Vallejo releases investigation into police badge bending five years after its completion

VALLEJO – The city of Vallejo on Tuesday released its long-anticipated investigation into “badge-bending,” an almost two-decades long practice of Vallejo police officers bending the tips of their badges to commemorate shootings.

The report was commissioned in 2020, shortly after former police Capt. John Whitney revealed the practice to several media outlets, and was completed the following year. But the city fought to keep it secret for the last five years. 

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to make the report public in November 2022. Last year, a state appeals court ordered the city to release it.

Emi Young, a senior attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, said in an email, “after five years of stonewalling, the City of Vallejo has been forced to release the badge bending report. It took a lawsuit by the ACLU to make them finally do it.”

The investigation was conducted by former Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano. Much of Giordano’s findings were made public during two days of testimony in 2022, when several officers testified that they participated in the practice and former police Lt. Kent Tribble testified that he had brought it from Concord in 2003.

During those hearings, Solano County Superior Court Judge Daniel Healy said that the investigation had “no value” and brought little light to the issue. He criticized some of Giordano’s practices, including not checking whether officers bought new badges to replace their bent ones.

The report does implicate some officers in spreading the practice within the department, and sustained allegations of misconduct against six former officers. Eight other officers were found to be “exonerated,” including three officers who were found to be “victims” of badge bending.

It is unclear from the records released what, if any, disciplinary actions were taken against the officers with sustained findings. Detective Terry Poyser was already retired by the time Giordano’s investigation was underway. Tribble, found to be the originator of the practice, retired during the investigation. Capt. Lee Horton, who was found to have known about the practice and not taken sufficient steps to end it, retired shortly after its conclusion.

Officer Ryan McMahon was fired by the time the investigation was complete for his conduct during the 2019 shooting of Willie McCoy. Officer Zach Jacobsen, who killed Angel Ramos in 2017 and was found to have bent McMahon’s badge, remained with the department until 2023. Sgt. Kyle Wylie remained with the department until last year and was named “supervisor of the year” in 2023.

"The conduct described in the badge bending investigatory report does not align with the Vallejo Police Department's code of ethics and values," Vallejo police Chief Jason Ta said in a statement. "Conduct of this nature erodes public trust and is inconsistent with the professionalism, accountability, and integrity expected of every member of this department. Members of the Vallejo Police Department have been reminded that such conduct will not be tolerated."

Kent Tribble introduced the practice of badge bending to the Vallejo Police Department after he was hired in 2003, according to his interview in Giordano’s report. Tribble said he came up with it at his previous agency, the Concord Police Department, along with his co-worker Officer Dan Golinveaux, who bent his badge after Tribble had missed a suspect at 7 yards with an AR-15 rifle. Tribble said he felt that he’d failed to do his job correctly and the bent badge was a way to console him. 

Tribble said he also bent his brother Todd Tribble’s badge while both were in Concord. Todd Tribble, who also joined the Vallejo Police Department, told Giordano that he was never involved in badge bending again and was exonerated.

Tribble said that his recollection of the mid-2000s was “pretty fuzzy” but indicated that he had bent several officers’ badges during that time period.  He said he bent Officer Eric Jensen’s badge along with his own after a shooting in 2003.

Tribble also indicated he bent now-Deputy Chief Sanjay Ramrakha’s badge during that time period. But he also mistakenly associated him with a shooting at the Relay bar across the street from Vallejo police headquarters in 2005 in which officers had gotten into an argument with a civilian customer who left and returned with a gun. Officers Jeremie Patzer and Brent Pucci were involved in the incident, but not Ramrakha.

Ramrakha told Giordano he never heard of badge bending.

The Relay bar often comes up in the Giordano report as a location where officers bent their badges after a shooting. Officers often said they went out for drinks after a critical incident as a way to decompress. According to several interviews, the officers bent their badges privately rather than in front of a group. 

The report indicates that officers other than Tribble began taking up the practice in the mid- to late-2000s. Then-Officer Kyle Wylie said in his interview that either Eric Jensen or Jeremie Patzer bent his badge after Wylie was involved in a shooting in February 2009 and later another officer whose name he didn’t remember bent it again after another shooting. Giordano found Wylie to be dishonest in his interview and sustained three policy violations against him.

In 2011, eight Vallejo police officers fired on Sherman Peacock, killing him. One of the officers, Waylon Boyce, said in his interview that he had never had any of his badges bent and that he first learned about the practice in 2017. 

As part of the investigation, Boyce brought in four metal badges for inspection and none of them were bent. However, invoices from badge manufacturer the Ed Jones Co. that were subpoenaed by a defense attorney indicated that Boyce had sent a badge to be repaired in 2017 to straighten the “point above E in Vallejo.” Boyce remains a Vallejo police sergeant.

Giordano wrote that he requested invoices from the Ed Jones Co. but the records the company produced were not specific enough to identify individual badge purchases.

“We did not follow up on this lead any further as it was highly unlikely anyone bought a new badge to replace a bent badge,” Giordano wrote. “It was very easy to bend the badge back with no damage or indication of having been bent.”

After Dustin Joseph and Sean Kenney shot and killed Mario Romero on Sept. 9, 2012, Tribble felt that the officers faced a lot of “persecution on Facebook” over the killing and he wanted to support them for doing their job. According to Giordano’s report, he “bent Joseph's badge but did not bend Kenney's badge because Kenney talked about everything and Kent did not think Kenney would keep this secret.”

Tribble also recalled bending the badges of Mark Galios and Josh Coleman after they fired on a suspect who “tried to ambush them” with an AR-15 in a South Vallejo Starbucks in 2013. The weapon jammed and the suspect fled. The officers chased the suspect and shot him. The suspect was not killed and was later acquitted, according to Tribble. Galios denied knowing anything about badge bending and Giordano exonerated him. Coleman had left Vallejo to be a Napa County sheriff’s deputy in 2018 and Giordano was unable to interview him, but he later testified that Tribble had bent his badge after a different incident.

Tribble also said that he “probably” bent then-Officer Jarrett Tonn’s badge after a shooting in 2015. Tonn denied that happened and Giordano found that he was “exonerated.” Tonn later shot and killed Sean Monterrosa in 2020, sparking widespread protests, and was fired and subsequently reinstated and promoted to sergeant.

According to Tribble’s interview, he bent the badges of Officers David McLaughlin and Matthew Komoda at the Relay in 2016 after they fired at a moving vehicle but the bullets did not penetrate the car. Tribble said that he wanted to buoy the spirits of the officers because they were being overly critical of themselves for firing at body mass instead of portions of the suspect’s body visible through the vehicle windows.

Komoda and McLaughlin both confirmed in their own interviews that Tribble had bent their badges. But they said that it was done against their will and that they later bent them back. Giordano exonerated both officers and found that they were “victims” of badge bending, despite that they never reported the incident to superiors. Komoda remains a Vallejo police officer.

Whitney testified in a 2022 deposition that he first brought badge bending to the attention of department superiors in 2014 or 2015, when he noticed bends on Officer Joseph McCarthy’s badge as he was being promoted to corporal. He testified that he pointed them out to then-police Chief Andrew Bidou and then-Capt. Lee Horton. Bidou told Horton to “take care of this,” but the practice continued for years, according to Whitney. 

Tribble received a promotion to lieutenant in 2016. Tribble recalled that shortly after that, Horton, his supervisor, approached him in his office and told him to fix his bent badge. 

"I had not bent my Lieutenant badge. So, I said, ‘I don't know what you're talking about’,” Tribble told Giordano. “And then he said, ‘I don't ever want to see that again, fix it,’ and left.”

Tribble said that Horton confronted him a second time around 2018. According to Tribble’s account, Horton said, "No bullshit. I know what that badge bend is for. I don't want to see it ever again and don't give any bullshit of what it's all about." 

Horton said, "Well, you know, what's going to happen if the Chief finds out," according to Tribble. Tribble claimed that he told Horton he would go into the Chief's office right then and explain it to him, but Horton told him not to. 

Giordano’s investigation found that former Detective Terry Poyser bent at least two officers’ badges starting in 2015. Then-Officer Jason Bahou told Giordano that after he shot and killed Phillip Conley in 2015, Poyser came up to him in the locker room, bent his badge and told him he survived, he did the right thing, he did what he had to do, and not to feel bad about it. Bahou did not disclose the incident but Giordano found he was a “victim” of badge bending and exonerated him.

Then, after Officer Zachary Jacobson killed Angel Ramos in January 2017, Jacobsen said that Poyser came into the locker room and told him that he handled himself well and bent his badge.

Jacobsen in turn spread the badge bending practice himself and bent then-Officer Ryan McMahon’s badge after he chased, beat, Tased and shot Ronell Foster, killing him in 2018. Jacobsen told Giordano that he approached McMahon in the locker room and bent his badge, telling him that he was available if McMahon wanted to confide in him.

McMahon was involved in another shooting in 2019. He was one of six Vallejo police officers who shot and killed Willie McCoy after they found him unresponsive behind the wheel of his car in a Taco Bell drive through. 

Within about four minutes of arriving the officers fired 55 bullets into the silver Mercedes, killing McCoy. 

According to Giordano’s report, the morning after the shooting the officers gathered at the Vallejo Police Officers Association hall for some drinks to “de-stress.”

Officer Mark Thompson, one of the officers involved in the shooting, told Giordano that McMahon asked the other officers at the hall, "Hey, when are we bending our badges?"  Thompson said that he did not know what McMahon was talking about and just brushed him off. 

Then-Officer Jodi Brown told Giordano that she heard from another officer that McMahon had bent his badge after the McCoy shooting and that he was at the union hall saying he had "two bodies on his gun." But Giordano did not interview the other officer or otherwise follow up on Brown’s account. 

Shortly after the McCoy shooting, the department became aware that McMahon had added a plate to his gun with the words “Veritas” and “Aequitas," Latin for “truth” and “justice,” a reference to the 1999 film Boondock Saints, where two brothers engage in vigilante justice by killing men they believe to be evil. 

McMahon was placed on administrative leave during an investigation into the McCoy shooting and the non-regulation back plate. When McMahon turned in his badge prior to going on leave, Horton noticed that the badge was bent. Giordano’s report only indicates that one tip of McMahon’s badge was bent, but Whitney’s lawsuit alleged it was bent twice. 

According to Bidou’s interview in Giordano’s report, he asked then-internal affairs Sgt. Drew Ramsay to look into badge bending within the department. Ramsay told Bidou that the badge  bending was about an officer being in a life or death situation and had nothing to do with someone being killed. According to Bidou’s account, Ramsay also said that the practice had come from another department and was not widespread in Vallejo.

Bidou said that based on that, he felt that the badge bending was not as serious an issue as he had thought and decided that handling it immediately, without the internal affairs process, would be better.

Bidou then directed Whitney to oversee a badge inspection and repair process.

According to Bidou, Whitney collected the bent badges and brought a shoe box-sized box to Bidou that contained badges that needed to be repaired. But Bidou told him to have officers fix the badges themselves. 

Whitney later alleged in a lawsuit that he disagreed with that instruction, as it would destroy evidence and cover-up serious misconduct. He then brought his concerns to City Manager Greg Nyhoff, Mayor Bob Sampayan, and City Attorney Claudia Quintana, but still no investigation was initiated.

Whitney himself was fired later that year for erasing data on his city-owned phone prior to turning it in during a leak investigation. The following year, Whitney disclosed his knowledge of badge bending to news media and it became a national story. The city hired Giordano in response and he completed his investigation a year later. 

But despite the widespread public interest in the case, the city refused to release Giordano’s report, arguing that it was a police personnel record not subject to public disclosure. The ACLU sued for its release under Senate Bill 1421, which requires California agencies to release records relating to police shootings. 

The city tried to escalate the matter to the California Supreme Court, but it declined to review the city’s case in September 2025, upholding the appeals court's previous decision in favor of the ACLU. 

Young, the ACLU attorney, said the report is an attempt to sweep the whole affair under the rug. Giordano, she said, did a “shoddy investigation,” taking “many officers' self-serving statements at face value,” dismissed others when they incriminated other officers, and characterized others as “victims.”

“If the report established anything, it was that the practice of badge bending was long-standing and well known amongst the leadership of the Department,” Young said. Yet because there was no proper investigation, “there is little hope of immediate accountability for the officers involved.”