When Police Profit From Protection

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”

- Justice Potter Stewart

​Local police departments are spending billions of dollars on surveillance technology, from cameras, to cell-site simulators, to drones. Customers in blue range from the New York Police Department, which has invested $3 billion in surveillance in recent years, to small-town departments willing to fork out tens of thousands.

With so much money sloshing around, it is reasonable to wonder how careful local officials are in maintaining clear boundaries between customer and vendor. Events in Atlanta suggest that sometimes these boundaries are, at best, blurry.

Marshall Freeman is the Chief Administrative Officer of the Atlanta Police Department (APD) and a former leader at the non-profit Atlanta Police Foundation. Together, the Foundation and the APD devised Connect Atlanta, a camera network that makes Atlanta one of the most surveilled cities per capita in the United States.

The Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) was combing through public records when they noticed Freeman’s name on a Conflict of Interest Disclosure Report. Citing “financial interest” in Axon, a law enforcement tech company, he recused himself from contract-related “matters and dealings” that could impact Axon financially. “I have interest in a company that is currently in talks with Axon around acquisition and investment,” he wrote, without specifics.

ACPC discerned that Freeman’s unnamed stake was in a company called Fusus, whose software fuels the Connect Atlanta surveillance system. Axon acquired it for $240 million barely a week after Freeman filed his disclosure. More red flags followed. Freeman was the only public official quoted in Axon’s press release announcing the acquisition: “I wholeheartedly encourage all agencies to embrace this cutting-edge technology and experience its transformative impact firsthand.”

Using open records requests, ACPC also reports it also found emails indicating that Freeman “boosted Fusus and Axon products to other agencies in Georgia and around the U.S.” on multiple occasions post-disclosure. When the reporting first surfaced, APD responded tersely: “The appropriate ethics filings were submitted.”

A few weeks later, though, the City of Atlanta Ethics Office begged to differ, announcing an investigation into Freeman’s post-recusal behavior. Fifteen months later, the body released an official report totaling 313 pages. The findings suggest that Freeman’s relationship with the camera-pushing Fusus dated back to his days at the Atlanta Police Foundation, a relationship he brought with him to APD and continued to nurture. According to The Guardian, he consulted for Fusus for at least a year after joining APD, “crisscrossing the country in person and by email while repping the company, including conversations with police departments in Florida, Hawaii, California, Arizona and Ohio.”

All told, the Ethics Office found 15 separate matters in which Freeman used his official position as an influencer for Axon and Fusus. For at least part of this time, he served on the board of two Fusus subsidiaries in Virginia and Florida – a fact he did not disclose to ethics investigators. 

Writing in The Intercept, Timothy Pratt and Andrew Free detail how Freeman’s impropriety (the “appearance” of which is the only thing he’s admitted to) is making all of us less free – taking the Great Atlanta Mass Surveillance Experiment and replicating it from sea to monitored sea: Seattle, Sacramento, New York City, Omaha, Birmingham, Springfield, Savannah, and counting.

Freeman may be an exception. But he might be the rule. It doesn’t matter, given the outsized influence even one public official can have when it comes to the proliferation of the police surveillance dragnet in the United States. Then again, by the time robust surveillance systems get to smaller, heartland cities like Lawrence, Kansas, it may already be too late.
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At the very least, police procurement processes would benefit from tighter rules, like those that govern Pentagon officials when they assess contracts.

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