Officers Probably Not Responsible for Radio Slurs, Police Probes Find

Internal affairs investigators in Westminster and Huntington Beach have concluded that racial insults overheard on a police radio frequency during a bank heist probably were not made by officers, authorities said Wednesday.

Detectives from both departments pored over tapes of the slurs and questioned more than 100 officers, dispatchers and supervisors in search of the person who made the remarks last month, officials said.

Westminster’s probe cleared its department’s personnel of any wrongdoing.

In Huntington Beach, police Lt. Chuck Thomas said, “We are confident that it’s not one of our employees, but we can’t say that with 100% certainty,” having no suspect. “Unfortunately, it’s going to be something that can be seen as a dark cloud hanging over us and our profession.”

The epithets, officials from both agencies said, could have been made by other police officers with access to radios or by an amateur radio operator hacking into the police frequency.

The slurs, Westminster police officials said, sound more faint than transmissions made by police officers. A slight echo accompanies them, they said.

“The police radios are a lot less secure than we’ve probably led the public to believe over the last couple of years,” said Westminster Capt. Andrew Hall. “Now that the facade is shattered, we’re probably more vulnerable than we were.”

The probe followed a Dec. 8 holdup of a Huntington Beach Wells Fargo Bank branch on Bolsa Avenue and Goldenwest Street. About 35 officers from the two police agencies hunted for a pair of armed robbers who fled the bank after pistol-whipping a bank clerk. A robbery suspect was arrested at the scene.

Other departments involved in the manhunt, including the FBI and the Orange County district attorney’s office, were not using the police frequency, officials said.

The incident marks the second time in a year that Westminster police investigators have cleared the agency’s officers in such a case. During protests in Little Saigon, scanner operators overheard racial insults, which police later blamed on an amateur radio operator. They did not have enough evidence to charge him.

Vietnamese community leader Van Thai Tran was furious about the remarks. Tran on Wednesday welcomed the findings of Westminster’s internal affairs probe. But he said he plans to lobby the state attorney general’s office to begin an independent investigation into the two incidents.

“I think that there has to be an independent inquiry into this matter given the ongoing sensitivity issues between the ethnic minority community and law enforcement in this county,” Tran, a Westminster attorney, said.

No matter what investigators conclude, the publicity surrounding the remarks will undermine support for police in some quarters, said Thomas of Huntington Beach.