DOJ Secures Agreement With Antioch, CA PD That’s Supposed To Make Its Racist Cops Less Racist
from the one-powerpoint-presentation-away-from-salvation dept
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.
Filed Under: antioch pd, california, consent decree, doj, police misconduct, racism
Comments on “DOJ Secures Agreement With Antioch, CA PD That’s Supposed To Make Its Racist Cops Less Racist”
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It’s hard not to get the impression that blob libs in NGOs, the media, academia, and government detest normal people.
The libs are always coming up with new transgressions the chuds are guilty of and need to be punished for:
Normal people are too racist and not guilty enough about their racism and need reeducation, they’re stupid and not sufficiently deferential to authorities and experts and they need to be made to understand how stupid they are, their lifestyle (personal automobiles, red meat consumption, single family homes) is harmful and decadent and regulation is needed to enforce more modest consumption, the chuds are not sufficiently tolerant of criminality and bizarre sexual fetishes and so they need to be put under surveillance by the administrative state and coerced into acceptance of strange and sociopathic behavior, they have bad political inclinations and can’t be trusted to participate in democracy so the ‘adults in the room’ must take the reins and manage democracy for them.
Etc etc etc.
It’s deeply sick that our institutions and institutional elite can’t conceive of themselves working broadly in the public interest, that they can only valorize themselves by acting on behalf of fetishized, often fake, victim groups, and that they are so animated by pathologizing normal people who are just going about their lives.
Re:
Sure, if you live in a conservative echo chamber up your own ass.
No, these are the same old violations of human and constitutional rights that have been going on for a long time. You’re just upset that some wrongs aren’t going unpunished like they have in the past.
When your definition of “normal” is racist, you’re the one with the problem.
Well, your comment is at least.
Newsmax jargon vomit doesn’t suffice as a real argument. Plenty of people left of fascist have personal automobiles, eat red meat, and live in single family homes (I certainly do). Do you actually think the majority of people to the left of you decry these things? You clearly don’t talk to people outside your bubble except to fight straw men. You probably rant about “Democrat cities” out one side of your mouth while ignoring how popular automobiles, red meat, and single family homes are in those “Democrat cities.” But no contradiction is too far as long as the present narrative is served!
Yeah, sorry, conservatives tolerate and sometimes encourage child marriage and child rape victims carrying their rapist’s baby to term. You don’t get to talk about bizarre sexual fetishes. Also, the majority of “libs” or anyone left of you is straight white boring people. Yes, the left has a greater percentage of LGBTQ folks, but the statistical majority is much like the statistical majority of Americans, as one might expect if they weren’t scrubbing their brains on ragebait propaganda interspersed with cheeseburger, light beer, and pickup truck commercials.
You mean like conservatives broadcasting their sociopathy on social media, livestreaming their insurrection from inside the capitol building? Or do you mean like conservative states passing surveillance laws on people exercising their 1st Amendment free speech rights?
Like denying life-saving insurance claims for profit? Coal-rolling bicyclists? Denying body autonomy to women because they can’t be trusted to make their own decisions about their own health and well-being?
Authoritarian says what?
You just voted for a man who can’t conceived of working in the interest of anyone but himself.
By denying their existence just because you never touch grass and these people likely try to avoid places where they might run into bigots like you, you are victimizing them.
What you consider “normal” is just self-righteous sociopathic bigotry. That you see people who try to protect the vulnerable and champion the rights of the oppressed as “elites” trying to control you only speaks the fact that you can’t stand being equal to others and you can’t stand the idea that they might have human rights too. You need to invent these villains to oppress you with their words that make you feel kind of bad and pretend they’re evil while you vote for people who literally deploy physical and systemic force against their victims with actual real world consequences. Keep crying out in pain from behind your privileged keyboard. It’ll never equal the actual injustices you’re supporting.
Re: Re:
The funny thing is, that comment mentioned…
…and Republicans are more likely to do that shit than Democrats. I mean, how often do you see Democrats defending imaginary Muslims who want to turn their religious beliefs into secular law in the same way that Republicans defend actual Christianists who want to (and are actively trying to) accomplish that goal?
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Hey bro, do you buy bullshit wholesale or are you still paying retail?
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Every accusation, a confession.
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Spoken like a true Chud.
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It is indeed hard not to get the impression that conservatives in NGOs, the media, academia, and government detest people who don’t fit an artificially narrow ideal, making those conservatives the abnormal ones.
potty mouth training
they are adults, their parents raised them wrong, the time for training is over. Fire them and replace them with non jerk types. the only way. of course that would require city officials / mayors to be anatomically correct and not ken dolls.
Criminals do what Criminals do
It still all boils down to basic intelligence and training.
Two to three years training where they start with the absolute basics while being thoroughly assessed as to background and personality.
Sort of what most first world countries do.
Well, here is an application for gunshot detection technology
Give the police body cams and mobile phones (and car communications) with a rolling buffer. Whenever gunshot detection goes off, a -2+3 minute of coverage of all police equipment in the perimeter is sent to a central vetting location from where it gets randomly assigned to handlers that review and evaluate the recordings.
Sure, the gunshot detection is inreliable, but the officers cannot rely on it being unreliable. This kind of completely external and uncontrollable monitoring would put a much more serious damper on bad behavior than any consent decree that can be circumvented internally can hope to achieve.
If you cannot depend on having good officers to work with, you have to focus on making the bad officers behave.
Shitty, but not surprising at this point.
Cops are sourced from the bottom of the barrel — people that the military doesn’t want or washed out. And cops don’t get nearly the same degree of training or scrutiny as the troops.
Combine that with institutions that seem to actively hate the populace they’re supposed to “protect and serve,” and of course you get shitheads with power and minimal oversight.
They ARE all bastards.
Re:
TIL: Cops are people who failed the necessary aptitude tests to become security guards. No sarc.
Snow plow drivers and school workers seem to need more background checks and bonding than cops, and need adhere to rules about behavior.
'Let this be a lesson to you: Don't get caught next time!'
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.
When departments and/or the DOJ have firing and/or bringing criminal charges respectively as the standard punishment then and only then will the police system in the US change. As it stands the system has made abundantly clear that nothing will change because it wants officers like that on the force, hence why it keeps treating them with silk gloves for behavior that would see damn near anyone else fired or even locked up in a heartbeat.
Have any of you been watching any cop movies or series?
Every single one shows cops breaking the law, in order to catch the bad guys. It is a theme Holy Wood has been churning out for years and is now pretty much standard fare for all police oriented shows.
Cops watch this shit too. They are simply doing what their TV and movie heroes do in every flick they watch. Since most cops have to have an IQ in single digits to be hired, they ‘think’ this is the acceptable and proper way to act.