A grand jury had indicted officers from Antioch and Pittsburg for a wide range of offenses, including criminal conspiracy
The Bay Area News Group, which first exposed the text messages, reported that the indictments this week include conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy against rights, deprivation of rights, and falsification or destruction of records. One officer who appeared in court on Thursday could face up to 20 years in prison on the records destruction charge alone, the publication reported.
Prosecutors have been forced to drop or dismiss dozens of cases that involved the officers who were exposed, and the local county has assigned attorneys to review thousands more files, according to the publication. “Not only do we have officers who have fundamentally racist ideas and disrespect for the community, but they’re dishonest, too, and that goes to the very integrity of the criminal justice system,” said John Burris, a civil rights attorney who has brought a class-action case against Antioch police. “There was a kind of lawlessness in the department, and there was no accountability. There was a code of silence.
Antioch’s mayor, Lamar Thorpe, said in a statement that it was “a dark day in our city’s history, as people trusted to uphold the law, allegedly breached that trust and were arrested by the FBI”. Elected in 2020 on a platform of reform, he added: “To those that have accused me and others of being anti-police for seeking to reform the Antioch police department, today’s arrests are demonstrative of the issues that have plagued the Antioch police department for decades.
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