The Justice Department announced Friday that it resolved a biased police investigation of California’s Antioch Police Department, where Racist texts allegedly sent by officers sparked outrage and backlash.
The city and its police agreed to hire a consultant to review its policies, its officer training and its use-of-force incidents to suggest improvements, the Justice Department said in a statement.
The parties agreed to a framework for federal monitoring, establishing a stronger accountability role for its oversight body and collecting data on the department’s interactions over five years, he said.
“By working with the Department of Justice to institute police reform, the Antioch Police Department sends a strong message that the discrimination and misconduct that prompted this investigation will not be tolerated,” said Deputy Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Friday’s announcement. .
The Antioch Police Department said Friday that it welcomes the settlement 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,” the police department said in its statement. “We will implement and improve comprehensive policies, practices, training programs, community engagement initiatives, and oversight mechanisms to ensure officers uphold integrity and fairness while addressing misconduct quickly and effectively.”
The Justice Department said its investigation was prompted 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” program A gun will be used against the city’s mayor, who is black and is in his fifth year as Antioch’s top leader.
The text messages allegedly included bragging 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 district attorney’s office report inspired the Justice Department’s own investigation in June 2023, he said.
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 nonwhite, more than a third Hispanic or Latino and about one-fifth black, according to data from the Bureau from the United States Census.
After the district attorney’s office 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 were revealed. Prosecutors said the prosecution’s reliance on officers involved in the scandal would not survive jury scrutiny.
“The Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office no longer has confidence in the integrity of this prosecution,” he said in a 2023 statement.
Sister Nicole Eason said the officers’ text messages should not have had as much effect and suggested Sharlman’s family was ready to take the matter to civil court. Prosecutors said they were trying to find other ways besides relying on the officers, who were not identified, to solve the case. No civil cases 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 shot and killed by officers announced a federal lawsuit against the city in April 2023. The civil action was ongoing, although some parties have settled their claims, according to court records.
Eight agents 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 locate 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 low.
“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 night about the Justice Department’s ruling.
