SAN JOSE — Two police officers with modest experience at the San Jose Police Department — including one who has long since left the agency — have been named as participants in a series of racist texts with a disgraced SJPD officer who abruptly resigned last fall.
The officers, Brandon LeTemplier and William Basil Haggerty, were first identified by KTVU and later confirmed by this news organization with multiple law-enforcement sources.
LeTemplier has been on administrative leave since November, around the same time Mark McNamara resigned. An unrelated internal criminal investigation — which did not yield any charges — turned up dozens of text messages in which McNamara, who is white, prolifically used the N-word both to reference himself and insult Black people, including a Black man he shot and wounded in 2022.
Haggerty was confirmed to have been involved in some of the 300-plus messages between March 2022 and July 2023 that were released, in redacted form. San Jose police released one batch after McNamara left, and another in response to a court order in favor of K’aun Green, the man who McNamara shot and who is pursuing a federal excessive-force lawsuit against him, the police department and the city.
LeTemplier, who did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment, has been with the police department since 2020. Records show Haggerty was an SJPD officer from 2017 to 2020, and went on to serve as a police officer in Eagan, Minnesota and Minneapolis starting in 2021. Both men are white.
In January, SJPD Police Chief Anthony Mata stated that a former officer — now identified as Haggerty — who participated in the texts had left his out-of-state police job shortly after his employer was alerted to the scandal.
Haggerty could not be immediately reached for comment. The San Jose Police Department declined comment, citing restrictions on publicly discussing personnel matters.
The Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the San Jose-Silicon Valley NAACP, said the city and police department have to take a hard line and emphasized that LeTemplier, as an active SJPD officer, “had a duty to report or tell somebody” about the texts.
“The fact that it had to be discovered, it shows he’s part of the problem,” he said. “Let’s set the bar for what we will not tolerate in San Jose.”
Last week, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said it would dismiss five misdemeanor narcotics convictions that relied on McNamara’s testimony — calling him “a bigoted man ” and “a disgrace to public service” — but preserve 36 other affected criminal cases.
County Public Defender Molly O’Neal contends that any case associated with McNamara should be dismissed. She said Tuesday her office is identifying criminal cases with links to LeTemplier and Haggerty, and as of Tuesday they have flagged 50, most of which are closed.
“We don’t have all the information. But you don’t text racist messages to people who aren’t going to be welcoming of them,” O’Neal said. “We have to look at any case those officers are involved in with the same lens as McNamara.”
Raj Jayadev, co-founder of the civil-rights group Silicon Valley De-Bug, said he doesn’t “see how any rational person thinks this starts and ends with the three people on this text string.”
“There has to be some larger investigation of the entire department,” he said. “We want to know if these texts are just what broke water.”
Because the McNamara texts publicly disclosed are partially redacted, it’s not clear how many of the messages were with LeTemplier or Haggerty.
The earliest messages released were in the wake of McNamara shooting K’aun Green on March 27, 2022. The shooting was controversial because Green had been a peacemaker in a brawl that erupted inside a taqueria near San Jose State University, and he had been holding a handgun — which he disarmed from someone else — up in the air and backing out of the restaurant when he was shot.
McNamara texts one of the two officers, “Your turn lol” after the shooting, to which the responder states, “Lol ideally I won’t have too. (sic) But if some fool wants to get smokes (sic) then he gets smokes (sic).”
In another message one of the officers laments being accused of harassment after he stopped a “car with these ghetto ass mofos in it,” smelling marijuana in the vehicle, and finding out a passenger had active criminal charges.
All throughout, McNamara and his texting partners liberally use the N-word to refer to each other and Black people, and also make multiple homophobic and misogynistic comments and at least one remark insulting Asian people. In a civil deposition, McNamara reportedly testified that his use of the N-word was playful and that he was inspired by Black actors and comedians to use the slur.
The most egregious texts were by McNamara, including “I hate black people” and “I hate black people more than I hate being a cop.”
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In reference to Green and later his lawsuit, McNamara wrote, ““N— wanted to carry a gun in the Wild West … Not on my watch” and “They should all be bowing to me and bringing me gifts since I saved a fellow n— by making him rich as f—. Otherwise, he woulda lived a life of poverty and crime.”
Another text referred to Green’s attorney using the N-word and in the same message said, “I’ll shoot you too too!!!!! AHHHHHH!!!!!”
The texting scandal was cited in Green’s lawsuit when his attorneys asserted McNamara deleted his social-media accounts to destroy evidence, while McNamara claims it was to end harassment. A federal judge denied the plaintiffs’ related request to issue a default judgment against the city.
McNamara’s legal team is asking the judge to dismiss the lawsuit outright, stating in a court filing that his texts were “made in jest although admittedly in extremely poor taste,” but ultimately had no bearing on the objective lawfulness of his decision to shoot Green.
