Lai’s te xts, how ever, a re co unter to Suhr’s statement that he’d rooted out the bad apples in the department. The texts date back to October 2014, and in them Lai uses racials slurs targeting black and Hispanic people, SFGate reports.
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The announcement of the charges may be another black eye for the department, which is still reeling over the release of several explicit text messages exchanged by officers that contained homophobic and racist messages.
“They’re like a pack if (sic) wild animals on the loose”, Lai said in reference to black people on April 27, 2015. A Cantonese slur for black people was used several times a year ago while describing a shooting and ridiculed a suspect who sustained gunshot wounds. Too bad none of them died. “One less to worry about”.
“It is chilling how casually former officer Lai dehumanizes the citizens he was sworn to serve”, Adachi said in a statement.
“He wished violence upon the very people he was being paid to protect and none of his colleagues turned him in”, Adachi said.
Suhr said that his department had provided the text messages to the Public Defender’s office after accessing cell phone records during the murder investigation. Their messages have not been provided to the public defender.
He said it appears the texts were exchanged when the officers were off-duty. Are there no real crimes for them to fight?
The release of the text messages comes at a time where accusations of racism and police brutality have roiled the SFPD.
Over Lai’s six years years as an SFPD officer, he made arrests resulting in 207 criminal cases, all of which are now under additional scrutiny due to his apparently biased remarks, Adachi says. Lai and one of the three remaining officers implicated in the texting scandal have resigned. “It is corroding community trust and making it harder for good officers to do their jobs”.
A San Francisco police officer is accused of sending racist and homophobic text messages and now those messages have been released.
On August 7, a woman went to San Francisco General Hospital for injuries she received during a sexual assault five days prior. It does them a grave disservice to dismiss every hateful act as an isolated incident.
Sgt. Yolanda Williams, who was the target of some of the text message released last year, said a year ago, “We know that this is not an isolated incident”.
He apologized to San Francisco and said officers who share racist views aren’t welcome in his department.
Police Chief Greg Suhr says Lai and three other officers exchanged inappropriate texts and that three of them have either quit or retired since last summer.
Suhr said he had a “visceral reaction” to reading the messages.
“You can have the chief say ‘We need to clean house, ‘ but it has to come from the officers themselves, ‘” Adachi said. I’m going to tell you something. It is outright bigotry and hatredness.
“There is a certain mean-spiritedness, an attitude in the department”, said the Rev. Amos C. Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP. Lai resigned from the department earlier in April.
In a letter sent to California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Adachi details a near-constant stream of scandals involving the department’s use-of-force policies, racially lopsided enforcement strategies, and bigoted text messages exchanged between two separate groups of officers.
Text messages from November 28, 2014 – the same day that protesters marched through San Francisco’s Union Square for a Black Friday demonstration – showed Lai calling the activists “f–in” N-words and talking to a friend about shooting them.
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The U.S. Justice Department has launched a collaborative review with the department, falling short of the federal civil rights investigation critics of the department called for.
