Subpoenas speed up officers' interviews with Citizen Review Board

By Rhonda Cook

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The subpoenas broke the resistance of Atlanta police officers to answering questions from the Citizen Review Board, which has had interviews with all 18 officers in less than a week about what happened at a Midtown gay bar last September.

CRB executive director Cristina Beamud said Tuesday that virtually all the officers the board wanted to interview have complied and only three of them have declined to answer specific questions because of their constitutional protection from self-incrimination. Beamud said it will take another two months to finish the case as recordings of those question and answer sessions still must be transcribed.

“This process was easier after the subpoenas were issued because we were able to designate the date and time,” Beamud told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday.

Trying to work with the limitations of each officer’s schedule was hindering the process, she said.

For more than a year, the board has struggled to prove its relevance as the Atlanta Police Department and its officers have declined to provide records or answer questions.

APD has argued  information had to be withheld as long as there was an open internal or criminal investigation.

Officers have refused to answer questions, claiming doing so would expose them to criminal and civil charges.

There also "is no trust between the police officers and the board," said Lt. Scott Kreher, president of International Brotherhood of Police Officers Atlanta Chapter Local 623.

Mayor Kasim Reed has said he is concerned that the officers’ answers during the CRB investigation could be expensive for the city in the pending civil suitbrought after the raid at the Atlanta Eagle Bar on Ponce de Leon Avenue.

Kreher agrees.

"I think the subpoena process has set up the city for more liability," Kreher said. "It remains to be seen how much damage this will do to the city's case."

The allegations of police brutality during the raid on a gay nightclub is the first time the board has had to secure subpoenas for individual officers.

On Sept. 10, more than 20 Atlanta police officers, including members of the Red Dog narcotics unit, detained and searched about five dozen Atlanta Eagle customers, making some of them lie handcuffed and face-down on a bar floor littered with broken glass and spilled beer. Some said the officers peppered their instructions to the detained men with insults about their homosexuality.

The city ordinance charges were heard in Atlanta Municipal Court on March 11. Three of the people arrested that night were acquitted, and the charges against eight others were dropped.

Last week, 31 APD officers were added to the list of defendants in the federal civil case.

The Citizens Review Board was revived in 2007 after the shooting of a 92-year-old grandmother who was killed in her living room by undercover officers executing a no-knock warrant in a botched drug raid.

The board had to seek subpoenas last June for its investigation of that case as well, but it was to force the department -- instead of individual officers -- to produce records from the then-closed criminal investigation into Kathryn Johnston’s death just before Thanksgiving in 2006. Three former APD officers had pleaded guilty by then and were serving five and 10 years in federal prison for the illegal raid, and the FBI gave the Atlanta Police Department its files 18 months ago, less than two years after the shooting. But the internal investigation remains open, preventing the release of the files.

There also is a federal lawsuit pending against Atlanta and APD for Johnston’s death.