Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Tuesday was a day of mixed emotions for the ACLU of Northern California.
The organization finally saw its lawsuit force Vallejo city officials to make public a third-party investigation of the city’s scandal-plagued badge-bending controversy.
Still, it wasn’t the result the organization was looking for.
RELATED: Vallejo finally releases police badge-bending report
The long-awaited report concluded that the act of bending badges to mark shootings “was not done to commemorate fatal officer-involved shootings,” but did “violate departmental policy.”
Allegations surfaced nearly six years ago that a group of officers secretly “commemorated fatal shootings with beers, backyard barbecues, and by bending the points of their badges” each time someone was killed in the line of duty. Officers reportedly called a badge modified in this way a “Badge of Honor.”
Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano said that although reports on the findings in 202 were “not substantiated by the evidence, the evidence nonetheless supports findings of misconduct.”
Emil Young, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, wrote the Times-Herald on Wednesday morning, saying that “by sitting on this information for years, the city missed any opportunity to hold any officer accountable.”
“Under California’s Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, agencies have one year from when they become aware of misconduct to initiate discipline,” writes Young. “Whether the department intended to shield the officers or merely avoid a public scandal, its dereliction of duty ensured impunity for those responsible.”
In Giordano’s summary of the investigation, “The badge is a symbol of public trust and the authority vested in law enforcement officers. It is to be used only for official purposes. Modifying the badge to mark an officer’s engagement and survival in a critical shooting incident is not an authorized use of the badge. Such an act can be misinterpreted or send the wrong message about Vallejo PD officers’ approach to use of force and the sanctity of human life, as it has here.”
Giordano said the city and its police “suffered a media firestorm and damage to their collective reputation as a result of these instances of badge misuse and how they have been interpreted. The persons who intentionally bent badge tips, their own or others’, have engaged in unauthorized use of the badge and conduct unbecoming of a law enforcement officer.”
In response to Giordano’s report, Young wrote that Vallejo residents have long demanded transparency and accountability, but they would not get it.
“Giordano did not conduct a serious investigation,” Young writes. “He accepted most officers’ self-serving accounts at face value, characterized some officers with bent badges as “victims” of the practice, identified a small number of ‘bad apples’ as scapegoats, and ultimately shielded department leadership and the broader culture from accountability.
“The report maintains that badge bending was intended as peer recognition for officers who ‘survived a dangerous encounter,’” Young wrote. “But the report, and the department, avert their eyes from what is plain: the Vallejo Police Department has a serious ‘us-versus-them’ problem, a mentality that has poisoned its relationship with the community for decades. And this is reinforced by a culture wherein officers from patrol through command understand their first duty is to stay quiet about the problems amongst their own.”
Young complained that officers identified in the report as chiefly responsible for badge-bending and the effort to hide it had retired before Giordano’s report was completed. Meanwhile, other officers Giordano characterized as badge-benders or enablers of the cover-up remain active on the force. Some have even been promoted.
“The release of the Giordano Report should prompt a long overdue reckoning — for the badge-bending scandal, and the rotten culture that created it,” Young wrote. “Vallejo residents should demand that the city and VPD officials answer to the public for this scandal.”