"Investment fund links to Atlanta police and ‘Cop City’ project revealed," 22 March 2023

A new investigation has uncovered connections between private equity firms and the contentious development of a sprawling police and fire service training complex in Atlanta known as “Cop City” and the police force which fatally shot an environmental activist....

...Research shared exclusively with the Guardian details links between Roark Capital, an Atlanta-based private equity firm which owns the country’s second-largest restaurant company, Inspire Brands, and a corporate backer of the Atlanta police foundation (APF).

Paul Brown, the CEO of Inspire Brands, whose portfolio includes fast-food franchises Dunkin’, Baskin Robbins and Arby’s, sits on the board of trustees of the APF, which is raising $60m from corporate funders to build Cop City in the Atlanta forest previously earmarked for a public park.

Police foundations are non-profits which raise private money from individual and corporate donors that is funnelled to police departments with little oversight or accountability. The APF has previously helped Atlanta police fund recruitment drives, surveillance cameras and Swat team equipment.

The police crackdown on community protests against Cop City have led to dozens of charges of domestic terrorism and the police killing of the environmental activist Manuel Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita”. Police said Paez Terán shot at them first, but have not produced any body-cam or other video footage of the shooting.

The APF has helped Atlanta become the most surveilled city in the US in large part thanks to a program called Operation Shield.

The Silicon Valley firm Silver Lake Management, one of the world’s largest tech-focused private equity firms, has invested more than $1bn in Motorola Solutions, which designed and implemented the surveillance system for Operation Shield, according to a new report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP).

Motorola has been criticised for providing hi-tech surveillance equipment used in US prisons, on the US-Mexico border and in the West Bank. Several European pension funds have divested from Motorola, and it was included in a UN list of companies “that had raised particular human rights concerns” by providing surveillance tools and other services to the Israeli government...

...Roark Capital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Silver Lake declined to comment...