DeKalb County pays homeless man $165,000 for kicking him out

By Steve Visser

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Robert Williams, cold and hungry, asked to be arrested Halloween night five years ago when a DeKalb County police officer found him sleeping behind a restaurant.

Instead, the officer put him the backseat of his patrol car, took him across the Rockdale County line and ordered him to hit the road. What happened after that cost the officer his job and, last week, it cost the county $165,000 when it settled a lawsuit with Williams.

Transporting vagrants across the county line was an unofficial police practice because it was easier than arresting them, a former DeKalb County police lieutenant said Thursday. It's a practice that Atlanta city officials have accused neighboring counties of using for years.

"Nobody will admit it but it is a quite common practice," said David Bertrand, who retired from the DeKalb police force in 2006." Instead of taking them to jail, they would take them to Atlanta or Rockdale or Chamblee or somewhere else."

On Oct. 6,  DeKalb County cut Williams a check to settle the lawsuit that claimed the officer had violated his civil rights, first by kicking him out of the county and then for beating and arresting him on false charges. His lawyer, Mike Puglise said he believed Williams' story because he had seen officers do the same thing in Gwinnett County when he was an officer there in the 1980s

“It should never be an acceptable practice to target the homeless," Puglise said. “It was an unwritten rule to relocate your drunks and your undesirables out of your area – to keep your area clean.”

"Basically you are creating musical chairs by moving them from one location to the next instead of dealing with the problem.”

DeKalb public safety director William Miller released a statement that blamed the incident on a "rogue officer."

"The county has never had a policy, written or implied, of mistreating homeless persons," the statement said.

Normally, Puglise said, the practice stays under the radar because nobody complains. But in 2004,  Williams refused to get out of the car and a fight ensued, which left both men beaten and bleeding.

The cop, former officer Ronald W. Jones, initially told superiors that Williams kidnapped him, got his  gun, put him in his car trunk and drove him across the county line. Jones said he stabbed Williams with knife as he was being let out of the trunk.  Williams then fled with the officer's gun and was later arrested, according to written police investigation.

Investigators, however, didn't buy the officer's story and within a few days Jones admitted that the fight occurred when he was trying to boot Williams out of the county -- a practice he admitted doing on at least one other occasion. Investigators charged the officer with aggravated assault, kidnapping and violating his oath of office. He later struck a plea bargain in which he got 12 months probation for making a false report of a crime. Puglise said.

Jones resigned from the police department during the investigaion. The charges that had been filed against Williams were dropped.

"According to Officer Jones, his only intentions were to take Williams to the county line and teach him a lesson," the investigative report said. "Jones said he told arriving officers and his supervisors a false story about being placed in the trunk of his patrol car and being kidnapped because he was scared and he knew he had messed up."

"Jones admitted that he had taken one other person to the county line ... and he knew the technique was outdated," the report said.

Bertrand said the practice was usually used in cases in which a vagrant was drunk or was otherwise being a nuisance and officers didn't want to be tied up booking someone into jail.  Or, in the case of drunks, it meant taking them to the secure unit at Grady Memorial Hospital if the jail wouldn't take them. Supervisors, he said, turned a blind eye to the practice but didn't officially acknowledge it.

“When you’re busy, the last thing you want is an officer tied up in Grady with a drunk,” Bertrand said. “I don’t think it was done with any ill will.”

What Williams will do with his windfall could not be ascertained Thursday. He is in jail in Kentucky on drunk-driving charges, Puglise said.