City faces new complaint over Atlanta Eagle raid; investigations continue as lawsuit settles
Geoff Calhoun held his face in his hands during the Atlanta City Council meeting on Dec. 6, visibly nervous as he leaned forward in his chair in the council’s chamber at City Hall.
Calhoun was a patron of the Atlanta Eagle, a gay leather bar, on Sept. 10, 2009, the night it was raided by undercover Atlanta Police Department officers and the APD’s Red Dog Unit.
As a plaintiff in the federal civil rights lawsuit filed by patrons who were detained and searched during the raid, Calhoun was waiting anxiously to see if the council would vote to approve a settlement the city reached with the plaintiffs on Dec. 3.
When the City Council finally voted 14-0 to accept the resolution that the city pay more than $1 million in a monetary settlement and change policies within the police department, Calhoun breathed deeply and stood up to hug his attorney, Dan Grossman. There were tears in his eyes. Fourteen months after his nightmare began, it now seemed to be over.
A court-mandated gag order remained in place at GA Voice press time Dec. 7, prohibiting anyone involved in the lawsuit from discussing specifics of the settlement. All that was made public in the city resolution was the city would pay out $1.025 million to be kept in an escrow account of Lambda Legal, a nonprofit legal agency that worked with Grossman and the Southern Center for Human Rights to sue the city for violating the constitutional rights of the patrons of the gay bar on Ponce de Leon Avenue.
The resolution also stated, “the Atlanta Police Department has agreed to take certain actions in regards to their standard operating procedures.”
How the money will be divided and the exact changes the APD will make to its standard operating procedures are not known, and will not be known until presiding federal Judge Timothy Batten signs off on the settlement and the gag order is lifted.
From the day the plaintiffs filed the federal civil lawsuit in November 2009, there was a mandate from the attorneys and plaintiffs that the city offer an apology. No apology is included in the resolution the city council passed and it remains unknown if one will be received after all court documents are made public.
The lawsuit settlement also does not fully resolve all of the fallout from the raid, which shocked LGBT Atlantans and drew comparisons to the 1969 raids on New York City’s Stonewall Inn that sparked riots and the modern gay rights movement.
The police department has not yet released results of its investigation into complaints filed with the APD Office of Professional Standards about the raid, and the independent Citizens Review Board also continues to investigate police actions that night.
And while the APD and city leaders have taken steps to rebuild trust with Atlanta’s gay community, including appointing a second police LGBT liaison officer and an LGBT citizen advisory panel, the wound caused by the raid could take years to heal.
Blue ribbon panel never used
On Oct. 28, at the gay Stonewall Bar Association’s awards dinner, Mayor Kasim Reed was the keynote speaker and announced he would form a blue ribbon panel to help mediate between the city and the Atlanta Eagle plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Grossman shared a testy exchange with Reed during a July LGBT town hall forum and argued that money was not why the plaintiffs sued the city.
Everything could have been solved quickly and easily, Grossman has stated in the past, if the city simply apologized to the men in the bar that night and agreed to change police procedures. When the blue ribbon panel was announced, Grossman was skeptical.
“The mayor doesn’t need a blue ribbon panel to talk to me about settlement, all he needs is a telephone,” Grossman said at the time.
However, the panel idea turned out to be fruitless, as it never even had time to meet.
Lawrie Demorest, a lesbian attorney with Alston & Bird, was hand-picked by the mayor to be part of the blue ribbon panel.
The panel was actually still being formed when the settlement was announced late Dec. 3.
“They apparently resolved it before we met,” she said this week.
Demorest said the mayor called her the weekend after the settlement was agreed upon to thank her for her willingness to serve.
“If the plaintiffs agreed to it they are obviously happy with the changes that will be made,” Demorest said. “Hopefully they will be effective and something like this won’t happen again.”
Citizens Review Board also investigating Eagle raid
Cris Beamud, executive director of the Atlanta Citizens Review Board, said the opinions of the CRB about the raid have been made very clear through its investigations of a dozen complaints filed by those in the bar that night.
“We sustained the allegations of false imprisonment — the board has been pretty clear on its opinions [on how the bar raid was handled],” she said.
Chief George Turner has never responded to the CRB’s recommendations about the raid. City policy requires him to respond within 30 days.
And while a lawsuit has been ongoing during the CRB’s actions, there are no exceptions cited in city policy that allow Turner to ignore the 30-day requirement of responding to the CRB, Beamud said.
“He’s not in compliance,” she said.
While the CRB conducted its own investigations of complaints filed by Atlanta Eagle patrons and employees, the board also voted to have Beamud and her staff investigate the supervisors involved in the raid and what roles they played. The CRB stated at meetings it wanted to ensure that officers following orders were not the ones to take the heat and that supervisors running the operation should also be held accountable. That report is complete, Beamud said.
The report is being distributed to board members this week and they will likely take up the issue in January, she said. She declined to release any information about the report until it is made public next month.
Bartender barred from lawsuit?
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Chris Lopez, a former Atlanta Eagle bartender who was one of the Eagle 8 arrested the night of the raid, has gone public via Facebook and Twitter claiming he was kept from being part of the lawsuit against the city.
Shortly after the news broke on Dec. 3 that a settlement had been reached in the Atlanta Eagle lawsuit, Lopez posted to his Facebook profile that it is “nice to know others will profit from me going to jail.”
He also claimed “the main lawyer would not include me and another employee...even with both of us going to jail...funny thing too, he got fired two weeks before me.”
Lopez and doorman Ernest Buehl were laid off from the Eagle in recent weeks. Co-owner Richard Ramey said it was due to hard economic times.
Dec. 7, Lopez filed a complaint with the city of Atlanta’s Municipal Clerk seeking $250,000 for “false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution for which I find the city is liable.”
He claims in his filing that he was kept out of the lawsuit despite repeated attempts to be part of it. He also states in his filing that he was told that the employees arrested would have to wait after their trial before joining the suit. The Eagle 8 went to trial in Municipal Court in March for permit violations. Charges were dismissed against Lopez and three other defendants including Buehl, while Judge Crystal Gaines found three others, including co-owner Robby Kelley, not guilty.
Grossman declined comment on Lopez’s comments, citing the gag order as well as attorney-client privileges. Buehl did not return a call seeking comment.
But criminal defense attorney Christine Koehler, a member of the Stonewall Bar Association, said Lopez does not have the same footing in making a claim against the city as the plaintiffs named in the suit.
“The plaintiffs were not accused of any criminal charges,” she said.
And while the charges against Lopez were eventually dropped, she said that the police did have arguable probable cause to arrest him because he was an employee where illegal activity was believed to be taking place.
The police never believed the patrons did anything illegal and instead searched them and held them for more than an hour while running background checks — a direct violation of civil rights, she said.
“The police said, ‘We’ll violate their civil rights to see if they have broken the law while we’re here,’” she said. “So they conducted illegal searches. The police did not even have reasonable suspicion to search them [the patrons].”
Robby Kelley, who is co-owner of the bar, is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit as part of Ramey & Kelley, a Georgia corporation owning the Atlanta Eagle. Kelley, who was also arrested the night of the raid, owns the bar with Richard Ramey.
Koehler said Kelley was likely not being named individually in the lawsuit for the same reason as Lopez.
Lopez remains hopeful and said he expects the city’s legal department to respond to his claim within 30 days.
thegavoice.com
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