The officers either declined to comment through their attorneys or did not respond to messages left by The Times at their homes or through their union, the Torrance Police Officers Assn., which represents rank-and-file officers. That board wont begin work until early 2023 and the nine-member panel will be tasked with the review of innumerable complaints lodged with police departments across the entire state of California including complaints lodged throughout 2022. California Atty. Providing the complainant a copy of their own statement at the time a complaint is filed. The officers were responding to calls from a mall employee who said Ross was walking through the building with a knife, muttering to himself. in communication and M.S. Community Affairs: 310-618-6392. However, the investigation has already produced statements by several former officers claiming that the department not only tolerates racism, but teaches it. In total, the officers were listed as potential witnesses in nearly 1,400 cases in the last decade, according to district attorneys records The Times obtained through a public records request. Youll get pulled over.. From 2016 to 2019, Torrance police upheld just three citizen allegations of police misconduct and zero allegations of racial profiling made against officers, according to data submitted to the California attorney generals office. Jeremy White and Eugene Pesikov sued Torrance and several individual police officers last year. WebTorrance, CA 90503-5056 310-618-5529 The Records Division is a service support unit within the Services Bureau. Dunn said he was frustrated that he was getting blamed for the vandalism. Part of our responsibilities includes interpreting federal and state laws, as well as departmental policy in determining the release and retrieval of confidential criminal information. You would want to consult them, figure out what their values and viewpoints are, then legislate and implement their values not yours.. WebThe Torrance Police Department has made vigorous efforts to achieve this status, and it is our desire to provide the means whereby it might be sustained. Without that officer, you couldnt prove that case.. The comments represent a sliver of a trove of racist text messages exchanged by more than a dozen current and former Torrance police officers and recruits. Two former Torrance police officers were charged with spray-painting a swastika inside of a residents car, and prosecutors are now reviewing hundreds of cases involving the ex-cops, officials said. It is really a surprising abdication of their responsibility as elected officials to respond to their constituents and to express the will of their constituents, said Jody David Armour, a lawyer and professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in an interview Friday. In some of those cases, the plaintiffs are members of the same ethnic groups the officers espoused hatred for in the texts. This isnt just a lone wolf, this is a huge group.. A survey of records at Police Watch, a nonprofit Los Angeles group that monitors Southern California police agencies, revealed numerous complaints by minorities alleging that they were pulled over by Torrance police for no reason. I questioned whether there was any other things that would lead us to believe that this is not sort of a single crime event, he said. But theyve hit a snag, Review: A reimagined Secret Garden fails to flower anew at the Ahmanson Theatre, A $150,000 executive protection dog? I am in receipt of your request and I am attempting to locate the information requested and will attempt to have it to you as soon as possible. The text messages might have remained hidden if not for the alleged bizarre actions of Tomsic and Weldin in January 2020. The grand jury found that Torrance was one of only two police departments among those it reviewed that warned complainants that filing a false claim against a Rich L.A. homeowners are snapping them up, Left-handed pitchers offer gold-like value for high school teams, Column: How I finally learned to care about Orange Countys crumbling coastline, Shipping firms to pay pipeline company nearly $100 million in O.C. Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair; our system of the administration of justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly. According to the affidavit, obtained by the Southern California News Group, the chain of events started at 4:07 a.m. Jan. 27, 2020, on Maricopa Street, where three men allegedly were stealing boxes from an apartment mail room. Atty. About 13 Torrance officers are on paid leave as the city and the state attorney general investigate the offensive texts, which include jokes about lynchings, gassing Jews and shooting Black men. SB 2 is very expansive, Hart said, noting that the American Civil Liberties Union of California recently announced its support for the bills expanded approach to police accountability. Torrance police sustained 35 out of 43 internally generated complaints of officer misconduct from 2016 to 2020, Ponegalek said. While no officers currently face criminal charges in direct relation to the text messages, the racist exchanges have led to the dismissal of at least 85 criminal cases involving the officers implicated in the scandal. Lopez had been fleeing police in a truck, and the officers said he attempted to ram them when they opened fire, according to a district attorneys office memo that determined the fatal shooting was justified. Torrance, however, has spent more than $1 million so far to defend its hiring practices, with City Atty. Such claims represent one of the most sensitive areas of police-citizen relations and were cited as a fundamental cause of both the 1965 Watts riots and the broader 1992 Los Angeles riots. Additional officers received the texts but did not interact with them in any way, so they are not considered under investigation, those sources said. You dont hang the star, someone wrote back. Out of hundreds of pages of documents, the judge allowed the Rastello familys attorneys to present 14 cases of alleged misconduct that resulted in little or no punishment, including an off-duty officer who fired 22 shots at a car, many of them out the window of his personal vehicle; a lieutenant who allegedly molested several children; evidence of rapes and beatings by officers, and officers driving drunk while on duty. LMAO, thats what they call a W.. One (Torrance officer) said, The white people pay us to keep Mexicans out, said Esparza, a night student at Inglewood High School. Your complaint will be quickly, professionally, and objectively investigated in order to arrive at an appropriate conclusion. Some individuals may be reluctant to file a complaint for fear of reprisal from the officer or officers they are complaining against or the police department itself, the grand jury report added. they have one of the worst reputations, Lynn said. 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MuckRock users can file, duplicate, track, and share public records requests it. Non-Emergency Police Response: (310) 618-5641 3300 Civic Center Drive, Torrance CA 90503 Animal Control: 310-618-3850 Community Affairs : 310-618-6392 Investigators concluded that they would probably find evidence on the officers cellphones that a felony hate crime had been committed. The inquiry is an expansion of a probe that began in 1993, when the government sued Torrance to stop what it described as racially biased hiring practices in the citys police and fire departments. Several of the officers have also been named as defendants in lawsuits alleging excessive force, false arrest and wrongful death, court filings show. Whenever it appears that somebodys chipping away at that crust, were going to rise to the occasion.. Records operates on a round-the-clock basis, performing numerous tasks aiding our department, other law enforcement agencies, and the general public to gain access to necessary records. Torrance police officials acquired evidence of the text message threads during their investigation of Weldin and Tomsic, according to Ponegalek, though he declined to give a specific timeline of when they obtained the data. We expect that as police officers, our members should be treated like any other citizen considered innocent until proven guilty, the union said in a statement. Torrance quietly allocated $700,000 at the last two City Council meetings for legal fees associated with two lawsuits involving the Police Department, including a Torrance police department complaints; left stove on low all night; beretta 84 10 round magazine; myinstants download mp3; best liposuction doctors in florida; When Gascn charged Officer David Chandler with assault in late August for allegedly shooting an armed man in the back, sources told The Times that Chandler was also under investigation as part of the scandal. Chavez, Williams, Satterfield and Tomsic all opened fire on Michael Lopez in 2017 after a vehicle pursuit that started in Palos Verdes Estates. Daniels, who is black, moved to Torrance from Michigan this summer to pursue an acting career, and claims that he was pulled over seven times in three months yet never cited. On July 2, the Torrance City Attorneys Office filed a criminal complaint charging Lena Hernandez, with battery, a violation of California Penal Code Section 242. After years of such complaints, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating accusations of racist policing by Torrance, the countys third-largest police department. Before they start complaining too loudly about how much it His work has been recognized by the National Headliner Club, the Associated Press Sports Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association and the Orange County Press Club. This project requires us to request data from your department. The city also pointed towards Harts recently established Chiefs Advisory Board which aims to serve as a forum for discussion to foster understanding between the police department and the community as another means of oversight as the city awaits the investigation results and the official establishment of the state oversight board. Country: United States Address 1: 340 Blount Ave City: Guntersville State: Alabama Zip Code: 35976-1106 County: Marshall County Phone #: 256-571-7571 Fax #: 256-571-7570 Police1 is revolutionizing the way . Which of the above data are published publicly? Torrance was one of four cities surveyed that were not in compliance with that policy, which the state penal code requires. From: Alexander Cartwright and Jennifer Dirmeyer, Subject: California Public Records Act Request: Torrance, CA PD Citizen Complaints. His stories have led to the closure of a chain of badly-run group homes, the end of a state program that placed criminals in inappropriate public jobs and the creation of a civilian oversight office for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, among other things. While I am understanding of the pressures borne by the police, I do not wish my son to live in a world in which he and his friends are confronted and ordered about by two officers at gunpoint, in which he is intimidated and traumatized by uniformed thugs . 3300 Civic Center Drive, Torrance, CA 90503. Although the Rastello case shocked much of Southern California, equally startling was a string of other cases--long kept in private police files and brought up at the trial--that offered a rare peek into disciplinary procedures at the department. You want to have a process that shines a light on whats going on and hold people accountable on a local, more granular level.. But the blow that many believed would force change in the department came in 1989. Lacey cleared the officers of wrongdoing in all three deaths, but Gascn has reopened the investigation into Mitchells killing . The Records Division public counter is located in the main lobby of the Police Department. According to district attorneys records reviewed by The Times, Concannon once sent a troubling text message referring to a deposition he gave in an officer-involved shooting., They believed our lies. The most controversial incident involving officers linked to the racist text scandal is the 2018 shooting death of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell. The department would not comment on citizen complaints against police beyond saying that it investigated 34 of them in 1993, sustaining 23. A city of 137,000, Torrance had 12 homicides while nearby Inglewood, with 112,000 residents, had 45. Judge Amy Carter will decide whether to suppress evidence from the personal cellphones of ex-officers Corey Weldin and Christopher Tomsic. Many of the officers under investigation as part of the scandal also have use-of-force histories involving the communities for which they expressed hatred. Prosecutors are reviewing dozens of additional cases linked to the officers, said Diana Teran, a special advisor to Los Angeles County Dist. A goal of the Torrance Police Department is to ensure that the public is served in a most efficient and effective manner by highly trained police officers, bearing in mind that the police officer of today works in an extremely complex society. Complaints were filed directly with the department because, unlike a number of Southern California cities, including Los Angeles, Torrance has no citizen commission overseeing its Police Department. They said they were stopped, pulled from their car at gunpoint, berated with racial threats during a 2 1/2-hour search, told to leave town and not come back--and escorted to the San Diego Freeway. A report to the city council estimated the potential cost being anywhere from $233,000 to $711,000. Gascn said the texts are proof that some Torrance officers hate the communities they were hired to serve. Ex-Torrance police officers move to suppress, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Ex-Torrance police officers move to suppress use of offensive texts, Hermosa Beach Police arrest 2 men suspected in shooting attempt, LA County serial rapist sentenced to 310 years in prison, Man wrongly imprisoned for decades declared innocent in killing of woman in Inglewood, Gov. In 1988, two Torrance police officers were caught on video choking and clubbing Thomas Tice, 20, at a Sunday afternoon party. But theyve hit a snag, Review: A reimagined Secret Garden fails to flower anew at the Ahmanson Theatre, A $150,000 executive protection dog? One year later, Tomsic was one of several officers involved in a deadly altercation with Deautry Ross in the Del Amo Fashion Center, according to district attorneys records. The department has also hired an 1. There are no results that match your search. Transparency of (a) police departments internal operations starts with an effective citizen complaint process, the report found. . Collecting this information is very important to our research, so we would like to emphasize, if you have questions about my request or suggestions, we would be happy to discuss them with you. This is a prime example of running away from local control and accountability and trying to delegate to some people far away who arent a part of the community.. WebPOLICE DEPARTMENT DAILY CRIME LOG February 2023 Date Incident Reported Complaint # TSU - MPD Location Offense Classification Date/Time Incident Occurred on or Between Item(s) Stolen (Torrance Parking Lot) Destruction-Damage-Vandalism 2/14/23 14:00 2/14/23 13:45 Sentra And De Ladurantey said complaints and litigation are an inherent part of modern policing--even in suburban Torrance. Long Beach police officials determined the use of force was justified, the records show. We the Peoplehave aRight to Knowaccording to the Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS], past Presidents (of both major political parties), Congress, and the United States Department of Justice. Torrance Police Department mission is to preserve public safety and quality of life within the City of Torrance, to respond effectively to the changing needs of the community, and to promote mutual respect between the Police Department and the people we serve. I wanted to follow up on the following Freedom of Information request, copied below, and originally submitted on Aug. 25, 2017. We have a group of officers who, apparently in addition to harboring very biased and racist beliefs, also may be engaging in inappropriate force that could be illegal in some cases, he said. Torrance settled some suits, lost others and won some, still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements. Learn more. Still, in the span of one week in November, the Los Angeles County public defenders office received about 300 letters from prosecutors disclosing potential misconduct by officers implicated in the scandal, said Judith Green, an office spokeswoman. All the while, the city contended officers were innocent and that all the allegations were fabricated, including one that officers had squeezed the testicles of three teenage Latino detainees. Johao Miguel Chavarri, 26, threatened the victims through social media platforms if they refused his request for explicit photos or videos. The impound yard agreed to pay the owner $2,750 for the damage, although there was no evidence the business was at fault, said the affidavit. Tomsic filled out a California Highway Patrol form attesting that the vehicle had not been vandalized, and had it towed by driver Chris Dunn to the impound yard at Van Lingen Towing. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Torrance--as well as others against El Monte, Alhambra and Pomona--claiming that the police and fire departments discriminated against minorities during hiring. The Times identified 13 officers in its investigation, including Tomsic, Weldin and Schroeder, meaning there are an additional five Torrance officers under investigation whose identities remain unknown to the public. Want the latest investigative and FOIA news? Rollo Green--who, according to testimony, had a history of alcohol abuse--caused the death of Kelly Rastello, 19, of Long Beach, by making an illegal left-hand turn in front of the motorcyclist, jurors said. The text messages were not on one continuous thread, according to two of the sources. Some critics say the citys most recent vote against a survey is a show of the councils unwillingness to address the concerns of the Torrance community. Another officer then sat on Ross legs before others were able to bind Ross arms and legs with a hobble restraint.. The findings were outlined in a grand jury report titled Policing the Police that investigated how the public could make complaints against police officers in a dozen county cities, including Inglewood and Culver City in addition to Torrance. TheCalifornia Public Records Actis a series of laws meant to guarantee that the public has access to public records of governmental bodies in California. According to their attorney, they were not cited. Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response, or if further clarification is needed. The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes. They say, in their complaint, that during a protest in the city council chambers against the Torrances handling of Mitchells death, police officers used excessive force against them, resulting in numerous injuries including, the complaint says, a fractured vertebrae for White and a partially amputated finger for Pesikov. 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