By Jonah Owen Lamb
New allegations of racism among
officers in the San Francisco Police Department have emerged from a criminal
case, the San Francisco Examiner has learned.
“We were in the middle of an
investigation and we discovered new racist and homophobic text messages that
were being used,” District Attorney George Gascon told the Examiner on Thursday
of the text messages.
Gascon said there were at least
five officers involved, but the names of the officers and the content of the
text messages were not immediately available. The text messages, however,
apparently mocked the public outcry around an earlier text message scandal.
Last year, a group of San
Francisco police officers were shown to have sent racist, bigoted and
homophobic text messages to one another from 2011 to 2012. The texts emerged
out of a federal police corruption trial and resulted in Chief Greg Suhr
recommending that eight officers be fired and the rest be punished.
The new allegations come from a
review of roughly 5,000 pages of text messages that are part of a criminal
case, which Gascon did not name. The texts were sent from 2014 to 2015 by five
officers who were not party to the scandal surrounding the earlier racist
texts.
“The N word was used many times.
They are of the same nature…as what we saw last year,” said Gascon, who was
notified about the discovery this week. “These officers are completely
unconnected with the 14 we saw last year.”
Gascon told Chief Greg Suhr about
the new racist texts Wednesday so that the officers involved can be removed
from public contact while an investigation is underway.
The Police Department did not
immediately return a call for comment.
The District Attorney’s Office is
also planning to notify defense counsel in cases involving the five officers.
“We still don’t know the full
scope of the messages,” Gascon said.
While Gascon would not reveal
many details in the ongoing investigation, he did say the phones were private.
Whether they were used on duty is unclear.
The allegations call into
question claims made by some that the department has no issues with race, and
come amid numerous police reform efforts, some of which were spurred directly
as a result of previous revelations of bigotry in the ranks.
“No one can say with a straight
face now with these new text message that they are isolated,” said Gascon.
Gascon and a Blue Ribbon Panel he
formed last year to look into police bias have been under attack from the
Police Officers Association, which has said there are no issues of widespread
racial bias in the department.
Most recently, POA leaders gave
statements to their lawyers that they heard Gascon allegedly make racist
remarks while he was police chief, the job he held prior to becoming district
attorney.
Gascon called that claim “a lie.”
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