Newly revealed text messages sent by police in Antioch, California show that officers for years engaged in racist conduct and celebrated their own brutality while facing no pushback at all from superiors.
Among other things, the Mercury News reports, officers in Antioch made racist jokes about offering a "prime rib dinner" to anyone who shot Mayor Lamar Thorpe with projectiles often used on protesters.
Other messages show officers boasting about violence they inflicted on others while at times lamenting they didn't go further in making alleged perpetrators suffer.
One particularly egregious text sent by Antioch Officer Eric Rombough lamented that the injuries he inflicted on a suspect wouldn't be as readily visible as he had hoped.
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“I was bummed that beast was so fat cuz he didn’t bruise up very fast,” he said.
Text messages from multiple officers showed them referring to Black people as "gorillas,” “monkeys” and “water buffalo," and one officer even boasted to an officer in a nearby city that he could use the N-word in group texts without any fear of being reprimanded.
Mayor Thorpe slammed his city's officers for the racist text messages in an interview with Mercury News.
"There are times where I’ve asked the police department to circle my house because my daughter’s there by herself,” Thorpe said. “And this is the type of animus they have toward people like me and my daughter? I’m just so disgusted right now. I can’t even describe it.”
