A revealing FBI and Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office probe into the Antioch Police Department’s alleged racist and homophobic text scandal in Northern California has resulted in a federal lawsuit. On Saturday (April 22), a “Good Morning America” report revealed that a civil rights suit had been filed.
The report of scathing correspondence between officers was released to the public last week. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of five residents and a family member of a man who was fatally shot by a police officer. They claim to have “experienced malicious treatment by Antioch Police Department officers during the time frame in which officers exchanged these text messages,” according to the document reviewed by CNN. The plaintiffs also allege that, via the published report, they “recently discovered that the method with which officers interacted with them was based in racial animus, misogyny, homophobia, and other offensive conduct.”
“This community probably should have been more afraid of the police than the gangsters or the criminals that were in their communities because these [officers] were criminals,” said civil rights attorney John Burris during a press conference in front of the department on Thursday (April 20).
As previously reported by REVOLT, the probe uncovered hundreds of text messages between dozens of officers using racial and homophobic slurs when referring to Black and brown citizens. “I’ll bury that n—ger in my fields,” wrote one officer. Another text read, “But we kill more Mexicans than anything else. So Blacks can feel safe.” But everyday residents were not the only targets of the hateful speech — so was Antioch’s Black Mayor Lamar Thorpe. The elected official expressed outrage over the scandal, saying, “Get the hell out of here. These people can go … they can go fly a kite for all I care. Get out of my police department. We don’t need them here,” he said during a city council meeting.
Like Thorpe, Burris has also called for the officers involved in the scandal to be fired. “This fact pattern is the most pervasive racial hatred case I’ve ever been involved in,” he said. “This conduct itself was so horrible that it was more than just locker room talk; it was a state of mind.”
Hear what some of the plaintiffs had to say about the report below.