Protesters gathered outside the Antioch Police Department on Sunday to handle concerns concerning the reinstatement of some officers implicated in last yr's racist, homophobic and sexist texting scandal.

“Some of them are starting to get their jobs back and we don’t want them to do that,” said Frank Sterling Jr. of Reimagine Antioch, one among the rally organizers.

The rally was scheduled to start at 2 p.m. Sunday within the Walgreens parking zone on Deer Valley Road in Antioch. The plan – as described on First Voice Media's Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/firstvoicemedia – was then speculated to move to the police station about 3.5 miles away.

The disturbing texts emerged during an investigation by the FBI and Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office nearly two years ago into allegations of police misconduct in Antioch and Pittsburg. In late April 2023, the DA's office released text messages from 17 Antioch officers between 2019 and 2022, but more were involved, in response to Ellen McDonnell, the county's top public defender.

The timing of the rally, Sterling said, coincides with the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the text messaging scandal, which led to the furlough of several officials.

He says the timing also has to do with the primary time Malad Baldwin was beaten by Antioch police ten years ago in 2014. Baldwin, who sued the town in 2015 after being injured in that beating, died in 2021.

Sterling also said Antioch police haven’t provided details about which officers involved within the racist/homophobic/sexist texts have been reinstated. He also said demoting an officer with a history of racism won’t solve the issue.

“I don’t think this will cure their racism – a degradation,” he said.

politics

According to a screenshot of the now-deleted post, a campaign consultant focused on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s outreach to minority voters used homophobic language on social media last week to attack the founding father of a black conservative group that supports the previous president Donald Trump endorsed.

Angela Stanton King, whose photo appears On the campaign website of Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate, the post on Wednesday on the social platform X targeted Diante Johnson, the founder and president of the Black Conservative Federation.

She called Johnson an “open, flaming, feminine gay” within the post. On Saturday I received a screenshot of the post that was first reported Politically.

“How is he supposed to lead straight black men to the Republican Party?” she wrote in a caption.

Reached by phone Sunday, Stanton-King asked how a Times reporter got her number after which hung up.

Stanton King, the Trump pardoned for her role in a automotive theft ring, ran as a Republican and lost her race for a U.S. House seat in Georgia within the 2020 election.

Kennedy's campaign didn’t immediately comment.

It was the second time in lower than every week that a Kennedy political adviser put the campaign ready to defuse a possible political landmine.

Last week, a video surfaced through which Rita Palma, a ballot access adviser, called President Joe Biden a “common enemy” of Trump and Kennedy supporters. She posted on

In the video, Palma discussed a hypothetical scenario through which Kennedy lost so many votes within the November election that neither of the 2 major party candidates – Biden or Trump – could reach 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the presidency is required.

Each state delegation within the U.S. House of Representatives would then get one vote to determine the presidency, she said, potentially helping Republicans swing the election in Trump's favor.

Kennedy's campaign Palma fired amid criticism of her comments, which were first reported by CNN and confirmed by the Times.

Johnson, the goal of Stanton-King's attack, didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.

Trump in February was headlining a gala hosted by the Black Conservative Federation in Columbia, South Carolina, and told the group that he believed the 4 criminal cases The elections he’s facing have earned him the support of black voters because they saw the historical injustice of the justice system reflected in his legal troubles.

A spokesman for Trump's campaign didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Stanton-King, a former reality TV star and writer, was convicted in 2004 on a federal conspiracy charge stemming from her role in a automotive theft ring. She received a pardon from Trump in 2020 after serving two years in prison and 6 months of house arrest.

A month after her pardon, she announced she would run against John Lewis, the civil rights activist and longtime Georgia congressman. He died just a few months later.

In this race, Stanton-King drew attention repeatedly posted QAnon content and obscure hashtags like “#trusttheplan.” They were later faraway from social media.

So read one other online post through which Stanton-King compared the LGBTQ+ movement to “pedophilia.”