California’s new congressional and state legislative maps include big wins for the LGBTQ+ community, after the state’s independent nonpartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission worked to unite and empower dense LGBTQ+ populations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Long Beach, the East Bay, Sacramento and the Coachella Valley. The achievement follows a months-long campaign led by Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, to advocate for fair and equitable maps that empower LGBTQ+ Californians to elect “candidates of choice” — members of the community and allies responsive to their unique challenges and priorities. [Click here to watch Equality California’s October 22 presentation to the Commission.]
“These maps represent a huge victory for diverse LGBTQ+ communities throughout California,” said Equality California Managing Director of External Affairs Samuel Garrett-Pate. “While states across the country launch unprecedented attacks against LGBTQ+ people and engage in partisan gerrymandering, California is once again leading the fight to protect our democracy and achieve full, lived LGBTQ+ equality.”
Unlike racial demographic groups, for which the Citizens Redistricting Commission receives block-level data to evaluate the concentration of Latino, Black, Asian, Indigenous and white voting age population in potential districts, LGBTQ+ people are not fully counted in the U.S. census. To fill the data gap, Equality California and Redistricting Partners used more than 500,000 georeferenced datapoints from Equality California and its partner organizations’ membership databases, as well as the U.S. Census Bureau’s Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Quarters (“POSSLQ”), to create a model identifying where LGBTQ+ people live throughout the state.
CONGRESS
Long Beach: California’s new 42nd Congressional District unites the LGBTQ+ community in coastal Long Beach and Signal Hill in a Latino-majority district that runs north through the Gateway Cities. In recent days, U.S. Representatives Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Downey) announced their retirements, clearing a path for Mayor Robert Garcia to make history as the first openly LGBTQ+ immigrant elected to Congress.
San Francisco: The state’s new 11th Congressional District includes all of the city’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhoods — including the Castro, SOMA, Noe Valley, Bernal Heights and Twin Peaks — and excludes the city’s neighborhoods that voted for Proposition 8 in 2008 (the latest statewide election data on opposition to LGBTQ+ equality), maximizing LGBTQ+ support for longtime ally and champion Speaker Nancy Pelosi and providing the community with a strong opportunity to elect an LGBTQ+ member of Congress in the future.
San Diego’s LGBTQ+ neighborhoods around Balboa Park are united in the new 50th Congressional District; Los Angeles’s LGBTQ+ community in West Hollywood, Hollywood and Silverlake is united in the new 30th Congressional District; Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ community is largely united in the new 7th Congressional District; and the East Bay’s LGBTQ+ community is united in the new 12th Congressional District.
ASSEMBLY
Los Angeles: The nation’s largest county currently has zero openly LGBTQ+ legislators for the first time since Sheila Kuehl made history when she was elected to the Assembly in 1994. But with the creation of the new 51st Assembly District running from Santa Monica through West Hollywood and Hollywood to East Hollywood and part of Los Feliz, the heart of the LGBTQ+ community is more united than ever — and well positioned to elect former Equality California Executive Director Rick Chavez Zbur next November.
Coachella Valley: After the 2011 Commission split Cathedral City from the rest of the Valley’s LGBTQ+ community in Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs and Rancho Mirage, the new 47th Assembly District reunites the community in a competitive district well positioned to elect a strong ally or an openly LGBTQ+ Assemblymember.
San Francisco: With Sunday’s last-minute reunification of most of West of Twin Peaks with the Castro and other historically LGBTQ+ neighborhoods, the city’s LGBTQ+ community remains largely united in the new 17th Assembly District.
San Diego’s LGBTQ+ neighborhoods around Balboa Park are largely united in the newly reconfigured 78th District; Long Beach’s LGBTQ+ community is united in the new 69th District; the East Bay’s LGBTQ+ community is evenly divided between the new 14th and 18th Assembly Districts; and Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ community is well represented in the new 6th District.
SENATE
Coachella Valley: Although the LGBTQ+ community is largely united in the new 19th Senate District, positioning Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton to make history as the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker, the Valley will have to wait until 2024 after moving from an even-numbered district (the current 28th) to an odd district. Meanwhile, the southern end of the Valley is included in the new 18th District, where Chula Vista City Councilmember Steve Padilla is the clear frontrunner to succeed Senator Ben Hueso in 2022.
Los Angeles: The heart of the LGBTQ+ community in Hollywood and West Hollywood are united in the new 24th District, while LGBTQ+ residents in East Hollywood, Silverlake and Los Feliz — as well as the emerging LGBTQ+ community in Downtown LA — are united in the new 26th.
San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community remains united in the slightly adjusted 11th District; Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ community remains united in the new 8th District; the LGBTQ+ community in Signal Hill and coastal Long Beach remains united in the 33rd District; most of San Diego’s LGBTQ+ community is united in the reconfigured 39th District; and the East Bay’s LGBTQ+ community remains united in the new 7th District.
Equality California worked in close partnership with the IVE Redistricting Alliance and organizations like the California Black Census & Redistricting Hub, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and MALDEF to ensure that efforts to unite LGBTQ+ communities did not inadvertently divide other communities of interest. An overwhelming majority of LGBTQ+ Californians are members of communities of color, and LGBTQ+ people are significantly more likely to live below the poverty line, so the community is best served by fair and equitable maps that empower all historically marginalized communities — including communities of color, immigrant communities and working class communities — throughout the state.
BACKGROUND
A decade ago, Equality California and Redistricting Partners successfully pushed the 2011 Citizens Redistricting Commission and local commissions in San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego to consider geographically connected LGBTQ+ communities as communities of interest in the redistricting process.
California has pioneered maximizing the LGBTQ+ community’s political power through the redistricting process. Harvey Milk became the state’s first out LGBTQ+ elected official in 1977, when San Francisco switched from at-large elections to districts for the Board of Supervisors. With the power to elect candidates of choice, San Francisco’s historically LGBTQ+ neighborhoods went on to elect nine more out LGBTQ+ supervisors, including Senators Mark Leno and Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who each served on the board before being elected to the Legislature.
In 1990, San Diego LGBTQ+ community leaders advocated for the creation of City Council District 3, which includes the traditionally LGBTQ+ neighborhood Hillcrest and surrounding neighborhoods with significant LGBTQ+ populations. In 1993, District 3 elected out lesbian Christine Kehoe, who was succeeded by an unbroken line of out LGBTQ+ city councilmembers including Toni Atkins, Todd Gloria, Chris Ward and Stephen Whitburn. Kehoe, Atkins, Gloria and Ward went on to represent the historically LGBTQ+ neighborhoods in the California Legislature. Atkins made history as the first LGBTQ+ woman to serve as Assembly Speaker and the first openly LGBTQ+ Senate President Pro Tem. Gloria became the first openly LGBTQ+ person to be elected Mayor of San Diego in 2020.
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Equality California is the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization. We bring the voices of LGBTQ people and allies to institutions of power in California and across the United States, striving to create a world that is healthy, just, and fully equal for all LGBTQ people. We advance civil rights and social justice by inspiring, advocating and mobilizing through an inclusive movement that works tirelessly on behalf of those we serve. www.eqca.org
Author Talk Friday, January 21 6:00–7:30 p.m. PT Online program $5 | Free for members
Historians Miriam Frank and Allyson Brantley will discuss the long and interwoven history of LGBTQ and labor activism through the lens of Brantley’s new book, Brewing a Boycott:How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Drawing on oral histories and archival collections, including those held by the GLBT Historical Society, Brantley details how activists across the nation, from gay liberationists to Chicano activists and union members, built supportive, vibrant coalitions. Over decades of organizing and coalition-building from the 1950s to the 1990s, they molded the boycott into a powerful means of political protest, challenging the Coors Brewing Company’s antiunion, discriminatory, anti-LGBTQ practices and conservative political ties. This talk will examine the particular success of the boycott in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and consider its impact in light of contemporary ongoing conversations about consumer power and corporate buyouts.
A California bill aiming to outlaw forced and unnecessary genital surgeries on intersex children has been pulled.
California state senator Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, has been working for three years to try to ban the “corrective surgeries”.
His bill, SB225, would have banned unnecessary surgeries on intersex children under the age of 12, but it has been stuck in the Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development, according to the Associated Press.
In 2020, the bill was opposed by committee chairman and state senator Steve Glazer, who said he believed it was moving “in the right direction,” but that he did not support the bill in its current form.
It has faced opposition from parents who want to make decisions on behalf of their children as well as the California Medical Association, and on Tuesday (4 January) Wiener said the bill “does not appear to have a viable path forward”.
He wrote on Twitter: “For three years, we’ve worked to pass legislation to protect intersex babies from medically unnecessary genital surgeries.
“Sadly, SB225 continues to lack the votes in the Business and Professions Committee. Despite this setback, I’m committed to this fight.”
Speaking to the Associated Press,Wiener added: “Pausing medically unnecessary genital surgeries until a child is old enough to participate in the decision isn’t a radical idea. Rather, it’s about basic human dignity.
“I’m not giving up, and I stand in solidarity with the intersex community in its fight for bodily autonomy, dignity and choice.”
Ebony Harper, executive director of California TRANScends, told PinkNews: “We are furious that SB225 had little to no support in the California state legislature. You can not claim pro-LGBTQIA+ liberties and drop the ball on protecting intersex babies.
“We hear stories of infant genital mutilation and the mental harm that it often causes.
“These archaic practices need to stop now… People are dying; there are high rates of suicide in our intersex communities because of mutilation. It is our duty to protect intersex babies, that will become intersex adults, defending them from non-consensual cosmetic medical interventions, violence, and protection from discrimination.
“That is our duty! And California has just dropped a huge ball… We will regroup and support any future bill to ensure protection from infant genital mutilation.
‘We want our intersex community to know you’re not alone, and we stand with you, love and support you.”
Intersex is an umbrella term, which encompasses those who are born with sex characteristics outside of the binary “female” and “male” definitions, and being intersex is thought to be as common as having red hair.
However, around the world, intersex children are forced to undergo unnecessary and cosmetic surgeries to “correct” their genitals.
These surgeries can cause long-lasting harm, and a 2013 United Nations report said: “Children who are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to irreversible sex assignment, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalizing surgery … leaving them with permanent, irreversible infertility and causing severe mental suffering.”
There are currently no laws in the US, federal or state, which protect children from these surgeries.
Over 30 years ago, Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve, the most successful lesbian magazine in the world, connecting lesbian community, changing the way lesbians are seen by the mainstream, highlighting the transgender experience, raising awareness of attacks on LGBTQ rights and amplifying the work of lesbian activists. One of the three 2021 recipients of the GLBT Historical Society’s History Maker Awards, Stevens reacquired Curve and co-founded the Curve Foundation last year to empower the Curve community — lesbians, queer women, trans women and nonbinary people of all races, ages and abilities.
The Foundation’s mission is to spur storytelling and cross-generational dialogue by supporting journalism inspired by the tradition of Curve magazine, investing in the next generation of intersectional leaders and bolstering community archives to ensure LGBTQ women’s culture and history are known. In addition to a fellowship to support emerging journalists, the foundation is establishing its own digital archives to preserve the living legacy of Curve magazine and inspire future writers. The foundation is currently hiring an archivist to oversee the launch of this initiative. We sat down for a chat with Stevens and Jasmine Sudarkasa, the Curve Foundation’s executive director.
The GLBT Historical Society’s archives enable people to learn about the LGBTQ past. Likewise, how are the new Curve Foundation’s activities inspired by the past 30 years of Curve magazine?
Jasmine: The work of the foundation is rooted in the magazine’s legacy: we resource stories and storytellers that embody authenticity, cultivate a sense of belonging and support intergenerational trust and resilience. These values are inspired by lesbian legacies of community building and culture work, particularly as embodied in Curve magazine. Putting these values into practice, then, we maintain two programs: The Curve Award, to resource LGBTQ storytellers, and The Curve Archive, which curates, activates and preserves lesbian stories well into the future.
Franco: There is no other organization that bridges our past and our present so directly. By preserving and making the Curve Archive available, we are honoring our history and making it visible and accessible today. By supporting today’s journalists and inviting them to find inspiration in the archives, we are fostering an intergenerational dialogue. All of the foundation’s programming is rooted in our history as a way of not only preserving our past, but also informing how we carve out our future.
The Curve Award is designed to foreground the voices of those who have been marginalized or censored. What kind of support do recipients receive?
The five winners of the Curve Award receive a $5,000 cash award, one-on-one mentoring through the National LGBTQ+ Journalists Association (NLGJA), cohort-based professional development and opportunities for outward-facing visibility. This might include conference presentations at NLGJA, writing opportunities for Curve, and so on. We are incredibly proud of the 2021 cohort—they are an incredible cadre of emerging journalists and have been published everywhere from the New York Times to Them. Applications for the 2022 cohort will go live in April, and we hope to hear from many more journalists this year.
The Curve Archive will make the entire run of Curve magazine available to the public in 2022; how has the GLBT Historical Society’s work helped with this project?
The GLBT Historical Society has been an invaluable partner to us in our first year of operations. The archival and development teams have been incredibly gracious, helping us to understand what it really takes to orchestrate and operate a compelling archive. We have a lot of gratitude for the leadership of the society in both setting the standard for efficacy and creating space to teach new partners in the field. It’s a very generous way to steward LGBTQ history, and very much in line with our approach to the work.
Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve in 1990. She has served on the board of GLAAD, was a founding board member of the San Francisco LGBT Center, and has worked extensively to promote lesbian visibility and educate media professionals on the lesbian market. Franco is the subject of the documentary Ahead of the Curve (dir. Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow, 2020).
Jasmine Surdakasa is the executive director of the Curve Foundation. She learned philanthropic practice while serving as the program fellow for the Effective Philanthropy Group at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, exploring equitable methods and power-sharing. Before philanthropy, she served as the senior trainer on behalf of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), subject agency of the film Very Young Girls.
California’s minimum wage is set to go up again in January, hitting a major milestone sought by labor advocates and activists.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2022, California’s minimum wage will increase to $15 an hour for employers with 26 or more employees. For employers with 25 or fewer employees, the minimum wage rises to $14.
With this latest increase, California now has the highest statewide minimum wage in the country. California’s minimum wage is now more than double the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour.
Several cities in California have an even higher minimum wage than the statewide amount.
West Hollywood has the highest minimum wage in the country: $17.64 an hour for hotel workers, according to payroll experts Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. Non-hotel workers have a minimum wage of $15.50 an hour in West Hollywood, though that amount is set to increase to $16.50 an hour in July 2022.
The UC Berkeley Labor Center tracks local minimum wages in the state and across the country. Other California cities and counties with higher minimum wages effective Jan. 1 include:
— Belmont ($16.20)
— Berkeley ($16.32)
— Burlingame ($15.60)
— Cupertino ($16.40)
— Daly City ($15.53)
— El Cerrito ($16.37)
— Emeryville ($17.13)
— Fremont ($15.25 for employers with 26 or more employees)
— Half Moon Bay ($15.56)
— Hayward ($15.56)
— Los Altos ($16.40)
— Menlo Park ($15.75)
— Milpitas ($15.65)
— Mountain View ($17.10)
— Novato ($15.77 for employers with 100 or more employees, $15.53 for employers with 26 to 99 employees)
— Oakland ($15.06 an hour)
— Palo Alto ($16.45)
— Petaluma ($15.85)
— Redwood City ($16.20)
— Richmond ($15.54)
— San Carlos ($15.77)
— San Francisco ($16.32)
— San Jose ($15.45)
— San Mateo ($16.20)
— Santa Clara ($16.40)
— Santa Rosa ($15.85)
— Sonoma ($16 for employers with 26 or more employees)
With officials Sunday painting a grim picture of a winter in which the omicron variant spreads with devastating speed, California hospitals are trying to do what they can to prepare for the weeks and months ahead.
Public health officials are expecting some kind of wave of new infections to sweep through during the winter, and depending on how large it is, that could tax the hospital system in a way not seen since the summer delta surge.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor on the pandemic, said Sunday the nation should be prepared for big spikes in hospitalizations and deaths, especially in areas with low vaccination rates, because of the remarkable spread of omicron.
“We are going to see a significant stress in some regions of the country on the hospital system, particularly in those areas where you have a low level of vaccination,” he told CNN.
People who are vaccinated and have received booster shots are still expected to be well protected against hospitalization and death, even against omicron. But Fauci and others say with omicron’s spread, they expect more breakthrough infections among vaccinated people — meaning they are at higher risk for coming down with mild symptoms and being contagious.
Those who are unvaccinated will be at the highest risk in a winter surge, experts say, and there are still many of them. In addition, vaccinated people who haven’t gotten their booster shot will likely be at greater risk with omicron of a breakthrough infection than with previous variants.
The limiting factor for many hospitals will not be beds, but people to staff them, said Dr. Nancy Gin, regional medical director of quality for Kaiser Permanente Southern California.
“What is going to be a concern for the entire medical community this year is that ‘Great Resignation’ that we’ve been hearing about with regard to healthcare personnel,” she said.
Besides omicron, Gin said that Kaiser Permanente Southern California has been eyeing the effects of the seasonal flu, which was squelched last year by the precautions that people were taking to prevent COVID-19 — and could reemerge as a serious threat as people have let down their guard about masking, hand-washing and social distancing
She urged people to get the flu vaccines, as well as COVID-19 shots and boosters, to give themselves more protection and help ease the strain on healthcare workers.
At hospitals, “people are tired. We have been at this for nearly two years,” Gin said. And “the emergence of omicron has renewed concerns about surges and a difficult winter.”
Kaiser Permanente Southern California, which has 4.8 million members across Southern California, the Inland Empire and nearby areas, believes it is “well positioned to be able to absorb the volume at this time,” Gin said.
As it stands, “we’re only using about 15% of all of our ventilator capacity for Southern California,” Gin said — far lower than last winter, when some of its medical centers were at 60% or more of their ventilator capacity.
Some doctors are concerned that people are so fed up with the pandemic that they won’t wear masks at a time when transmission is expected to climb.
“My concern — and the concern across the country — is the fatigue with regard to mask wearing and social distancing” as the more transmissible omicron variant spreads, said Dr. Stephanie Hall, chief medical officer for Keck Medicine of USC and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “People are tired. And they’re not sticking with it.”
Hall urged people who are planning to gather with loved ones for the holidays to get tested for the coronavirus and isolate if they are positive, to avoid travel if possible, and to keep wearing masks in public spaces, washing their hands and adhering to social distancing.
At L.A. County’s massive public hospital system, COVID-19 hospitalizations “have remained steady over the last two months,” Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly said in a statement.
“We are not seeing a rapid increase and we credit so far lower COVID-19 numbers this December to everyone who has gotten vaccinated, including getting the booster shot if eligible,” Ghaly said. “However, we recognize that other hospitals across L.A. County have begun to see some increases in inpatient volume and that other regions in the United States are experiencing a surge in patients.
“As we continue to manage this evolving pandemic, including the danger presented by a virus that continues to mutate, we cannot emphasize enough how critical it is for everyone 5 and older to get vaccinated and for those 16 years and over to get the booster shot if they are 6 months or more past their last dose,” Ghaly said. “We also encourage everyone to maintain vigilance over the holidays — for example, by limiting attendance at large gatherings and wearing a mask when in indoor public spaces.”
“The Obama Portraits Tour” and “Black American Portraits” exhibits at LACMA not only celebrate portraiture, but also queer Black artists and subjects.
In the West Coast presentation of “The Obama Portraits Tour,” Kehinde Wiley’s Barack Obama and Amy Sherald’s Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama are on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Jan. 2.
“Barack Obama” by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 2018; “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” by Amy Sherald, oil on linen, 2018. (Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald)
Wiley, who identifies as gay, was the first Black artist to paint an official presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery when Obama selected him in 2018.
Wiley’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” his eagerly anticipated reimagining of Gainsborough’s iconic 1770 painting “The Blue Boy,” is on display at The Huntington. Wiley’s work, which takes the name that Thomas Gainsborough initially used, incorporates the Grand Manner portraiture technique and style, but in a contemporary setting.
“The Portrait Gallery’s official portraits of President Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley and First Lady Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald are powerful works of art,” Michael Govan, LACMA CEO, said in a statement. “The colors and styles of the paintings are a fresh departure from the history of presidential portraiture, and these have become two of the most recognized artworks in the world.”
To complement “The Obama Portraits Tour,” “Black American Portraits” is an exhibit that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. It features 140 works mainly drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
The picture above it showed several Black men who had been lynched.
Another photo asked what someone should do if their girlfriend was having an affair with a Black man. The answer, according to the caption, was to break “a tail light on his car so the police will stop him and shoot him.”
Someone else sent a picture of a candy cane, a Christmas tree ornament, a star for the top of the tree and an “enslaved person.”
“Which one doesn’t belong?” the caption asked.
“You don’t hang the star,” someone wrote back.
The comments represent a sliver of a trove of racist text messages exchanged by more than a dozen current and former Torrance police officers and recruits.
Through interviews with sources with direct knowledge of the investigation, public records requests and a review of district attorney’s office records, The Times examined some of the contents of the until-now secret texts and identified a dozen Torrance police officers under investigation for exchanging them.
The broad scope of the racist text conversations, which prosecutors said went on for years, has created a crisis for the Torrance Police Department and could jeopardize hundreds of criminal cases in which the officers either testified or made arrests. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Wednesday his office will investigate the department in the wake of the scandal.
The officers’ comments spared no color or creed: They joked about “gassing” Jewish people, assaulting members of the LGBTQ community, using violence against suspects and lying during an investigation into a police shooting, according to district attorney’s office records reviewed by The Times.
Frequently, hateful comments were targeted at Black people. Officers called Black men “savages,”and several variations of the N-word, according to documents reviewed by The Times. The officers also shared instructions on how to tie a noose and a picture of a stuffed animal being lynched inside Torrance’s police headquarters, according to the documents.
While no officers currently face criminal charges in direct relation to the text messages, the racist exchanges have led to the dismissal of at least 85 criminal cases involving the officers implicated in the scandal. County prosecutors had tossed 35 felony cases as of mid-November, and the Torrance city attorney’s office has dismissed an additional 50, officials said.
In total, the officers were listed as potential witnesses in nearly 1,400 cases in the last decade, according to district attorney’s records The Times obtained through a public records request. The officers did not necessarily testify in each case, so it’s unclear how many of those cases could be affected.
Still, in the span of one week in November, the Los Angeles County public defender’s office received about 300 letters from prosecutors disclosing potential misconduct by officers implicated in the scandal, said Judith Green, an office spokeswoman.
Prosecutors are reviewing dozens of additional cases linked to the officers, said Diana Teran, a special advisor to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón. The review will prioritize active cases in which a defendant is still in custody and one of the officers implicated in the scandal was a “material witness.”
“So that could be, for example, a single police officer is in a patrol car and sees an individual on the sidewalk and then says he had a bulge in his pocket and then pats him down and then recovers a gun,” Teran said. “Without that officer, you couldn’t prove that case.”
Since 2013, the group of officers identified by The Times has been involved in at least seven serious use-of-force incidents in Torrance and Long Beach, including three that ended in the deaths of Black and Latino men, according to police use-of-force records and court filings. Although the officers’ actions were found to be justified in each case, experts say those cases should be reexamined in the context of the hateful messages.
“What those text messages revealed was an extraordinarily hostile attitude toward people of color, people who are nonbinary, people who have different sexual orientations,” said Walter Katz, a former independent police auditor in California who now serves as a vice president of criminal justice for research firm Arnold Ventures. “I don’t know that we can take anything they’ve said at face value.”
Two of the officers under investigation as part of the scandal — Anthony Chavez and Matthew Concannon — are also under investigation for the controversial 2018 slaying of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, a Black car theft suspect they fatally shot while he was holding an air rifle. Chavez and Concannon were cleared of wrongdoing by former Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, but the case is one of several that Gascón has hired a special prosecutor to review for possible criminal charges.
Several of the officers have also been named as defendants in lawsuits alleging excessive force, false arrest and wrongful death, court filings show. In some of those cases, the plaintiffs are members of the same ethnic groups the officers espoused hatred for in the texts.
In addition to Weldin, Tomsic and Chandler, The Times has reviewed district attorney’s records detailing racist texts or images shared by six other police officers: Blake Williams, Brian Kawamoto, Joshua Satterfield, Omar Alonso, Christopher Allen-Young and Long Beach Police Officer Maxwell Schroeder, who is a former Torrance police recruit.
Concannon, Chavez and fellow Torrance Police Officers Andrew Kissinger and Enrique Villegas are also under investigation as part of the scandal, according to three people with direct knowledge of the case and a review of district attorney’s records. The Times did not independently view documentation of racist text messages sent by any of those four officers, though the newspaper did review a document that showed Concannon sent messages that are part of the investigation.
The identities of all 13 officers named in this article were confirmed by three people with direct knowledge of the case and by reviewing district attorney’s records that detailed some of the officers’ comments. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could candidly discuss an ongoing investigation.
The text messages were not on one continuous thread, according to two of the sources.Additional officers received the texts but did not interact with them in any way, so they are not considered under investigation,those sources said.
The exact number of officers involved in the scandal is unclear. Sgt. Mark Ponegalek, a Torrance police spokesman, could not confirm or deny the identities of the officers involved, but said 15 have been placed on administrative leave in relation to the scandal.
That number did not include Tomsic, Weldin, or Schroeder, he said. The Times identified 13 officers in its investigation, including Tomsic, Weldin and Schroeder, meaning there are an additional five Torrance officers under investigation whose identities remain unknown to the public.
A Long Beach police spokesman said Schroeder was assigned to desk duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation, but would not say why.
The officers either declined to comment through their attorneys or did not respond to messages left by The Times at their homes or through their union, the Torrance Police Officers Assn., which represents rank-and-file officers. An attorney for the union said the officers were barred from commenting on the investigation.
“The current administrative investigations are confidential. As such, we do not have access to facts of the underlying investigation, or the alleged inappropriate materials. We expect that as police officers, our members should be treated like any other citizen — considered innocent until proven guilty,” the union said in a statement. “Our members have a right to due process and should be protected from illegal and unnecessary intrusion into their private lives.”
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The text messages might have remained hidden if not for the alleged bizarre actions of Tomsic and Weldin in January 2020.
The two officers responded to a report of mail theft in the South Bay city and directed a car linked to the crime to be towed from the scene, authorities said. The pair allegedly spray-painted a swastika and a “happy face” inside the vehicle, according to a criminal complaint.
District attorney’s records reviewed by The Times showed Tomsic sent a slew of racist images and messages, including a picture of former President Reagan feeding a monkey with a caption stating Reagan “used to babysit [former President] Obama.”
Another picture he sent referred to an “African American baby” as a “Pet Niguana,” according to the records, and he also sent a message mocking the fact that he was the subject of a racial profiling complaint.
“So we totally racially profiled his ass, haha … Shopping at 7/11 while Black, he didn’t know the rules lol,” Tomsic wrote, according to the records.
Torrance police officials acquired evidence of the text message threads during their investigation of Weldin and Tomsic, according to Ponegalek, though he declined to give a specific timeline of when they obtained the data.
Gascón said he first became aware of the situation in July, when he was given a briefing about the pending vandalism charges.
“I questioned whether there was any other things that would lead us to believe that this is not sort of a single crime event,” he said. “I actually made some comments about how, generally, when someone does this kind of stuff, there are bigger patterns of behavior. So, I started asking if we had checked for text messages.”
Within weeks, Torrance police provided the district attorney’s office with more than 200 gigabytes of data, which showed the officers had been exchanging racist messages since at least 2018, according to Teran, the advisor to the district attorney. Gascón praised Torrance Police Chief Jeremiah Hart for moving quickly to provide information to prosecutors, noting he met resistance from police leaders when investigating similar scandals involving racist text messages among San Francisco officers.
Gascón said the texts are proof that some Torrance officers hate the communities they were hired to serve.
“It creates a tremendous amount of concern for me. We have a group of officers who, apparently in addition to harboring very biased and racist beliefs, also may be engaging in inappropriate force that could be illegal in some cases,” he said.
In the texts, the officers showed little concern about getting caught and even less about the citizens they were assigned to protect, routinely joking about using force and mocking internal affairs.
“We had to [expletive] her up because we knew he wouldn’t,” one officer wrote in one exchange about an altercation with a female suspect. “Don’t ask me where that lump on her forehead came from though.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to do things your own damn self,” Kawamoto replied, later adding a comment that he wanted to “always make Torrance great again,” a reference to former President Trump’s ubiquitous political slogan.
Kawamoto also referred to Black men as “savages” in the texts, according to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times.
In another message reviewed by The Times, Alonso complained about the idea of having to work with a gay officer, and said he’d “straight punch” a member of the LGBTQ community, using a common slur for gay men.
Usually, conversations always seemed to circle back to vile insults or depictions of violence against Black people. After one officer shared a news article about someone being arrested for urinating on a Black child and calling them the N-word, Satterfield replied, “what’s the crime?” according to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times.
From 2016 to 2019, Torrance police upheld just three citizen allegations of police misconduct and zero allegations of racial profiling made against officers, according to data submitted to the California attorney general’s office. Katz, the former independent police auditor, described those statistics as “concerningly low.”
“If citizen complaints are not taken seriously, it does increase the sense of impunity that officers who are inclined toward misconduct have,” he said.
Ponegalek argued that The Times’ analysis was incomplete, as it did not include statistics involving complaints filed by other officers. Torrance police sustained 35 out of 43 internally generated complaints of officer misconduct from 2016 to 2020, Ponegalek said. The department has also hired an outside law firm to conduct a review of the scandal, he said.
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Many of the officers under investigation as part of the scandal also have use-of-force histories involving the communities for which they expressed hatred.
Schroeder used a carotid restraint hold — sometimes referred to as a blood choke — to subdue a homeless Black man in a park in November 2018, according to Long Beach police records The Times obtained through a public records request. Schroeder initiated contact with the man because he was sleeping in a park after it closed, the records show, and used the choke to take him down after an altercation.
Long Beach police officials determined the use of force was justified, the records show. The homeless man was booked on suspicion of resisting arrest, being in the park after dark and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to a Long Beach police spokesman. Long Beach City Prosecutor Doug Haubert did not respond to repeated calls and e-mails seeking information about the criminal case against the homeless man.
According to the district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times, Schroeder sent one message in the texts reading “No Jews, No Blacks,” and made racist remarks about a child eating a watermelon.
Several of the Torrance officers under investigation as part of the scandal have also used serious or deadly force against Black and Latino men while on duty in recent years, according to district attorney’s records.
Chavez, Williams, Satterfield and Tomsic all opened fire on Michael Lopez in 2017 after a vehicle pursuit that started in Palos Verdes Estates. Lopez had been fleeing police in a truck, and the officers said he attempted to ram them when they opened fire, according to a district attorney’s office memo that determined the fatal shooting was justified.
One year later, Tomsic was one of several officers involved in a deadly altercation with Deautry Ross in the Del Amo Fashion Center, according to district attorney’s records. The officers were responding to calls from a mall employee who said Ross was walking through the building with a knife, muttering to himself. Ross fled from Torrance police when they responded, and became violent when they tried to arrest him, district attorney’s records show.
During the struggle, Tomsic said, Ross tried to gain control of his gun, according to a district attorney’s office memo clearing the officers of criminal liability. The officers hit Ross with a Taser and handcuffed him, but he continued to struggle, according to the report, which then described two officers kneeling on Ross’ shoulders.
Another officer then sat on Ross’ legs before others were able to “bind Ross’ arms and legs with a hobble restraint.”
Minutes later, firefighters on scene noted Ross’ pulse was beginning to weaken. He eventually went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. A knife was recovered at the scene.
Medical examiners ruled Ross died of cardiac arrest resulting from methamphetamine use and his struggle with the officers, according to autopsy records.
The most controversial incident involving officers linked to the racist text scandal is the 2018 shooting death of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell. The incident sparked significant protests — including one inside Torrance’s City Council chambers that led demonstrators to file excessive-force lawsuits against several of the officers The Times identified in this article — and remains under review by Gascón.
Mitchell, who was Black, was suspected of driving a stolen vehicle when he pulled into a Ralphs parking lot in Torrance in December 2018, according to a district attorney’s office memo clearing the officers of wrongdoing. Concannon and Chavez pulled in behind him, exited their vehicle and yelled “police!” Mitchell initially placed his hands on the steering wheel, according to the memo, but when the officers approached him, they noticed his hands move toward his lap where Concannon saw what he believed to be a firearm.
The officers repeatedly ordered Mitchell to get out of the car, but he did not comply, according to the report. The officers described the weapon, later determined to be a “break barrel air rifle,” as “pinched” between Mitchell’s legs, though neither alleged he grabbed it or pointed it at them before they opened fire.
Lacey cleared the officers of wrongdoing in all three deaths, but Gascón has reopened the investigation into Mitchell’s killing . He declined to offer a timetable on that review and would not say whether the officers involvement in the text scandal would affect that probe.
Katz said the text messages call into question the credibility of the officers’ accounts of any past use-of-force incidents involving Black or Latino suspects.
In the Mitchell case, that could be especially concerning. According to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times, Concannon once sent a troubling text message referring to a deposition he gave in an “officer-involved shooting.”
“They believed our lies. Good job sticking to the script,” he wrote. “LMAO, that’s what they call a W.”
According to a Times review of public records, Concannon has shot only one person during his career: Christopher DeAndre Mitchell.
With more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court gives them the OK next year, California clinics and their allies in the state Legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking reproductive care, including possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states.
The California Future of Abortion Council, made up of more than 40 abortion providers and advocacy groups, released a list of 45 recommendations for the state to consider if the high court overturns Roe v. Wade — the 48-year-old decision that forbids states from outlawing abortion.
The recommendations are not just a liberal fantasy. Some of the state’s most important policymakers helped write them, including Toni Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who leads the state Senate and attended multiple meetings.
“We’ll be a sanctuary,” Newsom said, adding he’s aware patients will likely travel to California from other states to seek abortions. “We are looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.”
Abortion, perhaps more than any other issue, has divided the country for decades along mostly traditional partisan lines. A new decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which could come next summer, would be the culmination of more than 40 years of conservative activism. But Wednesday’s report offers a first glimpse of how Democratic-dominated states could respond and how the debate over abortion access would change.
California already pays for abortions for many low-income residents through the state’s Medicaid program. And California is one of six states that require private insurance companies to cover abortions, although many patients still end up paying deductibles and co-payments.
But money won’t be a problem for state-funded abortion services for patients from other states. California’s coffers have soared throughout the pandemic, fueling a record budget surplus this year. Next year, the state’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts California will have a surplus of about $31 billion.
California’s affiliates of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, got a sneak preview of how people might seek abortions outside their home states this year when a Texas law that outlawed abortion after six weeks of pregnancy was allowed to take effect. California clinics reported a slight increase in patients from Texas.
Now, California abortion providers are asking California to make it easier for those people to get to the state.
The report recommends funding — including public spending — to support patients seeking abortion for travel expenses such as gas, lodging, transportation and child care. It asks lawmakers to reimburse abortion providers for services to those who can’t afford to pay — including those who travel to California from other states whose income is low enough that they would qualify for state-funded abortions under Medicaid if they lived there.
It’s unclear about how many people would come to California for abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned. California does not collect or report abortion statistics. The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, said 132,680 abortions were performed in California in 2017, or about 15% of all abortions nationally. That number includes people from out of state as well as teenagers, who are not required to have their parents’ permission for an abortion in California.
Planned Parenthood, which accounts for about half of California’s abortion clinics, said it served 7,000 people from other states last year.
A huge influx of people from other states “will definitely destabilize the abortion provider network,” said Fabiola Carrion, interim director for reproductive and sexual health at the national Health Law Program. She said out-of-state abortions would also likely be later term procedures, which are more complicated and expensive.
The report asks lawmakers to help clinics increase their workforce to prepare for more patients by giving scholarships to medical students who pledge to offer abortion services in rural areas, help them pay off their student loans and assist with their monthly liability insurance premiums.
“We’re looking at how to build capacity and build workforce,” said Jodi Hicks, CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “It will take a partnership and investment with the state.”
Abortion opponents in California, meanwhile, are also preparing for a potential surge of patients from other states seeking the procedure — only they hope to convince them not to do it.
Jonathan Keller, president and CEO of the California Family Council, said California has about 160 pregnancy resource centers whose aim is to convince women not to get abortions. He said about half of those centers are medical clinics, while the rest are faith-based counseling centers.
Many of the centers are located near abortion clinics in an attempt to entice people to seek their counseling before opting to end pregnancies. Keller said many are already planning on increasing their staffing if California gets an increase of patients.
n honor of World AIDS Day, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s. Mason, whose current project is an art, care and community-expanding network called Queering Dreams that they recently cofounded with Jason Wyman, also worked with the San Francisco AIDS Project as a case worker in the 1990s.
Mason was one of 23 ACT UP veterans who sat for an oral history as part of the GLBT Historical Society’s ACT UP Oral History Project, which was completed last year and is available here. In their oral history, Mason offered their thoughts on the importance of intersectional identity and why ACT UP had limited success integrating those perspectives as an activist organization. We invited Mason to discuss some of the issues they raised in their oral history and reflect on what they learned as an activist of color thirty years ago.
In your oral history, you mention that even from attending your first ACT UP protests, you were living in Washington D.C., before you came to San Francisco, you were interested in how AIDS was affecting poor people, marginalized people and people of color.
CM: Yes, and in fact shortly after I moved to San Francisco I accidentally wandered into the Castro Sweep [a brutal police crackdown on AIDS activists in the Castro in October 1989] on my way home from work! I was taken by how physical it was. People were really willing to put their bodies, their physical selves, on the line, against police brutality. So right there, you’ve got the intersection of AIDS with policing and incarceration. That interested me, and I started attending ACT UP meetings. And I feel like part of my role during my work with ACT UP was to keep bringing up the fact that HIV was affecting other populations beyond what was commonly seen in the media and understood by the American public, which was largely gay white men.
I remember being in a meeting, trying to reach consensus, and I can’t remember what we were discussing—perhaps homelessness, and one guy got impatient and snapped, “While we’re sitting here discussing this, dozens of people have died.” And I said, “In my community people have been dying all this time—and for a hell of a lot longer.” So there was always that tension. It is true that there were some activists from earlier political movements who had been involved with larger social issues. There were also people who began their ACT UP work with a pretty narrow focus. And there were those who did eventually came to appreciate and align themselves with a larger worldview. But it was always a bit of a struggle.
In your oral history, you really insist on the fact that intersectionality informs priorities and that over time, ACT UP/SF deemphasized these. You mention specifically women and people of color.
CM: I did spend a lot of time on women’s issues, which many of the men were receptive to. AIDS did not affect women the same way, and for a long time that just wasn’t accounted for. Women who clearly had the disease couldn’t get a diagnosis, which meant they couldn’t access Medical, social security, treatment studies, and so on. But ACT UP was not successful in terms of issues that affected people of color and the most marginalized. There was a time, for example, when we focused on universal access to healthcare and health insurance, which would have made treatment more available to marginalized people, such as the homeless, people with mental-health problems, or low-income people. Ultimately when the focus became centered narrowly around “let’s get drugs into bodies,” these larger issues were deprioritized, and it turns out that they weren’t necessarily talking about poor bodies, brown bodies, Black bodies, homeless bodies…
And I really wonder how different things might be if we had centered intersectionality and been more strident about equity issues. Today many white gay people see HIV as a manageable disease, but it is still booming in the Black community. And it’s not just people of color; when I was a case worker at the SF AIDS Foundation, it was poor people and people with drug problems. Having mental-health problems or being homeless would automatically disqualify you from access to treatment and coverage. I’ve realized that over and over—in the women’s suffrage movement or the labor movement and today with voting rights—the notion of “urgency” has ended up deprioritizing marginalized communities. And this is going to keep happening until we create movements where the goal is really to create a better life for the most marginalized, including Black people, transgender folks, incarcerated people and sex workers.
What advice would you have for students, historians and members of the public who are interested in learning about ACT UP and AIDS activism today?
CM: I think that ACT UP in some ways was very successful and remains worth emulating. We were strident, even when we didn’t have social support. We were just one in a long line of movements that were more vilified than celebrated at the time. There’s such a thing as “respectability politics,” and a lot of LGBTQ people were not happy when we were out there protesting during Pride parades. But I’d also say to folks, be willing to look at what fell by the wayside. Yes there is a moral arc of history, and yes, it does bend. But that arc doesn’t bend without us. And when I say “us,” I mean all of us, we have to stop creating movements for change with this addiction to centering whiteness.
Black people and poor people and trans people are still fighting for a place at the table. Those who are at the table can’t speak for those who aren’t. What we can do is make space for other voices. And hand the microphone over from time to time. When we get in certain rooms, we have to demand that other people also get into that room. Not to see ourselves as singular, but realize our connections to the whole.
Photo by William Beverly
Crystal Mason (they/them) is an activist who recently cofounded “Queering Dreams,” anart, care, and community-expanding network that uses the power of art to envision liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.
