SOUTH FULTON, Ga. — Some City of South Fulton taxpayers want to know why the former police chief Keith Meadows was allowed to retire after the city paid nearly $200,000 for three different reviews of the department.
All the reviews said the police department had major issues that needed to be resolved immediately.
Channel 2’s Tyisha Fernandes reported live outside city hall in the city of South Fulton for Channel 2 Action News at 6:00. She asked the city manager why she hid one of those bad reviews from the public that said the city has a lot to hide.
For months, Mike Johnson, a former city council candidate, has been questioning City of South Fulton council members about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on three different operational reviews of the police department in just four years.
“It should’ve been a full-scale third-party independent review,” Johnson said.
One year after that report, city leaders paid a company nearly $90,000 to do a second operational review of the police department.
One council member said those results were so bad, city leaders hid them because the second review was worse than the first.
A couple years later, the city was hit with multiple lawsuits accusing the former police chief Keith Meadows of leading the department inappropriately.
The city council put Meadows on paid leave and voted to do a third operational review that cost taxpayers another $117,000.
That’s when some council members realized they never received results from the second review.
An email shows a council member asking those investigators to “please send a copy of that report, as it has been withheld from the council, and we are just now learning about the existence of the report.”
Then one month before the results of the third review came out, the council allowed the former chief to retire, with a $200,000 settlement, and agreed to pay him $100 per hour to testify in the lawsuits against him.
“Look at the timing of it. They did this 30 days, about a month prior to the report being released. I think they wanted to stay away from an independent investigation. It would’ve gotten him terminated. He wouldn’t have retired with his POST cert intact,” Johnson said.
The city sent Fernandes a statement that says they’re committed to transparency and improvement.
It says the city manager and some current council members weren’t here during the first two reviews, and they’re using the results of the last two reviews to find the right police chief to hire.
The city also says one of the three reviews was tied to a “specific work environment complaint” and not a department-wide assessment.
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