More than a year after a digital news outlet and a research group sued the Atlanta Police Foundation for allegedly violating Georgia’s open records law, the foundation has sent plaintiffs nearly 300 pages of records linked to its role as the driving force behind the police training center known as “Cop City”.
The outcome “opens the door to what we want; it’s a guide stone for getting records from police foundations, so they can’t be a black box”, said Matt Scott, executive director of Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC), an Atlanta-based digital news outlet and one of two plaintiffs in the case.
“A city can’t use police foundations as a way of getting around providing public records,” Scott added. The APF did not reply to an email from the Guardian seeking comment.
ACPC and Lucy Parsons Labs, the two plaintiffs, got the records after Jane Barwick, the Fulton county superior court judge, concluded a bench trial by ruling that the foundation was “under a duty to provide [the] records […] pursuant to the Open Records Act”.
The lawsuit was probably the first of its kind nationwide, Robert Vargas, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian last year. Although the case centered on the Atlanta police foundation, observers said last year they were closely watching to see if its outcome had implications for police foundations in general and whether they might be subject to open records laws. Every major US city has a private foundation supporting police, with more than 250 nationwide, according to a 2021 report by research and activist groups Little Sis and Color of Change. The foundations have been used to pay for surveillance technologies in cities like Baltimore and Los Angeles without being subject to public scrutiny, according to the report.
Vargas said the ruling, and the records provided, “sets a precedent”. But he added that the results are a “mixed bag”, since Barwick did not offer an opinion about whether all the APF’s records should be available to the public, or whether police foundations in general should be considered public agencies.
“The ruling doesn’t come down hard on the bigger issue,” Vargas noted. This means police foundations could continue to assert they have a right to withhold records and invite further litigation.
The 287-page document the APF sent to plaintiffs on 1 July offers insight into how the foundation actively lobbied Atlanta city council members to squash activist efforts to put Cop City’s construction to a citywide vote in a referendum, among other issues.
In a 17 September 2023 email, Rob Baskin, an APF spokesperson, said the foundation would speak to “the mayor’s key folks” and members of the city council about how allowing a referendum on Cop City to go before Atlanta voters “would, at best, delay and could derail the project’s financing”, according to a document he attached. Letting the city’s residents decide on the project would “almost certainly [result] in the loss of credibility of City Council and its members”, the document warns.
Activists behind the referendum “seek to override their elected representatives who conceived, debated and twice overwhelmingly approved the project in fully transparent public forums”, the document says. The foundation omits that the city council meetings he refers to, in which the training center’s funding was approved, included record-breaking numbers of Atlanta residents attending and dozens of hours of public testimony against the project. When the city council approved the training center funding anyway, the referendum effort was born.
Cop City Vote organizers then spent months gathering 116,000 signatures in late 2023 in order to reach a required threshold of about half that number of verified, registered voters. A coalition of voting rights and pro-democracy law firms across the US drew up an ordinance to codify how the city could verify and count voter signatures on petitions to place questions on ballots in general, and offered it to Atlanta city council.
This was needed because the Cop City referendum was the first such local democracy effort in the capital of Georgia’s 176-year history – and no such process existed. But in the end, the city council scuttled the ordinance behind closed doors, as the Guardian reported at the time; the referendum never took place, mired in legal disputes.
“If we had known, and gotten these documents when we asked, there was a potential for immediate impact on public opinion,” Scott said, referring to the foundation’s role in squashing the referendum.
Also revealed in the document: the foundation posted 40 officers and installed eight cameras at the training center’s 171-acre (70-hectare) footprint in a forest south-east of Atlanta in late 2023, to protect it from any vandalism by activists.
Opposition to the $109-million center has come from a wide range of local and national organizations and protesters, and is centered on concerns such as unchecked police militarization and clearing forests in an era of climate crisis.
Atlanta police, and the foundation, say the center is needed for “world-class” training and to attract new officers.
The last eight pages of the document include redacted emails, which appears to violate the judge’s order to leave all records un-redacted. Plaintiffs plan to file a motion to obtain those records.
After receiving the document several weeks ago, ACPC has not waited to test the ruling, and filed an open records request last week for minutes from the foundation’s board meetings going back to 2005, Scott said. He has yet to receive a reply.
“We’re going to keep going for transparency,” he said.