Police union president sues Vallejo after federal lawsuit fails

VALLEJO – Vallejo’s police union and its president filed a lawsuit in state court earlier this month based on similar allegations of civil rights violations that the union claimed in a federal lawsuit that a judge dismissed last month.

The new lawsuit, filed in Solano County Superior Court, alleges that Vallejo city officials and councilmembers planned to force the implementation of police reforms over union objections by targeting union president Michael Nichelini with a series of disciplinary actions that culminated in his termination in 2021.

The lawsuit states that “the City of Vallejo promulgated, adopted and ratified a plan to ‘reform’ the VPD by purposely construing the city’s mismanagement of public relations between the VPD and the citizens of Vallejo as the fault of rank-and-file VPOA members.”

Lawyers for the union and Nichelini point to email communications between members of the city council and city leadership as evidence of discrimination against the Vallejo Police Officers Association (VPOA) and interference with union bargaining rights. 

“City has tried to work with the VPOA,” wrote an unidentified member of a city legal and policy team, according to the lawsuit. “But VPOA is talking out of both sides of their mouth – they have resisted every single reform effort that the chief has proposed down to changing one word… although they have not dropped a single grievance [or unfair labor practice complaint].”  

City officials involved in the legal and policy team included assistant city attorney Randy Risner, then-city manager Greg Nyhoff, then-police chief Shawney Willims, then-assistant city manager Ann Cardwell, and then-HR director Heather Ruiz, among others, according to the lawsuit.

Neither the VPOA nor Nichelini responded to requests for comments on the lawsuit from the Vallejo Sun.

Similar allegations in both lawsuits

The lawsuit names the city of Vallejo and the Vallejo Police Department as defendants along with former mayor Bob Sampayan and council members from 2020 and 2021.

The allegations focus on discussions in the legal and policy team meetings and emails leading up to the city’s decision to issue a notice of termination for Nichelini in December 2020.

In March 2020, Nichelini had sent out an email to VPOA members with a photo of a police badge inscribed with a reverse swastika. The badge was inscribed in 1907, prior to the Nazi use of the symbol, and Nichelini claims not to have noticed that detail in the image, according to the lawsuit.  

The Vallejo Police Department issued a press release with a statement from Williams that an investigation was underway and that racism would not be tolerated at the department. The statement did not mention Nichelini by name.

Nichelini also sent an email to journalist Otis Taylor Jr., who had covered the Vallejo Police Department’s use of force, and had announced that he was moving to Atlanta. 

“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…” Nichelini wrote in the email. “We will warn our Georgia colleagues of your impending arrival.”

Taylor took the message as a threat and publicized the communication, but Nicholini’s lawyer, Michael Rains, said that the statement referred to warning Georgia police to not to talk with Taylor because he would not present an unbiased view. 

According to the lawsuit, the legal and policy team discussed Nichelini’s email to Taylor and how the incident would contribute to justification for his termination. Williams then fired Nichelini citing both the swastika email and potential threats to a journalist as the reasons for the termination, according to Rains. 

The lawsuit claims that the press release and the subsequent firing was an attempt to paint Nichelini as a racist cop and permanently damage his reputation. It also claims that the termination was an act of retaliation for complaints that he filed with the California Public Employee Relations Board.

The police union alleges that the city’s reform of the VPD violated state laws protecting freedom of speech and freedom of association of VPOA members by interfering with the protected political activities of the union and silencing that activity through threat of discharge. 

The union alleges that city officials attempted to instill that threat by “terminating Mr. Nichelini for engaging in protected, concerted activities, and in particular because Mr. Nichelini is a respected and fierce advocate for VPOA members’ rights in a hyper-political environment.”

An arbitrator overturned Nichelini’s termination just over a year-and-a-half later and ordered that he be returned to duty with back pay. 

Rains said the arbitrator found that Nichelini sent the emails as part of his union duties, which is protected activity so the emails could not be used as justification for termination.  

The federal lawsuit that Nichelini and VPOA originally filed in March 2021 made similar allegations based on the same series of events outlined in the state lawsuit. But that lawsuit centered around violations of federal laws, including protections against employer retaliation based on freedom of speech and freedom of association. The federal lawsuit also included a number of claims relating to state law violations.  

The federal judge dismissed Nichelini’s claims for lack of evidence showing that his rights were violated or that his termination was the result of retaliation by city officials. The judge also dismissed the union as a plaintiff altogether because arguments in the case had not shown that the defendants’ actions had negatively affected the union’s mission.

The new lawsuit includes many of the state claims from the federal lawsuit, and will now be heard in Solano County Superior Court with initial proceedings set to begin in November. The state lawsuit does not list the amount of damages sought by the union and Nichelini, but damages in the federal suit were set at $10 million.

A history of reprimands

Nichelini worked for the Oakland Police Department before he was hired in Vallejo in 2006, where his father, Robert Nichelini, was police chief.  

In Oakland, Michael Nichelini faced repeated allegations of excessive force, derogatory comments and insensitive language. When the Vallejo department hired Michael Nichelini, his father said he had a clean record despite an internal affairs investigation that had found two policy violations related to a violent arrest conducted by Nichelini at an Oakland sideshow in 2004.

In testimony from a wrongful termination lawsuit in 2022, former Vallejo Police Capt. John Whitney alleged that the police department overlooked an audit indicating that Michael Nichelini had committed tens of thousands of dollars in time card fraud in 2018. 

In 2019, Det. Matt Mustard resigned as president of the VPOA and Nichelini took over the position.

Attorneys for the family of Sean Monterrosa recently requested court sanctions against the VPOA for defying a subpoena seeking records related to the Vallejo police department practice of bending their badges following a shooting and for records regarding Det. Jarret Tonn who shot and killed Sean Monterrosa in 2020. 

In November of last year, process servers attempted to present Nichelini with a subpoena for the information in his role as VPOA president. The servers reached a man that they said matched Nichelini’s description at a condo in Reno that Nichelini owns. But during a brief conversation, the man denied that he was Nichelini and closed the door, according to the process server’s records.

The city of Vallejo confirmed that Nichelini remains employed by the Vallejo Police Department, but the department’s public information officer did not respond to questions about Nichelini’s current duties.