The worried Antioch Police faces yet 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 to have earned bachelor’s degrees in criminal justice in a ploy to qualify for higher pay, the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement Friday.
But the officers actually hired someone else to complete the online courses, unlocking raises and financial incentives they hadn’t earned, prosecutors said. The other five pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud earlier this year; Amiri’s case was the only one that went to trial.
Amiri was also captured by the Antioch Police Department racist texting scandal year 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.”
In texts presented at Amiri’s trial, he wrote to the person hired to take classes that he would “pay you per class.”
“[D]Don’t tell a soul I hired you for this,” he wrote. “[W]I can’t afford for it to leak and I lose my job.”
“I’m going to hurry up and order my degree to get my raise going,” he allegedly wrote.
The other five officers convicted in the conspiracy to defraud police departments were Patrick Berhan, Amanda Theodosy aka Nash, Ernesto Mejia-Orozco and Brauli Rodriguez Jalapa, who were current or former members of the Pittsburg Police Department at the time, and Samantha Peterson of the Antioch Police Department , the US Attorney’s Office states.
“Amiri engaged in a calculated conspiracy to defraud his police department of taxpayer funds. His actions were a violation of the law and a serious betrayal of the public trust,” said FBI spokesman Robert Tripp.
“The fraud of Amiri and his co-conspirators has no place in law enforcement. With this conviction, he now faces the consequences of his actions.”
Each of Amiri’s two convictions carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He is due to stand trial in a related case in February.