SAN FRANCISCO, May 7 (UPI) -- San Francisco's district attorney announced the expansion of an investigation Thursday to look for possibly biased behavior among police officers and sheriff's deputies.
The D.A.'s office is trying to determine if a deeply-seeded bias exists within both departments that results in inappropriate activities.
Many in the city's black population have been opposing excessive use of force by police officers for years -- and officials want to know why blacks account for half of all criminals arrested and jailed, when they make up just 5 percent of the population.
"In the last few months, we have seen city after city where police use of force or other police activity is coming to the light and indicating that racial animosity and other types of biases play a significant role," District Attorney George Gascón said. "I think at one point we felt we would be immune from that type of activity."
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The investigation's expansion comes on the heels of the discovery of racist and homophobic text messages that were supposedly sent among officers in the S.F.P.D. -- and forced fights between inmates at a Bay Area jail, which sheriff's deputies allegedly gambled on.
Gascón said those allegations have greatly impacted the public's confidence in the local justice system and the law enforcement community.
The messages were found in March amid a corruption investigation of two S.F.P.D. officers. The probe found several messages that had been sent among 14 officers.
Gascón's office has so far dismissed eight criminal cases because they were handled by one of the 14 implicated officers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The dismissed cases are among about 3,000 the city is now reviewing.
An investigation into the matter was already underway, but Gascón's broadening of the probe will now try to determine if a discriminatory culture exists within the 2,000-member police force.
"If just one individual was wrongly imprisoned because of bias on the part of these officers, that's one too many," Gascón said. "Can justice prevail under such conditions? Probably not."
Police Chief Greg Suhr has already moved to fire seven of the officers involved in sending the messages, and an eighth has resigned.
"We have cooperated with the district attorney and handed them the requested documents so they could conduct their audit," the S.F.P.D. said in a statement. "The D.A. has to review the cases and it's their responsibility to determine if there is any bias in those cases."
The task force is investigating deputies for the gladiator-style fights they allegedly arranged at a city jail. Inmates there were forced to fight by the deputies and were threatened with punishment if they did not, San Francisco's public defender, Jeff Adachi, said.
