The troubled Antioch Police Department faces another blow, as a second police officer was convicted last week in a scheme to fraudulently obtain college degrees for higher pay.
Morteza Amiri, 33, and five others from the Antioch and Pittsburg police departments falsely claimed they had obtained bachelor’s degrees in criminal justice in a ploy to qualify for higher pay, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement Friday.
But the officers actually hired someone else to complete the courses online, unlocking raises and financial incentives they had not earned, prosecutors said. The other five pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud earlier this year; Amiri’s case was the only one to go to trial.
Amiri was also caught up in the Antioch Police Department’s racist texting scandal in 2023.
In May 2020, two days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Amiri texted another officer about “riots in LA” over “the gorilla that died.”