Public Defender Asks DA To Hand Over SFPD Racist, Homophobic Texts

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Five San Francisco police officers accused Thursday of sending racist and homophobic text messages may have compromised hundreds of cases handled by the public defender's office due to the officers' alleged bias, the public defender's office said Friday.

In a letter, Public Defender Jeff Adachi requested that District Attorney George Gascon provide any evidence of inappropriate texts allegedly sent between the involved officers, in order to assess the credibility and implicit biases of the involved officers in cases in which the officers arrested suspects, signed statements of probable cause, testified in court or provided documentary evidence in support of prosecutors, according to the public defender's office.

The office then plans to determine what, if any, legal remedies are available to people whose cases were affected, the public defender's office said.

"This is going back ten years. There may be hundreds of cases at least," Public Defender's Office spokeswoman Tamara Barak Aparton said.

The racist and homophobic messages are related to the criminal investigation of alleged sexual assault by Officer Jason Lai in August 2015, police said.

Last week, the investigation found insufficient evidence for a sexual assault charge for Lai, in connection with an incident in which Lai was accused of raping a woman after drinking heavily with her while off-duty.

Lai, however, was charged with two misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of local criminal offender history information and four misdemeanor counts of misuse of confidential Department of Motor Vehicles information.

The recently uncovered messages were found by the District Attorney's Office sometime late last month, after investigators were given access to text messages related to Lai's case, in a searchable format, the district attorney's office said Friday.

The public defender's office is asking that the District Attorney hand over copies of all the texts in question, as well as the identity of the senders and recipients, including Jason Lai, Curtis Lui and Keith Ybarreta.

Additionally, the public defender's office wants a list of all arrests and incidents for the past ten years involving the officers in question, copies of police reports naming or listing the officers, complaints or reports alleging misconduct by the officers, any oral or written statements by the officers that may show their honesty, credibility or bias, as well as the officers criminal history.

The public defenders' office also wants to know the specific date that the District Attorney's Office became aware of the alleged acts of misconduct by the officers.

The police department said it learned about the text messages in question during the investigation into Lai. The department then immediately suspended all involved officers and referred the matter to the city's Police Commission for review.

The discovery of the latest texts comes as the police department has had to battle allegations of systemic racism within its ranks, including a separate scandal last year in which more than a dozen other officers were accused of sending racist text messages in March 2015.

In that case, a judge ruled in December that the department could not fire the officers who exchanged the racist text messages, because the department failed to act within a one-year statute of limitations after being notified by federal prosecutors of the texts.

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