Is ignoring racist texts worth a demotion?
Don Morrissey was stripped of his sergeant’s stripes in 2016 for failing to stop the sharing of bigoted messages both on the job and off-duty
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.
Other details in the Morrissey case have come to light in what would normally be a confidential personnel case after he sued the sheriff and the county to get his stripes back.
Morrissey declined to comment. But the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association issued a statement saying that Morrissey “rejects racism and discrimination in all its forms.”
“His only mistake was he was too busy to read every word of a long string of stupid, offensive text messages,’’ the statement said. “Even though Don didn’t do anything wrong he got dragged into this whole affair because the sheriff is a petty tyrant who views Don as a threat.’’
Morrissey had joined in at least one text string peppered with bigoted slurs against blacks, but he was cleared of sending racist messages because he did not use any epithets and denied being aware of the racially charged context.
The independent investigation commissioned by the sheriff’s office was conducted by former Oakland police chief Howard Jordan, who is African-American. The arbitrator in the case, Morris E. Davis, is also black.
LaDoris Cordell, a retired African-American judge and former San Jose independent police auditor who has sharply criticized Smith since the three jail guards fatally beat the mentally ill man on her watch, said supervising officers are not supposed to turn a blind eye to misconduct.
“It’s a policy obligation and a moral obligation,’’ she said. “You’re complicit if you don’t stop it or report it.’’
Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the Silicon Valley NAACP, said the sheriff should have fired Morrissey rather than demote him.
“A good department would flush him out whether the messages were off duty or on duty,’’ he said, “especially since there is a pattern here of repeated problems with this officer.’’
According to court documents, this was the second time Smith demoted Morrissey. About five years ago, she knocked him down a notch from lieutenant to sergeant after investigators concluded he had spent more than a hour a day looking at pornography on a work computer and had tried to persuade an employee to conceal the evidence.
Morrissey claims that both demotions were politically motivated because of the sheriff’s fear that he might someday run against her. Correctional deputy Charles Ramirez, who trained rookie jail guards and sent one text with the word “n——,” was not investigated or disciplined.
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.
The sheriff had indeed expressed concern about Morrissey’s political potential prior to the porn incident
and wanted to fire him once it occurred, according to depositions by retired members of her administration — including former Undersheriff John Hirokawa, who is running against Smith in the upcoming June election. Since then, Smith has routinely disparaged Morrissey, they said.
The relationship soured even more after the union endorsed Smith’s opponent in the 2014 election — and now that it has endorsed Hirokawa in hopes of defeating her current bid for a sixth term. In his deposition, Hirokawa said he believed deputies, including sergeants, may not be obligated to report racist remarks
if they are made offduty.
“On duty we have on duty conduct. Off duty, again, depending on the — let’s just say the stage or the context of what’s going on. Like is this like bantering. You know, it depends. It depends,’’ he said in his deposition. He later added in response to repeated questions by a lawyer for the county that, “I personally don’t consider it bantering.”
Smith has declined to comment, citing confidential personnel matters. In her deposition, however, she denied viewing the texts as a political opportunity, calling them “disgusting,’’ “horrible’’ and “hate-filled.’’ She
also said she believed that everyone involved in the incident should have been fired, including Morrissey.
But Smith chose to follow the recommendation of a member of her administration, who was responsible for determining the appropriate sanction after evaluating whether there were reasonable grounds for believing Morrissey engaged in misconduct.
“This was a political black mark against the sheriff’s office,’’ she said. “This is not representative of our employees.’’