A top Atlanta police department (APD) official worked as a consultant for a tech company whose software is key to the city’s massivesurveillancesystem, according to an investigation from Atlanta’s office of ethics.
The official’s activities included meeting withpolicedepartments across the country about the company’s products while also investing in the company and going on to serve on the company’s board.
With these actions, over a period of two-plus years, Marshall Freeman, the chief administrative officer for the APD, violated the city’s public employee laws regarding disclosure and use of city property, as well as creating “an appearance of impropriety”, the investigation concludes.
Freeman is appealing.
The case is an example of how “the corruption inherent in the Atlanta way of policing is getting exported across the country, with police departments and corporations, sometimes together with police foundations, expanding policing without public input or an interrogation of policing technology and its public safety benefits”, said Ed Vogel, a researcher atLucy Parsons Labs, a digital transparency research organization.
Freeman was a top official at the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) before starting work at the APD. Such private foundations exist in every major US city, with more than 250 nationwide, according to a 2021reportby research and activist groups Little Sis and Color of Change. They have been used to pay for surveillance technologies in cities such as Baltimore and Los Angeles without the contracts being subject to public scrutiny, according to the report.
The ethics investigation, prompted by email queries and reporting from theAtlanta Community Press Collective(ACPC), a local digital outlet, took the city 15 months to complete.
The resulting 313-page report obtained by the Guardian details how Freeman went from being chief operating officer at the APF, where he negotiated the private foundation’s multimillion-dollar purchase of Fusus software and surveillance tech on behalf of the city’s police department, to becoming the chief administrative officer at the APD while also working as a consultant for Fusus.
Freeman also had a small ownership stake in the company and was listed online in early 2024 as a “principal” on Fusus Inc’s board in Virginia and, in January of this year, as a “director” in Florida.
Along the way, on 31 January 2024, surveillance tech company Axonbought Fusus for $240m; the company is now calledAxon Fusus.
Freeman consulted for Fusus for at least a year after starting work at the 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.
Emails also detail plans to meet an investment company executive at steakhouses and lobster restaurants, and describing how the APD’s system of tens of thousands ofcamerasworked, with Fusus software at its center. Freeman told ethics investigators that during these meetings, he “focused on how APD utilized Fusus … rather than directly promoting or selling the product”.
The police official/consultant’s trajectory starts with seven years working at the APF, a backer of the controversial police training center known as “Cop City”. As COO, he oversaw negotiations for the leasing of city land to the foundation in a forest south-east ofAtlantawhere the training center has recently opened, despite four-plus years of local and national opposition.
Freeman also “facilitated the purchase of Fusus technology for use by APD” while working at the APF, according to the report. The APD then hired him on 9 January 2023, where he began overseeing the daily use of that technology across Atlanta – a city with “more [surveillance] cameras integrated [into one system] than any other place in the country”, Freeman told investigators.
Emails and meetings detailed in the report include Fusus public safety adviser Jack Howard asking Freeman in late February 2023 if he planned to attend the company’s upcoming “customer symposium” in Orlando, Florida, so he could introduce the Atlanta official to the Oak Brook, Illinois, police department chief. Freeman said he planned to go, was scheduled to speak at the event, and “would love to meet him, and help!”
On 10 April, Fusus customer success manager Austin DeClercq emailed Freeman, asking for his help with a new account with Birmingham, Alabama, police. Two weeks later, Fusus’s chief revenue officer, Mark Wood, contacted Freeman, asking him to speak to Seattle police about Fusus.
In May and June of that year, Freeman helped organize the Fusus Atlanta Client Symposium, scheduled for September.
The summer and fall included requests for information and recommendations on Fusus from police departments in Savannah, Georgia; Sacramento, California; Aurora, Colorado; and New York City – to whom he wrote, “We are HUGE fans of Fusus.”
He also began a series of meetings at a hotel penthouse, Chops Lobster Bar and Hal’s the Steakhouse with the Atlanta director ofBlackRock,a multinational investing firm with offices in 70 cities that owns8.2 %of Axon.
In December 2023, a Fusus staffer introduced Freeman by email to a representative of Honolulu’s police department. The staffer said: “Marshall works with Atlanta PD has been instrumental in implementing Fusus across the Atlanta metro area [sic].” Freeman scheduled an in-person meeting with his Hawaii counterpart during a trip to the island he had planned for the following week.
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A month later, on 23 January, Freeman filed a conflict of interest disclosure with the ethics office, saying he had “a financial interest in a company being considered for investment and acquisition by Axon”. He didn’t name Fusus, and indicated he would address the conflict by “recusal from discussion and vote”.
In thepress releaseannouncing Axon’s $240m purchase of Fusus a week later, Freeman is the only police official quoted. He praises “real-time crime centers”, which in Atlanta runs on Fusus technology and uses video feeds and other data to monitor, prevent and respond to crime, according to promotional material.
“I wholeheartedly encourage all agencies to embrace this cutting-edge technology and experience its transformative impact firsthand,” Freeman is quoted as saying. There is no mention of his connection to Fusus. Freeman earned an undisclosed sum of money through the sale from his private equity interest of less than 1% in the company.
The police official/consultant told the ethics office he didn’t think he needed to file a conflict of interest disclosure with Atlanta during the previous year-plus because the police foundation had paid for APD’s Fusus technology, not the department, “and the company did not have an existing contract with the city”, according to the report.
Going from the private foundation to the public police department – and continuing a relationship with a private company – “underscores the instrumental role APF plays in how APD operates”, said Matt Scott, executive director at ACPC.
In arecently concluded lawsuitACPC filed against the foundation for access to certain documents on Cop City under Georgia’s public records law, a judge ordered the foundation to supply the records.
In that case and the current one, the foundation “wants to have its cake and eat it too – saying, ‘We’re private and therefore hidden from public scrutiny; we’re not subject to open records or conflict of interest laws’”, Scott said. “And yet, [the APF] plays such an important role in how the police operate in Atlanta.”
Freeman also told investigators he was “done” working for Fusus – or Axon Fusus – when the purchase went through in January 2024. Nonetheless, records from Virginia and Florida show him being named to the board in both places months after that date.
Freeman’s appeal now puts the issue before the city’s ethics board, which may take a while because it is lacking enough members to consider the case. The ethics office is statutorily unable to fine more than $1,000 per violation and Freeman faces a possible fine of only $5,000.
The APD responded to questions from the Guardian with a statement from its chief, Darin Schierbaum:
“The Atlanta Police Department reaffirms our support for the City’sEthicsOffice … [and] we take every matter concerning employee conduct with the utmost seriousness. While this matter is under review … we trust that due process will prevail.”
Neither Freeman nor his attorney responded to queries from the Guardian.
Meanwhile, Freeman’s actions across the country show how “greater relationships between police and tech corporations continue reshaping how policing gets conducted”, Vogel said.