D. A. drops 8 cases over text scandal

The San Francisco district attorney’s office has dismissed eight criminal cases because they were investigated by one of 14 city police officers implicated in exchanging racist and homophobic text messages — officers whose judgment may have been clouded by bias, officials said Thursday.

Details of the eight cases were not disclosed, but they are among 3,000 cases the district attorney’s office is reviewing because of the text messages.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón provided an update into the review as he announced Thursday that three retired judges were joining a task force he established to probe into various scandals currently plaguing the city’s law enforcement community.

In addition to the text messages, which were sent in 2011 and 2012 and made public in March, the public corruption task force is looking into allegations that sheriff’s deputies forced County Jail inmates to fight each other, and reports that a police crime lab technician and her supervisor violated testing standards on DNA analysis.

The task force is reviewing past cases that may be affected by alleged misconduct. In the probe into the text messages, Gascón said, the task force will go further, looking not only at whether officers’ prejudices played a role in arrests, but also if the messages are indicative of deeper biases throughout the police force.

Gascón said this required bringing in three retired judges: former California Supreme Court Associate Justice Cruz Reynoso, former Santa Clara

County Judge and San Jose police auditor LaDoris Cordell, and former federal Judge Dickran Tevrizian Jr. Each will work on the task force without pay.

“They will determine how that bias translates to racially driven or biased police enforcement,” Gascón said. “They are guided only by the U. S. Constitution and the principles of equal justice that are the bedrock of our criminal justice system.”

The task force has so far identified more than 3,000 cases that had been processed by at least one of the 14 officers implicated in the bigoted text messages. Tevrizian said about 1,600 of those cases had resulted in convictions, while the other 1,400 were never prosecuted.

“I think this is very important because the Police Department is really the only barrier between the government and the Constitution of the United States,” Tevrizian said. “The policeman is the person out in the field that represents the government. The police officers need to abide by the constitutional protections that are guaranteed to each and every one of us as citizens of this country.”

Police Chief Greg Suhr said Thursday that while it was upsetting to see eight cases dropped over the text messages, it was expected.

“There’s just no way, as reprehensible as these text messages were, that there weren’t going to be any implications,” he said.

He welcomed Gascón’s expansion of the task force to include the retired judges.

“Just by the volume alone, it makes sense to get this done as quickly as possible,” Suhr said. “Certainly, if there are people in custody that shouldn’t be in custody because these officers exercised some sort of bias, then they’ve already been in jail too long.”

The Rev. Amos Brown, president of the local NAACP branch, stood with Gascón as he announced the task force. He said he supported Gascón’s efforts, and applauded his “courageous leadership.”

“For these texts to come out of the mind and heart of these officers, it speaks volumes,” Brown said. Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E- mail: vho@ sfchronicle. com Twitter: @ VivianHo