What To Read This Week
1. “I'm only stopping them cuz they black”
In the summer of 2020, as tens of millions of Americans in small towns and big cities came together to protest the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, officers with the Antioch Police Department—a city of 115,000 in the East Bay Area of California—were texting each other violent, racist memes about Mr. Floyd and joking about killing the city’s mayor, who is Black, who took part in the protests:
These snippets are from a joint investigative report (part 1; part 2) released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office, which “documents some of the derogatory, homophobic, and sexually explicit language and photographs shared by members of the Antioch Police Department that demonstrates their racial bias and animus towards African Americans and other people of color in the community.”
Here are a few examples that aim to capture the breadth of the subject matter that officers—by some estimates involving nearly half of the department—exchanged on text thread:
Joking about and celebrating the shooting of a civilian:
Bragging About Racially Targeted Traffic Enforcement:
Discussing falsifying reports, evidence:
What we have here just skims the surface. You can read coverage of this growing scandal at CNN, CBS, NBC, Associated Press, PBS, The Guardian, and The Los Angeles Times. But this snippet from a Fox news story best captures the magnitude of the crisis:
“Antioch may never be the same…[the text messages] could jeopardize both past and present criminal cases. The Contra Costa County DA's office has already dropped 40 cases tainted by the officers involved and hinted that there may be many more to come… The sheer number of police officers on leave due to the scandals would amount to an ‘excessive amount of money’ needed to hire law enforcement officers from other agencies to fill in, for potential litigation, and outside independent investigations into the scandal, Mayor Thorpe said in a statement… ‘We're not going to pretend that we have a few issues with a few bad apples,’ Thorpe said. ‘It is clear we have cultural and systemic problems that persist to this very day.’
2. “The U.S. is among the worst at solving murders in the industrialized world.”
For National Public Radio, Eric Westervelt explains that “the rate at which murders are solved … has now dropped to slightly below 50% in 2020—a new historic low. And several big cities have seen the number of murder cases resulting in at least one arrest dip into the low to mid-30% range … That makes the U.S. among the worst at solving murders in the industrialized world. Germany, for example, consistently clears well over 90% of its murders.”
WHY IT MATTERS—as Westervelt reports: “Experts warn that more people getting away with murder in the the U.S. is driving a kind of doom loop of mutual mistrust: low murder clearance rates impede future investigations which in turn potentially drive up killings in some communities where a lack of arrests undermines deterrence and sends a message that the police will not or cannot protect them.”
3. Meanwhile, Police Unions Behaving Badly:
“A Transgression So Basic It’s Hard To Fathom: Working As A Police Officer In Two Cities In Different States.” Writing for the Willamette Week, Lucas Manfield reported on the unusual case of Brian Hunzeker, the former head of the Portland police union who was caught working full-time for two separate law enforcement agencies in two separate states, collecting paychecks from both simultaneously—the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon and the Clark County Sheriff’s Department in Washington State—“in apparent violation of one if not both of his employment contracts.” Here’s Manfield: “That means Hunzeker earned two nearly six-figure salaries for almost two months, an impressive accomplishment for an officer who was fired in disgrace only a year earlier. It remains unclear what the Portland Police Bureau was paying Hunzeker to do. There’s no indication he was on patrol in Portland—after all, he was on duty in Clark County four days a week… To some observers, that’s especially galling given how regularly the bureau bemoans a shortage of officers.”
Not The Mafia: Police Union Targets Decorated Officer For “Opposing Union Membership And Politics”. Connecticut State Police Sgt. Joseph Mercer served as a member of the state’s elite SWAT team, was one of the first responders at the Sandy Hook shooting, and—as resident trooper of a small town—was effectively the local chief of police. In other words, Joseph Mercer’s a cop’s cop. But the badge couldn’t shield him from a police union scorned. As Sgt. Mercer alleges in a recent retaliation lawsuit filed against the Connecticut State Police Union, when he decided to stop paying union dues because he disagreed with the politics of the union, the union actively lobbied to get him demoted from his supervisory role and even filed a formal grievance arguing that his appointment violated the union’s collective bargaining agreement because the union had no say in his selection. But here’s the tell: all the previous holders of the same position were selected in the same way. However, unlike Mercer, they were all dues-paying union members. So, the police union never complained. Mercer just settled the retaliation claim for over $266,500.