California Police Officers' Bigoted Text Messages Have Just Undone Dozens Of Felony Cases

from the it's-time-to-keep-the-streets-free-of...-racist-cops dept

Racism and policing go hand-in-hand. It's been this way ever since police forces were created for the purpose of tracking down escaped slaves and returning them to their owners. Flash forward 150 years and very little has changed other than the ending of slavery.

Unsurprisingly, the advent of social media platforms and the increase in smartphone use has exposed the racism that still flows through far too many law enforcement agencies. Multiple investigations have been triggered by the exposure of bigoted communications between officers. It hasn't exactly resulted in a nationwide reckoning for racist officers, but it has at least seen a few bad apples tossed from barrels across the country.

If cops aren't worried about what happens to them -- as is evidenced by their carefree deployment of casual racism -- it's doubtful they're too worried about what happens to the general public. They claim to be the thin blue line standing between us and criminal chaos, but their racist words are erasing that line, allowing criminal suspects to return to the streets.

The Torrance Police Department in California is the epicenter of the latest garbage racist cop shitstorm. And rightfully so, given what's been uncovered there. Convictions and pending criminal cases are now in jeopardy because of officers texting each other things like this:

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.

Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times -- which includes open investigations into some of these officers -- shows the Torrance PD has a racism problem, one it is now forced to confront. It's one thing when it's officers being lousy human beings. That can be swept under the rug. It's quite another when dozens of criminal cases might be tossed because these officers have shown they can't be trusted on the streets, much less in court.

While no officers currently face criminal charges in direct relation to the text messages, the racist exchanges have led to the dismissal of at least 85 criminal cases involving the officers implicated in the scandal. County prosecutors had tossed 35 felony cases as of mid-November, and the Torrance city attorney’s office has dismissed an additional 50, officials said.

The bleeding is unlikely to stop there. Records from the District Attorney's office shows the officers implicated in this new scandal are (or were) listed as potential witnesses in nearly 1,400 cases spanning the last decade. The LA County public defender's office has been swamped since this information came to light, receiving nearly 300 letters disclosing possible misconduct by officers during one single week in November.

The officers didn't just target black people with these texts. They also joked about "gassing" Jews, assaulting (sexually or otherwise) LGBTQ persons, assaulting suspects, and lying during investigations.

It's possible this hatred and misconduct would never have been exposed. But two officers apparently felt untouchable enough that they felt comfortable spray-painting a swastika on a vehicle they towed following a report of mail theft. An investigation into the actions of Officers Cody Weldin and Christopher Tomsic uncovered racist messages originating from Tomsic.

District attorney’s records reviewed by The Times showed Tomsic sent a slew of racist images and messages, including a picture of former President Reagan feeding a monkey with a caption stating Reagan “used to babysit [former President] Obama.”

Another picture he sent referred to an “African American baby” as a “Pet Niguana,” according to the records, and he also sent a message mocking the fact that he was the subject of a racial profiling complaint.

“So we totally racially profiled his ass, haha … Shopping at 7/11 while Black, he didn’t know the rules lol,” Tomsic wrote, according to the records.

That led to the exposure of more bigoted messages from cops. There are a total of 18 officers implicated. The names of thirteen of those officers are known and have been published by the LA Times. Several of those officers have been investigated for deploying excessive force or killing citizens. In almost every case, they've been cleared of wrongdoing.

Fortunately, the Torrance PD seems to be taking this seriously. It has given the DA's office 200 gigabytes of data covering officers' text messages. And the DA's office has been ensuring this information is passed on to the public defender's office, so both parties can determine what cases might be affected by these cops and their racist attitudes.

But cops don't just start sending racist texts to each other without feeling comfortable doing it. At some level, the Torrance PD made it clear this sort of behavior was, at minimum, ignored, if not actively tolerated. Now, these self-proclaimed protectors of the innocent have shown they only care about certain people, and are apparently willing to set criminals free rather than reign in their bigoted impulses.

Filed Under: bigotry, california, police, torrance, torrance police

Institute For Justice Survey Shows How Philadelphia's Forfeiture Program Preyed On Poor Minorities

from the I-guess-the-gov't-feels-minorities-just-haven't-been-oppressed-enough dept

The Institute for Justice managed to kill off most of Philadelphia's severely abused civil forfeiture program in 2018. Litigation resulted in a consent decree that banned law enforcement from seizing cash amounts less than $250 and seizures of less than $1,000 were forbidden unless accompanied by criminal charges or if the seizure was to be used as evidence in a trial.

This consent decree was necessary because the Philly PD had abused the system for years, taking minute amounts of cash off anyone they arrested as part of a catch-and-release program where alleged criminals were free to go but the PD held onto the cash. Officers were also caught buying seized houses at auction, flipping them to turn a profit, and incentivizing even more bogus property seizures.

Of course, the PD took the "evidence" loophole and ran with it, seizing vehicles as supposedly instrumental to prosecutions that never happened before auctioning them off and pocketing the money.

The Institute for Justice has doubled back on the impetus of its lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia, surveying victims of forfeiture programs and coming up with plenty of reasons why residents should be thrilled these programs are now (mostly) dead.

Its report [PDF] on Philly forfeiture surveyed 407 residents, resulting in data that shows the PD targeted minorities frequently and poor minorities most frequently of all.

The demographic characteristics of Philadelphia forfeiture victims look quite different from those of Philadelphians overall. Figure 1 disaggregates the racial and ethnic makeup of the sample, showing the large majority of respondents were Black. Indeed, as Figure 2 shows, Philadelphia forfeiture victims are more likely to be Black than the general population. They are also more likely to earn lower incomes and be unemployed and less likely to have a college degree or own their homes. These results suggest Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture machine disproportionately entangled members of disadvantaged communities.

This is partly a result of biased policing efforts, which continues to be a problem for law enforcement everywhere, not just in Philadelphia. But targeting low income residents also ensured the Philly PD would be more likely to retain ownership of seized property. Residents making less than $50,000 a year had lower amounts taken from them and often lacked the funds to seek their property's return. With legal fees approaching $3,500 for a successful return effort, most chose to simply walk away from the forfeited property, rather than spend time and money they didn't have fighting against a system designed to deter them from retrieving seized property.

When it comes to forfeiture in Philadelphia, no job is too small:

Police seized as little as $25 in cash, a cologne gift set worth $20 and crutches.

As the report points out, the median value for seized property was just $600. More than 50% of seizures were amounts less than $600. Nearly 70% were for less than $2,000. Less than one-quarter were for more than $3,000 -- an amount that might turn a legal battle for the return of property into a breakeven effort.

But even the initial step in recovering property was often bypassed by the city. You can't try to reclaim property if there's no record of the police taking it from you -- something police officers appear to have used to their advantage.

More than half of respondents—58%—never received a receipt for their property at the time of seizure, and two thirds did not receive any information from police about how to begin the process of getting their property back. A simple receipt may not sound like much in the grand scheme of the complex civil forfeiture process, but people who received a receipt at the time of seizure were eight times more likely to get their property back than those who did not.

As for the argument that confiscating cologne sets and crutches is essential to fighting crime, the stats don't back that up. In most cases, forfeitures were completely removed from criminal convictions or even criminal charges.

Of those respondents who ultimately lost their property to forfeiture, more than half (56%) were never charged with a crime, and three-quarters were never found guilty of any wrongdoing—that is, they were not convicted of a crime, nor did they enter into any sort of plea deal with the court.

As we've covered extensively at Techdirt, abusive forfeiture programs aren't unique to Philadelphia. They're everywhere. It's only in recent years that legislators have decided to do something about abuses entities like the Institute of Justice have highlighted, reported on, and sued about for years. Things are changing for the better in many places, but more work still needs to be done to push cops back to earning their money honestly, rather than just taking stuff because they can.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, bigotry, civil asset forfeiture, legalized theft, philadelphia, poverty, racism
Companies: institute for justice

Police Union Responds To Outing Of Officers' Bigoted Social Media Posts By Offering To Erase Officers' Online Presences

from the getting-the-fix-in dept

An investigation called the "Plain View Project" has uncovered a truly disturbing amount of bigoted, violent social media posts by police officers located all over the United States. The entire database of posts is located here. Anyone wanting to see what their public servants truly think about the people they serve can click through and be horrified.

It would be horrifying enough if officers just kept their thoughts to themselves and let those thoughts guide their actions. But these are public posts able to be viewed by anyone and these officers apparently had no qualms about displaying the content of their character. This is just a small sampling:

“Just another savage that needs to be exterminated,” wrote Booker Smith Jr., a Dallas police sergeant, about a homicide at a Dollar General store. “Execute all involved,” he wrote separately about a group of teens who were accused of killing a 6-year-old. (One defendant pleaded guilty to aiding in the kidnapping. The alleged shooter and another defendant’s trials are scheduled for later this year.)

Reuben Carver III, a Phoenix officer, proclaimed in a stand-alone post, “Its a good day for a choke hold.”

And in St. Louis, Officer Thomas Mabrey shared a false news report that distorted an incident in which a woman police officer was shot responding to a call from a Moroccan man in Lebanon, Ohio. “F these muslem turd goat humpers,” he wrote, one of numerous anti-Muslim posts.

Lovely. That's the mindset of far too many cops. The people they interact with daily are viewed as subhuman garbage only worthy of a beating or a bullet. The good news is that since the publication of this database, the hammer is starting to fall.

A whopping 21 Dallas police officers are under investigation for “racist or violent” Facebook posts, which were uncovered by the Plainview Project. Four others have been placed on administrative leave, the Dallas police chief announced Friday.

Things have gone even further in Philadelphia, where officers are actually losing their jobs over their Facebook posts.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross announced Thursday that 13 officers will be terminated over violent or discriminatory Facebook posts.

The announcement comes after an internal review of a database detailing thousands of social media posts made by police, some of which contained homophobic comments, anti-Muslim slurs or calls to violence.

And you can kiss your "just a few bad apples" notions goodbye.

Seventy-two officers were already removed from street duty over their posts.

These are all rational responses to the public outing of law enforcement officers as not-so-closeted bigots and homophobes. Then there are the clearly irrational responses, emanating almost exclusively from police unions.

In Philadelphia, the Fraternal Order of Police has expressed its "disappointment" that the PD would actually punish officers for their hate-filled social media posts. Of course, unions like this also express their disappointment when cops are punished for literally any act, including unjustifiable homicide.

But the prize for most idiotic response (so far!) goes to the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association. PLEA doesn't seem to believe the bigoted posts by police officers are problematic. No, the real issue here -- according to PLEA -- is that the posts were seen by outside eyes. PLEA doesn't want better officers. It only wants less accountable officers.

After dozens of Phoenix police officers were caught posting racist memes and praising violence on Facebook, Phoenix police union president Michael London said the union plans on purchasing a service that will "scrub" police officers' information from the Internet.

"The Facebook investigation is still going on," London said Thursday in a video shared on the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association's Facebook page. "We had our monthly board meeting this past Tuesday, and Franklin Marino has contacted a service that will scrub your name from the internet. It's more of a security and privacy type thing. There's some more information about it on the members-only Facebook."

"We think right now with the numbers we have, it would cost you about $3 a month, but we're still trying to contact the provider of this and see if we can work out a deal," London said.

That's the solution. Just pay and make it all go away. The union head is so secure in his delusion he actually claimed this wasn't about making stuff vanish, but rather to "protect" officers from people attacking them online. Yep, it's the bigoted cops who are the real victims here.

Speech has consequences. The police union is trying to exempt Phoenix police officers from this rule. It won't work. The internet is forever. But it will give Phoenix residents even more reasons to distrust their public servants.

Filed Under: bigotry, plain view project, police unions, social media, social media monitoring