ATLANTA POLICE CHIEF DENIES CHARGES OF ARREST QUOTAS

The question of whether police have arrest quotas continued to follow
Atlanta police Chief Richard Pennington no matter where he went in
City Hall on Tuesday.

He insisted that officers do not have to make a minimum number of
arrests to avoid punishment; they do have "performance standards."
After fielding questions on the subject at a news conference,
Pennington was under fire as the head of the police union and some
City Council members questioned the difference between the two terms.

"Where's the fine line between performance evaluations and quotas?"
asked Sgt. Scott Kreher, president of the Atlanta chapter of the
International Brotherhood of Police Officers.

City Council members H. Lamar Willis and Joyce Sheperd, at a meeting
of the Public Safety Committee, wondered the same thing.

Pennington continued what has become his mantra: Officers have to
work and "produce," but there are no specific numbers of arrests or
search warrants they have to make each month.

Earlier, Pennington stood with Mayor Shirley Franklin to answer
reporters' questions about the conditions that contributed to a
botched drug raid in November that left a 92-year-old woman dead.
Last week, a Fulton County grand jury indicted three officers - Jason
R. Smith, Gregg Junnier and Arthur Tesler. That same day, Smith and
Junnier pleaded guilty to the voluntary manslaughter of Kathryn
Johnston in Fulton Superior Court and guilty in federal court to
conspiracy to violate her civil rights. Tesler, suspended without
pay, is fighting lesser state charges.

Some of the officers have contended a quota system was one of the
reasons they lied to get warrants, such as the one that allowed them
to break down Kathryn Johnston's door the evening of Nov. 21.

Kreher, before the committee, read from documents he said supported
the contention that officers felt they would be disciplined if they
did not make the required number of arrests or serve a minimum number
of warrants.

In one e-mail sent last summer to several officers in southwest
Atlanta, the major in charge at the time said any officer who did not
make any cases "for that day ... will be on a foot beat until further notice."

Since the indictments of the three officers last week, pressure has
increased on Pennington to at least justify the perception some
officers said they had to meet certain benchmarks for arrests and
warrants served. He's looking in to it, but he doesn't know where
they got that idea.

"I haven't heard it. I haven't seen anything in writing," Pennington
said. "We shouldn't have discipline attached to it [performance
evaluations]. We shouldn't be threatening anybody with discipline."

Pennington told reporters each zone commander is required to reduce
crime by 5 percent each month and "we hold them accountable to those goals."

Several council members were upset that they still had little
information on the FBI's findings so far into the agency's
investigation of the department. They also were frustrated because,
one member said, they had been asked to withhold comments because the
city was likely to be sued.

Indeed, the informant who first reported that he had been asked to
lie to protect the officers has notified the city that he planned to
sue. Johnston's family also has given notice of a planned lawsuit.

"We all have pain and rage, and we've had to hold that in check,"
Councilman C.T. Martin said.

"We don't even know who was in charge the first day of the incident.
Who was the first officer to arrive and who was in charge of these
officers? There is so much information we will never have," Martin
said. "Why was it necessary to do that to an innocent person?
"There's mountains and mountains of questions," Martin said. "Are we
going to do it the Atlanta way and let it just disappear?"

Pennington said the FBI, the U.S. attorney and the district attorney
told him little about what they were finding until a couple of days
before three of his officers were indicted.