Melissa Nold, an attorney who specializes in police use-of-force cases, filed the complaint. Two months later, she and Nichelini were at a city-council meeting in which the police were requesting a change to their contract. They wanted a clause deleted that allowed the city to order an officer to be drug-tested after firing his weapon. The clause had not been enforced for years, but Vallejo’s first Black police chief, Shawny Williams, was about to take office, and there was a presumption that he would be a reformer. Nichelini stood at the back of the room and filmed Nold. The clause was deleted and, two months later, Nichelini became the president of the V.P.O.A.
A few days after Monterrosa was killed, police replaced the windshield that Tonn had fired through. For possible involvement in the destruction of evidence, Nichelini was suspended by Williams. He maintains that he had nothing to do with the windshield replacement.
One spate of killings by police in Vallejo can be traced back to 2011, when an officer named Jim Capoot was shot and killed while chasing a suspected bank robber. He was the first cop to be killed in Vallejo in eleven years. The following year, police killed six people, accounting for nearly a third of the homicides in the city. Half the killings were committed by an officer named Sean Kenney.
Early on the morning of May 28, 2012, a forty-one-year-old Black man named Anton Barrett, Sr., whose nineteen-year-old son was also in the car, pulled out of a parking lot with his headlights off and ran a red light. He was drunk, and when cops tried to stop him he drove off. Then his car got a flat tire, and he and his son jumped out and ran in different directions through an apartment complex. Kenney began chasing Barrett, and, though he was carrying pepper spray and a Taser, he chose to draw his gun. Seconds later, he saw Barrett running toward him and fired five times. Kenney claimed that Barrett had started to pull a black object out of his pocket—it turned out to be a wallet. As Barrett lay on the ground dying, another officer Tased him. Barrett’s family sued, and the city eventually paid a settlement of two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars.
Three months later, Kenney shot Mario Romero, a twenty-three-year-old Black man, who was returning home after a night out with his sister’s boyfriend, Joseph Johnson. When the men pulled up to the house, Johnson called Romero’s sister and asked her to let him in. Kenney and Dustin Joseph, who were responding to a call about a burglary in the neighborhood, shone a spotlight on the men.
Kenney said that Romero got out of the car and reached for his waistband. Then, he said, when the officers yelled for the men to put their hands up Romero crouched “into a firing position,” prompting Kenney and his partner to begin shooting. Johnson, however, said that the cops began firing at him and Romero while they sat in the car.
Romero’s sisters were watching from their living-room window, and said that they saw Kenney jump onto the hood of the car and unload his clip through the windshield into Romero, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. Johnson corroborated this account. Kenney admitted that he’d stood on the hood but insisted that he hadn’t fired from there. Romero was shot thirty times. After his body was removed, Kenney searched the car. He said that he found an airsoft gun on the floor, wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console.
Seven weeks later, an autistic man named Jeremiah Moore and his boyfriend were smashing car windows and trying to set their home on fire during a psychotic episode. When the police arrived, Moore grabbed an antique rifle and Kenney shot and killed him. Moore’s family sued, and won a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar settlement.
The Romero family, along with other community members, attended sessions of the newly created citizens’ advisory committee, which met for several hours every couple of weeks. But the issues the committee debated were modest: a small reduction in wages, requiring cops to use body cameras, creating a position for a civilian auditor who would respond to complaints of police misconduct. The former officers who sat on the committee regularly objected to these proposals, raising the spectre of lawsuits by the V.P.O.A. should the city try to interfere with police work.
In the end, the committee’s recommendations included installing more surveillance cameras, establishing a daytime curfew for youths, increasing enforcement of parking violations, and using money from a new public-services tax to hire more cops.
Three years after the death of Romero, his family won a two-million-dollar settlement. Later that year, the police department completed its review of the case and declared that the shooting was justified. Officers told Open Vallejo that Kenney was initiated into the badge-bending group. In 2011, he was made a detective. One of his new duties was to investigate officer-involved shootings.
Reformers who have succeeded in getting rogue cops censured or fired often come up against a frustrating reality: because there are no national and few statewide indexes that track police terminations and disciplinary infractions, tainted officers often find new jobs in different jurisdictions. A recent study published in the Yale Law Journal found that about three per cent of officers serving in Florida had been fired from other state agencies. These cops, who typically moved to smaller forces that were desperate for experienced officers, were more likely than others to be charged with misconduct in their new departments. Sometimes a cop will resign before he is fired, thus avoiding any consequences. Before Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, in Cleveland, joined the city’s police force, he had resigned from his previous job, in Independence, Ohio, where supervisors noted his insubordination, lying, and emotional immaturity.
Officers can also transfer in order to escape reforms. In the past year, large numbers of cops in Seattle, Buffalo, Atlanta, and San Francisco have left. After four cops were charged with killing George Floyd, about two hundred officers in Minneapolis filed to quit the department, citing “post-traumatic stress.” Law Enforcement Move, a company founded in the wake of the recent protests, says that it helps officers “escape anti-police cities, and live in America, again!” Since June, its founder told me, the company has been contacted by more than a thousand cops, or their spouses, who are interested in relocating to more “police-friendly” communities.
Some of Vallejo’s most notorious officers transferred from Oakland, where a lawsuit brought on behalf of a hundred and nineteen plaintiffs claimed that police had routinely kidnapped, beaten, and planted evidence on people. In 2014, a court-appointed overseer announced that he would be tightening oversight on uses of force, and punishing officers who didn’t report misconduct by their colleagues. Within four months, six officers had left for Vallejo. Three of them were eventually involved in lethal shootings. All six were sued for excessive use of force.
Two of the former Oakland officers were the twin brothers Ryan and David McLaughlin, who often searched men of color in Vallejo on the ground that they smelled marijuana, even after it had been legalized. The brothers justified these searches as “compliance checks,” meant to make sure that people weren’t carrying more than the legal limit. “That’s maybe how they roll in certain other nations,” a judge later said in court. “But that is not probable cause.”
In 2018, David McLaughlin, while off duty, got into a heated confrontation with a man celebrating his son’s birthday at a pizzeria in Walnut Creek. He pointed his service gun at the man, then tackled him and punched and elbowed him until his face was bloody. (McLaughlin maintains that he acted within professional boundaries.) Five months later, McLaughlin pulled over a man on a motorcycle for speeding, then drew his gun on him. The man’s cousin, an African-American marine veteran named Adrian Burrell, filmed the encounter from his front porch. McLaughlin ordered Burrell to retreat. Burrell refused, resulting in a struggle that, he alleges, gave him a concussion. McLaughlin faces lawsuits in both cases.
Jarrett Tonn, Monterrosa’s shooter, joined the Vallejo force the same year as the Oakland cops. Tonn had been an officer in Galt, California, where he worked with his cousin, Kevin Tonn. One day in 2013, Kevin confronted a man who he thought, incorrectly, was a suspect in a robbery. The man pulled out a gun and shot Kevin, then shot himself. Jarrett rushed to the scene, but his cousin was dying.
Transferring to Vallejo might have seemed like an unlikely career move. Crime was high, the city was just a few years out of bankruptcy, and the school system had recently emerged from state receivership. But Tonn wasn’t going to live there. Even after the bankruptcy, Vallejo officers were some of the highest paid in California. Tonn’s base pay during his first full year in Vallejo was a hundred thousand dollars—thirty-six thousand dollars more than he made in Galt. This didn’t account for overtime and benefits. In 2018, he made twenty-seven thousand dollars in overtime and thirty-one thousand dollars in “other pay,” and received twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of benefits. In addition, his pension was funded with fifty-eight thousand dollars.
The year after Tonn started working in Vallejo, he chased an unarmed man who was driving a stolen car. The man crashed into someone’s front yard, then reversed into Tonn’s car. Tonn doesn’t remember feeling the impact, but in two seconds he shot eighteen rounds from his Glock into the car, injuring the man.
The officer who wrote the police review of the shooting was Kent Tribble, who once, when responding to a domestic dispute, went to the house of a Black man by mistake, Tased him through his bedroom window after the man shouted profanities at him, and later charged him with resisting arrest. On another occasion, when he was off duty, he pulled a gun on two men in Bend, Oregon, during a drunken confrontation after leaving a bar. (Tribble did not respond to a request for comment.) A couple of years later, Tribble was promoted to lieutenant. When he reviewed Tonn’s shooting, he wrote that Tonn had acted in accordance with his training.
In 2017, Tonn was paired with Sean Kenney, the officer who killed three people in 2012. One day, Tonn and Kenney were pursuing Kevin DeCarlo, a suspect in a pawnshop robbery that had ended in a homicide. (He was never charged in connection with the crime.) When DeCarlo stopped at a stop sign, Kenney rammed his car. DeCarlo rammed Kenney back, then got stuck in a ditch. Tonn fired at least eight rounds with a rifle at DeCarlo; other officers, including Kenney, fired at him as well. A witness told police that the scene resembled an execution. DeCarlo suffered four broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and the loss of two fingers. Tonn told investigators that he thought DeCarlo was reaching for a firearm, but DeCarlo had no weapon. (Tonn did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to the Pew Research Center, only a quarter of cops ever fire their weapon on duty, but this was Kenney’s fifth shooting in five years. A year and a half later, he retired. He started a consulting firm called Line Driven Strategies, which conducts training courses for police departments on the use of force and on how to investigate shootings by the police. Kenney declined an interview, saying that there was “too much negativity and hate in this climate.”
