DOJ Secures Agreement With Antioch, CA PD That’s Supposed To Make Its Racist Cops Less Racist

Well, there are two possibilities here. Either I’ve been doing this for too long or all cops are, indeed, bastards.

Let me explain. When this rolled through my hundreds of feeds recently…

DOJ enters agreement with California police department whose officers allegedly exchanged racist messages

… I was sure I knew which California police department this referred to. After all, I’d written about it back in 2021. In that post, dozens of felony cases were being swiftly unraveled because the testifying officers had spent their time texting each other racist memes and other derogatory material. Here’s some of it:

The caption read “hanging with the homies.” The picture above it showed several Black men who had been lynched.

Another photo asked what someone should do if their girlfriend was having an affair with a Black man. The answer, according to the caption, was to break “a tail light on his car so the police will stop him and shoot him.”

Someone else sent a picture of a candy cane, a Christmas tree ornament, a star for the top of the tree and an “enslaved person.”

“Which one doesn’t belong?” the caption asked.

“You don’t hang the star,” someone wrote back.

That was just the tip of the textberg. Records showed texts comparing President Obama to a monkey and references to African American infants as “pet niguanas.”

Aha! A follow up, I thought! I’m familiar with the subject matter! Everything’s coming up Cushing!

Then I searched for details. No hits for the PD referenced in the CNN article, at least not with this subject matter. And I knew searching cops+racist was just going to give me the phone book, as Detective Vincent Hanna noted years ago.

And here we are, at long last: a different set of racist cops from California:

The US Justice Department has reached an agreement with the Antioch, California, police department, resolving an investigation into racist text messages allegedly sent and received by some of its officers.

Under the agreement, the department will hire a consultant to review and update its policies, procedures and training on non-discriminatory policing and use of force, among other topics, the Justice Department said in a news release Friday. It also outlines commitments by the police department to ensure fair, non-discriminatory policing, as well as systems to report and investigate misconduct.

The announcement follows a 2023 report by the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office, which named a raft of Antioch officers who allegedly sent or received racist text messages, including the use of the n-word and sharing pictures of gorillas in reference to Black people.

That’s not all, though. The officers — some of who faced criminal charges — also bragged about engaging in violence against people. Texts referred to sending police dogs after people as its own form of justice, as the bitten people were still “punished” even if the “soft DA” was just going to cut them loose. They also celebrated excessive force deployment, in a series of texts that almost reads like a confession:

The indictment says Rombough had a history of using a 40mm less lethal launcher, to the point Amiri said in a text to an unidentified officer that “rombough be doing some unnecessary a** 40s,” referencing the launcher. When an unnamed officer texted Rombough in November 2020 asking what the officers were up to, he responded “Violating civil rights,” the indictment says.

Different cops, same racism. And the same disregard for rights that cost Torrance cops lots of felony busts. It doesn’t seem like any criminal cases are on the line here, though. And the agreement, which can be read here, is better than nothing, though it really doesn’t mandate the Antioch PD do anything more than some periodic and perfunctory “training” — the sort of thing its worst cops will sleep through and mock later.

The better part of the agreement raises the standards for hiring new cops, introducing stuff that always should have been there, like comprehensive background checks that include securing complaint/use-of-force history from any law enforcement agencies new hires might have worked for previously.

A better approach would simply be to fire cops that further undermine the extremely tenuous relationships most agencies have with the communities they serve. Until PDs are willing to rid themselves of their worst, they’ll never be able to rise above being just another employer of bastards.