Federal judge throws out Vallejo police union lawsuit against city

VALLEJO – A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that the Vallejo Police Officers Association brought against the city of Vallejo on Tuesday and ruled that the police union cannot amend the complaint to rectify any deficiencies, permanently ending the suit.

The lawsuit, which also named VPOA President Lt. Michael Nichelini as a plaintiff, was filed in 2021 and sought $10 million in damages. It alleged that city officials had targeted Nichelini and former VPOA President Sgt. Mat Mustard in an effort to place officers preferred by then-Chief Shawny Williams on the VPOA board. Nichelini was fired in March 2021 but remained head of the VPOA and won his job back in arbitration in December 2022.

U.S. District Court Judge Dale Drozd had previously dismissed the VPOA’s lawsuit in September, finding that Nichelini had not adequately shown that his rights were violated or that city officials had retaliated against him, but allowed the VPOA to amend the lawsuit in order to correct the deficiencies. A month later, Nichelini filed an amended complaint which alleged that city officials carried on secret email conversations to discuss his termination.

But in a 25-page order filed on Tuesday, Drozd found that the amended complaint did not adequately address the deficiencies. Among other things, Drozd found that Nichelini had provided no evidence that the individual plaintiffs named in the complaint, which included former City Manager Greg Nyhoff, former Assistant City Manager Anne Cardwell, and members of the City Council, had participated in the decision to fire him. 

Drozd also dismissed the union as a plaintiff, finding that the complaint is “devoid of any allegations addressing how defendants’ actions have caused or threatened injury to plaintiff VPOA’s mission or what steps plaintiff VPOA has been forced to take to avoid such harm.”

In response to a claim that the city had sought to restrict Nichelini’s speech and violated his Constitutional rights, Drozd found that Nichelini had not identified the specific speech that the city had tried to restrict and instead vaguely referred to internal communications with members and communication with a news reporter who was relocating to Georgia. Drozd further found that since these were limited or private communications, they did not involve an issue of public concern. 

The allegations referred to the two incidents that led to Nichelini’s termination. In the first incident, Nichelini sent an email to union members containing the image of a 1907 badge with a swastika – which did not have an association with Nazis at the time the badge was engraved – in early 2020. His attorney said that Nichelini found the image on Google and used it to illustrate the email without realizing that it had an image of a swastika on it.

Nichelini claimed that he was unfairly painted as a “racist cop” because of the incident. 

Nichelini was also fired for sending an email from the union’s email account to then-San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor following his announcement that he was leaving to take a newspaper job in Atlanta in late 2020.

“Looks like 2021 will be a little bit better not having your biased and uniformed [sic] articles printed in the newspaper that only inflame the public…you have never looked for the truth in any of your writings…We will warn our Georgia colleagues of your impending arrival,” Nichelini wrote in the email to Taylor.

Williams initiated an internal affairs investigation for the email, and alleged that Nichelini had sent “an inappropriate and potentially threatening email to a member of the media,” according to Nichelini’s lawsuit.

The arbitrator who overturned his termination found that he was engaged in protected union activity for both incidents.

Nichelini also said the city retaliated against him through other internal affairs investigations.

Nichelini was placed on leave for allegedly destroying the windshield of the truck that Vallejo police Detective Jarrett Tonn fired through when he shot and killed Sean Monterrosa in 2020.  An internal investigation later cleared Nichelini of having any role in the windshield destruction.

Nichelini also alleged that he was retaliated against when he was given a 40-hour suspension for allegedly harassing civil rights attorney Melissa Nold during a September 2019 City Council meeting. Nichelini used his cellphone to record Nold during the meeting, but Nichelini’s attorneys argued that he was monitoring the meeting and wanted to capture portions that would not be on his body-worn camera.

Nichelini’s attorney in his arbitration proceedings, Michael Rains, said that the arbitrator reduced Nichelini’s suspension to a written reprimand.