In racist police text scandal, US town sees echoes of an intolerant past
From an early age, Shagoofa Khan felt propelled to make her community a better place. Growing up in Antioch – a small city one hour north-east of San Francisco, where the industrial landscape of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta meets the rolling pastures of Contra Costa county – the now 22year-old activist witnessed the effects of racial and socioeconomic inequality on a daily basis.
At 15, after seeing peers succumb to gang violence, she trained and worked as a teen conflict manager. Once she graduated from high school, Khan – who is the child of immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan – ran for local office as a school board trustee, and later became a student senator at Los Medanos Community College.
After transferring to UC Berkeley, Khan grew active in the racial justice protests that came after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Seeing “the same culture as the Minneapolis police department in the Antioch police department, where there was a lack of transparency and accountability”, she felt compelled to help organize Black Lives Matter demonstrations in her home town that summer, she said.
Khan’s prominence as an outspoken police critic during the 2020 protests elevated her on the radar of Antioch law enforcement, she said. Khan claims that law enforcement placed a tracker on her car and followed her movements in the months after the protests. In 2021, she was arrested on arson charges for allegedly setting fire to a “Blue Lives Matter” flag, which had been placed outside the city’s police headquarters by the mother of a fallen officer. “They wanted to make an example out of me,” she said.
Two weeks ago, Khan learned that the department’s disdain for her ran even deeper than she previously knew.
On 11 April, Khan discovered that she was among the numerous Antioch community members named in violently racist, misogynistic and antigay text messages exchanged by city law enforcement officers between 2019 and 2022. Those texts, first reported by the East Bay Times, surfaced out of a year-long investigation into police misconduct in Antioch and neighboring Pittsburg conducted by the FBI and the Contra Costa county district attorney’s office. The investigation was spurred by a litany of civil rights violations, assault incidents and cheating accusations against the departments.
In the texting groups, some of which included supervisors, officers bragged about beating up local residents, and debased Black people as “gorillas” and “water buffalo”. By Tuesday, more than 45 officers – nearly half of the city’s 99-person squad – had been implicated in the racist behavior. On 18 April, the city council voted unanimously to audit the department, which has failed to conduct internal reviews since 2017.
When Khan saw that officers with whom she had interacted described her in Islamophobic and sexualizing terms, she was horrified. “I just wanted to hide in a bubble and be away from all this,” she said. But she soon felt compelled to speak out.
“I remembered the whole reason I got involved was because of the victims and the people who have been brutalized and ultimately ended up getting killed by this department,” said Khan. “This is a point of justice.”
Like Khan, many Antioch locals have been stunned by the revelations. But few are surprised. Since the early 2000s, the historically white city has grown in size and diversity. For Black and brown residents, as well as city leaders, the scandal is a reminder of the city’s intolerant past, an indicator of the systemic undercurrent of racism in some of its crucial departments, and a signal to the work that remains to be done to achieve equity in Antioch.
The Antioch police department did not respond to a request for comment on the racist texts or Shagoofa Khan’s allegations.
A shift in demographics
In the late 1950s, Tina Trail’s parents moved their young family out of nearby Pittsburg – a Bay Area city noted for its diversity at the time – to Antioch. “They didn’t want us to go to school with Black kids,” said Trail, whose mother was part American Indian and father identified as Mexican. Antioch, unlike Pittsburg, was almost entirely white.
In many respects, Antioch was designed that way. During the California Gold Rush, Chinese residents were barred from the city’s streets after sunset, and banned entirely starting in 1876, a trauma for which current mayor Lamar Thorpe apologized in 2021. Informally, especially among Black people, Antioch continued to be regarded as a “sundown town” for much of the 20th century, meaning that it was known to be unsafe for people of color after dark.
Trail remembers that there was not a single Black student in her high school graduating class. When Debbie Joseph, a local store clerk who has lived in Antioch her whole life, graduated three years later, just two of her classmates were Black.
People of color continued to encounter racism and hostility as the decades passed. One barber in the city’s Rivertown district, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of backlash, described experiencing racial harassment as a young child while visiting 1980s Antioch. “My parents and I went to the movies, and as soon as we got out of the car, a truckload of white dudes pulled up and said, ‘You better be out of here by sunset’,” he said.
In 1996, a Black student at Antioch high school was punished for ripping down a swastika described as the “flag of a fallen government” in a second world war exhibit. His actions were later recognized with an award from the Holocaust Oral History Project.
Antioch’s demographics have since shifted dramatically. According to the Census Bureau, its population grew from 90,000 in 2000 to more than 115,000 in 2020 – an increase of more than 25%. And while Antioch’s residents were over 65% white 20 years ago, today, white residents make up about 35% of the city’s population. In 2020, 20% of the city identified as Black or African American, and 35% of the city identified as Hispanic or Latino (up from 9% and 22% in 2000, respectively).
The trends are symptomatic of widespread micro-migrations that have reshaped the San Francisco Bay Area in recent decades: as the cost of living in historically diverse cities such as Oakland and San Francisco has become increasingly prohibitive, lower-income families – many of them Black and brown – have moved to more affordable places like Antioch.
The changes are evident in every stratum of the city, from schools to law enforcement – Antioch’s current chief of police, Dr Steven A Ford, is Black – to local government. When Monica Wilson moved to Antioch from Los Angeles in 2006, she said, the city council was made up entirely of “older white men”. In 2012, she became the first Black woman to serve on it.
Today, the five-member city council is majority female and majority Black – including a Black mayor. But to Wilson, the revelations about widespread racism in the police department “suggest that this majority council means nothing”.
“[It] reminds me of Black Wall Street,” said Wilson, referring to the post-civil war bastions of Black prosperity that, during the 20th century, were destroyed by redlining, the razing of entire neighborhoods, or, in the case of Tulsa Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921, deliberate incineration during a deadly race massacre.
“They were burned down by white people that were like, ‘Hey, we don’t want to see you thrive,’” Wilson continued. But while a certain contingent of the city wants to go back in time, Wilson is clear that “Antioch is moving forward”.
‘Heartbreak and disappointment’
Antioch is also a city that takes pride in its law enforcement. In the downtown corridor, blue flags honoring officers and veterans hang from lampposts, making that culture clear to visitors.
Sara, a local insurance professional, believes that Antioch needs a police presence to help resolve crime and safety issues. But she believes the department needs to be completely restructured in order to make that happen – and that starts with terminating the implicated officers. “You can’t be a criminal and a cop,” she said.
Trail remembers being told as a child that if she ever felt unsafe, she should approach a police officer. Now, she fears for the wellbeing of her brown grandchildren. “I totally lost respect for the police force,” Trail said. “How will my grandkids grow up? Who will they ask for help?”
“Ultimately, these are the people we trust to keep us safe,” echoed Wilson. Now, she said, if someone in Antioch calls the police hoping for assistance, they will have concerns about who is going to show up and whether that officer will act in their best interests, especially if they are a woman, person of color or member of the LGBTQ+ community.
For the barber in Rivertown, the scandal only confirmed what he already knew. “It didn’t surprise me. What surprised me is how many officers were involved,” he said.
“California is one of the most liberal places in the country,” he continued, before noting that “all you have to do is go to certain towns” to find racism and bigotry.
Antioch’s mayor, Lamar Thorpe, says he thinks that the recent revelations will floor even police champions. “For those who are religious supporters of the police department, I think there is a lot of heartbreak and disappointment,” he said. “I think they feel somewhat betrayed.”
For Thorpe and Wilson, the scandal also carries with it a personal heaviness. As two of the city’s three Black lawmakers, many of the colleagues they encounter on a day-to-day basis are in law enforcement. Thorpe was named directly in the text messages when one officer offered to buy dinner for a colleague in exchange for them shooting the mayor with a rubber bullet.
“You think to yourself, was this person thinking this about me?” said Wilson, alluding to the vile terms the officers used in reference to both women and Black people. “It’s very personal.”
For Thorpe, events like this magnify the intergenerational trauma experienced by Black people in the US. “Things like this … take us to places that we can envision, but have never been,” he said. “We don’t know what the chains looked like, but we have a clear understanding of what it felt like.”
Exposing ingrained biases
To re-establish a trusting relationship between law enforcement and the people of Antioch, community leaders are adamant that systemic changes must be made. Removing the implicated officers from the force, while necessary, is not enough, said Thorpe. (At present, several officers have been placed on administrative leave, but no firings have been announced.)
“[There is still a] sense that police are there to protect white people from Black people,” said Thorpe, explaining how racism in the police department perpetuates existing social biases.
Wilson, too, says she thinks that the FBI probe has pulled back the curtain to expose something bigger. “This is a sign of something that is cultural and ingrained,” she said.
Moving forward will require people in positions of power, including law enforcement officers, to recognize their biases, said Mark DeSaulnier, who represents Antioch and California’s 10th congressional district. “If we can’t recognize this in the Bay Area, then it makes it harder for the rest of the country,” he said. In the coming months, that process will unfold in federal courtrooms. John Burris, an acclaimed civil rights attorney, has filed a federal lawsuit against the city and members of its police department on behalf of five people who claim victimization from local law enforcement. He sees a possible “golden opportunity” to create meaningful change in what he characterized as a “throwback to old southern plantation justice” in which the police showed “no regard for [the victims] as human beings”.
“The time has come for this case,” said Burris, who represented Rodney King against the Los Angeles police department in 1993 and has spent his career fighting police misconduct.
As one of the plaintiffs in Burris’s case, Shagoofa Khan is hopeful that the lawsuit will lead to change in the department.
“I’m not anti-police. I don’t hate all officers,” said Khan. “I believe in accountability.”