1. Oregon Mayor—A Retired Long-Time Police Officer—Resigns Over Discovery Of “Hateful” Posts In Private Law Enforcement Facebook Group.
For Oregon Public Broadcasting, Jonathan Levinson reports on Newport Mayor Dean Sawyer—elected in 2018 after a 30-year career as a police officer in the city—who resigned earlier this month following outrage that erupted over the discovery of “homophobic and racist” posts that he made to a private law enforcement-only Facebook group. OPB gained access to the secret Facebook group and independently verified Sawyer’s posts:
“The group, called ‘LEO Only,’ has 39,180 members [and] to join, a person must send moderators a photograph of their law enforcement identification next to an item showing that day’s date, such as a newspaper… Since 2016, Sawyer has posted racist memes mocking Mexicans… sex workers, Spanish speakers and victims of sexual assault… [and] joked about committing violence against women … Two photos shared by Sawyer appear to endorse extra-judicial murder. One reads, ‘If you have a clear shot and a good shovel, ain’t no need to call the police’... Another says, ‘It’s a proven fact that criminals commit less crime after they’ve been shot.’”
Related: The Antioch Police Department’s racist text messaging scandal keeps getting worse. Last week, police chief Steven Ford, a Black man, resigned as additional racist text messages surfaced, including one of a police officer referring to the chief as a “gorilla.” Here’s the text:
Officer Jonathan Adams writes: "Have you met the new (gorilla emoji) chief yet?"
“It's a disgusting situation,” Antioch’s mayor told the local ABC News affiliate. “I have no other words to describe how disappointed and disgusted I am… I read up until the chief was described as a gorilla. And that was enough in terms of what I needed to see.” Unfortunately, the new racist text messages that have come to light in recent weeks show that the “gorilla” text exchange isn’t the only racist exchange in which Officer Adams participated. Here’s an exchange that Anser Hassan reported on for ABC News 7 in San Francisco:
Officer Eric Rombough writes: “I'm really good at racial profiling.”
Officer Jonathan Adams responds: “I'm a trained expert. Learned from the best in the business.”
None of the officers involved in the racist text message scandal have been fired.
2. “What Are They Hiding? Las Vegas Annual Police Accountability Report Discontinued.”
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department made a sudden decision to stop producing their “annual” accountability report “documenting complaints made against police officers and the outcome of internal investigations into those complaints.” That’s according to reporting from the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s David Wilson, whom the police department told they scrapped the report because it no longer met their “business needs.”
Here’s the Review Journal’s Executive Editor, Glenn Cook, making the point that accountability and transparency should be core to any police department’s “business needs”:
“The decision to abandon production of the report after just one year is a red flag for the taxpaying public… ‘To take a big step forward in transparency and accountability, promise more and then drop the entire thing without explanation is astounding… Did the numbers get worse? What’s the public supposed to think?’”
This is hardly an issue limited to Las Vegas. Indeed, it’s rare to see a police department either providing truly transparent access to police misconduct records or consistently holding officers accountable for such misconduct, let alone both. Yet, as Mr. Cook put the point, “What’s the public supposed to think?”
To better understand public opinion on police misconduct, and the public’s demand for transparency around and accountability for misconduct, Protect and Serve conducted a national survey of 638 likely voters. We found:
Voters view police misconduct as a serious issue of national importance. 59% of voters—including 76% of Democrats—said that “police misconduct” is either “a major problem” or “one of the most serious problems facing the country.”
Even more striking, among Black voters, 55% said that police misconduct is “one of the most serious problems facing the country” and an additional 28% said that misconduct is “a major problem.”
Voters want more accountability. 63% of voters—including 79% of Democrats—said that “greater civilian oversight of police departments” is “very important” or “somewhat important.” As Fair and Just Prosecution, a law enforcement advocacy organization put it, “Civilian oversight can … help promote police accountability, enhance public safety, and deter police misconduct.”
Voters want more transparency. 71% of voters—including 56% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats—said that “creating a federal registry of disciplinary actions against officers” is “very important” or “somewhat important.” Supporters say the registry is important because it provides transparency to other jurisdictions and ensures that officers who are fired for misconduct in one jurisdiction can’t get hired in another jurisdiction without the new department knowing about the previous misconduct. The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the LAPD’s most influential police union, put it best: “If you’re a proven bad officer in any city, you should not be an officer in any other city.”
3. Two Profiles In Undermining Community Trust:
“Where the Sheriff Is King, These Women Say He Coerced Them Into Sex.” As Ilyssa Daly and Jerry Mitchell report in a joint investigation from The New York Times and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, “Sheriff Scott has repeatedly been accused of using the power of his position to harass women, coerce them into sex and retaliate against those who criticize him or allege abuse.” Here’s just one of the alarming claims that Daly and Mitchell relay:
“A local woman said the sheriff had repeatedly forced her into sex during her eight months in jail starting in 2017. When she began telling people after her release, she said, a sheriff’s deputy arranged to have drugs planted in her car — an allegation corroborated by a secretly recorded conversation with a man who said he had planted them.”
“Greenpoint Mystery Solved: Serial Litterer Was NYPD Sergeant.” For The Gothamist, Bahar Ostadan reports on the disturbing behavior of an NYPD sergeant:
“Nearly every Sunday morning for four years, residents of a quiet block in Greenpoint, Brooklyn woke up to reams of paper dumped on their street. A serial litterer was precisely slicing pages from old Reader’s Digests, Bibles, junk mail and 1970s porn magazines before dumping them on tree-lined Noble Street between Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street. Surveillance videos captured the driver tossing the pages from his car before sunrise.
…
“I need to stress to those who have yet to experience this phenomenon with their own eyes the SHEER VOLUME of papers floating down the street. It looks like the work of someone with an enormous collection of old books who spends their weekend tearing apart pages before scattering them in the wind,” wrote a former block resident, wondering if the litter was some “weird fetish.”
…
In April, the serial litterer was finally identified to residents as NYPD Sergeant John Trzcinski ... An NYPD probe resulted in discipline for Trzcinski: loss of one vacation day, according to public records. He was not fined or issued a summons by the sanitation department, which can run in the thousands of dollars.