Coastal northern California town suspends police officers for ridiculing people experiencing homelessness

Jason Pohl reported for the Sacramento Bee in a story published earlier this week.  Several officers in Eureka, California, population 27,191, were ridiculing the city's homeless population.  An excerpt follows:  

The sergeant and officers compared people living on the streets to pigeons.

They likened them to troglodytes who could be organized like bowling pins or corralled into a burning building.

They joked about decapitating them with helicopter blades while they slept downtown.

After 11 weeks of interviews and a trickle of new details, the outside investigation into dehumanizing and violent text messages at a Northern California police department is at most only halfway completed, with yet another supervisor sidelined indefinitely and unease apparent through the ranks.

Eureka Police Chief Steve Watson put one of his top-ranking officers, Capt. Patrick O’Neill, on paid administrative leave May 17. In a written statement over the weekend, city officials declined to say what prompted the move or whether it was connected to the ongoing third-party review of the text messages among subordinates.

Homelessness in the Humboldt County area has been the subject of high-profile reporting in recent years, including in the New York Times here,  here, and here.  This 2012 story mentions an ordinance banning panhandling in Arcata.  

Wikipedia reports that Eureka is the largest coastal city between San Francisco, California, and Portland, Oregon.  The greater metro area includes Arcata, home to Humboldt State University, the subject of this recent post.