‘Bury That N—-r In My Fields’: California Police Needed DOJ to Help Them Curb Racism After Cops Exposed for Hateful Texts. Now They Must Submit to Federal Monitoring for Five Years

A civil rights investigation into a California police department and numerous racist texts exchanged between officers over a three-year period ended with a settlement with the Department of Justice outlining a few measures the police force must implement. The Antioch Police Department will have to hire a consulting firm to review and improve its policies on hiring and training, use of force, community policing, non-discriminatory policing, and misconduct investigations, among other areas. The agency must also submit to federal monitoring for the next five years. The Antioch Police Department in Northern California. (Photo: Google Maps) The settlement comes after a nearly two-year investigation that began in April 2023 when the Contra Costa County district attorney released racist and homophobic text messages that were sent between 2019 and 2022 in a chat group shared by 17 Antioch officers. In those texts, the group members bragged about beating Black suspects and manufacturing evidence, called Black people gorillas, monkeys, and the N-word, and even suggested shooting former Antioch Mayor Lamar Hernandez-Thorpe, who is Black, with a “less lethal” weapon such as a gun that fires rubber bullets. “I’ll bury that n—-r in my fields,” texted one sergeant to an officer in December 2020....