Documentary reveals how a small Georgia city’s history of overpolicing belies its liberal image

Watch the CBS Reports documentary “Welcome to Pine Lake” on the video player above.

About 30 minutes east of Atlanta is a small town run by a mayor and a women’s council. The police chief is a black woman, as is the city judge and the court attorney.

The city of Pine Lake, Georgia, is proud to be a liberal oasis in a state of conservative leaning, a community that supported Stacey Abrams‘Governor’s 2018 campaign and has a history of gay or lesbian council members. But there is also a not-so-progressive reality in Pine Lake: systemic racism in the way the city has generated revenue.

Although the city has fewer than 800 people, the police department writes hundreds of traffic tickets each year along Rockbridge Road, a stretch of county road that borders the city limits, and court documents reveal that the city the vast majority of ballots are issued to black drivers. from the surrounding region and other cities. Black residents in the area say this stems from aggressive police tactics that go back many years and still persist today.

The mayor and police chief disagree and say it’s just a matter of who frequents Rockbridge.

“It’s true that most of the tickets are for people of color,” Mayor Melanie Hammet told CBS News. “The demographic reality is that most of those who drive through Pine Lake are people of color.”

But this racial disparity is not just a coincidence. It is the result of the city’s decision to focus much of its police presence on patrolling this 1/3 mile stretch of road.

“It’s an ATM,” said filmmaker Elisa Gambino, who began shooting the documentary “Welcome to Pine Lake” in 2018. “In the film, the mayor claims that traffic pays about $ 100. % of police department “.

Pine Lake police issued 2,807 traffic tickets between 2017 and 2019, and 2,481, about 88%, went to black people, city data show. The volume of tickets means Pine Lake Court is full of mostly black people, even though the city’s population is mostly white. Police Chief Sarai Y’hudah-Green told CBS Reports that she noticed the courtroom was full of black defendants.

“Optics makes me a little shitty sometimes,” Green said, “but I have confidence in our officers and their ethics.”

A 1999 Atlanta Journal-Constitution / WSB-TV survey found that Pine Lake wrote more entries than any Georgia municipality in the previous decade. Ticket sales peaked in 1998-99, the newspaper reported, when more than $ 830,000 in citation revenues funded three-quarters of the city’s budget. Critics at the time accused city leaders of making police profit.

DeKalb County resident Quinton Wilson, who is black, remembers moving to the area as a teenager and the dismay he and his friends felt every time they had to drive through Rockbridge.

“God forbid if you had to go through Pine Lake and you had to go through Stone Mountain, because you’d get a ticket to Pine Lake and they’d harass you like crazy and lock you in Stone Mountain,” Wilson said. “It always happened that way, so we always tried to avoid that area.”

Twenty years later, the police force has shrunk by 75% and many in Pine Lake believe the problem was solved a long time ago. But other residents in the area say there is still an excess of police.

Kent Morris, a barber who worked on Rockbridge Road within the city limits of Pine Lake, said he believes there are so many tickets because the police department needs the revenue.

“There’s not a lot of money coming in from the police department, so of course they’re going to attract everyone and try to get as much money as they can,” said Morris, who is Black and her name is June da Barber. “They have to do it to meet their quota.”

The police department does not have a ticket quota to fill, Green told CBS News. And he said tickets are no longer such an important source of revenue for the city. Average annual income in recent years was $ 210,850, about a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, Pine Lake data show.

More than 7 million cars use Rockbridge each year, and most tickets are issued for violations such as expired tags, turning on a red light, or texting while driving, city officials said.

“They are giving away most of the tickets for poverty offenses; the data show that most of them are for expired labels, which is not a public safety issue,” Gambino said.

Despite the fall, Morris said past ticket sales problems created a stigma about Pine Lake that will not be forgotten any time soon, no matter who runs the city today.

Gambino adds: “As long as the council does not adequately fund the police, the city will continue to extract money through taxation by subpoenaing those who do not live in Pine Lake. That is why the stigma, a rooted stigma, remains. actually for many “.

Suzy Tarnower, a resident of Pine Lake, White, has also seen the effects. “All the African American friends I have, this is the first comment there is.” Do you live in Pine Lake? For real? I will not come to visit him. ”

CBS Reports Presents “Welcome to Pine Lake” is now available for playback on the video player above. It premiered Sunday, October 11 on CBSN.

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