SAN JOSE — A year after a blogger outed a series of racist, Islamophobic and other derogatory remarks posted on Facebook by former and current San Jose Police Department officers, two of the four officers investigated have been disciplined — one was fired and the other suspended, law-enforcement sources have told the Bay Area News Group.

But the department cleared two other officers involved in the scandal that rocked the SJPD during the height of the George Floyd demonstrations last summer, underscoring concerns among civil rights advocates about a lack of police accountability.

The revelation of the incendiary social-media posts in a June 2020 blog — written under a pseudonym who multiple sources confirm is the partner of an SJPD officer, came during a summer that saw the department embroiled in high-profile controversies, including backlash over its violent response to protesters — highlighted footage of aggression by Officer Jared Yuen — and a viral video of an officer kicking and dragging a non-combative woman across a parking lot.

The San Jose Police Department refused to comment on the officers investigated after the Facebook posts surfaced, other than to confirm whether they were still with the department, and would point only to changes made to the police duty manual in March addressing officers’ “personal online presence.” Those changes included barring speech “that adversely reflects upon the department” or “inhibits the department’s ability to operate efficiently and effectively.”  

But law-enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigations offered additional details, revealed here for the first time, about the status of the four officers who were placed on leave in the wake of the scandal. All but one of the officers either could not be reached or declined to comment for this story.

Officer Mark Pimentel was the most severely punished, and his Facebook posts on the defunct 10-7ODSJ SJPD alumni group page were the most recent messages investigated. Most of the group members who posted derogatory comments were not investigated because they had either retired or were no longer with the police department. 

Pimentel was linked to anti-Muslim comments on a post inside the group about a Muslim woman whose hijab was pulled off by a Ventura County Sheriff’s Office deputy in 2017. “Hell, I would have pulled it over her face,” he wrote.

In another group thread referencing the Black Lives Matter movement, Pimentel is associated with a comment stating that “black lives don’t really matter” on a public thread, which had been started by a retired officer weighing in on a rash of shootings in Chicago.

Pimentel was terminated, sources confirmed, but he is contesting that decision in arbitration.

A second officer, Ryan Welch, was issued a four-week suspension after the June 2020 blog lifted a 2010 Facebook post in which he commented in a thread describing how a Jihadist inadvertently killed himself with an improvised explosive device in the Middle East. Welch stated in the decade-old post: “Does that mean they don’t get their 40 virgins? Maybe like 20 who just lost their virginity.”

Welch is also contesting the severity of his punishment.

Sgt. Chris Sciba was exonerated of any department violations after a 2015 Facebook post of his surfaced in which he shared a meme photo comparing Nazis to “Islamic Muslim terrorists.” While Sciba was cleared, sources in the department said the fallout has led to him being passed over for a lieutenant promotion.

The department also cleared Sgt. Fabrice Bellini. Bellini wasn’t investigated for any social-media comments, but for claims made in the blog post connecting him to a commemorative coin referring to San Jose’s police district L as “Stinkin’ Lincoln,” surrounded by the inscription, “To Hell and Back.” The district’s population is largely Vietnamese and Latino. 

In an interview with the Bay Area News Group, Bellini asserted that the coin was an internal token to signify the shared experience of officers who worked the district, and was not meant to demean the people who live there.

Still, Bellini said that after the experience, he felt a lack of initial support both from the department and his police union. Combined with nagging physical injuries, he declined a full-duty return and chose to retire after 23 years with SJPD.

“That’s not the department I joined,” he said in a May interview before moving out of state. “But I’m not bitter. It was the best experience of my life.”

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area office for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said she was not surprised to hear about officers that were cleared or remain with the department.

“This episode and so many others demonstrate there is nothing to hold them to account,” she said.

A few months after wide public condemnation of the social media posts by civic and elected leaders, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office dismissed 14 criminal cases in which either Pimental, Welch, Sciba or Bellini was a primary witness.

In a statement, the San Jose Police Officers’ Association — which previously criticized the case dismissals — emphasized that two of the officers were cleared and that the city manager’s office “objectively evaluated these cases and upheld the exonerations.” 

The statement added that the arbitration decisions for the other two officers will be made public because of new contract language between the union and the city aimed at increasing transparency of the arbitration process.

The social-media controversy has also added fuel for supporters of the California Law Enforcement Accountability Reform Act, a California bill authored by San Jose Assemblymember Ash Kalra to compel police to vet a police candidate’s background for any evidence of “membership in a hate group, participation in hate group activities, or public expressions of hate.”

Kalra credited some agencies including SJPD with already instituting the practice, but he wants to see it become mandatory across the state.

“We can’t stop folks from being racist and White supremacists,” Kalra said in a February interview. “But we can stop them from becoming law enforcement.”

William Armaline, a professor and director of the Human Rights Institute at San Jose State University who helped with the bill’s framing, said it would be a “common sense” solution to help stop problematic officers from being hired and later protected. 

“We can put those filters in the front end,” he said, “before we give someone a gun.”

He added that accountability extends well beyond any individual officer’s consequences.

“I think the bigger question is, how can the agencies demonstrate to the public that they reject these kinds of behaviors, whether it’s juvenile-level actions and violence of officers during protests or really disturbing expressions of White supremacy in the ranks?” he said. “This is a problem that’s been kicked down the road long enough.”