In San Jose, four cops in 2020 engaged in racist commentary in a private Facebook group dubbed 10-7ODSJ — Police code for a fire alarm or prowler — where one remarked “black lives don’t matter” and others shared a “Sharia Barbie” meme depicting a Muslim woman with a black eye and “stoning accessories.”

Around the same time in Oakland, a group of current and former officers shared racist and sexist memes on an Instagram account they called @crimereductionteam — one featured a White woman “cop that just wants to fight crime” surrounded by leering Black men labeled as criminals, command staff and police overseers.

From coast to coast, discriminatory banter has turned up in private message groups linked to law enforcement that critics say captures an undercurrent of racism among police dating back decades.

So this past week when the Bay Area News Group obtained documents detailing how more than two dozen Antioch Police officers shared phone text messages boasting of beating suspects and calling Black people “gorillas,” it renewed public outrage and raised a recurring question: How can people know if the officers sworn to protect them are bigots?

“I’m not surprised you have people with these ideas, I’m surprised it was made public and that the officers’ names were made public,” said Oakland civil rights lawyer Adanté Pointer. “That’s what we’ve been fighting for all these years — transparency.”

There is evidence — thanks to a series of new disclosure laws aimed at helping weed out abusive cops — that transparency is starting to pay off.

The Antioch text message revelations were stunning in a diverse city of 115,000 in which the mayor and police chief are Black and more than one in five residents is Black, one in three Hispanic and one in eight Asian. The racist messages evoked comments exchanged by cops in Los Angeles in 1991 leading up to the notorious videotaped beating of Rodney King — comments that turned a spotlight on concerns over police bias and excessive force in the post-civil rights era.

As with the Los Angeles messages some 30 years earlier, the Antioch texts only surfaced in the context of a criminal probe. The FBI and county district attorney had been investigating alleged excessive force, fraud, bribery and drug distribution among Antioch and Pittsburg officers. Agents found the texts dating back to 2019 after seizing officers’ personal phones in January 2022, and a judge ordered their release to attorneys this month. Otherwise, the public likely would not have known.

Several Antioch residents said at a City Council meeting last week that the disclosure validated their longstanding sense that city officers were biased against them. But how could they prove it?

While the racist banter wasn’t necessarily illegal, it runs afoul of city and department policies. Recent laws require departments to disclose disciplinary records of certain types of officer misconduct and establish a process for the state to decertify problem cops so they can’t work for other departments.

One of those laws, SB 1421 in 2018, was considered groundbreaking in California, a state with strong police unions. It allowed public access to records concerning officers discharging their firearms, using force resulting in injury or death and committing misconduct involving sexual assault or dishonesty.

A follow-up bill, SB 16, in 2021 broadened disclosure requirements involving the use of force and added misconduct findings about unlawful arrests and searches and — most importantly in the cases of Antioch, San Jose and Oakland — prejudice or discrimination. Now, it is possible for officers’ racist remarks and actions to become public, assuming their department discovered the wrongdoing first.

“This is exactly why we needed the provision about the public being able to access any records where an officer has been shown to have repeatedly engaged in racist conduct,” said state Sen. Nancy Skinner, the East Bay Democrat who authored those bills.

But she acknowledged there are limitations to the law. It only applies to sustained findings of misconduct, typically triggered by a complaint or internal audit.

“Public disclosure of records is very important, but it’s also dependent on the law enforcement agency being a responsible agency, that when a complaint is filed they do investigate it,” Skinner said. “If you have agencies that bury such complaints, then even a public records complaint isn’t going to reveal it.”

Often, racist banter surfaces outside the complaint and internal investigation process. The private San Jose Facebook group of current and former cops was publicized by a blogger who was the partner of a city cop. Oakland’s police department — under court supervision over the 2000 “Riders” civil rights case — was aware of the Instagram account started by an officer fired after a fatal shooting, but it didn’t begin an investigation until months later when a local news organization wrote about it.

Pointer and John Burris, a longtime Oakland civil rights lawyer who represented King in his civil lawsuit against LAPD, said cities have other tools at their disposal to root out racist cops. They can audit officers’ department cell phones and other electronic equipment.

“If that was happening regularly, then the city would be in a position to identify those officers who were engaged in that reprehensible conduct and get them off the force,” Pointer said.

David E. Mastagni, an employment lawyer who represents officers, said employers have a strong argument to justify searching department-issued equipment, as long as employees are notified in advance that their communications aren’t private. But it becomes more complicated when such expectations aren’t made clear, and private equipment and accounts generally have strong privacy protections that can only be breached with a subpoena — as happened in the Antioch case.

“If it’s a personally owned electronic device, there’s a very strong right to privacy,” Mastagni said.

Burris said that disciplinary follow-through is key. Another recent California law, SB 2 in 2021, disqualifies officers fired for serious misconduct from being hired as police officers. California was one of only five states that didn’t decertify problem cops until it passed the law in the wake of the George Floyd murder and protests. The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s report on the Antioch scandal specifically mentions the new law.

“What you have to do is make people know they’re going to get caught, and if they get caught doing it, they’re going to lose their job, and they can’t go to another department because they’ll be on the decertification list,” Burris said.

Pointer noted, however, that crackdowns on communications may just prompt biased officers to get better at hiding their thoughts.

“The real issue for me goes beyond the cell phone — it’s the culture where multiple police officers felt comfortable enough to have this conversation not just with one officer but many officers,” Pointer said. “It’s just the symptom of a much larger disease.”

The push and pull over privacy vs. the public’s right to know is an ongoing battle over law enforcement in California. And to be sure, the Antioch department also has supporters in the community, who at a recent City Council meeting said they’ve had positive interactions with the chief and officers, and that most people, including the city’s elected leaders, wouldn’t want their own private messages publicly exposed.

Mastagni said laws like SB 1421 and SB 16 “really struck a fair balance between rights of privacy” because they only called for disclosure of investigations where “there’s serious misconduct that’s proven and sustained” after the officer had a chance to challenge the accusations.

“If you release everything when the allegations are out there and stigmatize officers with false accusations that they’re racist or biased, they can’t get their name back and erase that stigma,” Mastagni said.

Michael Rains, the lawyer for Antioch’s officers, didn’t respond to a request for comment. But with about a fifth of the roughly 100-member Antioch force on leave over the texting scandal, Burris said the problem there may be so widespread that more dramatic remedies are needed, like disbanding the department and having a new one formed, as Camden, New Jersey, did in 2013.

“When it’s so pervasive in the department, how do you deal with it?” Burris asked. “Are you changing the tires but it’s the same old car?”

Staff Writers Nate Gartrell and Judith Prieve contributed to this report.