Former Vallejo police chief received threats before resigning, lawsuit alleges

VALLEJO – Former Vallejo police Chief Shawny Williams received verbal and written threats that pushed him to resign from his post in November 2022, according to allegations made in a new civil rights lawsuit against the Vallejo Police Department. 

Williams, the city’s first and only Black police chief, was hired in 2019 in an effort to reform the troubled department. He frequently faced opposition from the Vallejo Police Officers Association, who took a vote of no confidence in his leadership. After that, the new lawsuit alleges, Williams began receiving racially targeted threats, both written and by phone.

Civil rights attorney Melissa Nold made the allegations in a complaint filed in federal court on Wednesday on behalf of a couple who claimed Vallejo police officers injured them while forcing them out of a crashed vehicle two years ago. Nold included the allegations about Williams in arguing that the couple’s case existed in a long history of excessive force complaints against the Vallejo Police Department and failure to discipline officers. 

The couple, Daisy Romero and Gonzalo Romero Hernandez, allege that Vallejo  police officers wrongfully arrested and injured them after they were involved in a car crash on March 19, 2023. They were in the backseat when the vehicle crashed on Curtola Parkway. According to the complaint, police dragged the unconscious Romero out of the vehicle by her hair and slammed her body to the ground as she screamed in pain and vomited. 

Romero Hernandez vocally opposed the officers’ treatment of his wife and, when he began recording the incident on his cellphone, officers knocked the phone out of his hands as he backed away and choked him and slammed his face into the concrete, according to the complaint. His cellphone video shows an unnamed officer with his hands on Romero Hernandez’s throat, the complaint states.

The incident left Romero with injuries to an existing herniated disk, trauma to her sciatic nerve and multiple handprint bruises on her arms and body, among other injuries. Romero Hernandez suffered contusions, lacerations, and permanent scarring on his face and forehead and pain throughout his body, according to the complaint.

The suit names Officers Rosendo Mesa and Pablo Lopez as two of multiple Vallejo officers involved. According to the complaint, the Solano County District Attorney’s Office later dismissed all of the charges against the couple.

Vallejo police did not respond to questions from the Vallejo Sun about the incident but the department posted a notice on Facebook about an auto accident that took place on March 19, 2023, near the intersection of Lemon Street and Curtola Parkway, which alleged that the three passengers in the vehicle were under the influence of alcohol. 

The post did not describe how the woman exited the vehicle but alleged that she was belligerent, lunged at an officer, grabbed his gun, and that the officer had to remove her hand from the weapon. The post also states that a male passenger was arrested for obstruction of justice because he refused to back away from officers as they arrested the woman.

The lawsuit argues that the couple’s case is part of a pattern of the city’s failure to properly train officers and “deliberate indifference” to officers violating people’s constitutional rights, which included allowing Williams to be pressured into leaving and taking steps to obscure the reasons he left.

“All of this is being done in hopes of finally obtaining a federal monitor and direct judicial oversight of a department that is rapidly backsliding and cannot be trusted to operate lawfully,” Nold said. “I’ve already completed multiple depositions, received sworn testimony, and/or collected indisputable evidence in support of each and every one of these issues.” 

The suit is the first public accounting of allegations of threats to Williams. Williams was hired in 2019 after a series of high-profile incidents involving Vallejo police, 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 VPOA took a vote of no confidence in Williams’ leadership in July 2022 and announced the results in a press conference. But when Williams did not leave after that, he began receiving targeted verbal and written threats, according to the lawsuit. 

In November 2022, Williams resigned and received a $408,000 severance package, which prevented him from speaking publicly about his employment with Vallejo for two years. Nold alleges that Williams resigned out of fear for the safety of his family, and that City Attorney Veronica Nebb and then City Manager Mike Malone both knew about the racial threats he received but failed to disclose it to the public or to entities overseeing the Vallejo Police Department, such as the state Department of Justice, which entered a reform agreement with the city in 2020. 

Nold argues that the city has continued to hide wrongdoing by officers. She said she discovered an undisclosed database of internal affairs complaints last year which contained numerous incidents that had been withheld from plaintiffs and defendants. 

Nold previously told the Vallejo Sun that former Assistant Vallejo City Attorney Kelly Trujillo ordered the destruction of records in 2019 which were subject to preservation of evidence rules in multiple pending excessive force cases. The concealed evidence affected the outcomes of several civil rights cases, she claimed, as she sought to depose Trujillo, who is now a Solano County Superior Court judge. 

The complaint alleges that since Williams’ departure, Chief Jason Ta has been more permissive with officers and undertaken less transparent practices, such as by terminating a body camera auditing policy. Department data shows that use of force incidents by Vallejo police officers have increased since Williams’ departure. 

The police department routinely fails to discipline officers accused of excessive force, which “permits untethered racism, excessive force, and disregard for human life,” the Romeros’ lawsuit alleges. 

Nold, who has long sought oversight of the department by a federal judge, told the Vallejo Sun she approached the lawsuit with broad allegations about the city because “the city bound my hands by continuing to engage in corruption, even after they entered into a reform agreement with the Department of Justice regarding their long history of misconduct.”