in Israel, these games were the inspiration for establishing police exchanges with his "home country." In 2019, he gave an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying, "When the announcement came in 1990, I had two reactions: To be in an Olympic city was a dream, and the second was, 'What are we getting into?'"…I thought immediately of Munich 1972."  GILEE as the "Super Agency" is the ideology of control of people like Friedmann made material, and it's worth due meditation; as Tea Troutman writes, radicals "must [also] view the mega-event as a frontier for antifascist struggle."

In a publication from the American Military University, Jon Gordon, retired APD Deputy Chief  and Professor of Homeland Security, wrote about the process local law enforcement goes through preparing for the Olympic Games:

After winning an Olympic bid, the host country's law enforcement agencies (in addition to its other public safety agencies and military forces) face a daunting challenge during the ensuing six years. Olympic-related demands for services become extensive, unique, and potentially overwhelming if adequate preparations are not completed in time…It takes six years for police to develop and strengthen Olympic security capabilities—which are broad in scope and extensive—due to interdependence with emerging Olympics Organizing Committee (OOC) event preparations. 

Despite the work and effort done by several local law enforcement agencies and tens of thousands of federal troops, the '96 Olympics were still marked by tragedy. On July 27, a pipe bomb left by anti-abortion activist Eric Rudolph exploded, killing two people, injuring 11 more, and smearing Atlanta's legacy as an Olympic city. Security officials were expecting an outside Arab or Muslim "terrorist" threat and were not prepared to handle homegrown, white Christian, domestic terror. But the domestic nature of the threat paradoxically did not seem to dampen enthusiasm for the GILEE program. 

The September 11, 2001 attacks a few years later, and the subsequent War on Terror by foreign forces, allowed the GILEE program and others like it to become entrenched within the U.S. National Security Apparatus. In Atlanta, across the United States, and among various national security bodies, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war escalated an ideology of national security at the expense of individual and communal rights. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "many state and local police agencies embraced a concept called intelligence-led policing (ILP)" after 9/11. ILP focuses on the gathering and analysis of "intelligence" in the pursuit of proactive strategies "geared toward crime control and quality of life issues." This new theory of criminal intelligence argues that collecting data on even outwardly innocuous behaviors will somehow enhance security.

In Atlanta, the pivot to ILP tactics targeted "street gang" activity. In the 2010s, APD used tools from the Atlanta-based and founded technology company Formulytics to construct a more advanced "gang-member" database that facilitated better coordination between police and prosecutors. In 2013, APD credited this coordination with a 97 percent increase in gang-related indictments and the achievement of guilty pleas on Georgia gang statute violations in 22 out of 31 cases. In the context of the War on Terror—which pathologized (often in Islamophobic terms) anti-settler and anti-imperial resistance in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the "Middle East" as "terrorism"—and in the afterlife of the Black Mafia Family (BMF) RICO case in 2005, there is a direct connection between the way urban policing targets Black and brown "gang-members" and  foreign-grown "Islamic terrorists." This, alongside the "anti-terror" ethos of the zionist settler project's methods of policing Palestinians, is the blueprint for today's policing, surveillance, and anti-terror paradigm that birthed the Cop City and YSL RICO cases, and made Atlanta's use of homegrown FLOCK safety technology a hot commodity. Each of these cases shares an imperative to continue policing what is perceived as the "insurgency" that threatens the capital accumulation that underwrites Global City status. 

The War on Terror marked a new era for national and international security. The rhetoric of "public safety" and fighting "terror" gave cover for many abuses of the law. This would not be the first time the United States used the rhetoric of "national security" to justify expanding its own surveillance and military powers. Consider the Espionage Act of 1917,  the Sedition Act of 1918,  or the FBI-established COINTELPRO to surveil and destroy the lives of leftist citizens. Abuses of citizens' rights abound.  For a brief period in the post-Civil Rights, post-Vietnam era, Congress established several laws to rein in the capacity for the security agencies to use power unjustly against American citizens. Following 9/11, however, several things changed. In the Brennan Center for Justice, Elizabeth Goitein chronicles the changing nature of the U.S. privacy landscape:

"After 9/11, the legal protections against suspicionless surveillance were swiftly and systematically cast aside. In a variety of contexts, it became lawful for the government to collect an American's sensitive information based merely on a claim that the information was "relevant" to a legitimate purpose, regardless of whether the person was reasonably suspected of wrongdoing. Even for the most sensitive of information, communications content, Congress gave the NSA free rein to collect phone calls, texts, and emails between foreign targets and Americans — communications that previously could not be obtained domestically without a court order based on probable cause."

Most notably, the Patriot Act was passed 45 days after 9/11, giving the government nearly unchecked authority to surveil citizens. Additionally, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which officially established the Department of Homeland Security, which encompassed the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), two agencies now known for their consistent abuse of the law. This was the foundational era of open and flagrant digital surveillance, harassment, and harm to Arab and Muslim communities, or anyone perceived to be Arab or Muslim. 

In 2021, the Georgia chapter and national office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, released a report on GILEE with a specific focus on anti-Arab racism. Their report speaks to specific tactics exchanged, such as "racking" their firearms when they unholster them, flashing their vehicle's blue lights when patrolling neighborhoods, and limiting free speech by targeting "incitement," as well as GILEE's links to anti-Arab extremist individuals and organizations. 

It was also the catalyst for several police forces across the United States to develop their own police exchanges with Israel. The GILEE website states: "Following the September 11 terrorist atrocity, GILEE focuses on enhancing homeland security efforts through international cooperation and training programs."

Other aligned institutions saw 9/11 as a catalyst for expanding their relationship with Israeli security forces as well. In 2022, The Mapping Project, a group of organizers occupying Massachusetts, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations' land, shared a project that sought to create maps that documented the breadth of police collaboration with the genocidal entity. Of particular interest is their map that connects the Anti-Defamation League to policing institutions in the so-called United States. Through their research, they found that "the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) formalized and expanded its cooperation with U.S. police by coordinating all-expenses-paid trips to the National Counterterrorism Seminar in Israel and by bringing Israeli advisors to lead training programs in the United States, such as the ADL's "Advanced Training School in Extremist and Terrorist Threats." In their 2016 annual report, the ADL boasted that "100% of major U.S. metropolitan police departments' have participated in these training programs."

A national moment of hysteria around terrorism, new laws and technology expanding the government's ability to surveil citizens, and an upsurge in retaliatory hate, repression, and ostracization of Arab and Muslim communities helped catapult police exchanges with Israel. For programs like GILEE, it accelerated their already established relationship. 

Housed in GSU's Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, where Robert Friedmann taught, the GILEE program has been sending delegations of officers from across Georgia to train alongside the Israeli police for more than 30 years. The reach of the program goes far beyond Georgia: "Recognized as a professional education training program by the U.S. departments of Justice and Treasury", GILEE has also received the Governor's Public Safety Award. Robert Friedmann has also received the J. Edgar Hoover Award and Georgia State University's Service Award.

GILEE boasts partnerships with at least twenty other states and twenty other countries, including The Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK. In June, 2023, GSU issued a press release celebrating the return of the 30th delegation of officers from Israel, boasting: 

"Nearly 1,250 law enforcement executives from the U.S. and countries around the world have graduated from GILEE peer-to-peer exchange programs during its 32 years. Additionally, almost 43,000 public safety, homeland security and police executives have attended GILEE-led special briefings, seminars, workshops, training sessions and conferences featuring experts on issues related to homeland security, public safety, community policing and law enforcement." 

Israeli law enforcement officials frequently send delegations to Atlanta as well. In 2014, Gordon County Sheriff's Office hosted 18 Israeli police officials as part of their GILEE exchange. A 2016 article for the Jerusalem Post shared how much the program means for Israeli police officers, citing that "Delegations of Israeli police officers who've visited in the U.S. share their counterparts' enthusiasm. Twelve conferences have been held in the U.S. in the last decade, in which over 10,000 local police officers have participated." 

In 2023, a delegation of Israeli officers visited Atlanta to tour the proposed Cop City site. In describing the relationship between Georgia and their police partners in Israel, Friedmann said, "This relationship is so close that the Atlanta Police Leadership Institute built its school according to what it saw in Israel… it was the Israelis who initiated our first meeting in order to develop a better approach to civil rights."

GILEE is a well-connected program. On the 20th anniversary of the program, then Governor Nathan Deal held a celebration in the governor's mansion. Senator Johnny Isakson has also declared his support for the GILEE program: "I thank you for your willingness to be a part of this successful law enforcement training program and for sharing your knowledge with other officers on your return. It is important that the men and women who serve in law enforcement have all the tools necessary to protect the citizens of our country." Civil Rights icon, former Atlanta mayor, congressman, and UN Ambassador Andrew Young touts GILEE as essential for our continued ability "to live together as brothers and sisters." 

The program is endorsed by the Georgia Sheriff's Association, the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police (GACP), and the Center for Atlanta Progress. In an endorsement letter for GILEE, the latter shared that "The greater Atlanta area agencies and corporations have hosted many of the various delegations participating in the programs, exchanging best practices for both public and private partnerships. Likewise, many senior executives from the Greater Atlanta area and surrounding States, from law enforcement and the private sector, have participated in the GILEE programs."  

In addition to these organizations, GILEE boasts productive partnerships with other local institutions such as Emory University. The school made headlines in the spring of 2024 for a brutal show of force by police during the establishment of a Palestine solidarity encampment on their campus. Through these and other partnerships, GILEE is able to lead coalition efforts related to policing and security across Georgia, host summits, and share reports. In relation to the struggle to stop Cop City, its partnership with policing agencies across the state of Georgia is of particular interest. 

Law enforcement officials and lawmakers around the country espouse the collective benefits of the exchange, citing shared knowledge in policing styles and counter terrorism tactics. For those of us who have seen firsthand the intense reach of the state and its enforcers, GILEE represents something much more sinister.