The top civil rights lawyer for the Oregon Department of Justice filed suit Wednesday against Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, her deputy and other key officials, accusing them of racially profiling him when a colleague tracked his social media messages.

Erious Johnson's

, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, says his civil rights were violated in 2015 when

to monitor the Black Lives Matter hashtag.

The investigator turned up posts that Johnson, the agency's director of civil rights, had made 10 months earlier. One included the logo of the rap group Public Enemy, which shows an African American in cross-hairs. Investigators said they thought the image was a police officer.

The investigator, identified in the lawsuit as James Williams, began collecting Johnson's Twitter messages and told his bosses that Johnson could be a threat to police, the suit alleges.

Rosenblum said the "act of profiling" was "deeply troubling" and promised to take appropriate action. She hired an outside investigator, who concluded in April 2016 the surveillance violated state law and internal Justice Department policies. The investigator recommended the department undergo diversity and anti-bias training. (Read the

The state has not offered any such training, Johnson's lawyers said Wednesday.

Johnson "has given the Department of Justice every opportunity to make amends and address the harm that the state has afflicted on him and his reputation," said Beth Creighton, a civil rights attorney representing him. "But the state has failed to do so."

Rosenblum fired one employee this summer and demoted the former chief counsel earlier this year. Another investigator tied to the surveillance left the agency, she said.

"I can't say I'm happy about what happened," Rosenblum told The Oregonian/OregonLive recently. "But what we've done since then demonstrates my seriousness about this issue."

Creighton said Wednesday that Rosenblum didn't act quickly enough.

"If there was outrage from the attorney general that this had happened, there would have been some immediate action," Creighton said. "Not just when it's politically necessary for her."

The suit asks the state to offer training and change policies "to ensure this doesn't happen again," Creighton said. "We want a change in the culture over there. Cultural incompetency is what's going on now."

The incident began Sept. 30, 2015, the suit says, when Williams tested a surveillance tool called Digital Stakeout, which searches publicly available social media material for chosen keywords, filtering results by specific locations.

According to court documents, Williams said he was reacting to potential police threats mentioned in law enforcement bulletins sent weeks earlier, around Sept. 11, 2015. He found Johnson after searching for Black Lives Matter tweets in Salem.

The following month represented "so many failures at so many different levels," Creighton said.

Williams told his supervisor, David Kirby, about Johnson's Twitter messages. Kirby described the messages to Darin Tweedt, then chief counsel for the department, who then recommended to Deputy Attorney General Frederick Boss that Williams prepare a report on his findings. Boss agreed, directing Williams to prepare a "threat assessment" about Johnson.

1986 the construction of the logo, magic markers -white out copy machine -Exacto knife ..no computer or Photoshop pic.twitter.com/67SV6vFK2H — Chuck D (@MrChuckD) August 3, 2014

On Oct. 13, 2015, Tweedt gave the assessment to Boss, who then passed it on to Rosenblum.



Nearly two weeks later, the suit says, Rosenblum told Johnson that his colleagues had downloaded his entire Twitter history and viewed Johnson as a threat to public safety based on his use of the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.



"It's a sense of betrayal," Creighton said. "These are your coworkers. They are targeting you based on your speech. It's your job to fight for the civil rights of Oregonians. And it's your job to engage in that political dialogue. And yet you're being punished for it. This never would have happened if he were not a black man."



Williams, the investigator, was not told that what he did was wrong, Creighton said, until Nov. 10, when Johnson's wife, Urban League of Portland president Nkenge Harmon Johnson released a letter detailing what happened to her husband.



In a reply sent to Harmon Johnson, Rosenblum said she was "appalled" to learn about her employees' actions.



"I have now seen firsthand how devastating profiling can be -- written on the face of a member of my team," Rosenblum wrote to Johnson's wife. "It must not continue."



In April, four days after the outside investigator released her findings, Johnson filed a complain with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.



"I have been subjected to racial discrimination and a hostile work environment for engaging in protected social media activity," Johnson wrote in the four-page complaint.



Johnson argued in that complaint that the surveillance wouldn't have happened "had I not been a black male" and "had my Twitter activity involved matters other than the lives and experiences of black people."



Rosenblum is up for re-election in November. Williams, Kirby, Tweedt and Boss are all named as defendants alongside Rosenblum.



Johnson continues to work at the department. In January 2016, state officials moved Tweedt -- the demoted former chief counsel -- to an office three doors down from his. Creighton said Johnson moved to the Portland office to avoid him.



Johnson's suit asks the state to expunge his record and offer training for state employees. It asks the state to pay for his attorney's fees, as well as damages to be determined at trial.



Kristina Edmunson, a spokesperson for Rosenblum, said Wednesday that the justice department will begin training employees next month in cultural competency and implicit bias, starting with the criminal justice division.



-- Casey Parks

503-221-8271

cparks@oregonian.com, @caseyparks