The San Francisco Police Department is facing a widening scandal over racist and homophobic text messages. And an additional three more officers supposedly received bigoted texts from Lai but did not respond, police said. “There are these festering views within the San Francisco Police Department, which unfortunately are now coming to light”, Adachi said. Police Chief Greg Suhr promised swift action, but we’ll see what he can do.
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The texts were sent on the police officers’ personal cell phones between late 2014 and late 2015.
Officer Jason Lai was charged with two misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of criminal history information and four misdemeanor counts of misuse of confidential Department of Motor Vehicles information, police said.
The four officers involved had either left the force or would face termination proceedings, according to San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr.
“It is horrifying from a purely operational point: Here we go again, having to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how many cases were impacted”, Gascon said.
“There were text messages of reprehensible, racist, homophobic nature”, said Suhr. Police officers with evidence of open bigots operating in their departments need to do the right thing, even if anonymously.
Police said that during the criminal investigation into Lai’s case, the department’s internal affairs investigators learned on August 8 that officers had sent racist and homophobic text messages. “Certainly to have officers like this among fine men and women in the department is disconcerting, but we will root them out”, he told The New York Times. Given the most recent discovery of officers sending racist text message, Mr Gascón is inclined to believe the issue is “deeper than just 14 officers”, NBC reported.
“For you to suggest that you discovered the text messages through your own criminal investigation would be disingenuous”, Suhr wrote. San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi says his office will immediately begin reviewing all the cases connected to the implicated officers for bias.
The union “condemns the appalling racist behavior committed by a handful of officers”.
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In addition to this development and the earlier texting scandal, the Examiner found last month that an anti-Black Lives Matter editorial from the Wall Street Journal had been posted on a bulletin board at Taraval Station. Despite this, no officers were fired because a judge ruled the department had waited too long to discipline them.
