Beverly Harvard

CTL-E-6774 · Person · other · 1950–present

PROVISIONAL evidence grade of this record

Beverly Harvard (born December 22, 1950) was chief of the Atlanta Police Department from 1994 to 2002, the first African American woman to lead a major-city police department in the United States. Harvard joined the APD in 1973 — on a one-hundred-dollar bet with her husband that she would not make it through training — and worked patrol, background investigations, and public affairs; as the department's chief spokesperson during the Atlanta child murders investigation she became one of its most visible faces. In 1982 she was promoted to deputy chief, the first woman to hold that rank in a major American department, in the APD's own accounting of her career. Confirmed by the City Council on October 26, 1994, Harvard led the department through Freaknik, the Centennial Olympic Park and Otherside Lounge bombings of 1996–1997, and a corruption scandal inside her own department. She stepped down in 2002 after Mayor Shirley Franklin required the city's department heads to reapply for their jobs and she chose not to. Harvard later served as a deputy federal security director for the Transportation Security Administration at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and, from 2010 to 2019, as United States Marshal for the Northern District of Georgia, nominated by President Barack Obama.

Notes

Merged 2026-11-02 from the staged police chiefs packet (website/.build-work/scratch-v114/police/) under the GOV-006 founder gate opened 2026-11-02; the staged record is carried verbatim — no claim upgraded in transit (GOV-004). · Roles as staged: Police leadership — Chief, Atlanta Police Department (1994–2002) · Photo slot: HELD — No photograph of Harvard exists on Wikimedia Commons; searches return Beverly, Massachusetts material. Her APD and U.S. Marshals portraits are department/press images, not rights-clean.

Sources

• Wikipedia, 'Beverly Harvard' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Harvard
• atlantapd.org — https://www.atlantapd.org/about-apd/apd-history

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