The Georgia Bureau of Investigation probe of Atlanta City Hall’s handling of open records requests appears to include matters involving the city’s police department, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News have learned.
A lawyer for Francine Williams, a former Atlanta police public affairs employee, said his client has been interviewed by the GBI as part of the state criminal investigation into the city’s compliance with the Georgia Open Records Act.
Attorney Ash Joshi said personnel in Williams’ department were allegedly instructed not to comply with certain requests for public documents, and his client shared those allegations with the GBI.
“I believe there was a list of people, a list of people requesting open records, in which they were told not to fulfill those requests,” Joshi said.
The GBI opened the criminal probe in March following reports by the AJC and Channel 2 that showed the city's communications and law departments tried to obstruct production of public records.
The police department is among the most active agencies in the city in handling records requests, from requests for records related to traffic incidents to felony offenses.
The GBI on Thursday initially declined comment for this story. On Friday afternoon, the bureau issued a statement clarifying the police department is not under investigation for open records violations, and that the probe has not expanded in scope.
Williams was fired in June of last year after a police sting allegedly showed she discarded an open records request sent by a state prison inmate. City officials said Williams’ actions violated state records law and embarrassed the department.
At a hearing Wednesday to contest her termination, Williams said the records request she discarded was a “duplicate” of an earlier request that had been fulfilled.
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Williams said she was acting as she had been told to in cases where multiple requests for the same information were made by the same requester on or about the same day.
Another revelation from the hearing was from Atlanta police Sgt. Warren Pickard, who told the city’s Civil Service Board he had been instructed on at least one occasion not to provide records requested by a former city employee.
The AJC and Channel 2 confirmed that Tracy Woodard, a former Atlanta police employee who was fired by the city in 2017, made the request. Woodard sued the city in April 2017 alleging she was terminated after she raised questions about federal funds used to buy luxury SUVs that were used to transport former Mayor Kasim Reed and his family.
The city has said Woodard was fired for poor performance.
“There was some information requested by one of the employees who had been terminated and I got an email from — uh, I’m not sure who the email came from — but it said, ‘Pickard, the information is not to leave this office,’ ” Pickard said. “I am saying I was given instructions not to release information to a particular person.”
In a statement, police spokesman Carlos Campos said department leaders “had no prior knowledge” of Pickard’s allegations. The statement said Pickard “had an obligation in his position as supervisor in the Public Affairs Unit to bring the matter to the attention of the Chief of Police; and to ensure that the law was followed.”
The department has opened a professional standards investigation into Pickard’s allegations and into whether he handled the matter properly.
Greg Lisby, a Georgia State University communication professor, who teaches communication law, said it is “worrisome” if someone instructed a subordinate not to follow the records law.
“You get into a question when someone tells you not to follow the rule of law, they are telling you to break the law … without fear of consequence,” Lisby said.
Current and former public affairs employees described an office buried under a mountain of requests from the media, law firms and the public. Identical requests from the same person or group often arrived at the office on the same day or within a few days of one another via mail, email and fax.
Williams, Pickard and other current or former staffers testified there was no formal training or policy on how to handle “duplicate” requests.
Williams said her procedure was to determine if the first received request had been fulfilled and discard any of the others she determined to be a “duplicate.”
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Lisby said the law requires governments to respond to each request and the practices described by Williams and others likely do not comply with state law.
He said requests that appear redundant might be subtly different, and yield additional records critical to a legal proceeding.
“If she sees a duplicate and she trashes it because she thinks it has been fulfilled — what if she was wrong and it wasn’t, and she trashed it and a person is denied justice?” Lisby said.
Discarding potential “duplicate” requests to reduce a backlog “might be well-intentioned,” Lisby said, “but you run the risk of clerical errors that could cause huge problems.”
The story so far
March: The GBI opened a criminal investigation into Atlanta City Hall's handling of open records requests after reports by the AJC and Channel 2 about the city's communications and law departments efforts to obstruct fulfillment of requests.
April: Lawyers for the AJC and Channel 2 filed a complaint with Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr alleging "a culture of political interference" with open records requests at City Hall.
This week: A lawyer said his client, a former Atlanta police employee, was interviewed by the GBI about open records matters. An Atlanta police sergeant said in a city hearing he was once instructed not to fully respond to a records request.
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