Northern California police officers placed on leave after sending degrading, violent texts

Two police officers in the Northern California town of Eureka have been placed on paid administrative leave while a third-party investigator conducts its review of demeaning and violent messages sent in a private texting group.

The leave was effective immediately, Eureka Police Chief Steve Watson said Wednesday afternoon. The announcement came just hours after The Sacramento Bee published an investigation into a private text message group that involved a half-dozen officers in the North Coast department, including a sergeant.

“While we leave room for the investigation to reveal more information, we also fully denounce the content of the communications that have been reported,” Watson wrote in a message to the public on Facebook. “And, we respectfully ask you to join us in doing the same. This is, in my opinion, the only right way forward.”

Sgt. Rodrigo Reyna-Sanchez and Officer Mark Meftah were put on leave “effective immediately,” Watson wrote on Wednesday. He said an independent, outside investigator would conduct the review but did not say who that investigator would be.

In the group chat, Reyna-Sanchez — the squad’s supervisor — openly advocated violence to his team, according to images of the messages obtained by The Bee.

The messages within the group chat also included obscene comments about people experiencing homelessness and mental illness. Just months before, a damning Humboldt County grand jury report had criticized the department’s treatment of the homeless.

Officers made degrading comments about women’s breasts and ridiculed a female colleague. They imagined homeless people and others in sexual situations, and Reyna-Sanchez wrote that his officers should “face shoot” a suspect who had just been released on bail.

Officer Meftah bantered with the sergeant about women’s bodies and said he would “beat down” protesters, according to the messages. In one conversation, they discussed a woman who was known to shoplift and who also had a history of mental illness. She was walking in a section of town.

“Get pics of her rack!!” Reyna-Sanchez wrote.

Mayor Susan Seaman said comments like that would have been something she expected from a previous department with an authoritative, “old school mentality.” It’s unacceptable for anyone, she said, but especially for police officers in a department that has been trying to build bridges with residents.

“This wipes all of that work away, at least in the perspective of the community, I think,” Seaman said. “All of the good work that’s been done could be dismissed with comments like this.”

Eureka police chief says texts were ‘profoundly upsetting’

In his Facebook post, Watson said: “Upon learning the details of the content in these reported communications, I, like you, was deeply saddened and disturbed. While the exchange that reportedly occurred between officers was something that appears to have taken place on private devices, the subject matter discussed professional duties and was profoundly upsetting.”

Experts on police culture roundly criticized the comments. Messages like those offered an unvarnished reality into the world of police culture, they said, including the toxic masculinity and problematic rhetoric that goes with it.

“These officers are doing their own organization a terrific disservice,” Kevin Robinson, a retired assistant chief from the Phoenix Police Department who teaches criminal justice at Arizona State University, told The Bee. He called the banter “reckless” and a signal of a “pervasive attitude.”

“We should not have to rely on anonymous sources to reveal unacceptable and egregious behavior,” Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Santa Rosa, said in a statement. Wood’s district spans the North Coast, including Eureka.

“I can only hope that this investigation reveals that this behavior is limited to a few officers and that actions taken against these officers will result in allowing us to trust the city’s force and its leadership,” Wood said.

In his Facebook post on Wednesday, Watson said the text messages do not reflect the training his department had received since he took over in 2017, including “providing our officers training on implicit bias, procedural justice, racial and cultural diversity, de-escalation techniques, and crisis intervention.”

“They do not demonstrate the positive changes we have worked so hard to reach and they do not meet my personal performance expectations for this department,” he wrote. “Transparency and accountability are required in the positions we fill, and you have my word that we won’t rest as we keep working to achieve the standard our community expects.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 4:08 PM with the headline "Northern California police officers placed on leave after sending degrading, violent texts."