ANTIOCH — Outside police headquarters, a small crowd of residents, organizers and activists gathered peacefully Tuesday afternoon to register sorrow and outrage, as well as resolve toward change, before marching together toward City Hall to attend a scheduled City Council meeting.

Many within the gathering wore T-shirts with slogans calling for firings of specific Antioch police officers who last week were revealed to have sent racist and homophobic text messages, which were discovered during an FBI investigation of at least a dozen Antioch and Pittsburg officers.

Civil rights attorneys John Burris and Adante Pointer addressed the crowd gathered Tuesday, as did parents of those victimized by police officers mentioned in the texts.

Kathryn Wade, whose son, Malad Baldwin, sued the city in 2015 after Antioch officers beat and injured him said she is still waiting on an autopsy after Baldwin’s death in 2021. “The officers’ texts about my baby made me feel like he died all over again,” Wade said. “The boasting and bragging about what you did to people is so heartbreaking. The threats you make on this community, Black and Brown (residents), something needs to be done.”

Wade added, “He had a mom. He had a son. He had aunties and uncles. Even some of them didn’t believe all the things that we saw happening with Antioch police and him. Some of them didn’t believe it. How you gonna deny it now?”

As part of their demands, protesters said they sought firing and decertification of officers involved in abusive and racist behavior, as well as full accountability and called for authorities to reopen in custody death cases.

The action comes after this news organization last week obtained and published material from two reports compiled by the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office that identified officers — including sergeants and gang unit detectives — who shared deeply racist and homophobic messages and memes, boasted about falsifying arrest reports and made light of violence against residents. In all, the names of 45 officers, or nearly half of the police force, were listed in the two reports as at least receiving one offensive text message.

Frank Sterling, who said he was beaten by police in 2009 during a noise complaint at his home, for years has been calling out the names of officers who he says behaved inappropriately. That includes the current head of the police union whom Sterling said called him a homophobic slur during that 2009 encounter with police.

“This, the police department, is where the hate, the racism, the bigotry, the sexism has been emanating,” Sterling said before the rally. “It’s important to be out there for that. And the reason we need to go at this point is to let the chief and the city council know that we support what they’re doing and trying to change things. But we also have some demands of our own.”

Pointer, a civil rights attorney who has filed suits against Antioch police, talked to the crowd about the problem of police culture and racism.

“These text messages that have been exposed show us that you don’t have to go to the backwoods of Mississippi. You don’t have to go into the backwoods of Arkansas, somewhere down South to find what’s happening right here in the Bay Area. In Antioch in 2023, it’s symbolic, just like the Klu Klux Klan because they kill people, they beat people, they terrorize people. How many people have done time behind a trumped-up case? How many families have you destroyed because of what the Antioch Police Department has done? There has to be a full-court press to look at every time any of these officers is interacting with the community.”

Burris, who said he plans to file lawsuits against the department, said the most abhorrent issue of the texts to him is the fact that they were allowed to circulate unchecked.

He also said the hate shown in the texts are the worst in printed form he’s ever seen.

“It’s at the top of the list in terms of verbal communication,” he said. “What’s even worse than that is No. 1, if you read the chain of texts, not one person responds that it’s inappropriate or that maybe this isn’t cool. And No. 2, you see supervisors on there. And if the supervisors are saying it and allowing it, it’s the culture. There’s no two ways about it.”

In anticipation of the protest, Tri Delta Transit said in a social-media post that it had detoured service for two downtown Antioch bus routes, with service cancelled at nineteen separate stops.

Detour for Antioch Downtown for the rest of the day. These stops will not be in service:
R388: E 815737, 811949, 819018, 818681 / W 818668, 818675, 813093, 813086, 815595
R387: E811965, 811954, 815728, 819617 / W 815697, 819574, 815700, 815716, 813072, 813064 pic.twitter.com/G0w8s0Q8kZ

— Tri Delta Transit Alerts (@tdtransitalerts) April 18, 2023

Check back for updates.

Staff writer George Kelly contributed to this report.