South Fulton police chief will be on leave during department investigation

The public scrutiny of the police chief marks the latest controversy to roil South Fulton’s leadership. Earlier this year, the City Council called for a forensic audit of Mayor khalid kamau’s public spending.

In his lawsuit, former detective Avery Bragg alleged Meadows confronted him for going outside the “chain of command” when he informed the mayor and City Council about what he perceived was unethical handling of his internal affairs complaint against a supervisor and other colleagues.

In a recorded conversation, Meadows told Bragg: “It doesn’t even matter what they (Human Resources) say, because at the end of the day, when we do our investigation inside the police department, that’s what I’m going to go with,” according to Bragg’s lawsuit.

Bragg was fired about two weeks later, on Dec. 16, his lawsuit says.

Bragg reported the issues to elected officials because multiple people, including a now-deceased internal affairs officer, told him: “Nothing was going to get done with his internal affairs complaint unless he went outside the chain of command,” his lawsuit says.

It adds that Meadows abused Bragg by “cheating” him out of on-call pay for several years and that Meadows allowed a relative to escape criminal charges after the man, who was allegedly in possession of illegal drugs, jumped out of a stolen car that Bragg had been chasing.

The other plaintiff, former police Maj. Theron Griffin, alleges the city retaliated against him for “blowing the whistle” on the chief’s “unethical and unlawful conduct of trying to influence the outcomes of polygraph examinations.”

His lawsuit alleges Griffin witnessed a South Fulton police officer physically attack another officer in February 2023. Two weeks after Griffin reported the incident, he was informed he was under investigation because the officer he accused of assault had filed an internal affairs complaint accusing Griffin of sexual harassment and workplace violence, the lawsuit says.

All charges against Griffin were dropped but Meadows demoted him to captain, according to the lawsuit.

Earlier this year, a police lieutenant accused Griffin of untruthfulness in another matter and recommended his termination. According to the lawsuit, Meadows told Griffin the untruthfulness charge was too harsh but ordered that he undergo a polygraph exam to ensure he had not tried to deceive the lieutenant.

According to the lawsuit, Meadows “altered the examination questions” to include irrelevant questions, including whether or not Griffin had contacted human resources about “negligent hiring.”

Griffin’s polygraph test detected no deception, his lawsuit says, but he was told one week later, on March 12, he was being fired for alleged untruthful statements in his “whistleblower email” to HR.

The lawsuits by Bragg and Griffin both were filed July 14. Four days later, the City Council unanimously approved the initiation of an independent probe into the police department.

On Tuesday, the City Council amended human resources policies to require that a department head whose department is the subject of a city-council-authorized investigation be placed on paid administrative leave.

“When we get here, there is a very deep problem that needs to be uprooted,” City Council member Natasha Williams-Brown said during the council’s discussion of the resolution. “And that cannot happen with the people in place who have overlooked and coddled and enabled the problem to reach critical mass in the first place.”