The troubled Antioch Police Department is facing another blow as a second police officer was convicted last week in a scheme to fraudulently obtain college degrees in exchange for higher salaries.
Morteza Amiri, 33, and five others from the Antioch and Pittsburg police departments falsely claimed they had earned bachelor's degrees in criminal justice as a strategy 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 hired someone else to complete the online courses, allowing them to access 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 involved in the Antioch Police Department's racist text message scandal in 2023.
In May 2020, two days after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, Amiri texted another officer about “riots in LA” over “the gorilla that died.”
In documents presented at Amiri’s trial, he wrote to the person hired to take the lessons that he would “pay per class.”
“[D]“Don’t tell anyone I hired you for this,” he wrote.[W]We can't allow this to leak out and lose my job.”
“I will urgently request my degree so that my pay rise can start to kick in,” he allegedly wrote.
The five other officers convicted of 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 U.S. attorney's office said.
“Amiri participated in a calculated conspiracy to defraud his police department and steal taxpayer funds. His actions were a violation of the law and a gross betrayal of the public trust,” said FBI spokesman Robert Tripp.
“The deceit of Amiri and his accomplices has no place in law enforcement. With this conviction, he now faces the consequences of his actions.”
Amiri's two convictions carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He is scheduled to go on trial in a related case in February.
