Antioch PD looking into racist online remarks targeting town, officials

ANTIOCH — Police here have opened an investigation after someone on social media called for bringing back “hangings in town square” to “fix Antioch right up.”

Interim Antioch Police Chief Brian Addington this week said police were investigating the recent comments as potential criminal or terrorist threats.

“It’s an open investigation. So, we are not gonna comment further on it,” Addington said. “It should be wrapped up within a couple of weeks at most.”

Once completed, Addington said the case would be sent to the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office to review filing charges against anyone believed to have violated the law.

The post in question, which purports to be from a man claiming to live in nearby Oakley, was first brought to the city’s attention at the Aug. 27 City Council meeting, when resident Nicole Arrington addressed the council about it. She later shared screenshots of the post with officials, including Addington.

Arrington said the remarks were part of a pattern of “vile, racist, and hateful” comments aimed at Black members of the council and city staff.

“Us calling out the truth doesn’t make us racists. We are not running around saying, ‘We hate people,’ or, ‘Somebody should be hung’ … we are not going to start talking about hanging,” Arrington said. “We are people of love; we don’t run around hating, hurting, or talking about hurting people.

“But if you keep talking about hurting people and making terrorist threats, then it might be a problem,” Arrington said.

The incident comes on the heels of someone vandalizing one of Mayor Lamar Hernandez-Thorpe’s campaign signs to add a clown wig and nose on his face and remove Hernandez from his name. Earlier this year, Hernandez-Thorpe successfully petitioned the county court to add Hernandez to his legal surname, as a way to honor the Mexican immigrants who raised him.

Racial tensions in Antioch, a city of 115,000, have been bubbling up for years, as the Black population doubled in the past two decades, while the White proportion of the population has plummeted to just over one-third of the city’s total.

In 2020, voters for the first time elected three Black politicians to the five-member City Council. But the city’s police force was soon mired in a racist text-message scandal where officers used slurs to refer to residents of color — even against then-Chief Steven Ford.

A total of 44 officers — or about half of the department — received the racist, homophobic and sexist texts. Three of those same officers are charged in an alleged conspiracy to assault Black residents for sport, and face trial later this year.

Councilmember Tamisha Torres-Walker in an interview called the “hanging” comment “outrageous” and a reminder of the vitriol that exists in the community. Since taking office in 2020, the Black councilwoman said, she has received several hateful comments on her social media pages, including being called “nasty miserable racist disgrace human,” “ugly,” “ghetto,” and “progressive clown,” among others.

Just three days before a recent council meeting, Torres-Walker posted on Instagram about a post she saw on social media about a sign on a highway near Concord that read, “not White, not welcomed.”

“I’ve always said I’m not as worried about those who are loud and vocal. Their bigotry is clear. I’m more concerned about the people who aren’t saying anything but listening to all these things,” she said. “It’s a bold thing to say publicly, but I’m glad people are saying it publicly because you know who they are.”

The last council meeting saw some of the same vitriol when the council voted to appoint Bessie M. Scott as Antioch’s new city manager. The hiring of Scott, who is Black, drew backlash from some residents who called out her social media history — some of which referenced systematic racism and social constructs that benefit only one race.

Within the council chambers, it resulted in a heated exchange similar to when emotions boiled over last year when the racist texts by police officers surfaced and Mayor Hernandez-Thorpe and a member of the public exchanged words. The mayor had been in a target in the texts; an officer said he’d buy a prime rib dinner to anyone who shot the mayor with a sponge bullet.

At the Aug. 27 meeting, resident Erika Raulston said that during the public comment period about Scott’s hiring, she heard a woman siting behind her say, “You guys are the problem; you guys are racist.”

“I turned around, and I said no. I turned back, and I heard her say ‘racist b—-,’ ” said Raulston, who added the woman asked if she wanted “to take matters outside.”

Raulston did not follow the woman, listening to her mother, Leslie May, who “snatched” her arm and warned her they could get arrested. May, a 72-year-old mental health therapist who sits on the city’s police oversight commission, said she, too, has been harassed, threatened and defamed by “keyboard cowards.”

“Their attempts didn’t work…They’ve even tried to interfere with my job by calling and lying to my supervisor about me to get me fired,” May said. “I’ve gone through hell with them.”