Report from the Atlanta Community Press Collective on surveillance plan advanced by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) in 2023.
In 2023, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) quietly advanced what one critic called an “unprecedented” plan to test an invasive individual electronic surveillance program and secure a $1 million city contract for Talitrix, an APF donor company.
Founded in 2020 and with ownership stakes held by several current and former Georgia Republican lawmakers, Talitrix aims to capture a share of the rapidly growing electronic monitoring market. The company uses geofencing and proprietary algorithms to produce a “Talitrix score” that agencies can use to determine whether someone’s behavior on pretrial release or probation should subject them to re-arrest and incarceration.
Talitrix provided a demonstration of the company’s product for APF and Atlanta Police Department (APD) officials in January 2023. During that demonstration, Talitrix CEO Justin Hawkins expressed an interest in integrating his company’s technology with Fusus, the surveillance company that underpins Atlanta’s massive camera network.
The day after the demonstration, APF’s vice president of programs, Gregory McNiff, emailed Anthony Baldoni, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Fusus, to make introductions and express an interest in the integration on behalf of the city. “The Mayor’s office is ready to fund the purchase of Talitrix monitoring bracelets for the purpose of tracking repeat offenders,” McNiff wrote.
The Fusus-Talitrix integration would combine GPS-enabled digital shackles featuring biometric monitoring capabilities with the growing canopy of Fusus-linked video cameras in Atlanta. By integrating Talitrix equipment with AI-powered real-time video surveillance that can trigger multiple public and privately owned “pan-tilt-zoom” (PTZ) cameras at a person’s precise location, APF planned to put up to 900 people under constant video, audio, biometric, and GPS surveillance as a condition of pre-trial release.
“This [proposal] turns the City of Atlanta into an open-air prison for everyone on electronic monitoring,” said Cooper Quinton, security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab.
Several technology and legal experts who reviewed the integration proposal concluded it would be the most sweeping state-run electronic surveillance program in the United States and raised serious legal and ethical concerns.
“We’re seeking huge upticks in the rate of electronic monitoring. It’s gone up tenfold since 2005, and it doubled between 2021 and 2022. It’s already very invasive,” Quinton said, referring to a report released by the criminal justice research and policy nonprofit Vera Institute. “This is an unprecedented expansion of that surveillance. Even if you have not yet been convicted of a crime under this system, you and your family and your friends could be subject to constant, targeted video surveillance.”
Fallon McClure, deputy director of policy and advocacy with the ACLU of Georgia, noted that Georgia’s courts have disapproved of blanket electronic monitoring. “We are gravely concerned about what will be a panopticon for those on pre-trial release,” she said.
Kendra Albert, a public interest technology researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, had a more emphatic perspective.
“Grave concerns would be putting it mildly. My level of concern would be best expressed in expletives,” said Albert.
Albert said that no other electronic surveillance program to their knowledge has subjected people to the level of constant monitoring APF’s proposed Fusus-Talitrix merge would entail. The proposal could subject people on pre-trial release and everyone around them to warrantless wiretapping without notice or consent, they said, a prospect that “functionally upends the relationship under the Constitution that the police are supposed to have when they want to surveil people.”
“This is fucked,” Albert added.
Black Communities as “unwitting research subjects”
Records show the APF planned to test the Talitrix technology on a cohort of so-called “repeat offenders.” The group consists of 1,000 people convicted of three or more felonies who are arrested again in Fulton County. Over 93 percent of APF-designated “repeat offenders” are Black, according to a 2022 annual report.
Drug offenses are the most common charge, representing 34 to 40 percent of the arrests in the dataset, according to APF’s 2022 report.
Mayor Dickens and APD officials have worked with APF’s Repeat Offender Commission on a multi-year public relations campaign to paint repeat offenders as a scourge whose “life of crime” makes up “40 percent” of the offenses in Atlanta. However, APF’s data characterized 83 percent of repeat offender cases as non-violent.
Notes from an APF Repeat Offender Commission meeting reflect racial concerns amongst stakeholders. President and CEO of the Buckhead Coalition, Jim Durrett, is quoted in the notes questioning the presentation of the commission’s marketing materials. “How important is it to put their picture up on the flyer? Five black males. What is being received? What message are we sending?” Durrett asked.
Those notes reflect an unnamed party responding, “Most of the jail is primarily African-American so the stats support it.”
Testing of “unvetted Talitrix technology appears to align with this country’s history of using Black people and communities as unwitting research subjects,” said Tiffany Roberts, public policy director at the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Laura Rivera, an attorney with Just Futures Law, agreed, saying, “Make no mistake: these draconian measures are meant not to ensure safety, but to control the bodies of Black and Brown people, including immigrants.”
Concerns surrounding the use of Talitrix devices spurred APF to form a temporary task force in June 2023 aimed at responding to objections and allowing the project to proceed.
The APF pushed forward with the plan and paid student volunteers at Georgia State University and Georgia Tech a $50 stipend to install and wear Talitrix devices in October and November 2023 as a “proof of concept” plan for the integration. A month before the pilot program, Talitrix donated at least $25,000 to the APF as a sponsor of the foundation’s “Crime is Toast” breakfast.
Repeat Offenders?
Both the price tag and the process of the Fusus-Talitrix proposal appear to fall outside Atlanta’s procurement rules. Those rules require any solicitation for a city contract over $1 million that would be presented to the city council for approval to run through the city’s procurement department and undergo a review by the city’s Inspector General’s (IG) Independent Procurement Review Division.
The APF planned to fund a 6-month Talitrix pilot for $234,000 and then have the city assume the contract while adding 700 devices for a total cost exceeding $1 million. APF funding would have allowed the initial phase of the plan to avoid any pre-award independent procurement review.
The IG found in March 2023 that the $109 million single-source contract the Atlanta Police Department inked with Axon failed to follow procurement guidelines. APD agreed to revise its procedures and retrain its staff.
As of March 22, the City of Atlanta’s Procurement Office confirmed Talitrix is not listed as a vendor. Despite an email from the APF stating otherwise, APD’s public affairs office told the Atlanta Community Press Collective “the Mayor’s Office did not approve funding for Talitrix” and “there was never a commitment to purchase” the Talitrix technology.
The Atlanta Community Press Collective also inquired about the status of the plan to twelve members of the Repeat Offender Commission. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C. McBurney said the program is not active “at least not as a Court-authorized initiative.”
“Does it pass the smell test?”
Talitrix is no stranger to controversy. In October 2023, the Fulton County Commission voted to terminate a $2.1 million contract Talitrix inked with Sheriff Pat Labat for 1,000 devices. By October, the sheriff had deployed only 15 devices inside Fulton’s Rice Street jail. The decision to pull out of the deal followed revelations that Talitrix donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Sheriff’s campaign committee.
“Some $70,000 from a group of people all associated with this same enterprise and I think quite frankly, it raises questions, it could be perfectly legal, but does it pass the smell test?” Fulton County Commission Chair Rob Pitts said at the time. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) published an investigation in March alleging heavy-handed legal tactics Talitrix used against critics, including legal notices Talitrix’s lawyer served on Forsyth County Commissioners who raised questions about the company. Forsyth Commissioner Todd Levent told the AJC that attorney Robert Ashe—who is also representing the city of Atlanta in its fight against the Cop City referendum—represented Talitrix in public records requests to the Forsyth County Commission following critical statements about the company by some of the commissioners.
The Atlanta Police Foundation did not respond to ACPC inquiries in the weeks before publication.
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Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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