Police: Slurs Weren’t Made by Officers

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

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

Westminster’s probe cleared its department’s personnel of any wrongdoing. But Huntington Beach officials cautioned that without a prime suspect they are unable to rule out that an officer made the offensive remarks.

“We are confident that it’s not one of our employees, but we can’t say that with 100% certainty,” Huntington Beach Police Lt. Chuck Thomas said. “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 latest slurs, Westminster police officials said, sound more faint than transmissions made by police officers. A slight echo suggests that the insults were probably made by someone hacking into the transmission, 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,” Westminster Police Capt. Andrew Hall said. “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 third robber was arrested at the scene.

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

The incident marks the second time in a year that Westminster police investigators have cleared the agency’s officers of similar charges.

Officers came under fire last year when scanner operators overheard racial insults during the Little Saigon protests. Westminster police said they found an amateur radio operator they suspected of making the slurs but did not have enough evidence to charge him.

Vietnamese community leader Van Thai Tran was furious over the remarks but on Wednesday welcomed the findings of Westminster’s internal affairs probe. He added, however, that he plans to seek an investigation of the two incidents by the state attorney general’s office.

“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,” said Tran, a Westminster attorney. “I only see positive results coming from such an investigation.”