Former San Francisco police lieutenant charged with impeding rape investigation
A former San Francisco police lieutenant has been charged with impeding an investigation into a fellow officer accused of rape, prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Curtis Liu is charged with the felony offense of making a false statement on a police report and two misdemeanor counts of delaying a police officer. No arraignment date has been set.
Prosecuters allege that Liu told former officer Jason Lai that he was named as a suspect in a rape investigation but then lied on a police report by saying no suspects in the crime had been identified.
The Lai rape case is at the center of a text messaging scandal — the second to rock the San Francisco department — after internal affairs investigators revealed a series of racist messages between Lai and other officers when they searched his phone.
In helping Lai, the police lieutenant also failed to tell his superiors and subordinates that he’d informed Lai he was a suspect in the case, authorities said.
Liu, who is retired from the department, is the the latest San Francisco police officer to be charged with a crime in what’s become a turbulent period for the department.
Last year, a federal grand jury convicted an officer of violating a person’s civil rights while conducting unlawful searches at a downtown hotel that serves the poor.
About the same time, federal court filings revealed that more than a dozen officers had sent or received racist text messages, which called into question more than 3,000 criminal cases.
In January of this year, civil rights activists demanded a federal investigation into the shooting of Mario Woods, a black man who was struck by more than 20 bullets during an encounter with police.
In March, Dist. Atty. George Gascon revealed that his office obtained additional racist text messages from a handful of other officers during the Lai rape investigation.
Another 200 criminal cases will have to be reviewed because of Lai’s and other officers’ involvement, San Francisco’s public defender said.
For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna.
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