Seven Charlotte Police Officers Caught in Racist Text Scandal

What happens inside American police departments when the public isn’t watching? A scandal at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) in North Carolina offers a revealing look.

Seven officers have been caught up in an investigation into allegedly racist text messages. Five have resigned. A sixth, Seth Elliot, left in August amid a separate probe. A seventh, Jeremiah Todman, “remains suspended without pay pending further investigation.” The five who resigned were Mateo Juarez, Joseph Kelly, Alexander Larsen, Tredan Maronic and Matthew Osborn. All of them had been suspended on Oct. 9 before stepping down.

The most telling part may be how the messages came to light. Colleagues didn’t report them, and supervisors didn’t flag them. The texts, which “contained racial slurs,” turned up by chance during an unrelated investigation into Elliot’s alleged misuse of Flock cameras. If that separate probe had never happened, the messages might have stayed hidden.

Police Chief Estella Patterson spoke bluntly. “The allegations against them are serious,” she said. “They’re deeply troubling. And frankly, I’m disappointed that we’re even having to talk about this today.”

The department says it acted quickly. “We immediately conducted audits of their body worn footage, we reviewed their traffic stops, their traffic stop datas, we looked at their arrest records,” Patterson said. She said investigators “have not found any evidence” of misconduct so far. Even so, she has asked federal agencies to look into the “possibility of civil rights violations.”

That leaves an uncomfortable question for communities everywhere: how do officers who privately share racial slurs treat the public they’re sworn to serve? Patterson plans to seek revocation of the officers’ North Carolina law enforcement certificates. “And I hope that they will not be an officer anywhere in this country,” she added.

CMPD has stressed “the importance of transparency and public access to information in maintaining public trust.” Yet that transparency only came after an accidental discovery. The Charlotte case shows that what happens behind closed doors in police departments may surface only by chance, and that public trust depends on what stays out of sight.

Here are the seven officers:

Mateo Juarez: suspended without pay on Oct. 9, then resigned

Joseph Kelly: suspended without pay on Oct. 9, then resigned

Alexander Larsen: suspended without pay on Oct. 9, then resigned

Tredan Maronic: suspended without pay on Oct. 9, then resigned

Matthew Osborn: suspended without pay on Oct. 9, then resigned

Jeremiah Todman: still suspended without pay while the investigation continues

Seth Elliot: resigned in August during a separate investigation into alleged Flock camera misuse, which is how the texts were found

Link: ABCNews