Crime & Courts

Tisdale is, for lack of a better term, a “citizen journalist,” a label that’s taken on greater relevance as video recording has become more ubiquitous and as conventional media outlets have shrunk. Citizen journalists often straddle the line between reporter and advocate. Since 2011 Tisdale has recorded hundreds of videos of elected officials and political candidates in public settings, uploading them to her website, unedited and without commentary.

“That kind of trafficking—whether it’s money or guns—within the airport, it creates an additional layer of harm to the community,” says John Horn, U.S. attorney in Atlanta. “The airport is such a huge institution to [Atlanta]; we have the obligation to make sure that it’s safe.”

Not long ago, Clayton County was metro Atlanta’s cautionary example of municipal dysfunction. Then came DeKalb. We rank each venality out of 10.

After a weeklong sentencing hearing, a judge orders the civil rights leader behind bars for misuse of nonprofit donations.

From the rigid and amateurish brushstrokes, the piano that caught Zheng Li’s eye in Z Gallerie definitely was not his work. But the angle and shape of the instrument—and even the color palette—were almost identical to his 2004 Piano No. 9.

Last month, a DeKalb County patrolman shot and killed an unambiguously unarmed man, drawing an investigation and protest. Two weeks ago, a North Charleston police officer shot and killed an unambiguously unarmed man, drawing an investigation and protest.

When Phillip Sailors shot and killed a young man who mistakenly pulled into Sailors’s driveway in Lilburn two years ago, the story made headlines from ABC News to the Huffington Post. The case was in the news again last November, when Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter announced he would not pursue murder—or even felony manslaughter—charges against Sailors, allowing the 71-year-old retired Bell South employee to walk free with a year of probation and a $500 fine.

Atlanta Police Lieutenant LeAnne Browning recalls her days as a patrol officer. “Our lieutenants would say, ‘Okay, I want you to look at the beat books so you can know what’s out there on your beat.’ Well, the beat books are like this thick with reports,” she says, holding her hands a couple of feet apart. “And you’d sit there and thumb through it all, and there was no time because they were then kicking you out of the precinct to handle calls.” She pauses before pointing to her computer screen. “That’s the old way of doing things. This­—it’s right here.”

This morning, the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments on whether or not the city’s issuance of $200 million worth of bonds to help fund the $1.2 billion retractable-roof facility is constitutional.

When the fleet of news vans is docked, mast-like antennae jutting upward, outside of the Fulton County Courthouse, they are there for murder, corruption, the headliner drama of Superior Court. But while the big-shot prosecutors slug it out with the high-priced defense attorneys in front of the media gallery on the upper floors of 136 Pryor Street, real life plays out on the ground floor, in courtrooms 1A and 1B. This is State Court—Criminal Division, strictly for everyday misdemeanors