Arbitrator probes demotion of guard in racist texts case
SAN JOSE — An arbitrator is poised to decide whether a sergeant with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office had an obligation to report that jail guards he worked with were exchanging vile, racist texts, including images of swastikas and Ku Klux Klan members in pointy white hoods.
The decision, expected any day now, will determine whether Sheriff Laurie Smith made the right call when she stripped Don Morrissey of his sergeant’s stripes in 2016 for failing to stop the guards and a fellow sergeant from sharing bigoted messages both on the job and off duty.
The group of about eight officers, including the president of the correctional officers union whom the sheriff fired, referred to Vietnamese as “g—,” Jews as “k—,” and black people as “n—” and “yard apes.” In one typical text, an officer wrote, “We could hang a n — in Haiti for about 75 bucks tops.”
Morrissey, who is president of the deputies’ union, was forced to take a 15 percent pay cut and will ultimately retire with a smaller pension for violating his duty to report misconduct that could discredit the Sheriff ’s Office — unless he wins in arbitration.
The case is noteworthy because it involves a supervisor disciplined for allegedly tolerating a culture of racism, rather than for sending racist texts. Across the country, law enforcement officers have either resigned, been suspended or been fired for sending racist missives.
The racist texts in Morrissey’s case surfaced in 2015 when the Sheriff’s Office — acting on a search warrant — seized the cellphone of an officer suspected of associating with a known member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. When the Mercury News exposed the texts, it touched off a wave of outrage and horror in the community, which was already reeling from the death of a mentally ill inmate at the hands of three jail guards who were ultimately convicted of murder.
Before disciplining Morrissey, Smith fired one of the most prolific texters in the ring, Lance Scimeca, president of the correctional officers union. It appears that Morrissey and Scimeca spent time together outside work, judging from a photo of them socializing at a San Diegoarea brewery in 2015, the same year the texts were exchanged.
Because Morrissey sued the county and the sheriff as well as took the case to arbitration to get his stripes back, other details in what would normally be a confidential personnel case have come to light.
Morrissey declined to comment, but the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association issued a statement saying that Morrissey “rejects racism and discrimination in all its forms.”