Following the fatal arrests of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta in 2020, city leaders expanded the power of the Atlanta Citizen Review Board to investigate every time police used deadly force. In a seven-month investigation, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution analyzed 39 deadly force cases that Atlanta police had referred to the board since 2020 and found the board had not investigated any of them.
To determine why these cases were languishing with the board, the AJC made dozens of open records requests to the board, Atlanta Police, city offices and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In response, the AJC obtained a database of cases from the board and hundreds of pages of police records.
Among the records were letters to state investigators dated from 2021 to 2024 from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis notifying them that she was declining to prosecute officers in about half of the 39 deadly force cases that occurred since 2020.
The AJC interviewed legal and medical experts, members of a professional organization for civilian police oversight and the Atlanta police union. During interviews, the board’s executive director Lee Reid, confirmed that he had not assigned investigators to review the deadly force cases despite some of the criminal investigations being closed – a requirement he had set for starting investigations.
One of those cases was the fatal arrest of Ricardo Dorado Jr.
To report on Dorado’s death, the AJC reviewed the body camera footage of four Atlanta officers obtained through an open records request. Reporter Samantha Hogan listened to 911 calls and read the autopsy report, police report, dispatch log, litigation documents and discipline histories of the officers. She also interviewed Dorado’s siblings who reside in Nebraska. They shared a copy of the district attorney’s investigation. The family also gave the AJC a recording of their Oct. 17 meeting with Willis explaining her July 1 decision not to criminally charge the officers.
Police refused to make any officials or officers available for interviews.
The AJC also compared the board’s data with police records and found seven additional cases of Atlanta police discharging firearms at civilians that had not been referred to the board.
