Amid outrage over text messages showing police officers in northern California using racist slurs and bragging about making up evidence and beating suspects, city officials voted to audit the troubled department.
The FBI and the Contra Costa district attorney’s office discovered the shocking messages while investigating officers within the Antioch police department suspected of crimes. Officials have named 17 officers who sent texts, including the president of the Antioch police union, but nearly half the department was included in the messages.
At a crowded Tuesday meeting at the city hall, where local media reports almost 70 people spoke, the Antioch city council voted unanimously to conduct audits of the department’s internal affairs unit as well as its hiring and promotional practices and department culture.
The text scandal has rocked the city of 115,000 residents about 45 miles (72km) east of San Francisco, which the mayor, Lamar Thorpe, said was once predominantly white but has diversified in the last 30 years. The city has seen multiple protests since the news broke, including from families of victims of police violence who were mentioned in the texts.
“The officers’ texts about my baby made me feel like he died all over again,” Kathryn Wade told the East Bay Times, which first reported on the texts. “The boasting and bragging about what you did to people is so heartbreaking. The threats you make on this community, Black and brown [residents], something needs to be done.”
The police chief, Steve Ford, issued a statement last week apologizing and condemning “in the strongest possible terms – the racially abhorrent content and incomprehensible behavior being attributed to members of the Antioch police department in media reports.
“I promise to hold accountable the officers expressing racist or bigoted beliefs, biased insensitivity, and those boasting about harming members of the community.”
Ellen McDonnell, a defense attorney, has asked the district attorney, Diana Becton, to dismiss all cases involving the public defender’s office and Antioch police. Becton said she was reviewing cases for potential dismissal or resentencing. It is unclear how many cases are at stake.
“The public simply cannot have trust or confidence in any criminal prosecution involving the Antioch police department,” McDonnell said in an email on Wednesday. “No one should be charged with a crime based on the report of a police department so thoroughly riddled with corruption.”
In the text messages, which are heavily redacted, officers use derogatory, racist, homophobic and sexually explicit language and brag about making up evidence and beating up suspects. They refer to women as water buffalo, use sexist and racist language to describe an activist, share photos of gorillas in reference to black people, freely use racial slurs and make light of the police killing of George Floyd.
In April 2020, one Antioch officer texted an officer at another police department: “Since we don’t have video I sometimes just say people gave me a full confession when they didn’t, get filed easier.”
One officer offered a steak dinner to anyone who could “40” the city’s now mayor, Lamar Thorpe, at a June 2020 protest, referring to a “.40mm less lethal launcher”, a senior inspector for the district attorney’s office explained in a report, which shoots rubber bullets or bean bag rounds.
In September 2020, two officers agreed by text to write a large number of traffic citations by targeting a specific group in a specific area. A male officer referred to Black people by a racist slur and said authorities should make them “eat shit”. A female officer responded, “Yes that will be easy. And it will be a good time lol start off quick with the numbers.”
Tensions were high in a council meeting last week – Thorpe and a man defending the department had a heated exchange as the man argued the mayor should be investigated and Thorpe accused him of dog whistle racism.
Thorpe is among three Black, progressive members of the five-person council who have said they are committed to holding police accountable and protecting tenants’ rights. In 2021, the city issued an apology for its past treatment of Chinese immigrants.
“What you’re seeing is a maturation process, it’s like watching a teenage kid develop pimples,” he said. “The institutions have taken a long time to catch up with where the voters and public have been.”
The text messages came out as part of an investigation launched in March 2022 by the FBI and the Contra Costa district attorney’s office into a broad range of offenses, including what prosecutors called crimes of “moral turpitude”, by officers with the Antioch and nearby Pittsburg police departments.
The district attorney’s office released two batches of text messages to reporters after a judge on 7 April ordered the messages shared with defense attorneys in a pending felony case involving some of the officers. The reports did not identify the races of the officers who sent the text messages, and none have yet been charged with a crime.
The messages were sent largely in 2020 and 2021. The president of the Antioch Police Officers Association, Sgt Rick Hoffman, is named as sending communications. The association did not respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press.
The East County NAACP has requested federal oversight of the department and said the organization has reported numerous complaints about the Antioch police.
“No apologies from the police department, city manager, chief of police or the city council of Antioch will ever return the lives of a child or loved one to their families or return the life loss of an innocently incarcerated resident,” the organization’s president, Odessa Lefrancois, said in a statement.
