The head of Atlanta’s police watchdog agency will have one month to report to city lawmakers why the agency has not investigated police shootings or custody deaths, a resolution proposed Thursday states.
The resolution is in response to the Atlanta Citizen Review Board not investigating a single police deadly force case in the four years since the City Council expanded the board’s powers in 2020, an investigation published last week by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.
“We are in a crisis,” District 10 Council member Andrea Boone told lawmakers as she introduced the resolution.
Boone leads the city’s public safety committee, which the review board reports to, and she said that the board’s lack of action on deadly force cases was shocking. “It has to be dealt with,” Boone told the AJC.
Her resolution requires Lee Reid, the board’s executive director, to submit a written report to the committee by Feb. 24 addressing the AJC’s findings, before lawmakers “consider whether a strategic legislative overhaul shall be necessary to expedite the conclusion of critical ACRB investigations.”
Boone said Wednesday in a statement, “We were not made aware of the massive delays, and we were not apprised of the complete failure of the ACRB (the board) to fully investigate these urgent cases.”
Reid did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday or Thursday.
The legislation was introduced during the council meeting on Thursday along with a parallel proposal to add four additional investigators to the review board’s staff. No dollar amount was included.
The review board has a current budget of $1.6 million. Reid said he needs additional employees and higher salaries to attract more skilled investigators for the review board to do its work. Reid’s annual salary is $203,830.
The board’s chairman, Germaine Austin, said that he is looking into the AJC’s findings.
“It has caused quite a frenzy,” Austin said, and declined to comment further on Wednesday.
The review board was created in 1987 and reconstituted in 2007 to investigate citizen complaints of alleged officer misconduct.
Boone was among the council members in 2020 to support expanding the review board’s powers to investigate police use of deadly force against civilians in the wake of the fatal arrests of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.
The review board is authorized to investigate and hold public hearings when Atlanta police shoot civilians or people die in police custody. Atlanta police have reported 39 cases to the board since 2020, but it has not started investigating any of those cases, the AJC’s investigation found.
“We have a responsibility to the families and our citizens to ensure that transparency in officer-involved shootings is at the forefront of everything we do, especially when there is severe injury or loss of life,” Boone said in the statement.
Reid has told the AJC that his agency cannot begin to investigate until after the criminal investigation and police internal affairs review are completed. The AJC found, however, that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has already declined to prosecute officers and has closed about half of the cases. Police internal affairs has also completed its review of officers’ conduct in some of the cases.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor from 2018 to 2022 and a lawyer, said the review board should be determining on a case-by-case basis whether it can conduct its investigation simultaneously with the criminal and internal affairs investigations. There may be instances where the board needs to wait, she said in a statement to the AJC.
Bottoms said it was her intention while mayor to provide the review board the resources and legislative support it needed to independently fulfill its duties.
“By the end of my term as mayor, I thought we had done that,” Bottoms said.
Among the 39 deadly force cases not yet investigated by the board is that of Ricardo Dorado Jr., who was acting out and damaging a gas station when police were called. While attempting to handcuff Dorado, police held him down on his stomach for 17 minutes before he went into cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead 12 hours later on August 21, 2022 at an Atlanta hospital.
Arcelia Beltran said she hasn’t been able to properly grieve her youngest brother for the past 2 1/2 years due to long investigations and the slow release of information about his death.
The family learned from the AJC’s reporting that seven officers involved in Dorado’s arrest were suspended for three days in 2023 -- two of them for unnecessary force. The Atlanta Police Department didn’t make the discipline decision public until January at the request of the AJC.
“Our family wasn’t shown any respect or empathy,” Beltran said. “I would like for all of them to think about: If this happened to them and their family, wouldn’t they want justice?”
Our Reporting: Atlanta citizens were promised four years ago that all police deadly force cases would be reviewed by an independent citizen board. That promise has been broken. An AJC investigation that published earlier this month revealed that the Atlanta Citizen Review Board has not investigated a single police deadly force case in the four years since the City Council expanded the board’s powers in 2020. The 39 cases include the 2022 death of Ricardo Dorado Jr., who was acting out and causing damage at a gas station when police were called. While attempting to handcuff Dorado, officers held him down on his stomach for 17 minutes before his heart stopped beating. He was pronounced dead 12 hours later. Officers were disciplined and served three-day suspensions in 2023. The district attorney declined to prosecute officers in about half of the cases including Dorado. A year after Dorado’s death, the city of Atlanta paid $3.75 million to Dorado’s family, who says they are still waiting for justice.
About the Author
