Richmond cops face discipline in sex scandal

A teenager who was sexually exploited by Bay Area police officers, and who goes by the name Celeste Guap, is pictured speaking to KGO-TV. A teenager who was sexually exploited by Bay Area police officers, and who goes by the name Celeste Guap, is pictured speaking to KGO-TV. Photo: Courtesy KGO-TV Photo: Courtesy KGO-TV Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Richmond cops face discipline in sex scandal 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

A Richmond police probe recommends discipline for some of the 11 current and former officers it investigated for contact they had with a teenager at the center of a sex scandal, even though none had committed crimes, Police Chief Allwyn Brown said in a letter to the City Council.

The internal affairs probe recommended some of the officers be fired, reprimanded or offered counseling because they violated department policy or ethics codes, according to the Monday letter, which was shared with The Chronicle. The review included more than 10,000 text messages and cell phone records, 5,000 pages of social media activity and 13 hours of testimony from the sexually exploited teenager, who goes by her online alias, Celeste Guap.

“We found no conspiracies,” Brown said. “The facts show individual, unconnected, non-criminal engagements and other activities that violate multiple Department policies and the professional Code of Ethics on the part of several RPD officers.”

He did not say how many officers were recommended to be disciplined.

Contra Costa County prosecutors have an open investigation into misconduct that may have happened in the county, and could theoretically file charges despite the police chief’s assertion that no laws were broken.

Guap, 19, has said she had sex with 29 officers in the Bay Area in the last two years. She told The Chronicle that at least four of the officers had sexual relations with her before she turned 18 and that others paid her or gave her inside police perks, like warning her about antiprostitution stings or running the names of people she knew through law enforcement databases.

Richmond police have come under fire not only for accusations that some on the list of 29 officers were from the department, but over claims that they helped send Guap to a rehabilitation center in Martin County, Florida amid multiple criminal and internal affairs investigations and just before her presence was needed to formally charge seven East Bay police officers in Alameda County Superior Court.

Richmond officials have denied a formal involvement in Guap’s treatment, saying they only referred her resources offered to victims of crime.

“The teenager, in consult with her family, made a choice to seek inpatient treatment,” Brown said in the letter. Victim advocates in the police department’s domestic and sexual violence unit, and those at the Family Justice Center and the California Victim Compensation Program, helped get her into the rehabilitation clinic, the letter said.

Brown’s letter highlighted the lengths to which law enforcement is bound by California’s laws that protect the confidentiality of police misconduct.

For instance, though the Oakland Police Department began its own investigation nearly a year ago after Oakland Officer Brendan O’Brien killed himself and left behind a suicide note referring to Guap, Richmond police officials weren’t notified of their officers’ involvement with Guap until mid-May this year. Even then, “The facts on confidential matters pertaining to police personnel investigations cannot be shared among agencies, so we had no named or accused employees to focus on at that time,” Brown said.

The police chief cited the same laws in declining to name the officers or the precise punishments they will face.

“I wish I could share more,” Brown said. “Every public statement that we could make about this case invites more questions than we can answer without significant consequence.”