Atlanta police chief Shields returns controversial $10,000 bonus check,

Shields says she should get a bonus only after rank-and-file officers.

Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields on Tuesday wrote a check for $10,000 to the city, returning the year-end bonus she received from former Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration.

Shields becomes at least the fourth city employee to decline the bonus or return the money.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News reported Tuesday that Reed went on a year-end, $518,000 spending spree just before leaving office. He provided top administrators on his staff with $350,000 in bonuses, gave $42,500 to his security detail, and handed out another $67,000 to city employees in raffles and contest awards during a December “executive holiday party.”

Former Human Resources Commissioner Yvonne Yancy also gave

her leadership team $57,500 in bonuses just days before quitting her job.

The AJC also learned on Friday that City Council member Andrea Boone returned about $18,000 that she received as a lump sum payout of sick leave accrued before leaving her job as Reed’s director of Constitu

ent Services in August. Boone said she returned the money out of “an abundance of caution” after she began to suspect that not all employees receive payment for unused sick days. Channel 2 also had filed an April 20 open records request for her payroll records.

Shields explained her reasons for returning the bonus money in an April 25 email to the Atlanta Police Department command staff. She called the bonus “generous,” but said “it did not feel good to receive it.”

“I firmly believe that any monetary accolades that I am afforded should only occur once the depart- ment has been taken care of, which means there are roughly 2,000 people before me,” Shields wrote. “I wrote a check back to the city for $10,000 (Tuesday) morning and dropped it at City Hall. “I’m making you aware of this

because we have much work ahead of us, and the people grinding it out every day need to know

that you and I have not forgotten how difficult it is to police.”

In an interview with Channel 2 on Friday, Shields said “some of