A law clinic at the University of Georgia has sued the Atlanta Police Foundation, after the non-profit organization repeatedly ignored records requests from journalists and researchers about its role in backing the controversial police-training center opponents have dubbed Cop City.
The complaint, filed on behalf of the digital news outlet Atlanta Community Press Collective and the Chicago-based digital transparency research organization Lucy Parsons Labs, details how numerous queries to the foundation under Georgia’s Open Records Act have not been answered.
It is “the first lawsuit to my knowledge taking on a police foundation” over access to information about what they do, according to Robert Vargas, a University of Chicago sociology professor who researches police foundations.
The Atlanta Police Foundation, or APF, is building the $109m training center on a 171-acre footprint in a forest south-east of the city; at least $67m of the project’s cost comes from taxpayer funds.
The lawsuit “alleges that by virtue of [the foundation] performing a service or function for or on behalf of the City of Atlanta”, all records related to the project should be publicly available, according to a press release from Samantha C Hamilton, an attorney at the university law school’s first amendment clinic.
The APF has followed a nationwide trend of police foundations receiving increasing donations over the last decade, since the inception of the Black Lives Matter movement, Vargas noted. Their role has increasingly been “to help launder the reputation of the police … [and] operate outside of open records laws”.
The lawsuit’s claims highlight how “over the last decade, the failure of police foundations nationwide to provide basic levels of transparency raises questions about their motives, and whether or not they have the public interest at heart”, said Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing. “If you have nothing to hide, then why are you hiding?” Vitale said.
The fight against Cop City has drawn national and global headlines, particularly since 18 January of last year, when state troopers shot and killed Manuel Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita”, who was camping in protest at a public park near the Cop City site – the first such incident in US history. Opposition to the project has come from a wide range of local and national supporters, with concerns such as unchecked police militarization and clearing forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police say the center is needed for “world-class” training.
Last week’s lawsuit draws attention to the center’s driving force, the APF – one of the nation’s largest police foundations, and one of the most well-funded among hundreds, with support from corporate donors such as Delta, Wells Fargo and Home Depot. Its CEO, Dave Wilkinson, is also the highest-paid among police foundation CEOs nationwide, with a 2022 salary of $500,000.
Corporate funding, coupled with their non-profit status, have allowed police foundations to escape public scrutiny, said Vitale. “Police have relied on these slush funds to provide them with levels of independence from government oversight unheard of in any other agency,” Vitale said.
The complaint joins at least four others linked to Cop City filed by journalists and documentarians in more than a year, for actions ranging from Atlanta police deleting a documentarian’s footage to the Georgia bureau of investigation refusing to release its investigative file on Paez Terán’s death, claiming that it forms part of an ongoing criminal investigation into dozens of people opposed to the project.
The Atlanta Community Press Collective, or ACPC, began reporting on the training center in late 2021, filling a vacuum left in local media exemplified by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution failing to disclose in much of its news and opinion coverage of the project that Alex Taylor, the CEO of Cox Enterprises – the paper’s owner – had led a multimillion-dollar fundraising drive for the foundation.
ACPC’s early reporting gleaned details from minutes of the APF’s quarterly board meetings, which the scrappy startup obtained from open records requests to Atlanta police, who were receiving the minutes by email. By the end of 2022, “we noticed they stopped sending the minutes that way, along with other emails”, said Matt Scott, an ACPC reporter.
In spring 2023, the outlet started making records requests directly to the APF for board meeting minutes – and a “line-item construction budget”. They received no reply. Scott said that foundation representatives also had not appeared in Atlanta city council meetings with updates on the project for more than a year.
Around the same time last year, Ed Vogel, a researcher at Lucy Parsons Labs, also began submitting records requests to the foundation – including for contracts, “environmental testing and assessments”, communications about a grassroots initiative to let voters decide via a referendum whether the center should be built and communications between Wilkinson and the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, who by September had issued an unprecedented indictment of 61 people for alleged conspiracy, or Rico. Vogel also received no reply.
An APF spokesperson, Rob Baskin, did not return requests for comment.
Vogel said he was as interested in financial records as in understanding how “key individuals [such as Wilkinson] understand their relationships” to government figures such as Carr. “For me, it’s important to see how individuals with significant roles are talking about their roles, and how they are talking to each other,” Vogel said.
Not having access to records and not understanding these relationships means not understanding how certain key decisions in any community get made, said Vitale. “By obscuring the role of police foundations, we allow very powerful actors to shape public policy around public safety with absolutely no accountability,” he said.
Vogel hopes the suit leads to more than producing documents. “Transparency is important – creating public access regarding what’s happening in and around this facility,” he said.
“But transparency isn’t democracy … What this should lead to is better democratic processes – a greater role of the public in deciding how infrastructure gets built. It shouldn’t be something handled behind closed doors.”
