Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/673657
ByPaulElias TheAssociatedPress SAN FRANCISCO SanFran- cisco's police chief said Fri- day that he has ordered that all officers finish an anti- harassment class within the next month amid a rac- ist texting scandal that has rocked the department al- ready dogged by fatal shoot- ings of unarmed minority suspects. Flanked by religious and minority community lead- ers at a San Francisco press conference, Chief Greg Suhr also released more tran- scripts of racist and homo- phobic text messages first made available to The As- sociated Press along with inflammatory and inappro- priate images found on for- mer officers' cellphones. It's the second texting scandal since 2014 in a de- partment that is attempt- ing to diversify its officers to reflect the San Francisco culture and population. The department of 2,100 was led by an Asian-American woman and a black man before Suhr took over five years ago. About half the officers are white, roughly reflect- ing the white population in San Francisco. Asians make up a third of the city population, but account for about 16 percent of the of- ficers. Close to 9 percent of its officers are black, ex- ceeding a city population of 6 percent, Suhr says he has no plans to resign and Mayor Ed Lee says he supports the chief. Lee sent an email letter to the entire department of nearly 2,100 officers Thurs- day night calling on them to report colleagues who dis- play intolerant behavior. Suhr said Friday that two officers turned in by col- leagues for suspected over- time abuse and unauthor- ized access of driving re- cords are being investigated by the district attorney for possible criminal charges. "I support Chief Suhr," said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of San Francisco's NAACP chapter. Investigators say they found the text messages on the personal phones of the officers during criminal probes of former officer Ja- son Lai and retired Lt. Cur- tis Liu. "The vast majority of police officers are shaken," Suhr said in an interview with The AP Wednesday night. "The expectations have never been higher, so when officers do some- thing like this, the dis- appointment can't be greater." The names of those in- volved in the racist and ho- mophobic conversations Suhr provided were re- dacted. Suhr said that Lai, Liu and an unidentified third former officer sent and received many of the messages. He also said sev- eral civilians were involved in the conversations. Lai resigned earlier this month and Liu retired last year. Both are Chinese Americans, according to Suhr. The unidentified offi- cer, who is white, also re- signed. Suhr declined to identify a fourth officer im- plicated in the texting scan- dal who is facing dismissal before the city's Police Com- mission. The newly provided tran- scripts denigrate minority suspects with racial slurs and insult colleagues per- ceived to be gay. The texts ridicule blacks in Fergu- son, Missouri, where police shot and killed an unarmed black man. They discuss a shootout among black men and the shooting of an armed sus- pect by police. In doing so, they appear to ridicule the shooting death by police in 2014 of a mentally ill man carrying a stun gun officers mistook for a handgun. They also exchanged photographs with racist captions. One photo depicts a white man playfully spray- ing a young black child with a garden hose. The caption calls the boy a racial slur. LAW ENFORCEMENT SFchiefreleasesracisttexts,orderstraining ERICRISBERG—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr makes his way to a podium before the start of a news conference on Friday in San Francisco. The Associated Press SAN CLEMENTE It literally was a whale of a job. Crews on Friday finished removing the 60,000-ton carcass of a rotting whale from a Southern California beach. A contractor working for the state parks depart- ment spent two days using an excavator to cut up the 40-foot whale, which was hauled off to a San Diego County landfill. The end of the two-day, $30,000 project included skimming the top layer of sand off the Lower Tres- tles, a surfing beach near San Clemente where the whale washed ashore on Sunday. That was to eliminate any sand contaminated by the whale's body fluids. "As they started to dis- member the carcass, they said it was messy but it wasn't as messy as it could have been," Rich Haydon, area state parks superin- tendent, told the Orange County Register. "It's to be expected there will be a little bit of a smell down there for a while," he said, "but I think we dodged a bullet." The whale was a tour- ist attraction for a few days. Despite an overpow- ering stench, some people skipped work or school to snap photos with the tow- ering carcass. However, few people were on hand Friday for the finish. Nick Lind of Newport Beach and Matthew How- ell of San Clemente were surfing as the last remnants of the whale were being re- moved. "It did have an inter- esting stench to it, sort of like a rotten baked potato," Lind said. "It was overpow- ering when we were near shore." Lind said he wasn't wor- ried about sharks that might have been attracted by the whale's remains. $30K PROJECT 60,000-pound whale carcass removed from Southern California beach MARK RIGHTMIRE — THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER Crews use earth-moving equipment to begin removing a massive gray whale carcass from Southern California's San Onofre State Beach in San Clemente on Thursday. By Jennifer Mcdermott The Associated Press The military is check- ing U.S. bases for potential groundwater contamina- tion from a toxic firefight- ing foam, but most states so far show little inclination to examine civilian sites for the same threat. The foam was likely used around the country at cer- tain airports, refineries and other sites where cat- astrophic petroleum fires were a risk, but an Associ- ated Press survey of emer- gency management, envi- ronmental and health agen- cies in all 50 states showed most haven't tracked its use and don't even know whether it was used, where or when. Only five states — Alaska, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ver- mont and Wisconsin — are tracking the chemicals used in the foam and spilled from other sources through ongoing water monitoring or by looking for potentially contaminated sites. A dozen states are be- ginning or planning to in- vestigate the chemicals — known as perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs — which have been linked to prostate, kidney and tes- ticular cancer, along with other illnesses. The rest of the states, about two thirds, are waiting for the U.S. En- vironmental Protection Agency to make a move. In addition to the Aque- ous Film Forming Foam used in disaster prepared- ness training and in actual fires, PFCs are in many household products and are used to manufacture Teflon. Knowledge about the chemicals' effects has been evolving, and the EPA does not regulate them. The agency in 2009 issued guid- ance on the level at which they are considered harm- ful to health, but it was only an advisory — not a legally enforceable limit. The EPA said then that it was assessing the potential risk from short-term expo- sure through drinking wa- ter. It later began studying the health effects from a lifetime of exposure. Those studies remain in progress, and the agency is also con- sidering whether to estab- lish a firm limit on PFCs in water. The EPA required large public drinking water sys- tems and some smaller ones to check for PFCs between 2013 and 2015. The full results have not been released because data is still being submitted, but officials in several states told the AP that PFCs were found in their water sys- tems during those checks. Detections were reported by six Massachusetts public water systems, for example. To date, about 4,800 wa- ter systems have submitted their findings to the EPA. About 2 percent so far have reported measurable levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) or perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), or both, the agency told the AP on Thursday. None of the PFOA levels were above the EPA's guid- ance, the agency said, but 17 of the PFOS levels were. But beyond public drink- ing water, there may be contamination elsewhere that could affect private or other water supplies, in- cluding from any use of the firefighting foam. The five states forging ahead with wider tracking for PFCs are going well beyond the EPA's minimum requirement. States that are not act- ing point to the cost of the testing and say nothing in federal law gives them the authority to require water utilities and cities to do it routinely. "We don't have the re- sources to go out beyond what's required by the EPA at this point," said Mark Mayer, administrator of the drinking water pro- gram for the environmen- tal department in South Dakota. "But we have been paying attention to it be- cause there have been is- sues in other states." A few states could pin- point situations where the foam had been used. Utah's fire marshal said the fire service there uses it spar- ingly and only on large flammable liquid fires, which are rare. Last month, U.S. mili- tary officials told the AP they would check 664 sites where fire or crash training was conducted. FIREFIGHTING Most states do bare minimum on fire-foam contamination STEVE RINGMAN — THE SEATTLE TIMES Firefighting foam is used in an attempt to extinguish a burning fuel tanker truck on Interstate 90in Issaquah, Washington. | NEWS | REDBLUFFDAILYNEWS.COM SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2016 10 A