From his office at the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, longtime president Russell Hardin can see the results of decades of support for Atlanta’s civic institutions.
Out one window, there’s the Winship Cancer Institute, where the foundation made a $200 million donation. Out another is Atlanta’s publicly owned Grady Memorial Hospital, to which the foundation donated $250 million. Just a few blocks away is Centennial Olympic Park, another grant recipient that helped revitalize Atlanta’s downtown.
The Woodruff Foundation has long been an enthusiastic supporter of civic projects in Atlanta. Its grants often total in the tens of millions of dollars. “We are at our best when we are a venture-capital fund for Atlanta’s civic leadership, working together with our elected leadership,” Hardin says.
Yet the foundation landed in the crosshairs of angry activists because of its support of another kind of civic project: a $10 million grant for a public-safety training facility — dubbed “Cop City” by protesters — that is being built and partially funded by the Atlanta Police Foundation. It received thousands of irate emails (though Hardin thinks they were generated by bots) that he says are a nuisance. Protesters shattered some of the windows in the high-rise office building where both foundations have their offices.
“Our building has been impacted because of the presence of the police foundation here, and that’s disconcerting. We’ve had extra measures of security in the building that are warranted, lots of police presence,” he says. “This is kind of is unusual.”
The training center is desperately needed, says Dave Wilkinson, CEO of the Atlanta Police Foundation, an independent nonprofit that raises money to support the city’s police department. Although recruitment increased in 2023, he says the police force is still operating with hundreds fewer officers than it needs. Until 2021, officers trained in an old elementary school; instruction has since moved to a local state college.
We definitely need a training academy. We need something to enhance morale.
“We definitely need a training academy. We need something to enhance morale,” Wilkinson says. “We need something that shows not only the officers but the citizens of Atlanta that public safety matters.”
The new training complex will be used by police, fire, and emergency services as well as jail guards. It will have a barn with 18 horse stalls, a firing range, a small replica town for training, a burn tower for the fire department, a driving course, classrooms, and nature trails. Wilkinson envisions a campus where the public can gather and public-safety officers receive first class training.
From its early days, the project has faced opposition. In late 2021, just a few months after it was approved, protesters occupied the forest where the center is being built. Some protested peacefully, while others vandalized equipment. Businesses and individuals associated with the project have been the subject of protests and sometimes destruction of property. Last January, police shot and killed an activist, and an officer was shot and seriously wounded.
In March nearly two dozen protesters were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. In September, the Georgia attorney general indicted 61 activists on racketeering charges.
Opponents see a facility designed to steep officers in military-style tactics. They are upset at the training center’s vast size — 85 acres set on a 350-acre site — far larger than those in many cities with much bigger departments. It is located beside a low-income, largely Black community and carved into a forest that has grown over an old prison-farm site. Critics worry about the loss of the regenerating forest — one of the largest green spaces in the city — and pollution risks to the creek that runs through it.
The training center will only further the use of force against marginalized people, says Tiffany Williams Roberts, policy director with the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. “Not only is it an investment in the status quo,” she says, “it is an investment in the escalation of force against organized First Amendment exercises of free speech.”
Roberts and others are critical, not just of the project but of philanthropy’s central role in bringing it to fruition. They ask whether a nonprofit with all its government-sanctioned advantages — tax write-offs and secrecy for donors, tax exemption for itself, little transparency or accountability over its actions — should be involved in policing at all.
Critics say police foundations funnel private dollars to police departments with little public debate.
The police foundation and its backers argue that the foundation hews to the vision of civic philanthropy that Hardin embraces — providing funding that, in concert with policymakers, allows the city to achieve more than it could on its own. It’s no different than increasingly common philanthropic aid to parks, libraries, and schools, Hardin says. Who doesn’t want a safe city?
But critics say that police foundations often circumvent the democratic process by funneling private dollars — usually from big corporate donors — to police departments with little public debate or oversight. When foundations fund public services — as they are doing more often — they have an obligation to be open, accountable, and inclusive, something many grant makers are not used to, says Beth Gazley, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University.
Philanthropic funding for police departments is problematic because it gives donors the power to shape public services according to their whims under the guise of doing something charitable, says Rob Reich, co-director of Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. It gives foundations and wealthy donors a level of access and influence over local government that regular citizens lack.
“The establishment of safety and security for the population is the core function of government,” Reich says. “To make that dependent upon the preferences of wealthy actors undermines democratic accountability and compromises the independent decision making of citizens and the city council.”
Nation’s Largest Police Foundation
There are about 250 police foundations across the country, and most are relatively new — about two-thirds were started from 2005 to 2015, according to a study co-authored by Kandyce Fernandez Sawyer at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Some are tiny organizations in small cities and towns; others bring in millions of dollars a year.
The Atlanta Police Foundation is the largest in the country, raising $11.7 million in 2021. Its affiliated APF Support brought in an additional $14.5 million that year. Atlanta’s 1,600 officer force is about 5 percent of the size of the New York City Police Department, but New York City’s police foundation raised less — $9.9 million in 2021.
The Atlanta Police Foundation also wields far more financial influence than other similar groups. According to the study, the median police foundation’s total revenue is 0.4 percent of the median police department’s budget. The Atlanta Police Foundation and its sister organization’s total revenues are nearly 10 percent of the Atlanta Police Department’s budget.
Police foundations are one of many philanthropic institutions that provide charitable support to help cities deliver services. And they are doing so more often in an era of shrinking city budgets, says Jessica Sowa, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies public and nonprofit management. It’s not unusual for nonprofits to raise money for parks or public schools. Often those groups subsidize services like park maintenance that would otherwise be provided by the city.
Philanthropic funding for those kinds of services often involves engaging members of the communities being served, says University of Indiana’s Gazley. Volunteers build trails or provide educational services. Donors seek broader input on their efforts, sometimes working in coalitions.
But, she says, the Atlanta Police Foundation and police foundations in general don’t operate that way. She argues that the foundation is a vehicle through which big corporate donors and corporate executives who sit on the board can increase policing in Atlanta to attract and retain employees to boost their business interests.
In Atlanta, the foundation’s 56-member board is made up entirely of corporate executives, with the exception of one who is with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. None are from a foundation or nonprofit. Bank of America, Chick-fil-A, Coca-Cola, Georgia Power, and UPS have all donated to the police foundation’s campaign to raise money for the training center and other projects, according to board-meeting minutes obtained through a public-records request by the nonprofit Atlanta Community Press Collective. Foundation correspondence and board-meeting minutes were subject to public-information requests only because foundation staff were communicating with city employees.
Rob Baskin, the police foundation’s spokesman, says its programs focus on neighborhoods with the highest crime rates and its board members are committed to public safety citywide.
Even the Woodruff Foundation, which has given the police foundation about $25 million over the past decade, was initially skeptical of the police foundation. “We asked, What in the world are our tax dollars for if the private sector has to support the police department?” says Hardin.
Over time, Woodruff funded police-foundation programs Hardin thought were important, such as an effort to get the department accredited through a national program. It also funded affordable housing for officers and now the training center. Today the police foundation supports training programs for officers conducted by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, a network of video-surveillance systems, a juvenile-diversion program with very low recidivism rates, even tuition reimbursement and hiring incentives for police officers.
While those programs may have real benefits, Atlanta’s city council does not have oversight over much of the foundation’s work with the police department. In Atlanta, the city council approves donations given directly to the city. In 2021, it approved about $1.5 million in donations from the police foundation to the police department, mostly cars and trucks — gifts that were not broken out in the foundation’s informational tax returns. The foundation also spent $7 million on behalf of the police department, according to those tax returns. Because the funds were spent to benefit the police department, not given to it directly, the city council never voted on whether or not to approve those programs.
The city council was aware of many of those programs, Baskin says. The council has approved city donations and property leases to the police foundation for ongoing efforts like the juvenile-diversion program and the video-surveillance program. He says joint programs are presented by the police department or, in one case, the mayor’s office to the city council for approval — although when asked, Baskin did not provide evidence of votes to approve individual programs and referred questions to the city council. A spokesman for the city council would only say that the city charter allows the city to accept donations. The foundation funds and administers other initiatives on its own, such as scholarships for officers, so the city council is not involved, Baskin says. He says that the vehicle donations are part of the $7 million spent on behalf of the department and that the tax returns comply with the law.
Such a lack of public input and oversight of private money flowing into public services can lead to programs that run counter to community needs and interests, says Sowa, the University of Delaware professor. “If you don’t actually understand the communities that you’re engaging with, you could be doing harm.”
Close Relationships With the City
Over the last two decades, the Atlanta Police Foundation has developed close working relationships with the city and police department that help advance its priorities.
The police foundation’s Wilkinson, for example, meets regularly with city-council members. Its press person and other staff are in regular contact with the mayor’s office and police department, according to emails obtained in the press collective’s public-records requests.
I had breakfast with a city councilmember yesterday. I’ll have lunch with one tomorrow.
“I had breakfast with a city councilmember yesterday. I’ll have lunch with one tomorrow,” Wilkinson says. “We meet with city-council members constantly.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of everyday citizens, including nonprofit leaders, who wanted to express their opinions to lawmakers on the training center had to wait for hours to speak during a city-council meeting in June to approve funds for the center. Each got two minutes to speak; the public comment period lasted for 15 hours.
Policymakers turn to the police foundation for public-safety expertise, and because of its relationships, the foundation usually gets what it asks for, says Roberts of the Southern Center for Human Rights. She has served on several Atlanta criminal-justice committees, including some with Wilkinson. “I have been doing work around policing in Atlanta across three mayoral administrations,” she says. “The power of the Atlanta Police Foundation is a constant.”
The police foundation has been instrumental in supporting the police department, says Marshall Freeman, deputy chief administrative officer at the Atlanta Police Department. He says representatives of the department meet with staff of the police foundation to discuss challenges and the private resources available to address problems. “Working with the corporate community, they have ideas. The private sector has resources that you just don’t have in the government. Therefore, they can bring a lot of the brand-new ideas,” he says. “It is a much more collaborative effort amongst the two organizations than it is one telling the other what needs to happen.”
Freeman has an informed view of that process. He served as the police foundation’s chief operating officer for nearly seven years before moving into his current position with the police department. He’s not the only foundation executive to join the city government. The grant maker’s longtime development director was hired as a policy adviser to the city in March.
The police foundation helps with communications work, too. Baskin, the police foundation’s spokesperson, wrote an op-ed for a retiring chief, and the police foundation shared talking points and other press strategy with the city about the training center, based on a review of hundreds of emails between the foundation and city officials obtained through the press collective’s public-records request. Baskin says that the foundation provides talking points and writes opinion articles on behalf of the police department when asked and the department makes the final decision on materials.
Police foundations across the country often boost the images of police departments, says Kevin Walby, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, who has studied and published research on American police foundations.
“The main overt mission of the police foundation, wherever it pops up, is PR,” Walby says. “On an everyday basis, maybe the most powerful thing that they do is public relations and communication.”
‘You’d Want to Be Squeaky Clean’
The training center project is structured in a way that gives the police foundation a lot of autonomy. Atlanta leased the land to the foundation and is paying the foundation to build the training center. As a result, the foundation does not have to adhere to any of the city’s contracting rules, such as those on competitive bidding. Wilkinson says this structure allows the foundation to construct the training center more quickly and for less than it would cost the city.
The foundation did not always look far for those services. It hired the construction firm Brasfield & Gorrie to be the lead contractor on the training center project. The company had previously built three youth diversion centers for the police foundation and waived its fee for those projects, Baskin says. Brasfield & Gorrie also contributed $1 million to the training center project. It has long had an employee on the foundation’s Young Executives Board, which is different from its Board of Directors.
The city council voted to lease the property for the training center to the foundation in September 2021. According to Baskin and the foundation’s meeting minutes, the foundation had already decided to hire the firm for the training-center project before the September vote. Less than a week after the city council approved the project, the police foundation added a Brasfield & Gorrie executive to its Board of Directors. It immediately placed him on the committee that provides guidance and oversight of the training-center project.
The Chronicle contacted both the board member and Brasfield & Gorrie. The board member did not respond, and the company referred all questions to the police foundation.
When asked in an email whether there was a competitive bidding process to choose the contractor and who is evaluating whether services are truly offered at a discount, Baskin did not answer directly. He wrote that the decision to work with Brasfield & Gorrie was based on the foundation’s past experience working with the firm and its support of the foundation’s mission. He wrote that the company “agreed to a substantially below-market fee” for the training-center job. He added that the firm made a “pledge of financial support to the Atlanta Police Foundation outside of its contract.”
The office of Mayor Andre Dickens declined to answer any questions and referred all questions to the Atlanta Police Department. The department did not answer emailed questions about oversight of the contractor.
The best way to know whether a company’s bid for a large and complex construction project like the training center is reasonable, or if services are offered at a discount, is to have a competitive bidding process, says nonprofit consultant David La Piana, who often works with nonprofit boards. “Not only does that give you legitimacy,” he says, “but it also gives you the right answer.”
Appointing a company representative to the board and then tasking that individual with oversight of the company for which he works presents additional challenges, La Piana says. Board members must have loyalty to the organization on whose board they serve. This person, by serving both the police foundation as a board member and the company as an employee, will have a hard time representing the foundation’s interests over his company’s in the event of a dispute, he says. “His primary loyalty has got to be to the board that he serves on,” La Piana says. “But his job is to advance the company’s agenda. I would think you wouldn’t want to be in that situation. You’d want to be able to advocate for your company.”
Given the controversial nature of the project and the public scrutiny that has followed, La Piana says the police foundation could have done more to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. “You would expect to be under a microscope, and you’d want to be squeaky clean.”
We have builders and designers and others willing to come in and do this with no profit.
Wilkinson says the city benefits from the foundation’s ability to attract interested companies to this project. “We have builders and designers and others willing to come in and do this with no profit. We have companies that provide materials for free or at cost. This was our philanthropic way of creating a process where everybody could chip in,” he says. “It’s really easy to get all the corporations and businesses and everybody excited about this idea because they all want a safe city.”
Foundation Gifts
When the city council met in June to approve funds for the training center, it provided clarity on the training center’s financing, something that was hard to determine through the police foundation. The foundation is raising money for the center through its Public Safety First Campaign, which will also support other projects like recruitment, training, community policing, and technology.
But in its communications and fundraising materials, the police foundation often gives the impression that it is paying more and taxpayers are paying less than they really are.
“The city is going to kick in $30 million, and then ultimately they’re going to have a $90 million state-of-the-art public-safety training center,” Wilkinson told the Chronicle last spring. But that is not the complete picture.
The plan until recently was for the police foundation to contribute $30 million of the money it’s raising to the training center. Wilkinson added that the foundation is also securing $20 million for the training-center project in the form of a low-interest loan. But the city, not the foundation, will pay back that loan. The bulk of the costs for the training center will be paid by the city — a $30 million payment upfront, another $36 million to repay the loan, and $1 million for a gym. Federal taxpayers are contributing an additional $10 million through a tax credit — something Wilkinson never mentioned when speaking to the Chronicle, and the foundation only confirmed when asked.
Then last month the Atlanta mayor’s office reported to city council that the cost of the training center had risen by $19 million because of bolstered security measures, litigation, and increased construction costs and insurance rates. Baskin says the police foundation will cover the additional costs.
The Atlanta Police Foundation is not required to disclose the names of donors.
The foundation has not disclosed the names of the donors to the training center, but some contributions have been disclosed in informational tax returns and others were noted in foundation meeting minutes obtained by the press collective. The foundation has discretion over whether the money raised for its public-safety campaign pays for the training center or the other less controversial efforts. Some donors have earmarked their funds for the police training center; others have not.
The J. Bulow Campbell Foundation pledged $5 million to the public-safety campaign as a challenge grant. John Stephenson, who recently retired as executive director of the Campbell Foundation, says the police foundation will determine how it wants to spend those funds within the parameters of the campaign.
Despite the protests and the violence surrounding the project, Stephenson says he has no concerns over the police foundation’s vision and its role. “I would venture to say that there’s not a dollar handled by the police foundation that does not meet with the approval of the mayor and the chief of police,” he says. “It’s not like the police foundation is off doing some stuff that the public policymakers and the paid professionals would disapprove of.”
The city council has twice voted by a wide margin for the training facility. But according to an Emory University poll from March, city residents are closely divided on the issue — 48 percent favor it, and 46 percent are opposed. More Black residents oppose the training center than support it. The inverse is true for white residents.
The person leading the fundraising for the police training center is Alexander Taylor, the CEO of Cox Enterprises. The James M. Cox Foundation — the corporate foundation for Cox Enterprises — donated $10 million to the public-safety campaign, according to the police foundation meeting minutes.
Cox Enterprises owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a newspaper that has produced both important investigations into the training center and editorials in favor of it. The newspaper has not always disclosed the relationship between Taylor and the police foundation. Through a Cox Enterprises spokesperson, Taylor and James Kennedy, chairman of the Cox Foundation, declined to speak with the Chronicle. The Atlanta Journal Constitution did not comment on the record.
The Buckhead Coalition, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that works to improve the largely white, prosperous Buckhead neighborhood and its business community, asked its members to contribute to the police foundation. Coalition CEO, Jim Durrett, supports the training center, as do a majority of Buckhead residents, according to the Emory poll. “We understand that it’s important to have your police fully staffed. When you’ve got people leaving the force every year, you’ve got to continue to recruit. You’ve got to retain the folks as long as you can who come into the force,” he says. “Having a high-quality training center is integral to those goals.”
The Chronicle reached out to several other foundations that funded the public-safety campaign, and they declined to comment.
Once the training center is completed, the city and the foundation expect other public-safety agencies to rent it out. But Wilkinson says no one has determined whether the city or the foundation will receive the money. He says the funds will stay within the training facility to pay for maintenance, for example, or to pay off the loan — broad language echoed by the mayor’s office in a news release.
The lack of transparency about simple questions like this, not to mention much bigger ones, like who the donors are and where their funds are going, worries Kyle Bibby, interim chief campaign director at Color of Change, a civil-rights organization that opposes the training center.
“The police are the only institution that we have in the United States that can legally use violence as a tool against the community. Do we want our facilities to now be run privately by major corporations and foundations that don’t have public accountability?” he asks. “This is a dangerous precedent.”
Windfall Ahead
Opponents of the training center have discovered that derailing or redirecting a wealthy, entrenched organization like the police foundation is a herculean task. Even as the opposition has gathered signatures for a referendum on the training center — which is now awaiting a decision from a judge — the foundation has moved ahead with construction on the training center. Roads have been cut, steel and glass has been ordered, and concrete has already been poured for some structures.
And the Atlanta Police Foundation, along with other police foundations in Georgia, are about to receive a financial windfall. Thanks to a new law, which went into effect this year, taxpayers in Georgia are eligible for a dollar-for-dollar state tax credit for donations to police foundations. Individuals can be reimbursed for up to $5,000 or $10,000 for a couple. Corporations can be reimbursed for up to 75 percent of their state tax liability. It will transfer up to $75 million a year directly from the state coffers to police foundations.
“That’s a way to privatize public services, to shape the form of public services according to the whims of donors under the guise of being philanthropic,” says Stanford’s Reich. “It’s an exercise of philanthropic power gussied up as an act of charity.”
Wilkinson sees huge potential for the tax credit. He’s hearing from small police foundations all over the state that want to learn more about how Atlanta’s foundation operates and how they can similarly support their departments.
“We hope every police jurisdiction across the state of Georgia can do this. I hope they’re all successful,” he says. “This is a game changer in the way it’s going to allow people to show their support of police through their tax dollars.”
