Thirty-one Atlanta police officers have been added to a federal lawsuit that complains patrons of a gay nightclub were ordered to lie on the Atlanta Eagle Bar floor, on spilled beer and broken glass, while enduring insults about their homosexuality.
The suit, originally filed in November, was expanded Wednesday to include six more bar employees and contractors, bringing the total to 28 people who say they were victimized during the highly publicized raid on Sept. 10.
Only interim Chief George Turner was added as a defendant in his official capacity. The other APD officers and supervisors are being sued individually.
The amended suit also provided a few more details – many of them based on comments police officials made to a neighborhood group and during court testimony last week. A club owner and two dancers were acquitted March 11 of violating city ordinances and prosecutors dropped the charges against eight other men.
As the scope of the suit has grown, the legal action has drawn sharp criticism from Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. In a written statement, Reed complained that those who brought the suit are “asking for unlimited punitive damages at a time when the city is facing considerable budget challenges. As the chief financial steward of this city, I have to take that threat very seriously.”
But he also said in a response to questions from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "I am always troubled to hear about allegations of police misconduct or verbal abuse regarding sexual orientation.”
The amendment to the federal suit was filed late Wednesday as the attorneys defending the city took sworn depositions from people who were at the bar that night.
At the same time, the Citizen Review Board was questioning once-reluctant officers in the CRB’s investigation.
According to Cristina Beamud, executive director of the board, 11 officers have appeared or agreed to appear to answer the board's questions about the Eagle Bar raid. Beamud said only two of them have declined to answer some questions, claiming their constitutional protection from self-incrimination.
The depositions and the CRB interviews are expected to continue Friday.
Until the City Council subpoenaed the officers, they had been showing up for CRB interviews but were refusing to answer questions.
At first, in the days after the event in September, police said the raid was staged because undercover vice officers had seen men having sex while other patrons at the Atlanta Eagle watched. Police also said there were allegations that drugs were sold at the bar, but they later conceded that officers saw no illegal drugs when they were at the Ponce de Leon Avenue nightclub.
According to the updated complaint, several officers posing as patrons at the bar drank vodka, gin and beer while they waited for the raid to start. Once the rest of the force arrived, including members of the Red Dog drug unit, the undercover officers joined in, screaming at patrons and employees to “hit the floor.”
The men in the bar said they initially thought they were being robbed.
Police asked each person for identification and checked their names against a police database.
The suit said officers broke into a locked liquor storage room even thought they did not have a search warrant. The officers also searched cash registers, beer coolers and the manager’s office, as well as another business on the site, Rawhide Leather, according to the suit.
A few days after the raid, then-police Chief Richard Pennington said officers acted according to policy when they searched the bar and the people there.
“I would say, we are required to frisk someone for the safety of the officer,” Pennington said at a Sept. 14 news conference.
A month later, at a community forum at the Virginia-Highland Church, two other top-ranking police officials admitted that officers had no probable cause to ask for each person’s identification, but it was the department’s policy to check for the safety of the officers and to check for any outstanding warrants.
"Once we’re inside a location based on any illegal activity, for the safety of not only the citizens of the city of Atlanta but for the safety of the patrons and the officers, we conduct warrant checks on all the patrons, on everyone,” Maj. Debra Williams, who was over the Red Dog Unit at the time, said, according to the amended complaint.
“When asked about probable cause to run ID checks on the patrons, Major Williams referred to probable cause being ‘based on the reason for being there,’ and on ‘safety,’ and she commented that, if police did not check the IDs of ‘subjects that are at the location that we hit, or make an arrest, or in an open area also, we allow subjects with warrants, wanted for murder or wanted for other things, to walk away,’” the suit says.
But the Eagle Bar employees and customers say the police used unnecessary force and they left for the raid already planning to search individuals and the bar even though police “had no reasonable belief that any of the [people there] was armed and dangerous… Atlanta police had neither a warrant, nor probable cause.”
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