The Torrance Police Department and the California Attorney General's Office have entered into an "enforceable agreement" meant to reform the troubled agency following a scandal that led prosecutors to toss dozens of criminal cases linked to officers who sent racist text messages, officials said.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced the reforms — which will include changes to the agency's use-of-force and internal affairs practices, along with attempts to curtail biased policing — during a news conference in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday morning.
Bonta credited former Torrance Police Chief Jeremiah Hart with approaching him after the scandal first erupted in 2021, leading to collaborative reform efforts.
“The Torrance Police Department has demonstrated a commitment to self reflection to looking inward … to address systemic challenges," Bonta said Thursday.
The California Attorney General's Office announced its Torrance investigation in December 2021, the same day a Times investigation first revealed the contents of the text messages and the names of most of the officers involved. Court records and documents obtained by The Times showed the officers made offensive comments about a wide range of groups. They joked about "gassing" Jewish people, attacking members of the LGBTQ community and using violence against suspects.
The worst comments were saved for Black men and women, who the officers repeatedly called "savages" or referred to with variations of the N-word. One officer shared instructions on how to a tie a noose and posted a picture of a stuffed animal being hung inside police headquarters. Another message referred to the relatives of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, a Black man shot to death by Torrance police in 2018, as "all those [N-word] family members," according to court records.
Sometimes, the officers blatantly fantasized about the deaths of Black men, women and even kids.
One officer shared pictures of tiny coffins intended to house the bodies of Black children they would “put down.” Another imagined executing Black suspects.
“Lucky I wasn’t out and about,” one officer wrote in response to a text about Black men allegedly involved in a Torrance robbery, according to records reviewed by The Times in 2022. “D.A. shoot team asking me why they are all hung by a noose and shot in the back of the head 8 times each.”
The officers also suggested a political allegiance in their hate-filled text thread. In a conversation about needlessly beating a female suspect, Sgt. Brian Kawamoto said he wanted to “make Torrance great again,” a play on President Trump’s ubiquitous campaign slogan.
The texts were sent between May 2018 and February 2022, according to investigative reports made public by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. Bonta said Thursday that roughly a dozen officers were involved in the thread. At least seven of those officers are no longer employed by the agency, according to court records and a POST database.
The group of officers that The Times linked to the texts has been involved in at least seven serious use-of-force incidents in Torrance and Long Beach, including three killings of Black and Latino men, according to police use-of-force records and court filings.
The officers actions were initially found to be justified in each case, though prosecutors later revisited Mitchell's death and indicted Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez on manslaughter charges.
While Concannon and Chavez were investigated as part of the scandal, The Times has never seen evidence that they sent racist text messages. In the past, authorities have said, some officers under investigation were aware of the texts but did not send any hateful messages themselves.
David Chandler is also awaiting trial on assault charges for shooting a Black man in the back in 2018. In total, five officers linked to the text thread have been charged with crimes.
The scandal may not have come to light if not for the actions of former officers Cody Weldin and Michael Tomsic, who were charged with spray painting a swastika inside of a vehicle that was towed from a crime scene in 2021. That incident prompted former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón to launch an investigation into possible hate crime charges. While a hate enhancement was never charged in the vandalism case, it led to the execution of warrants on the officers' cellphones that unveiled the texts.
Tomsic and Weldin pleaded guilty to vandalism earlier this year and gave up their right to be police officers in California. Disciplinary records made public earlier this year identified Weldin as the “owner” of the group text in which many of the racist remarks were found. The group was dubbed “The Boys,” records show.
By engaging in "collaborative reform," Bonta chose the least forceful method of reform in Torrance. Often, the attorney general's office will seek court-mandated reform through a settlement, as it has with the Los Angeles County sheriff's and probation departments, so that it may ask a judge to force change if a police agency doesn't comply.
Bonta is now seeking to take over the county's juvenile halls after the probation department failed to honor its settlement with the state.
In 2021, Hart personally approached Bonta's office, seeking to work together on reform, which may have led the attorney general to use a softer method. Interim Police Chief Bob Dunn, who came to Torrance in 2023 after a long career with the Anaheim Police Department, said he believes Hart's actions should show the department is committed to reform in the wake of the ugly scandal.
"It was the department that identified the behavior, the department that did the investigation and the department that took the case for criminal filing on the initially involved officers," Dunn said of the city's reaction to the revelation of the text messages in 2021.
In recent years, Dunn said, the department has taken steps to improve its use-of-force and police pursuit review processes by deploying sergeants to respond to any force incident. The hope, Dunn said, is to collect better information from individual cases that can be used to train officers in deescalation. Hart also created a Chief's Advisory Panel to collect greater community input on issues facing the department, including bias allegations, according to Dunn.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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