ACLU decries delayed response to calls for decertification of Vallejo police officers

VALLEJO - The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is calling for the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to provide an update on its review policies more than one year after the ACLU called for the decertification of nine current and former Vallejo Police officers.

In October last year, the ACLU filed a complaint calling on POST to investigate allegations of serious misconduct and consider decertifying those officers. Since then, there has been no substantive update on the process of handling this complaint, according to ACLU attorney Allyssa Victory. 

The ACLU pressed the commission for a response this week in a public comment submitted ahead of the commission’s meeting Wednesday in Sacramento. It asked POST to respond to or provide an update on the complaint.

Victory told the Vallejo Sun that POST staff said in 2024 that they would "communicate directly with the ACLU regarding our process,” but the ACLU has not gotten any updates or communications about the complaint. While the matter has never been added to a POST commission meeting agenda, the ACLU this week is calling on the body - which has more power and discretion than POST’s Peace Officer Standards Accountability Advisory Board - to clarify its review process. 

The ACLU’s complaint was made under Senate Bill 2, a 2021 law which created a process to decertify police officers found to have carried out misconduct or criminal actions so they can no longer work as police officers.  The ACLU is seeking the decertification of  current Vallejo police officers Colin Eaton, Jordon Patzer, Bryan Glick, Mark Thompson, and Jarrett Tonn as well as former Vallejo officers Anthony Romero-Cano, Ryan McMahon, Sean Kenney and Dustin Joseph, who later was hired by Fairfield police. All were involved in at least one fatal on-duty shooting. Kenney had three, which occurred in 2012. 

“We really are there to support the actual Vallejo residents and the people impacted, to uplift their stories and encourage POST to give any transparency in the process,” Victory said. She criticized the fact that people have to attend the commission’s meetings in person in Sacramento to be heard. 

Victory said that the comment has already garnered a response from the commission. “We did receive a response, and were told that we will receive an update within 30 days,” she said.

While this is a step toward an update, Victory added, “We’re not sure what to expect. There’s a lot of possible actions that can occur once someone submits a request regarding an officer.”

Victory said she hopes that POST can at least give guidance on if it has a backlog for processing complaints and how long that processing might take. 

“Additional complaints covering the same officers have since been filed, we’re seeing additional evidence that could supplement our complaints,” Victory said. “But I have no real guidance on how we can do it, because we have no real status of our actual complaint.”

Family members of people impacted by violence by Vallejo police officers are planning to attend Wednesday’s commission meeting, including family members of Sean Monterrosa, who was killed by Vallejo police in 2020, and Vallejo civil rights attorney Melissa Nold. 

Nold filed an additional complaint regarding Eaton, who is one of six officers who killed Willie McCoy in 2019 and is the subject of an ongoing civil rights case Nold brought on behalf of McCoy’s niece, who was pulled from a car and Tased about two months after her uncle was killed.

Nold said that last year she told the commission’s advisory board that Vallejo has a history of hiring officers with known misconduct in their background. She said that, given the multiple complaints POST has received concerning Vallejo officers, POST has the option to tell the city to review its records and hiring practices. 

Nold said that she thinks the complaint regarding Eaton will be “the test case” for how POST will handle the allegations. Before the city hired Eaton in 2017, a background investigator found that he should be disqualified due to integrity and judgment issues. Eaton owed tens of thousands of dollars in back child support and participated in a sham marriage to profit through his military service, according to the investigator’s report.

“If he can keep his job … it also sets a precedent for other people with complaints to go get jobs,” Nold said. “Eaton is a really low hanging fruit for them. POST never sees your background check, somebody from the police department did that. He fell through the cracks. The city should have ways to prevent that … in theory it shouldn’t happen.”

Nold added that she hopes POST will clarify its policy for when different complaints are reviewed, including if they might review all complaints concerning one officer at once. 

‘’It’s a complex situation,” Nold said. “It’s not about whether a person had a good or bad use of force. It’s about whether a person is qualified to be carrying a gun. If POST would chime in, that would be really helpful.’’

“We’re just hoping to get a timeline, or what to expect,” she said. “I suspect that they’ve probably been inundated with complaints .. thousands and thousands of them.”