Robert Weisberg, a professor of criminal law at Stanford University, said it is “very unusual” for police to be prosecuted in something other than a single incident that resulted in someone’s death. When presented to jurors — who are often sympathetic to police — those cases are often framed in life-or-death, self-defense scenarios, he said. In contrast, the charges against Amiri and Wenger are about systemic abuse of people’s rights, and they stem back to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
“If racist police in the South attacked civil rights workers or attacked Black citizens just out of racist proclivities — where you could not expect the state criminal authorities to intervene — these were the laws,” Weisberg said. “These criminal laws here are not like some newfangled technicality. They are very much embedded in American history.”
While the FBI was investigating alleged criminal activity by Antioch police, they uncovered a trove of racist and misogynistic text messages shared among officers in the department and some in Pittsburg.
A report from the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office named 14 Antioch officers — sergeants, detectives and supervisors, including Wenger, Amiri and Rombough — who sent those racist memes and texts directed at Black and Latino Antioch residents, including then-Police Chief Steven Ford and former Mayor Lamar Thorpe. About half of the department’s officers received the messages, yet none reported it to superiors or outside authorities.
After the indictment was unsealed, about 20% of all Antioch officers were put on administrative leave. The scandal upended criminal cases, resulted in several protests, and provided evidence for what many residents had alleged for years: A culture that tolerated excessive force and racism was spread throughout the Antioch Police Department.
Eventually, 10 officers would face charges of corruption, ranging from faking college degrees to distributing steroids, in addition to the alleged civil rights violations.
Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School, said “a major police corruption case” like this one is “relatively rare and they’re not easy to win.”
“In this particular case, what might be the greatest help to the prosecutors are other officers who have pled guilty and agreed to cooperate,” Levenson said, “because in order to win these cases, you often need an insider who explains what kind of misconduct was going on with the police and that they were acting intentionally. That’s the type of evidence that jurors will pay attention to.”
In January, Rombough pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and two counts of deprivation of rights under the color of the law, admitting that he and other Antioch officers used premeditated violence, failed to report uses of force and then falsified police reports. Rombough’s plea deal includes a provision that he could receive leniency for cooperating with prosecutors, and a status conference in his case is scheduled for April 22, after Amiri and Wenger’s trial could be concluded.
Amiri and Wenger are charged with one count of conspiracy “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate residents of Antioch, California.” Wenger faces one count of deprivation of rights under the color of law for a specific incident, while Amiri faces four such counts, along with a single count of destructing, altering and falsifying records in a federal investigation.
At the heart of the trial are the text messages between Amiri, Wenger, Rombough and several unnamed officers that suggest they celebrated using violence on the people of Antioch with racist language.
Not long after he was hired by Antioch police in 2017, Amiri was partnered with a K9 service dog named Purcy, who prosecutors allege he commanded to bite at least 28 people in Antioch, sharing graphic photos of the injuries the dog inflicted with other officers and keeping an ongoing tally of them as they occurred.
“ill bite em,” Amiri texted Wenger and Rombough on April 21, 2019, after a suspect fled, according to the indictment.
In July 2019, while his roommate — an officer at another department — was with him for a ride-along, Amiri set Purcy on a person for not having a light on their bike at night. Amiri sent several officers a bloodied photo of the person on a gurney in an ambulance, and Rombough replied, “yeah buddy good boy purcy” and “fuck that turd,” the indictment states.
When one officer asked what cut the dog’s face, Amiri allegedly replied, “that’s a piece of the suspect’s flesh lol.”
The indictment includes several instances where Wenger and Rombough thanked Amiri for “biting” a suspect, including instances where they sought out interactions with citizens so the dog could bite them.
“imagine fat ass purcy on your fucking throat [smiling crying emoji]” Amiri texted Rombough on Nov. 26, 2021, after sharing a bloody picture from his body camera of a woman Purcy bit, according to the indictment.
