Timothy Colomey said his fellow Los Angeles police officers had a nickname for him after he transferred out of SWAT: “Top Rope.”
It was a reference to a professional wrestler flinging himself from the top rope of a ring and flooring his opponent, Colomey said. A former senior SWAT sergeant, Colomey had aggressively taken down plenty of suspects during his career, but according to his testimony at a civil trial that played out in a downtown courthouse in recent weeks, the nickname insinuated he was trying to flatten his old unit by spilling its darkest secrets.
Colomey, 55, has made allegations of “unlawful killings” by SWAT members and department cover-ups of the alleged misconduct. He claimed a cadre of senior officers, a so-called “SWAT mafia,” exercised “god-like power” over who was allowed into the elite unit and how it operated, creating a “culture of violence” that glorified deadly force.
Colomey filed a lawsuit in 2018, alleging he was forced out of SWAT and faced retaliation for blowing the whistle.
A jury found that Colomey’s claim had merit, ruling in his favor Wednesday afternoon and awarding him about $3.5 million in damages. A visibly emotional Colomey turned and kissed his wife on the forehead as the verdict was read.
In an interview afterward, Colomey said he was optimistic that the new LAPD chief would take a serious look at the SWAT unit’s operations.
“I’m hoping that others that are behind me, that were here, that risked a lot to show up and tell the truth, that they’ll be protected,” he said.
During the trial, Colomey and his attorneys described how he fell into depression and even became fearful for his life after he blew the whistle on his SWAT colleagues. He said he was transferred to less desirable post supervising bomb-sniffing dogs at LAX, which took away his overtime and stripped him of his supervisory duties.
Before his transfer, Colomey considered himself a marked man by those loyal to the SWAT mafia, he testified in court. In one incident recounted by multiple witnesses, one of the unit’s two lieutenants, Chester “Lee” McMillion, convened an informal meeting of SWAT officers at the department’s training academy in Elysian Park and allegedly told them that “we have enemies within this platoon.”
One of those present testified that McMillion also made reference to a copy of a complaint on his desk, suggesting that he had read Colomey’s comments — even though statements to Internal Affairs are supposed to stay secret.
After that meeting, he said, he was ostracized.
“I am a ghost. I’m ignored. I’m talked about behind my back. And I know it: I’m a rat. I’m listed as a rat,” Colomey said. “No one will talk to me. It’s probably very dangerous to talk to me, if you have anything to do with SWAT.”
The trial pulled the curtain back on rifts within one of the LAPD’s most storied — and notorious — units. The LAPD was among the first police departments to have a dedicated tactical team, forming SWAT in the wake of the 1965 Watts uprising. The unit developed such a big reputation worldwide that former Chief Daryl Gates famously boasted in 1980 that his SWAT team could rescue American hostages being held in Iran. But the unit’s tactics and culture have also been the subject of numerous critical reports over the years.
Colomey first raised his concerns with Internal Affairs starting in 2018, he said, when an investigation was launched into an anonymous complaint alleging he and the unit’s other supervisor, Lt. Ruben Lopez, had shown preferential treatment and submitted false paperwork in a SWAT training academy. The department’s investigation concluded that the allegations were unfounded.
In court filings, Colomey accused officers of covering up incidents in which officers were struck by friendly fire, showing up to calls drunk and participating in hazing rituals with newer members. Department higher-ups, he said, covered up such behavior after the fact.
Although the majority of the unit’s operations were resolved without firing a shot, Colomey said the SWAT mafia’s “groupthink” occasionally led to preventable deaths. Stopping short of calling them homicides, he singled out three “unlawful” killings by the SWAT unit, including the 2017 shooting of an unarmed man by a sniper in a circling helicopter; a nonfatal shooting the same year of a man holed up inside a shed; and the 2014 death of a mentally ill homeless man named Carlos Ocana who fell off a billboard atop a downtown building after an officer shot him with a Taser.
In his opening arguments, Colomey’s attorney Greg Smith said that police leaders sought at all costs to protect the image of SWAT, which he called “the crown jewel of the Los Angeles Police Department.”’
Christopher Cianci, an attorney hired by the city of Los Angeles to argue on its behalf, painted Colomey as a bitter and headstrong officer on a downward spiral who lashed out at former friends who tried to help him. Cianci called the former SWAT sergeant’s whistleblower claim the act of a desperate man trying to take his colleagues down with him as he himself came under investigation.
The defense argued that Colomey suspected that the anonymous complaint against him had been lodged by Wilson Wong, a former SWAT officer with whom he had a prior conflict. Cianci maintained that Colomey sought to have Wong transferred into his unit, so he could make the junior officer’s “life a living hell,” as Colomey had allegedly told another colleague.
Colomey denied the allegations about Wong from the witness stand and said he had reason to be wary of blowback.
“In order to protect the secrets, and I think I’m only the tip of the iceberg here, … they will do anything to hide 100% what I believe is happening in SWAT,” Colomey testified.
Colomey said he often worried for his safety while taking part in often-dangerous training exercises in which his life was in his colleagues’ hands, including exercises in which the unit was rappelling down the sides of high-rises in San Francisco or practicing scuba diving.
On cross-examination, Cianci pressed Colomey on why, if he felt the problems were so entrenched, he hadn’t raised them with the unit’s leadership.
“It couldn’t be handled within SWAT; it needed an immediate Internal Affairs investigation into this — it was getting dangerous,” he responded.
“Why didn’t you go to the inspector general? Why didn’t you go to the mayor’s office?” Cianci said.
Colomey said that at the time he “still believed” in the department’s resolve to investigate itself, and wasn’t as concerned about effecting cultural change as he was about exposing the civil rights violations that he believed had been committed.
By reporting the alleged misconduct outside the department, he worried about potentially painting a target on his back.
“This talking about people dying is something that’s very dangerous to do within any police department, within any culture related to law enforcement,” he said.
Colomey was at odds with his direct bosses, Lopez and McMillion, the two SWAT lieutenants.
McMillion testified that he felt any perceived issues should’ve been handled in-house at SWAT. He admitted that he’d made comments about “enemies” who had spoken to Internal Affairs, but denied that he was referring to Colomey. He said the comments were about four retirees from the unit who were “chronic gripers.”
As their conflict escalated, McMillion said, Colomey became “easy to anger,” and “just intolerant of opinions other than his.”
Colomey said he took his frustrations all the way up to Bob Green, chief of staff to then-Chief Michel Moore. During a 2019 meeting, Colomey said, he revealed “a lot of damaging information,“ but Green tried to talk him out of making a complaint, saying “that if Chief Moore got involved in this, they would have to dismantle SWAT. And I’m not going to allow that, Tim.”
Green allegedly continued: “Tim, I know we need to get you outta there, but we cannot allow you to blow up the place on the way out.”
In his testimony, Green denied trying to intimidate Colomey into remaining silent. Instead, he said he brought up an experience from early on in his own career to show Colomey that a change of scenery might benefit him if he was feeling burned out.
Colomey still works for the LAPD, but has been on injured leave for months and plans to retire next fall. The ordeal has taken a toll, he said. He averages about three hours of sleep a night and took anti-anxiety medication to try keep his regular panic attacks under control, he said. “I try to hide stuff from my wife, like when I cry at night,” he said.
The defense cited Colomey’s appearance on a department podcast, “Born in Boston: A SWAT Story,” in which he detailed how the “majority” of SWAT training emphasized de-escalation. Reading from a transcript of the episode, Cianci asked whether Colomey still stood by his comments that “99.99%” of SWAT incidents are resolved peacefully.
“I’m more concerned about that point-1 percent that are unnecessarily dead today,” Colomey said.
Among the most damning testimony was that delivered by Lt. Jennifer Grasso. The first woman in SWAT whose likeness appeared in department recruitment posters, she described Colomey as the unit’s “go-to sergeant,” who always struck her as being “calm, cool and collected.”
Grasso has filed her own government claim against the city, alleging that she was denied a promotion in retaliation for her decision to testify on Colomey’s behalf. From the witness stand she recounted a conversation with Lopez, the former SWAT lieutenant and a mentor of hers, in which he ordered her to “keep her f— mouth shut” after a 2017 incident in which one SWAT officer may have accidentally shot another.
“What did you take it to mean when he said ‘keep your mouth shut’?” Smith asked.
“I took it to mean that we should not talk about what happened that day,” she responded.
Grasso testified that SWAT members mercilessly derided a fellow officer, Phillip Peery, when he chose to seek cover during the incident instead of putting himself into the line of fire. For weeks afterward, the chatter within the unit was about him being a coward and that he “didn’t have what it takes.”
In the fall of 2019, Grasso said, she was summoned to a meeting with two department higher-ups, one of whom was Deputy Chief Pete Zarcone. She was told it would be “off-campus” — code for taking place away from prying eyes of headquarters downtown. They met at a small restaurant in Carson, near the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Zarcone told her at the meeting that “he said he wanted me back in SWAT for my leadership and for my experience.” She replied that she couldn’t go back as long as Lopez and McMillion were in charge, saying that they “had helped kind of create this culture that I was complaining about.”
“They enabled it, they benefited from it, and I could not possibly go back because of those two men who were still in charge of SWAT,” she recalled saying.
Zarcone assured her that she could change culture with her leadership. She said she doubted it, considering that Colomey couldn’t make a dent despite his efforts. “The most powerful sergeant in the department, he was kicked out,” Grasso said, wiping away tears.
When it was his turn on the witness stand, Lopez testified that the SWAT unit had undergone dramatic changes to the way it operated in recent years, with a heavy emphasis on de-escalating encounters. Among the changes was overhauling the selection process and maintaining a database of uses of force by officers, so that they could notice any worrying patterns.
In his closing remarks, Smith told jurors that the case was not so much about believing whether the “SWAT mafia” existed as Colomey alleged. Rather it was about how the department responded to an officer like Colomey when he came forward.
“My belief is that the defense used the SWAT mafia incidents to conjure up dirt about Colomey,” Smith said. “We don’t really care about the SWAT mafia incidents.”
“He thought that the [academies] were being operated in a way that created a desire to shoot as opposed to a desire to end things peacefully,” Smith said. “Nobody here is saying that SWAT is an organization that shouldn’t exist.”
The jury foreperson, Robert Elmquist, said it took less than two days of deliberations to reach a decision, with the only disagreement coming over the amount of damages they believed Colomey was owed for emotional distress. Two jurors had argued for a lower figure, said Elmquist, 60, a truck driver by trade.
He said it seemed like most of the defense witnesses “weren’t giving out a lot of information,” while Colomey had offered a compelling narrative about his efforts to fix the problems he saw at SWAT.
“It was more about trying to change the culture, getting everybody to do it it,” Elmquist said.