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A Georgia judge will soon rule in a major press-freedom case that could clarify to what extent private groups doing government business are subject to the state’s open records laws.
In January 2024, the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) and Lucy Parsons Labs — a Chicago think tank advocating for government transparency — sued the nonprofit Atlanta Police Foundation in Fulton County Superior Court, alleging that the powerful police lobby had unlawfully withheld records about the controversial Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, also known as “Cop City.”
The lawsuit revolves around 15 records requests that ACPC and Lucy Parsons Labs filed with the police foundation seeking emails about the training center’s construction on city-owned land, as well as board meeting agendas and minutes. The Atlanta Police Foundation refused to turn over most of the records, citing its status as a private nonprofit.
The plaintiffs are seeking a court order for the police foundation to produce the requested records and hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees.
During a two-day bench trial last week, ACPC argued that the police foundation’s close ties with the Atlanta Police Department (APD) makes its work a matter of public interest and subject to public inspection. The police foundation built APD’s hotly contested new training center, and also fundraises and helps recruit for the police department.
The Atlanta Police Foundation countered that it should not be subject to open records requests, because it also supports non-governmental community groups and businesses, making it just another private nonprofit. It manages the @Promise Youth Centers’ programming, for instance.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jane Barwick’s ruling, expected later this month, could either establish a legal precedent empowering people to probe deeper into public-private partnerships — like that between the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation — or further shield private entities working with local governmental agencies in Georgia from scrutiny, said Samantha Hamilton, the ACPC attorney who filed the case.
A different kind of nonprofit?
This is Georgia’s first public-records trial testing access to the internal workings of a nonprofit so deeply intertwined with a government agency, Hamilton told Atlanta Civic Circle.
ACPC argued that the police foundation isn’t just another private nonprofit, as the police foundation professes to be. Rather, its sole purpose is to support Atlanta’s police department.
The Atlanta City Council, which has approved $67 million in public funding for the $115 million training center, recognizes the police foundation as APD’s sole authorized fundraiser. It is raising the remainder of the training-center money from major Atlanta corporate and philanthropic donors. The Atlanta Police Foundation’s donors include Chick-Fil-A, the Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines, Georgia Power, Home Depot, and the James M. Cox Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Cox Enterprises, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Is there any Chick-Fil-A that calls itself the Atlanta Chick-Fil-A Police Foundation and only serves chicken nuggets to local police officers?” ACPC lawyer Joy Ramsingh of Ramsingh Legal asked Atlanta City Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari, whom ACPC called to testify.
“No,” replied Bakhtiari, one of the only city council members to vote against funding the training center in June 2023.
Can the public see APF’s records for a municipal project?
Georgia’s Open Records Act defines a “public record” as any document prepared by or in the custody of a government agency or “a private person or entity in the performance of a service or function for or on behalf of” the government.
Because the Atlanta Police Foundation spearheaded a development that relies on at least $67 million in taxpayer funds and is built on city land, the general public should be able to audit that spending and related decisions, ACPC’s executive director Matt Scott testified.
Since its announcement in 2021, the now-completed police training center has sparked government transparency concerns and years of protests — mostly peaceful, although a few turned destructive.
ACPC’s May 2023 revelations that the training center would cost taxpayers more than double the police foundation’s initial $30 million projection fueled the grassroots Stop Cop City movement. That blockbuster discovery came from ACPC’s open records requests to the city of Atlanta.
The news organization also revealed details about the progress of the training center’s construction in the face of stiff public opposition. That included a last-ditch effort to get a referendum on the ballot for voters to decide whether it should be built, which has been stalled by the city of Atlanta.
At the bench trial, the police foundation argued that ACPC and others should be denied access to its records pertaining to the training center by contending that the news outlet’s reporting fueled harassment campaigns by Stop Cop City activists against the project’s construction contractors, such as Brasfield & Gorrie and Ernst Concrete.
Allowing ACPC more access to the Atlanta Police Foundation’s internal records could produce more unrest and harassment, said the nonprofit’s lawyer, Harold Melton of Troutman Pepper, a former Georgia Supreme Court chief justice.
Atlanta Police Foundation CEO Dave Wilkinson echoed those concerns: “This organization was complicit in all the anarchy and terrorism, and all the nonsense that was going on,” he testified for the nonprofit on April 4, accusing ACPC of trying to “intimidate and terrorize” his organization’s board, donors, contractors, and staff.
Wilkinson and the police foundation’s project manager for the training center, Alan Williams, testified that Stop Cop City activists have confronted them both at home and at job sites.
“They pelted my truck with rocks,” Williams said, saying the “highly trained and highly organized” demonstrators threw rocks and fruit at him. “They visited my mind for the next few years.”
But what’s at issue is the police foundation’s interpretation of Georgia law, not how activist groups may or may not respond to ACPC’s reporting, Ramsingh emphasized. In other words, she said, ACPC’s motivation — or that of any other member of the public — is irrelevant. Instead, what matters is the public interest value of the police foundation’s records about the training center.
“The requestors are journalists and researchers, not terrorists or criminals,” Ramisingh said during closing arguments, adding that the Georgia Open Records Act “does not discriminate who the requestor is.”
