A police officer accused of leaking confidential information to Proud Boys national leader Enrique Tarrio became a “double agent” for the far-right extremist group after its members burned a stolen Black Lives Matter banner in the nation’s capital, a federal prosecutor said Monday at the start of the officer’s trial.

Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Shane Lamond was a “Proud Boys sympathizer” who warned Tarrio about his impending arrest for the banner’s destruction and later lied to investigators about their communications, said the prosecutor, Joshua Rothstein.

“He knew the difference between right and wrong, and he knew it was a crime to lie to law enforcement,” Rothstein said during opening statements for Lamond’s trial.

Lamond, who was arrested in May 2023, is charged with one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will decide the case after hearing testimony without a jury.

Ana Jara, one of Lamond’s attorneys, said describing the veteran officer as a Proud Boys sympathizer is inflammatory and “simply not true.” Jara said prosecutors are asking the judge to view “cherry-picked” messages between Lamond and Tarrio “in a vacuum” without the proper context.

“Context matters, especially in conversations,” Jara said.

Tarrio, who could be a key witness at Lamond’s trial, is serving a 22-year prison sentence after a jury convicted him and other Proud Boys leaders of seditious conspiracy charges stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The judge said Tarrio was waiting for the outcome of last month’s presidential election before deciding whether to testify at Lamond’s trial. President-elect Donald Trump, who repeatedly has vowed to pardon people convicted of Capitol riot charges, suggested he would consider pardoning Tarrio.

Tarrio was arrested in Washington two days before Proud Boys members joined a mob’s attack on the Capitol. The Miami resident wasn’t at the Capitol when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building and interrupted the congressional certification of President Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

Tarrio was sentenced to more than five months in jail for burning the banner stolen from a historic Black church in downtown Washington and for bringing two high-capacity firearm magazines into the district.

Lamond, who met Tarrio in 2019, had supervised the intelligence branch of the police department’s Homeland Security Bureau. He was responsible for monitoring groups like the Proud Boys when they came to Washington.

Lamond’s name repeatedly came up during Tarrio’s 2023 trial. The men exchanged hundreds of messages across several platforms, with Lamond frequently greeting Tarrio with the words “hey brother.”

Rothstein said Lamond provided Tarrio with “real-time updates” on the police investigation of the Dec. 12, 2020, banner burning. Tarrio, in turn, shared the updates with other Proud Boys members.

“This play-by-play information allowed the Proud Boys to be one step ahead of law enforcement,” the prosecutor said.

In a message to Tarrio on Dec. 25, 2020, Lamond said police investigators had asked him to identify Tarrio from a photograph. Lamond warned Tarrio that police may be seeking a warrant for his arrest.

Later, on the day of his arrest, Tarrio posted a message to other Proud Boys leaders that said, “The warrant was just signed.”

Lamond’s indictment accuses him of lying to and misleading federal investigators when they questioned him in June 2021 about his contacts with Tarrio.

“The defendant knew the truth, and he chose to lie anyway,” Rothstein said.

The indictment also says Tarrio and Lamond exchanged messages about the Jan. 6 riot and discussed whether Proud Boys members were in danger of being charged in the attack.

“Of course I can’t say it officially, but personally I support you all and don’t want to see your group’s name and reputation dragged through the mud,” Lamond wrote.

Lamond, of Stafford, Va., was placed on administrative leave in February 2022.

The first government witness to testify at Lamond’s trial was Metropolitian Police Lt. Ahsan Mufti, who investigated the banner burning and obtained a warrant for Tarrio’s arrest.

Mufti said Lamond didn’t tell him that Tarrio had personally confessed to him that he had burned the banner. Mufti said that would have helped his investigation. However, Tarrio also publicly confessed to the crime on social media before his arrest.

On cross-examination, Mufti said Lamond helped him identify Tarrio’s image in a photograph and his voice on a podcast.

“He was in fact quite helpful?” defense attorney Mark Schamel asked.

“He was,” Mufti replied.

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Officers threatened to kill the dog of Thomas Perez Jr as they pressured him to falsely confess to killing his father, who was alive

A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.

During the 2018 interrogation of Thomas Perez Jr by police in Fontana, a city east of Los Angeles, officers suggested they would have Perez’s dog euthanized as a result of his actions, according to a complaint and footage of the encounter. A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.

The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.

The incident began on the evening of 7 August 2018 when Perez Jr’s father, Thomas Perez Sr, whom he lived with, left the house with their dog to get the mail, according to a summary of the case written by Dolly Gee, a federal judge. The dog returned a few minutes later, but Perez Sr did not; the next day, his son called the police and reported him missing.

Officer Joanna Piña, who took the call, reported Perez Jr’s demeanor as “suspicious”, claiming he seemed “distracted and unconcerned with his father’s disappearance”. She and her supervisor, Cpl Sheila Foley, went to Perez’s house, and then brought him back to the police station for questioning. Police then searched his house, where they claimed they found “visible bloodstains” and that a police dog smelled the presence of a corpse. Jerry Steering, Perez Jr’s lawyer, said there had been no blood in the home, and police appeared to have been claiming miscellaneous stains were blood.

Perez Jr sat for hours of initial questioning while officers obtained additional search warrants allowing them to access devices they had seized. At one point, two officers took Perez out of the station and drove him around to different locations “purportedly to investigate his father’s disappearance”, the judge wrote. The officers berated him, insisting he killed his father and did not remember it, and telling him he did not need his medication as Perez begged for medical attention.

“Where can you take us to show where Daddy is?” one said.

“We’re not going to go to the hospital, because that’s not going to help you,” another added.

The officers eventually returned to the station, where Perez Jr faced further questioning, the judge said.

Video of the interrogation revealed hours of two officers accusing him of murder while Perez was distraught and crying, said the judge, who noted Perez was “sleep deprived, mentally ill, and, significantly, undergoing symptoms of withdrawal from his psychiatric medications”. The officers at one point brought in his dog, with one of them saying: “It did happen … you killed [your father], and he’s dead … You know you killed him … You’re not being honest with yourself … How can you sit there and say you don’t know what happened, and your dog is sitting there looking at you, knowing that you killed your dad? Look at your dog. She knows, because she was walking through all the blood.”

During the interrogation, Perez Jr started pulling out his hair, hitting himself and tearing off his shirt, nearly falling to the floor, at which point the officers laughed at him and told him he was stressing his dog, the judge summarized. The footage showed him at one point lying on the floor holding on to his dog. Officers also said he would be “charged” $1m in restitution if he did not lead them to his father’s body.

Eventually, detectives falsely told Perez his father’s body had been located, that he was in the morgue with stab marks, Perez’s complaint says. Perez then falsely confessed and was left alone in the room, where video captured him trying to hang himself.

“[Perez] was berated, worn down, and pressured into a false confession after 17 hours of questioning. [The officers] did this with full awareness of his compromised mental and physical state and need for his medications,” the judge wrote. “[The officers’] conduct impacted Perez so greatly that he falsely confessed to murdering his father and attempted to commit suicide in the station.”

Perez was then transported to a hospital on an involuntary psychiatric hold and, for the first time, read his Miranda rights indicating he had a right to remain silent, the judge said. That night, one of the detectives received a call from Perez Sr’s daughter, who confirmed that her father had been located and was alive.

Steering, Perez Jr’s lawyer, said Perez Sr had left their home to visit a friend, which is why he had not returned, and that his daughter informed the police that he was at the airport on his way to visit her in northern California. Steering said police did not, however, inform Perez Jr that his father was alive and instead kept him isolated in a psychiatric hold for three days while he believed both his dog and father had been killed.

Steering said detectives took the dog to a pound, but that Perez Jr was eventually able to track him down due to the dog’s chip and rescue him.

Fontana police spokespersons and lawyers for the city did not respond to inquiries on Friday and have not said whether any officers faced disciplinary action. Lawyers for officers David Janusz and Jeremey Hale, who conducted parts of the the interrogation, did not respond to inquiries. A third officer involved in the interrogation, Kyle Guthrie, who was not a named as a defendant, could not be reached.

“Between mentally torturing a false confession out of Tom Perez, concealing from him that his father was alive and well, and confining him in the psych ward because they made him suicidal, in my 40 years of suing the police I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty by the police,” Steering said in a statement.

In an interview, the lawyer said watching the footage laid bare how officers can force people to make false confessions: “This case shows that if the police are skilled enough, and they grill you hard enough, they can get anybody to confess to anything.”

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has proposed an end to public disclosure of investigations of abusive and corrupt police officers, handing the responsibility instead to local agencies in an effort to help cover an estimated $31.5 billion budget deficit.

The proposal, part of the governor’s budget package that he is still negotiating with the Legislature, has prompted strong criticism from a coalition of criminal justice and press freedom groups, which spent years pushing for the disclosure rules that were part of a landmark law Newsom signed in 2021.

The law allows the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to investigate and decertify police officers for misconduct, such as use of excessive force, sexual assault and dishonesty. It requires the commission to make public the records of decertification cases. The Newsom administration now wants to get rid of that transparency element. The commission says the public could still get the records from police departments.

But advocates say local police departments often resist releasing that information. A number of states with a police decertification process, including Republican-led ones such as Tennessee and Georgia, require state agencies to divulge records of police misconduct. In Tennessee, records made available through the requirement provided a slew of new details on police officers’ actions when they brutally beat Tyre Nichols, a Black man, during a traffic stop earlier this year.

Those details, released by the state police certification commission, were not previously made public by the local police department. “It’s a slap in the face to the family members who have had their loved ones stolen from them that … a key provision of the decertification process is not being honored,” J Vasquez, of social justice group Communities United For Restorative Justice, said at a news conference last week. Removing the transparency element from the 2021 law would continue eroding public trust, Antioch Mayor Pro Tem Tamisha Torres-Walker said.

The city, 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of San Francisco, was shaken after a federal investigation found more than half of the officers in the Antioch police force were in a group text where some officers freely used racial slurs and bragged about fabricating evidence and beating suspects. “To say, ‘go to the very people who commit the crimes against your community and ask them to reveal themselves to you so that you can hold them accountable,’ I don’t think that’s a fair process,” Torres-Walker said.

The coalition of more than 20 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, also accused the Democratic governor of abusing the budget process to push through his proposal introduced in April. Carmen-Nicole Cox, director of government affairs for ACLU California Action, said Newsom’s proposal should have gone through the traditional legislative process, instead of being put into the budget.

Democratic Sen. Steven Bradford, who authored the 2021 landmark bill, declined to comment on the proposed change. The governor’s office referred questions to the commission, whose spokesperson said the proposed change is a cost-saving measure that would still allow the public to access information on decertification cases from local police departments. California is facing a nearly $32 billion budget deficit this year after enjoying several years of record-breaking surpluses and the proposal is one of many of Newsom’s cost-cutting measures.

Neither the governor’s office nor the commission shared how much money the state could save under the proposal. According to a May budget request, the commission estimated it will handle up to 3,500 decertification cases each year. That’s about 4% of all officers in California.

The commission, which has suspended or decertified 44 police officers so far this year, requested an additional $6 million to handle the large number of complaints. “Because of the substantial fiscal implications, as well as the need to urgently implement these cost-saving measures into law, the budget process is the most appropriate avenue for this,” commission spokesperson Meagan Poulos said in a statement. For decades, police officers in California have enjoyed layers of legal protections helping shield most of law enforcement misconduct records from public scrutiny, First Amendment Coalition Legal Director David Loy said.

In 2018, things began to shift after the Legislature passed a bill requiring the disclosure of records pertaining to police misconduct including use of excessive force, sexual assault and dishonesty. That law was expanded in 2021 to include the release of investigations into police racist or biased behavior, unlawful searches or arrests and use of unreasonable force. The 2021 decertification law was hailed as another mechanism to hold law enforcement accountable. “California has always been a black hole for police transparency,” said Loy, whose group is part of the coalition opposing the change. “The last thing California should be doing is taking any step backward on police transparency.”

The state Legislature passed its own version of the state budget Thursday to meet its deadline without including Newsom’s proposed change to the decertification process. Legislative leaders and the governor’s office will continue negotiations to finalize the budget by the end of the month.

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