Looking at What’s Underneath the “Cop City” Rocks

One of the dirty secrets in US law enforcement are the allegedly private alleged charity police foundations, which serve to launder police lobbying and malfeasance.

As a result of a court case, the Atlanta Police Foundation will have to turn over its records to journalist.

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.

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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.

There is an infrastructure that has been created ti create law enforcement impunity.

It's a rotten system, and it needs to be torn down brick by corrupt brick.