Antioch City Council backs audits for police department under scrutiny

ANTIOCH — Racism will not be tolerated in Antioch’s police force. That was the clear message from dozens of speakers and all of the City Council members at a Tuesday special meeting, though how to achieve that goal remains to be seen.

The meeting, which Mayor Lamar Thorpe called to discuss potential audits and how to move forward, resulted in unanimous decisions to start the process of three audits: an external audit of police internal affairs, an audit of police hiring and promotional practices and an equity audit of the police department examining its culture.

Once the meeting began, nearly 70 residents and community leaders took to the podium to share stories of their experiences with Antioch police or to urge the council to take action, suggesting everything from external audits to dismantling and rebuilding the department or requesting federal oversight.

Dr. Kimberly Payton, vice president of the East County branch of the NAACP, said the text messages were a “symptom of a much larger disease.”

“We would hope this body would start and move to heal this community by reaching out and getting input in any and all direction that they provide to new staff and as they hopefully rid themselves of the disease that is plaguing the staff,” she said.

Ellen McDonald, chief public defender of Contra Costa County, urged full disclosure and transparency.

“I’m deeply concerned and outraged,” she said regarding the offensive text messages. “The community and our clients have been sounding the alarm about your police department for years and years and need immediate and full disclosure and transparency.

“Individuals that have spoken tonight are victims of police brutality, they are victims of crime at the hands of their police department. And we can’t downplay this issue, this isn’t a few officers. I want to be really clear. We’ve reviewed this and there are 45 officers on these text chains …16 of them are in leadership roles. There’s an internal affairs officer that’s heard of these text chains, showing once again the police cannot police the police.”

Only several hours earlier, a small crowd of residents, organizers and activists gathered peacefully Tuesday afternoon outside police headquarters before marching together toward City Hall to attend the council meeting.

Many wore T-shirts with slogans calling for firings of specific Antioch police officers who last week were revealed to have sent racist and homophobic text messages, which were discovered during an FBI investigation of at least a dozen Antioch and Pittsburg officers.

Civil rights attorneys John Burris and Adante Pointer addressed that crowd Tuesday, as did parents of those victimized by police officers mentioned in the texts.

Kathryn Wade, whose son, Malad Baldwin, sued the city in 2015 after Antioch officers beat and injured him said she is still waiting on an autopsy after Baldwin’s death in 2021. “The officers’ texts about my baby made me feel like he died all over again,” Wade said. “The boasting and bragging about what you did to people is so heartbreaking. The threats you make on this community, Black and Brown (residents), something needs to be done.”

Wade added, “He had a mom. He had a son. He had aunties and uncles. Even some of them didn’t believe all the things that we saw happening with Antioch police and him. Some of them didn’t believe it. How you gonna deny it now?”

As part of their demands, protesters said they sought firing and decertification of officers involved in abusive and racist behavior, as well as full accountability and called for authorities to reopen in custody death cases.

The action comes after this news organization last week obtained and published material from two reports compiled by the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office that identified officers — including sergeants and gang unit detectives — who shared deeply racist and homophobic messages and memes, boasted about falsifying arrest reports and made light of violence against residents. In all, the names of 45 officers, or nearly half of the police force, were listed in the two reports as at least receiving one offensive text message.

Frank Sterling, who said he was beaten by police in 2009 during a noise complaint at his home, for years has been calling out the names of officers who he says behaved inappropriately. That includes the current head of the police union whom Sterling said called him a homophobic slur during that 2009 encounter with police.

“This, the police department, is where the hate, the racism, the bigotry, the sexism has been emanating,” Sterling said before the rally. “It’s important to be out there for that. And the reason we need to go at this point is to let the chief and the city council know that we support what they’re doing and trying to change things. But we also have some demands of our own.”

Pointer, a civil rights attorney who has filed suits against Antioch police, talked to the crowd about the problem of police culture and racism.

“These text messages that have been exposed show us that you don’t have to go to the backwoods of Mississippi. You don’t have to go into the backwoods of Arkansas, somewhere down South to find what’s happening right here in the Bay Area. In Antioch in 2023, it’s symbolic, just like the Klu Klux Klan because they kill people, they beat people, they terrorize people. How many people have done time behind a trumped-up case? How many families have you destroyed because of what the Antioch Police Department has done? There has to be a full-court press to look at every time any of these officers is interacting with the community.”

Burris, who said he plans to file lawsuits against the department, said the most abhorrent issue of the texts to him is the fact that they were allowed to circulate unchecked.

He also said the hate shown in the texts are the worst in printed form he’s ever seen.

“It’s at the top of the list in terms of verbal communication,” he said. “What’s even worse than that is No. 1, if you read the chain of texts, not one person responds that it’s inappropriate or that maybe this isn’t cool. And No. 2, you see supervisors on there. And if the supervisors are saying it and allowing it, it’s the culture. There’s no two ways about it.”

In anticipation of the protest, Tri Delta Transit said in a social-media post that it had detoured service for two downtown Antioch bus routes, with service cancelled at nineteen separate stops.

Detour for Antioch Downtown for the rest of the day. These stops will not be in service:
R388: E 815737, 811949, 819018, 818681 / W 818668, 818675, 813093, 813086, 815595
R387: E811965, 811954, 815728, 819617 / W 815697, 819574, 815700, 815716, 813072, 813064 pic.twitter.com/G0w8s0Q8kZ

— Tri Delta Transit Alerts (@tdtransitalerts) April 18, 2023

Gregory Osorio of Souljahs, a Pittsburg-based social justice group, brought a group of concerned members who also carried signs and protested outside City Hall just before the council meeting began.

“There’s a business side of protest and it’s about making change, not just noise,” Osorio said.

“And so our presence is to insist on the immediate termination of people that they have evidence on. They’ve got the FBI investigation. And so, you know, what more credible evidence do you need to take an HR action?”

“Many of them (the texts) were racist,” Osorio added. “A lot of them — the majority (of texting officers) — were low-integrity and also just hateful kind of people, and so those are dangerous to the community. You get a lot of people hurt by people that enjoy perpetrating violence on other people, and so we have zero tolerance for that.”

Staff writer George Kelly contributed to this report.