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| San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr makes his way to a podium before the start of a news conference Friday, April 29, 2016, in San Francisco. Suhr ordered that all officers attend an anti-harassment class, as he released more transcripts of a former lieutenant and two former officers exchanging racist text messages. |
SAN FRANCISCO
(AP) -- San Francisco's police chief said Friday that he has
ordered that all officers finish an anti-harassment class within the
next month amid a racist texting scandal that has rocked the department
already dogged by fatal shootings of unarmed minority suspects.
Flanked
by religious and minority community leaders at a San Francisco press
conference, Chief Greg Suhr also released more transcripts of racist and
homophobic text messages first made available to The Associated Press
along with inflammatory and inappropriate images found on former
officers' cellphones.
It's the second texting
scandal since 2014 in a department that is attempting to diversify its
officers to reflect the San Francisco culture and population. The
department of 2,100 was led by an Asian-American woman and a black man
before Suhr took over five years ago.
About
half the officers are white, roughly reflecting the white population in
San Francisco. Asians make up a third of the city population, but
account for about 16 percent of the officers. Close to 9 percent of its
officers are black, exceeding a city population of 6 percent, Suhr says he has no plans to resign and Mayor Ed Lee says he supports the chief.
Lee
sent an email letter to the entire department of nearly 2,100 officers
Thursday night calling on them to report colleagues who display
intolerant behavior.
Suhr said Friday that two
officers turned in by colleagues for suspected overtime abuse and
unauthorized access of driving records are being investigated by the
district attorney for possible criminal charges.
"I support Chief Suhr," said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of San Francisco's NAACP chapter.
Investigators
say they found the text messages on the personal phones of the officers
during criminal probes of former officer Jason Lai and retired Lt.
Curtis Liu.
"The vast majority of police
officers are shaken," Suhr said in an interview with The AP Wednesday
night. "The expectations have never been higher, so when officers do
something like this, the disappointment can't be greater."
The
names of those involved in the racist and homophobic conversations Suhr
provided were redacted. Suhr said that Lai, Liu and an unidentified
third former officer sent and received many of the messages. He also
said several civilians were involved in the conversations.
Lai
resigned earlier this month and Liu retired last year. Both are Chinese
Americans, according to Suhr. The unidentified officer, who is white,
also resigned. Suhr declined to identify a fourth officer implicated in
the texting scandal who is facing dismissal before the city's Police
Commission.
The newly provided transcripts
denigrate minority suspects with racial slurs and insult colleagues
perceived to be gay. The texts ridicule blacks in Ferguson, Missouri,
where police shot and killed an unarmed black man.
They
discuss a shootout among black men and the shooting of an armed suspect
by police. In doing so, they appear to ridicule the shooting death by
police in 2014 of a mentally ill man carrying a stun gun officers
mistook for a handgun.
They also exchanged photographs with racist captions.
One
photo depicts a white man playfully spraying a young black child with a
garden hose. The caption calls the boy a racial slur.
There's a photo of smoke rising above San Francisco and guesses are exchanged about the origins of the fire.
"Must be Korean BBQ," quips one.
"I heard was a slave ship!!" quips another.
Liu's
attorney Tony Brass said that the texts investigators turned over to
him show Liu only on the receiving end. Brass said he may not be privy
to all Liu's texts, only the ones that pertain to his criminal case.
"But
I can say that there (has) not been a single allegation that Curtis Liu
has ever displayed any racist behavior," Brass said.
Lai's attorney Don Nobles didn't return a call.
