FOREST PARK, Ga. — Two Forest Park city councilors alleged Tuesday that they were told by city officials the city's former police chief, Dwayne Hobbs, assembled a task force to illegally surveil them both for years.
The councilors, Latresa Akins-Wells and Dabouze Antoine, announced their intention to file suit against the city and its police department.
The alleged surveillance program - which the councilors' attorney, Rod Edmond, said occurred without any kind of warrant or probable cause - included posting cameras outside their homes, sifting through their trash and following them.
"It hurt me, more than anything," Akins-Wells said, wiping tears away at a press conference. "This is where I grew up, this is where I’m raising my kids, this is where I went to school. So to know I’m out here fighting for the people to prevent this from happening to them, and it’s happening to me - it hurts."
Edmond said they were filing what is called an ante litem notice, a six-month advance notification required by Georgia law in order to file suits against cities.
According to Akins-Wells and Antoine, they were told about the surveillance in an October meeting with City Attorney Mike Williams and the former city manager, Angela Redding (who herself was fired by the city council on Monday, at least in part, according to a Clayton News-Daily report, for not firing officers involved in the surveillance).
She said they were told that some of the officers involved had blown the whistle on it. The department issued a formal apology to the two city leaders in October after an audit outlined the activities of the VIPER task force.
Officials said the task force was operating to investigate two unproven allegations the council members were involved in voter fraud and illegal drug activity. The task force, however, turned up nothing, and has since been disbanded.
"The idea of a police department using taxpayer resources to basically target a vengeful campaign against political adversaries, that is just abominable, it is shameful," Edmond said. "And those are the allegations, that’s the information they got."
The police chief, Hobbs, was fired in October 2018 in a 3-2 council vote for what was characterized by Akins-Wells at the time as mismanagement of the department and creating a "hostile environment."
On Tuesday, she said she had long suspected the department engaged in racial targeting, and that her scrutinizing is what ultimately drew retaliation.
"I felt like they target black people, and I put it out there," she said. "It wasn’t a secret, everyone knew I felt that way."
Akins-Wells and Antoine were, Edmond said, the only two black members of the city council for much of the time of the alleged surveillance.
Akins-Wells described an interaction she had with Hobbs that she felt was illuminating.
"I would go and sit in the courtroom, and you could count on one hand how many whites were there versus blacks, and I started looking into that and asking questions," she said. "And so me and Chief Hobbs had a meeting one day and he asked me, ‘Latresa, what is it you have against me? Why are you digging into my department like this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know you, personally, to have anything against you. I just don’t like how this department is being ran.' So he knew I was looking into certain things, he knew that the (police) employees were talking to me - and not just black employees, these were white employees as well - so he knew this was going on."
"So I guess it was ‘Well, let me get her before she gets me.' That’s how I look at it," she added.
Antoine described one instance of police visiting him at school, where he teaches special needs students, and questioning him about his citizenship.
"I feel very sad, my heart is broken," Antoine said. "I felt violated."
In a statement, Antoine also spoke of the fear he felt with the nagging suspicion someone was watching.
“As a young African-American man in the South, I am very sensitive to racial profiling. When I wondered if I was being followed, it scared me. Was I going to be arrested? Were the police going to set me up to be convicted of something I did not do?" he said in a press release. "I did not know for sure what was happening. It was a horrible way to live.”
Edmond said they are attempting to learn more facts about the case in order to prepare the suit, and said there was a GBI investigation that would reveal more into the circumstances of the allegations. The GBI clarified to 11Alive that there is not yet a formal investigation.
"At this point, the GBI is conducting a preliminary review of the matter before determining next steps," Nelly Miles, the GBI public affairs director, said in an email to 11Alive.
Edmond said what they currently know, though, is just "the tip of the iceberg."
"What they were told was that the police chief and the police department took the full weight of all the taxpayer resources and basically tried to besmirch their good names by digging up dirt on them," he said. "The offensive thing about this is that they are using taxpayer - the police chief was using taxpayer resources to target political adversaries."
"We have this kind of stuff happening up in Washington, D.C., now it’s in Forest Park," he added. "I mean, really?"
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