6 min read
Major Takeaways
- Charlotte police named seven officers tied to a racist text thread on Monday. Five have now resigned.
- The messages allegedly included racial slurs and a contest over who could pull over the most Black drivers.
- Chief Estella Patterson backs firing the rest and wants their law enforcement certificates revoked so they cannot police anywhere.
- The FBI is investigating possible civil rights violations, and prosecutors must review cases these officers touched.
The Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department put names to its racist text scandal on Monday.
The department released the records of seven officers tied to group texts filled with racial slurs and talk of violence against Black residents.
Five of the seven have resigned. The rest remain suspended without pay while a city board decides whether they will be fired.
For Black Charlotte, the names were the point. Residents deserve to know if an officer who stopped them treated Black drivers as a game.
The Names Are Now Public
The seven officers are Seth Elliott, Mateo Juarez, Joseph Kelly, Alexander Larsen, Tredan Maronic, Matthew Osborn and Jeremiah Todman.
The department said the release follows state public records law. State law bars it from releasing the race or ethnicity of any employee.
Officials did not say which of the officers have resigned.
Six officers were cited for termination on October 9 and suspended without pay. Three resigned by last Thursday, a fourth by Monday, and Elliott had already resigned in August. Two remain, suspended without pay, waiting on the Civil Service Board.
What the Texts Allegedly Said
The full texts are not public. What follows is what the chief confirmed and people briefed on the thread described.
Chief Estella Patterson said the messages showed racial, sexual and religious bias, and that they stretched back several years.
People briefed on the investigation say the thread included repeated use of the N word in talk about using force and firing on Black residents, plus a contest over who could pull over the most Black drivers. In one message, an officer wrote that the texts “sound like a clan rally.”
The six came out of the same 2024 academy class and are of three different races, Patterson said.
A Camera Case Opened the Door
Agents with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation were looking into Officer Seth Elliott, accused of misusing the Flock license plate camera network.
They arrested him on July 29 and charged him with illegally accessing a government computer. He went on administrative leave that day and resigned on August 4.
State agents downloaded data from Elliott’s phone during that investigation and turned it over to the department. A closer review uncovered the group thread, and internal affairs built the case behind the termination citations.
The Chief Is Not Defending Them
Patterson took the job less than a year ago.
“My personal reaction is one of disgust,” she said at a briefing last week.
“As a Black woman who began my career here, in this very department, it is especially painful and disheartening to hear concerns from our community about racism coming from within the ranks of this organization.”
An independent chain of command board voted unanimously to terminate the officers who had not resigned. Patterson backed the vote.
“I fully concur with that decision,” she said. The Civil Service Board, not the chief, holds the sole authority to fire sworn officers.
She is also going after their ability to police anywhere else. “We will be pursuing, as an organization, the revocation of their North Carolina law enforcement certificate so that they cannot be an officer anywhere in our state,” she said. “And I hope that they will not be an officer anywhere in this country.”
Patterson said the review of their arrests, traffic stops, body camera footage and complaints has so far found no evidence the officers targeted Black drivers on the street. The department is auditing footage from every involved officer and reviewing its hiring checks.
Federal Eyes and Court Fallout
The case is no longer only a Charlotte case. The Justice Department faces civil rights pressure on several fronts, including its investigation into conditions at the DC jail.
The FBI is investigating possible civil rights violations, and Patterson has asked partner agencies, including the United States Department of Justice, to help.
United States Attorney Russ Ferguson said his office is examining a possible civil rights case and warned that the legal standard is “very, very high.” His office will prosecute if proof of wrongdoing emerges.
Anything that damages the credibility of an officer must be shared with defense attorneys, and these messages do exactly that.
District Attorney Spencer Merriweather must now decide what the messages mean for cases built on the work of these officers. His office had not begun that review as of last week.
Charlotte defense attorney Tim Emery said their “credibility is severely questioned and compromised” and urged prosecutors to consider halting cases where the officers were heavily involved. The same fight played out in the Senatobia case.
No officer has been charged with a crime over the texts themselves.
The Community Demanded Names
The Charlotte Mecklenburg NAACP forced the transparency question into the open last Friday, even as the chapter fights on other fronts, including its lawsuit to block the Justice Department plan for more than 1000 poll monitors.
Chapter President Minister Corine Mack stood with community leaders to demand the officers be identified and an independent federal investigation opened.
“Our lives are on the line every single day,” Mack said. “And to hear the people who took an oath to protect and serve, who are now trying with all their might to harm us, it’s devastating.”
“Racism is the number one disease in this country,” she said.
Mack pressed for change in the pipeline that produced these officers: rigorous bias training, psychological testing and deeper background checks before anyone gets a badge. Patterson had called her personally before the briefing, and Mack said the fast move toward termination must be followed by change that lasts.
Next, the Civil Service Board will decide the fate of the two officers who remain, on a date not yet set.
Federal investigators will decide whether racist talk crossed into civil rights crimes. Prosecutors will decide which cases can survive officers who cannot be believed.
Charlotte is a city where about a third of the residents are Black. For them, this is not an abstract scandal about text messages. It is a question about every stop, every arrest and every call for help that came before the thread was found.
