Vallejo on Tuesday finally released a long-buried investigation confirming what many already knew: department officers bent their badge tips at barbecues to celebrate on-duty killings — and command staff knew and looked the other way for years.

The report, commissioned from former Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano and completed in 2021 but suppressed for five years by personnel privacy laws and conflicting court rulings, found that six officers violated department policy. Eight others — including a detective who killed a 22-year-old and was later reinstated — were cleared entirely. For a scandal that put Vallejo on the national map, the outcome amounts to citations for damaging city property and behaving "unbecomingly."

The City of Vallejo released the long-suppressed Giordano report at Tuesday's city council meeting, six years after the badge-bending practice first became public. The investigation confirmed a culture that ran from 2003 to 2019, in which Vallejo officers bent the tips of their service badges at celebratory gatherings each time a colleague killed someone in the line of duty.

Giordano conducted 43 interviews with current and former officers, city officials, and department leadership. His conclusion: badge bending constituted misconduct, but was a "discrete" practice — one carried out in support of "an officer who was willing to pull the trigger." He did not find a direct link between the ritual and the shootings themselves.

At least 14 officers were named in the investigation. Six were found to have violated department policy: Lee Horton, Terry Poyser, Ryan McMahon, Ken Tribble, Zach Jacobsen, and Kyle Wylie. The violations cited were damaging badges, conduct "unbecoming" an officer, and failure to report misconduct.

Eight others were cleared: David McLaughlin, Matt Komoda, Jason Bahou, Jeremy Huff, Mark Galios, Jason Scott, Jarrett Tonn, and Todd Tribble.

Tonn's clearance is the detail that stops you. The former detective was acquitted in the 2020 killing of 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa — a case that drew national attention after Tonn shot Monterrosa through the windshield of a police SUV, claiming he saw a gun. It was a hammer. Tonn was fired, then reinstated in 2023. Now the badge-bending report clears him too.

According to NBC Bay Area, Giordano found that badge bending was started not by Vallejo tradition but by officer Kent Tribble, imported from his prior tenure with Concord police. Several officers told Giordano the practice was "weird." One — Jason Bahou, who shot and killed a man in 2015 — said a superior bent his badge tip after the shooting and he quietly bent it back, calling it "a visible scar, reminding him of the shooting, a negative event."

The practice came to public light after Bay City News and Open Vallejo published an investigation in 2020 in the wake of the killing of Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot by multiple officers while asleep in his car at a Vallejo Taco Bell. At the time, Vallejo had one of the highest rates of officer-involved shootings per capita in the state.

Giordano's report was finished in 2021 — but stayed sealed for nearly five more years as personnel privacy laws and conflicting court rulings kept it out of public view.

When the report finally surfaced Tuesday, the community response was pointed. Cristal Gallegos, director of the Vallejo Housing Justice Coalition, told the council the findings confirmed what residents had long experienced.

"The release of today's report shows that these failures were real, were repeated, and were harmful," Gallegos said. "Badge bending happened, and command staff knew and didn't act… our community has lived with this fallout for years."

Police Chief Jason Ta issued a statement calling the practice unacceptable. "Members of the Vallejo Police Department have been reminded that such conduct will not be tolerated," Ta said.

What the statement didn't address: why a report finished in 2021 took until 2026 to reach the public, or what disciplinary consequences — if any — the six officers found in violation will actually face. The violations are classified as policy infractions, not criminal conduct. Whether that distinction satisfies a city still reckoning with years of high-profile shootings is another matter.