The Justice Department announced Friday that it has resolved a biased police investigation into the Antioch Police Department in California, where racist texts allegedly sent by police officers sparked outrage and negative reactions.
The city and its police department agreed to hire a consultant to review its policies, officer training and use of force incidents to suggest improvements, the Justice Department said in a statement.
The parties agreed to a federal oversight framework, establishing a stronger accountability role for its oversight agency and collecting data on the department’s interactions for five years, it says.
“By working with the Department of Justice to enact police reform, the Antioch Police Department is sending a strong message that the discrimination and misconduct that prompted this investigation will not be tolerated,” the statement said. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Friday’s announcement. .
The Antioch Police Department said Friday it welcomed the agreement as it continues to cooperate with a separate California Department of Justice investigation into biased policing.
“The actions that prompted this investigation were unacceptable and failures occurred,” police said in their statement. “We will implement and improve policies, practices, training programs, community engagement initiatives and comprehensive oversight mechanisms to ensure officers respect integrity and fairness while addressing quickly and effectively to errors. »
The Justice Department said its investigation was triggered by racist texts allegedly exchanged. by agents from late 2019 to early 2022, which included homophobic and racist slurs and a suggestion that a “less lethal” vaccine that this weapon be used against the mayor of the city, who is black and who is in his fifth year at the head of Antioch.
The texts allegedly included boasts about beating suspects and fabricating evidence, according to a 2023 report compiled by the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office after it and the FBI investigated the racist texts.
The prosecutor’s office report inspired the Justice Department’s own investigation in June 2023, it says.
The Antioch Police Officers Association, which represents rank-and-file sworn employees in city contract negotiations, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Antioch, a city of more than 117,000 about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, is more than two-thirds non-white, more than a third Hispanic or Latino and about a fifth black. , according to data from the US Census Bureau.
After the prosecutor’s office’s report was released at the order of a local judge, outrage erupted and civil rights lawsuits were filed.
An arson and mutilation case against two men charged in connection with the discovery of the burned body of Mykaella Sharlman, 25, was dropped in 2023 after the texts came to light. Prosecutors said the prosecution’s reliance on the officers involved in the scandal would not survive the scrutiny of a jury.
“The Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office no longer has confidence in the integrity of these prosecutions,” he said in a 2023 statement.
Sister Nicole Eason said the officers’ texts should not have had such an impact and suggested Sharlman’s family was prepared to take the case to civil court. Prosecutors said they were trying to find other ways — besides using police officers, who have not been identified — to resolve the case. No civil complaints appear to have been filed in Contra Costa County in connection with Sharlman’s death.
Four people who say their civil rights were violated by Antioch police officers and a fifth whose father was fatally shot by officers announced a federal lawsuit against the city in April 2023. The civil action was in course, although some parties have settled their claims, according to court records.
Eight officers in text message report were placed on administrative leave, three were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” residents, and one of those three resigned.. Efforts to reach the three were unsuccessful at the time of the indictment in 2023.
Michael Rains, an attorney who represented some of the officers involved in the text messages mentioned in the report, said in 2023 that the number of officers involved in the text messages was small.
“The suggestions in many media outlets that inappropriate text messages were widespread… were simply not the case,” he said at the time.
Rains did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday evening regarding the Justice Department’s resolution.
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