Controversial Vallejo police union head retires

VALLEJO – Vallejo police Lt. Michael Nichelini, the controversial head of the Vallejo Police Officers Association, retired from the department in April and left his position in union leadership, according to two sources with knowledge of Nichelini’s departure.

Nichelini had been with the department for nearly two decades after being hired by his father, former Vallejo police Chief Robert Nichelini, after a rocky tenure in Oakland. In Vallejo, Nichelini often butted heads with city leadership, was accused by a former captain of timecard fraud, and was fired for over a year but won his job back in arbitration.

While his employment was terminated, Nichelini remained in his union leadership position and was harshly critical of department leadership and an obstacle to the city’s reform efforts. While union members worked to undermine the department’s recruitment efforts, Nichelini publicly blamed then-police Chief Shawny Williams for an exodus of officers. 

Meanwhile, Nichelini sued the city in federal court for $10 million. That suit was eventually dismissed, but Nichelini filed a similar suit in state court last year, which is still pending.

As of Friday, the VPOA’s website lists Sgt. Lenard Alamon as VPOA president. VPOA leadership did not respond to a request for comment.

Nichelini joined the Vallejo Police Department in 2006 after a decade in the Oakland Police Department. He followed his father, Robert Nichelini, who was employed by the Oakland Police Department since 1971 and left to be Vallejo’s chief in 1995. Robert Nichelini retired in 2012.

Michael Nichelini was subject to several excessive force allegations in Oakland, including a 2004 internal affairs investigation that questioned his fitness for duty.

In December 1999, Nichelini fractured a woman’s shoulder while he was arresting her husband, according to records obtained by the Vallejo Sun through a public records request.

The man had allegedly committed an assault, and as Nichelini was arresting him, he said that the man’s wife approached him yelling at Nichelini to let the man go. Nichelini alleged that he yelled at her to step back, but she swung her arms and punched him. The woman denied that she had swung at Nichelini and said that he grabbed her by the shoulder and the wrist and spun her around to the police vehicle, and she heard her shoulder “pop.” 

Later, Oakland’s Citizens Police Review Board recommended that Nichelini be suspended for two days and reprimanded orally for a May 2, 2004, incident when he used profanity while ordering a teen out of his truck after citing him for a suspended license, according to the Oakland Tribune. The board also found Nichelini used his knees to hit the teen’s head against the pavement.

Then an internal affairs investigation sustained two policy violations for an incident when Nichelini responded to a sideshow on Nov. 14, 2004, and recommended that he be placed in a position with minimal citizen contact and that his fitness for duty be evaluated.

The officers had stopped a Buick that they said had been blocking traffic. According to the officers’ account, as Nichelini spoke to the passenger, they got into a struggle and Nichelini pepper sprayed him and arrested him. In jail, the man told medical personnel that he had a separated shoulder that was re-aggravated during his arrest. He said they had been stuck in traffic while the sideshow was happening. 

Despite that, when Nichelini’s father hired his son in Vallejo, he claimed that he had faced no discipline during his time in Oakland.

“There was no discipline from either case,” Robert Nichelini told the Vallejo Times-Herald in 2006, referring to the two incidents in 2004. “He has a perfect record. (Oakland) didn’t want him to leave. His background is clean.”

In Vallejo, Nichelini became an influential figure, but controversy continued to surround him.

Former Vallejo police Capt. John Whitney testified in a deposition in a wrongful termination lawsuit that city officials gathered evidence that Nichelini may have committed time card fraud worth tens of thousands of dollars in the spring and summer of 2018, but then-police Chief Andrew Bidou refused to investigate the allegations further. 

Whitney had alleged that Vallejo police had a pattern of not investigating issues within the department, including use of force and alleged misconduct by officers, such as allegations that officers had bent the tips of their badges to mark shootings, which were publicly revealed by Whitney.

Nichelini became the head of the VPOA in early 2019 when longtime VPOA President Det. Mat Mustard suddenly resigned from the position.

As union president, Nichelini frequently clashed with city leadership and in particular former police Chief Shawny Williams, who was hired in 2019 to help reform the department after a series of high-profile incidents, including the fatal shootings of Willie McCoy in 2019, Ronell Foster in 2018, and Angel Ramos in 2017. 

Among other things, Williams took steps to reform the department’s recruitment practices but faced opposition from senior members of the command staff, such as current Deputy Chief Robert Knight. The VPOA, in turn, blamed Williams for a failure to recruit and retain officers. The union also fought against some of the department’s reform efforts, such as by blocking an independent auditor contract approved by the City Council.

In early March 2021, Nichelini sued the city alleging he was subjected to harassment, retaliation and intimidation by top-ranking Vallejo city officials, and seeking $7.5 million in damages. Later that year, Williams fired him, and Nichelini amended the complaint seeking $10 million and his job back.

Nichelini’s attorney Michael Rains said that Williams attempted to fire Nichelini for two reasons: sending an email to VPOA members that contained an image of a Vallejo police badge with what appeared to be a swastika from 1906, long before the Nazis co-opted the symbol, and for sending a threatening email to a San Francisco Chronicle columnist.

During that time, Nichelini remained head of the police union, though he had no role in the department. The VPOA continued to clash with Williams and took a vote of no confidence in his leadership in July 2022. A new lawsuit alleges that when Williams did not leave after that, he began receiving targeted verbal and written threats. Williams resigned from the department in late 2022.

A month after Williams was fired, an arbitrator ordered the department to reinstate Nichelini. Rains had argued that sharing the image of a swastika did not have racist intent and was an accident and that the email to the Chronicle columnist wasn’t threatening. He also argued that both instances were protected speech in his role as the union head.

Rains said the arbitrator also overturned a separate 40-hour suspension against Nichelini for allegedly harassing civil rights attorney Melissa Nold by recording her with his personal cellphone during a city council meeting.

It’s unclear how large of a role Nichelini played in the department following his return. When the VPOA defied a subpoena in a lawsuit over the 2020 fatal shooting of Sean Monterrosa, a process server attempted to serve Nichelini at a condo he owns in Reno. The Monterossa family’s attorneys alleged that Nichelini answered the door at the Reno address, but lied and said he wasn’t Nichelini. 

Nichelini’s lawsuit against the city was dismissed after a federal judge found Nichelini had not adequately shown that his rights were violated or that city officials had retaliated against him. Nichelini then filed a similar lawsuit in state court last year, which is still pending.

Editor's note: This story has been updated after the VPOA's website updated its president.