California Police Department Agrees to Reforms After Federal Inquiry

The police department in the Northern California city of Antioch has agreed to be monitored by federal officials for five years after reports of racist and sexist texts by officers drew outrage and led to a civil rights investigation.

As part of the agreement, announced by the Justice Department on Friday, a law enforcement consulting firm will review and update the Bay Area police department’s policies on hiring and training, use of force, community policing and other areas.

“A police department that discriminates based on race and other protected classes undermines both public safety and public confidence,” Ismail J. Ramsey, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said in a news release. “Today’s agreement will help ensure that policing in Antioch is done constitutionally and will help restore public trust.”

In a statement on Friday, the Antioch Police Department acknowledged the settlement and said its cooperation with the Justice Department “underscores our dedication to fostering trust, transparency and accountability.”

The department also said it was cooperating with state officials in a separate civil rights inquiry.

In April 2023, the district attorney in Contra Costa County released text messages obtained during an F.B.I. investigation into the police in Antioch and Pittsburg, another Bay Area city, that were shared between officers in group chats and direct exchanges dating to 2019.

In the messages, officers used racist slurs to describe Black people, bragged about the use of force and, during the protests in 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers, used slurs against Mr. Floyd and mocked the public outrage against racism in law enforcement.

In one message, an officer talked about potentially shooting Lamar Hernandez-Thorpe, Antioch’s former mayor, who is Black, with a firearm that uses rubber or other less-lethal bullets.

The investigation that uncovered the messages also led to four federal indictments, involving 10 Antioch and Pittsburg police officers, for a slew of crimes, including the illegal distribution of drugs, faking records to get pay raises and improperly siccing dogs on unarmed residents.

Six officers, including two from Antioch, have been convicted of falsifying records to get raises. Some of the indicted officers have pleaded guilty or have trials pending on the other charges.

The Justice Department’s agreement with Antioch may be one of the last inked under the Biden administration to address abuses by the police after ramping up efforts during its term to improve public safety. As President Biden’s term draws to a close, it is uncertain whether the agency will continue holding local police departments accountable in the same way under President-elect Donald J. Trump.

In the past month, the Justice Department has struck tentative deals to reform the police departments in Louisville, Ky., and Minneapolis — two epicenters of the social justice protests of 2020 — as well as to improve the conditions at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. All three must still be approved by a judge. In Minneapolis, the agreement first needs to be approved by the City Council.

Unlike those agreements, the Antioch settlement is not a consent decree — an arrangement with the federal government involving monitoring that is overseen by a court.

In the Bay Area, some civil rights advocates expressed wariness about Antioch’s pledge to institute reforms, and saw the findings of investigations into the department as indicative of a much larger problem.

“We are concerned because the Antioch Police Department’s actions reflect deep-seated racial injustice in policing across the Bay Area that disproportionately harms Black and brown communities,” Nisha Kashyap, an official with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement. The agreement is a necessary step, she said, “but it must lead to real change, not superficial fixes.”

In a statement, Mr. Hernandez-Thorpe, who lost his re-election bid in November, praised the deal and said that, as a result, his administration had met its goal of “reforming the culture of racism” that he said had plagued the department for decades.

Mr. Hernandez-Thorpe has said his city’s police force was slashed by about half and left severely understaffed after the indictments came in August 2023. His successor, Ron Bernal, is tasked with continuing the recovery of staffing levels. The city, like others with shortages, has turned to financial incentives to attract new officers.