An FBI raid resulted in the arrest of ten current and former police officers from the Antioch and Pittsburg Police Departments in California. The officers stand accused of numerous crimes, including multiple conspiracies and cover-ups.
Among the allegations, officers from the Antioch Police Department are accused of collecting “trophies” from crime scenes and displaying these mementos. This startling revelation is part of a grand jury indictment that was unsealed following the multi-state FBI raid on Thursday.
The officers were arrested in Hawaii, Texas, and across the San Francisco Bay Area after an 18-month investigation into law enforcement in East Bay. The investigation led to four indictments being handed down by a federal grand jury.
Three of the officers from Antioch—Eric Rombough, Morteza Amiri, and Devon Christopher Wenger—are charged with a series of civil rights violations. These officers are accused of using excessive force against citizens and subsequently covering it up by falsifying police reports and evading body-worn cameras.
The indictment also states that the officers unabashedly boasted about their illegal use of force and had no interest in de-escalating to avoid violence. Instead, they collected mementos as “trophies” from their attacks on Antioch residents.
One officer, Timothy Manly Williams, is accused of destroying a cellphone that recorded a K-9 bite incident in 2021. The officers’ private cellphones, which contained evidence of racist, unethical, and homophobic text messages, provided ample evidence against them.
The officers face charges of conspiracy against rights, deprivation of rights under color of law, destruction of evidence, and falsification of records. If convicted, they could be sentenced to serve decades in prison, reinforcing the severity of violating citizens’ civil rights under the guise of law enforcement.