A San Jose police officer has resigned after the police department found numerous “disgusting text messages that demonstrated racial bias,” according to a statement by the San Jose Police Department (SJPD). The text messages related to a 2022 shooting incident in which the officer shot a college football player who had wrestled a gun from a perpetrator during a fight in a local taqueria.
In the statement released on Friday, the SJPD identified Mark McNamara as the officer, saying the department found the messages during an unrelated criminal investigation into one of their officers.
“There is zero tolerance for even a single expression of racial bias at the San Jose Police Department,” San Jose Police Chief Anthony Mata said in the statement. Chief Mata added that the investigation “also determined that a current employee who was on the receiving end of some of the messages engaged in other concerning dialogue with the former officer.”
The other employee, who has not been identified by the SJPD, was immediately placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation, according to the statement.
In March 2022, then 20-year-old K’aun Green, who is Black, was at a taqueria in San Jose when a fight ensued. One of the perpetrators pulled out a gun which Green wrestled out of his hands. He was then shot four times by McNamara, who was responding to the scene, as Green was backing out the door of the taqueria.
In one message sent in the aftermath of the shooting, McNamara, who is white, said he was “just out here clappin fools,” a term Green’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Adanté Pointer, said is a slang term for “shooting gangsters.”
“I’m still processing,” Green, now 22, said on Sunday during a press conference, speaking publicly for the first time since the text messages were released. “I never thought somebody could just have that much hatred in their heart to where they would want to kill me just ‘cause of what I look like.”
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