Photo: AP

Newly unearthed evidence that a high-ranking Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department official forwarded racist emails at work makes clear one thing: it sucks that people can read your racist work emails!

The LA Times reports that Tom Angel, who is chief of staff to the LA County Sheriff, forwarded various noteworthy “jokes” while working for the Burbank police a few years ago, including one that said, “I took my Biology exam last Friday... I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently ‘Blacks’ and ‘Mexicans’ were NOT the correct answers.”

The emails were unearthed thanks to public record laws, which make hilarious work emails such as these sent by your unbiased law enforcement officers accessible to the public and the media. This episode of well-documented racism by a police official has given Angel a unique point of view, bolding ours:

In an interview, Angel told The Times he did not mean to embarrass or demean anyone and said it was unfortunate that his work emails could be obtained by the public under the state’s records laws. Asked about the “Biology exam” email, which made light of high incarceration rates in some minority communities, he described himself as Mexican.

“Anybody in the workplace unfortunately forwards emails from time to time that they probably shouldn’t have forwarded,” Angel said. “I apologize if I offended anybody, but the intent was not for the public to have seen these jokes.”

We can only pray that public record laws will be eviscerated and government secrecy increased as a sort of “silver lining” to this entire unfortunate incident.