ANTIOCH — Just days away from a possible reelection, Mayor Lamar Hernandez-Thorpe during a town hall on Monday night highlighted the achievements and focus of his administration over the past four years with a promise of working harder toward achieving increased community inclusivity and safety.
Held at Delta Bay Church, Hernandez-Thorpe touted the Antioch City Council’s accomplishments, which include the Angelo Quinto Community Response Team, promoting transparency and police reforms, establishing initiatives to address homelessness, and acknowledging the challenges of rising gun violence.
The mayor, however, criticized some who have attempted to politicize firearm-related incidents. He said while it’s not right to dismiss the experiences of certain communities who have dealt with violence in Antioch, those issues do not reflect the city as a whole.
“I always think it’s unfair to ascribe what someone may be experiencing in Sycamore or on 10th Street and say that’s the entire city of Antioch,” Hernandez-Thorpe said, reflecting on a string of shootings when he first took office in 2021 and recent incidents around the Sycamore Drive corridor north of Highway 4. “That’s unfair to the residents.”
Earlier this month, the City Council approved $500,000 in funding for extra patrols from outside law enforcement agencies to help deal with gun violence in the city. There have been more than 22 shootings reported in the Sycamore Drive corridor alone since the beginning of the year.
Hernandez-Thorpe said those who have taken the opportunity to politicize these issues are doing so in an attempt to discredit the city and his effort to reduce violence.
“People think that they’re hurting me when they do that,” he said. “All you’re doing is making their (the victims’ families) situation even worse because you’re adding such nonsense to their situation that we start becoming numb to the fact that we shouldn’t be experiencing these shootings to begin with. We shouldn’t normalize these experiences by politicizing them.”
The mayor also noted that police staffing levels have been steadily growing.
As of August, the Antioch Police Department had 73 out of 115 authorized officers’ positions filled following the termination or departure of several who were either charged or indicted with crimes related to a widespread police misconduct investigation or for participating in a practice in which racist, homophobic, and sexist text messages were sent among officers.
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Hernandez-Thorpe reminded residents that a dip in police staffing levels was not related to any action he or any politician took, but because people “were violating other people’s civil rights.”
“I think it’s worth knowing that typically in this city, mayors have hid behind the city managers or the police chief and said ‘well, that’s your problem,’” he said. “I took the responsibility and said we have to fix this whether people agree with my approach or not. If I was going to be the mayor, there was not going to be racist people running around in the police department and abusing people’s rights.”
The mayor also took pride in fostering a more inclusive environment, adding that many African Americans, Asians and Latinos in the community felt like they were guests in their own city. He said Antioch now has multi-cultural celebrations, adding that the city was the first in the nation to apologize for its mistreatments of its Chinese residents decades ago.
Hernandez-Thorpe acknowledged that he might not be everyone’s cup of tea and that residents may not agree with his ways of handling issues, but he assured residents he would fulfill his promises.
“With me, you will always get what I tell you,” he said. “… We are not always going to agree on the path, but if I say this is what I am going to do … I am going to do it.”
