How Did Things Get So Bad Between Vallejo and Its Police?

This is part III of The Bay’s three-part podcast series on policing in Vallejo. Here is part I and part II.

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allejo police officers have shot and killed 21 people since 2005, and residents and families of those victims have returned to City Hall repeatedly to say: They’ve had enough. But it’s not just police shootings, which have been driving people to protest in Vallejo since at least 2012. It’s also everyday run-ins with Vallejo police officers that, for years, have added to a sense of mistrust that’s blowing up in City Hall.

So, how did it get this bad?

The Year the Money Dried Up

Tensions with police today can be traced back to 2008, when Vallejo became the first city of its size to file for bankruptcy in California.

That year, the city had some tough choices to make. When the city went bankrupt, police and firefighter salaries, pensions and overtime accounted for 74% of Vallejo’s $80 million general budget, according to a 2009 study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The city could no longer afford its contracts with police and firefighters. Osby Davis, the mayor at the time, said negotiations with the unions reached the 11th hour before the city decided to file for bankruptcy.

“It had an impact on the entire city, not just the police department,” said Davis, who served as Vallejo mayor for 10 years. The city lost employees as a result. At the police department, staffing for officers went from 126 to 77, he said.

“We stopped putting any money into our streets and roads, no money into infrastructure, no raises for any employees,” Davis said. “We were just … in dire straits.”

Citywide, businesses closed and people lost their homes. At the police department, there was an exodus of police officers, which put additional pressures on the ones who stayed.

“We had to pick up the slack and the duties of others that were no longer present,” said retired VPD Sgt. Brent Garrick, who had several jobs throughout his 30-year career with the department.

During the most dire years, Garrick was juggling more than one job at once. Officers began putting in a lot of overtime, he said.

“And so you didn’t have a consistency and continuity within the department, and that produced a situation where, you know, I’d kind of describe it as a perfect storm,” he said. “You don’t have a good sense of direction, policy, procedure.”

The city had less money to send officers to training outside of the department, Garrick said. Before bankruptcy, the department required its officers to attend firearms training upward of six times a year — significantly more than the state standard, he said. But budget cuts meant fewer trips to the range, said Garrick. Officers began to worry that the lack of training was creating a liability for the city.

Then, in 2011, Officer James Lowell Capoot was shot and killed in the line of duty.

“I remember hearing some of the conversations: ‘Wow, you know, look what the city is doing to us, man they’re gonna get someone killed,’ ” Garrick said. “And sure enough, in 2011, that came to fruition, and people were really impacted by that and hurt by that.

“And it was a very turbulent time, and almost painful to even think about, because as a result a lot of people feel that, you know, officers were out there on a killing spree, and that was so far from the truth.”

The next year, however, Vallejo experienced the deadliest year of police shootings in the last 14 years. In 2012, the city budgeted for about 85 police officers but Garrick said there were only around 76 cops patrolling the city, an all-time low for the department.

The staffing levels had a direct impact on officers in the field. There were fewer officers to call for backup. Garrick said that put officers in scary situations — often alone.

“You can imagine there was a fear factor that was going on,” he said. “Because the reality is you know we don’t know what’s behind that closed door.”

At the time, the department pointed to skyrocketing crime rates. Crimes did increase, almost 10 percent from the year before.

But Vallejo, even with its smaller population, still had more shootings in 2012 than big Bay Area cities also dealing with high crime rates. That year, Oakland had one fatal officer-involved shooting, and San Francisco had two. In Vallejo, there were six.

Vallejo hasn’t had a year of police shootings that bad since then. So what makes this moment — when activists are showing up at City Hall to protest police violence again — different in Vallejo?

‘The Only Way to Not See It Is to Close Your Eyes’

Melissa Nold, an attorney with the Law Offices of John Burris and a Vallejo native, said police body camera and bystander video has changed everything. Nold and her group have represented the families of people shot by Vallejo police in lawsuits against the city and the police department.

“It’s changing because now you have this objective thing,” Nold said. “So I think people are willing to say: You know what, they haven’t been as forthcoming as we would like them to have been in the past.”

Videos have played critical roles in the public’s response to the police killings of people like Oscar Grant in Oakland, Eric Garner in New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston. They’ve led to a cultural awakening nationwide to the way black and brown people are disproportionately impacted by police violence.

Nold said that awakening is happening in Vallejo with residents. But city leaders aren’t acting quickly enough.

“How do you not see the problem? The only way to not see it is to close your eyes,” said Nold.

Greg Nyhoff, Vallejo’s city manager, said the city is conducting risk analyses of its fire and police departments. The city hired the California-based consultant OIR Group to review the police department.

“I want to hear from the OIR Group on their expert observations before I make any statement or come to any conclusions regarding the extent of needed improvements,” Nyhoff wrote in an email to KQED.

At a June City Council meeting, Nyhoff told councilors that the number of police calls compared to the number of use-of-force incidents in each of the last three years don’t show a use-of-force problem in Vallejo.