Global Courant 2023-04-20 08:47:27
ANTIOCH, California — A San Francisco Bay Area City Council is conducting an audit of its troubled police department, the latest development in a year-long federal investigation of the Antioch Police Department that exploded this month with the revelation of racist and hostile text messages from officers.
Angry residents converged on City Hall on Tuesday night as the Antioch City Council unanimously approved audits of the department’s internal affairs, hiring and promotion practices, and department culture. Officials have named 17 officers who texted, including the president of the Antioch police union, though the Contra Costa County public defender said nearly half of the department’s 100 officers were texted.
Defense attorney Ellen McDonnell has asked District Attorney Diana Becton to dismiss all cases involving the public defender’s office and the Antioch Police Department. Becton said she is investigating cases for possible dismissal or a new conviction. It is not clear how many cases are involved.
“The public simply cannot have confidence in any criminal prosecution involving the Antioch Police Department,” McDonnell said in an email Wednesday. “No one should be charged with a crime based on the report of a police station so thoroughly riddled with corruption.”
The inflammatory text messages, which were heavily redacted, contained derogatory, racist, homophobic and sexual language. Cops brag about fabricating evidence and beating up suspects. They call women water buffaloes, share photos of gorillas, freely use racial slurs and make light of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.
In September 2020, two agents agreed by text message to write a large number of traffic messages by targeting a specific group in a specific area. A male officer referred to black people with a racial slur and said authorities should force them to “eat food.” A female officer replied, “Yeah that will be easy. And it will be a good time lol start the numbers quick.”
The city of 115,000, about 45 miles east of San Francisco, was once predominantly white, but has diversified in the past 30 years.
Mayor Lamar Thorpe is one of three black, progressive members of the five-member council who have said they are committed to holding police accountable and protecting tenants’ rights. In 2021, the city apologized for its treatment of early Chinese immigrants.
“What you see is a maturation process, it’s like watching a teenager develop pimples,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “The institutions have taken a long time to catch up where the voters and the public were.”
The text messages came out as part of an investigation launched in March 2022 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office into a wide variety of crimes, including what prosecutors call crimes of “moral disgrace”. called, by officers with the Antioch and nearby Pittsburgh police departments.
The district attorney’s office released two batches of text messages to reporters after a judge on April 7 ordered the messages be shared with defense attorneys in a pending felony case involving some officers. The reports did not identify the races of the officers who sent the text messages, and no one has been charged with a crime to date.
Most of the messages announced so far were sent in 2020 and 2021. Sgt. Rick Hoffman, president of the Antioch Police Officers Association, is named as the sender of messages. The association did not respond to requests for comment.
In April 2020, an Antioch officer texted an officer from another police station, “Since we don’t have video, sometimes I just say people gave me a full confession when they didn’t, it’s easier to press charges.”
In June 2020, an officer offered a steak dinner to anyone who could “40” Thorpe during a protest, referring to a “.40mm less-lethal launcher,” a senior inspector from the district attorney’s office explained in a report. Such a device can fire rubber bullets or bean bag rounds.
Antioch Police Chief Steve Ford issued a statement last week condemning the “racially abhorrent content and incomprehensible behavior attributed in media reports to members of the Antioch Police Department.”
His department also set up an email address and phone line for community members to provide feedback. Ford did not respond to email requests to speak to The Associated Press.
Police officers have been caught before for sending bigoted messages to each other. In 2015, then-San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr moved to fire or punish 14 officers involved in trafficking racist text messages.
Authorities have not provided a timetable for when their joint investigation could end.
