ANTIOCH, Calif.—For at least four years, officers in this small Bay Area city called Black residents racial slurs, bragged about beating suspects and joked about violating people’s civil rights in text messages.
The texts, made public by prosecutors last month as part of a criminal investigation into a group of Antioch officers, have sparked protests in the city of 115,000. Officials haven’t disclosed the reason for the investigation but said it involves “crimes of moral turpitude.”
Prosecutors in Contra Costa County say they will review hundreds of cases investigated by Antioch police to determine whether they should be dismissed because of how widespread racial animus was at the department.
Almost half of the sworn personnel in the department, 44 of 99, were on the text threads, according to a review by the Contra Costa County public defender’s office. A judge has released the names of 17 officers accused of sending the texts.
“This community is in an uproar,” said Antioch Police Chief Steven Ford, who was hired last year to clean up the department. “It’s up to us to atone for it.”
Ford said that about 20 officers and sergeants have been put on leave as a result of the racist texts. He said he is awaiting the findings of an outside investigation before deciding whether to fire them.
Similar revelations have occurred at several police departments around the country. A small Alabama city voted to dissolve its three-member police force last year over an officer’s text containing a joke about slavery that surfaced on social media.
Officers in other cities such as Wichita, Kan., and San Francisco have been punished for sending messages with slurs and derogatory memes to one another in recent years. Most of these text chains have been discovered on personal phones of officers during criminal investigations.
In Antioch, the messages were sent by police personnel up and down the chain of command. In April 2020, Sgt. Joshua Evans wrote, “I’ll bury that n—— in my fields” to Officer Morteza Amiri, who sent a laugh response. “And yes…it was a hard R on purpose,” Evans wrote. “Haha there’s no accidents with you on that,” Amiri replied.
Officer Eric Rombough sent graphic photos of injured suspects in their hospital beds, bragging about how he had hurt them. “I field goal kicked his head,” he said in one message from 2021.
In another text exchange from last year, Rombough wrote of his traffic stops that he was “only stopping them cuz they black. F—- them. Kill each other.”
Rombough and some others referred to Black residents as “gorillas” in their texts.
Adam Carpenter, a 33-year-old house painter who is Black, said he wasn’t surprised by the text messages because Antioch officers often mistreated him. He said he has been pulled over so many times for no reason that he sold his car in hopes that they would stop bothering him.
“It’s just inhumane,” said Carpenter. “We shouldn’t have to endure this type of treatment.”
In recent years, Carpenter, now a plaintiff in a civil-rights lawsuit against the department, was arrested by officers implicated in the texting scandal on drug and gun charges.
But this week, prosecutors dropped the drug possession charges against Carpenter because the district attorney “no longer has confidence in the integrity of this case,” said a spokesman for the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office.
Last year, federal prosecutors dropped the gun charges against him. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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