IN THE “THIN blue line” myth, cops stand in the breach between civilization and chaos. But what happens when these same police become agents of wanton violence? A new federal indictment pulls back the curtain on sadistic behavior by cops in northern California, who allegedly brutalized residents — with K-9 dog bites or by shooting them with “less lethal” projectiles — and even bragged of breaching their civil rights. The charging document, filed Aug. 16, accuses a trio of Antioch Police Department officers with conspiracy “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate” city residents and to deprive them of the constitutional right to be free of “unreasonable force by a law enforcement officer.” Antioch is a suburb of 115,000 about an hour’s drive east of San Francisco that has become a popular landing spot for people of color displaced by soaring rents elsewhere in the Bay Area. The city’s nonwhite population has doubled over the last two decades, exacerbating tensions between residents and a PD notorious for biased law enforcement.
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