Vallejo declares police staffing emergency against union objection

VALLEJO – The Vallejo City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to adopt a proclamation that staffing levels in the police department have declined to the point that it constitutes a public safety emergency, empowering City Manager Mike Malone and interim police Chief Jason Ta to take unencumbered steps to address it.

Ta said at a contentious council meeting Tuesday evening that he has already started taking drastic steps to address the staffing shortage, seeking to eliminate the department’s response to alarm calls, dissolving the traffic division, and assigning detectives to the patrol division.

Ta said he will soon need to reach out to outside law enforcement agencies for help supplementing Vallejo police patrols and may need to reorganize patrol shifts. One thing the proclamation will do is allow him to change patrol shifts without first conferring with the Vallejo Police Officers Association, the union representing most Vallejo officers.

Chief Assistant City Attorney Randy Risner said that the main purpose of the proclamation passed Tuesday would be to defer conferring with the union when the chief and city manager need to make swift changes to address the staffing shortage.

For example, if Vallejo suddenly lacked the officers to cover a patrol shift, Ta may need to immediately assign officers to 12-hour shifts. Without the proclamation, such a change would require him to meet and confer with the union first, but the proclamation allows him to first make the change and then meet with the union to address any concerns, according to Risner.

VPOA objects to emergency proclamation

The VPOA — which has complained bitterly about the staffing shortage — objected strongly to the proclamation in a statement released ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.

“It is unconscionable that the Vallejo City Council would attempt to change working conditions for Vallejo police officers by unlawfully declaring a local emergency,” the VPOA said. “The councilmembers’ refusal to engage in meaningful and productive labor negotiations with the VPOA has reached a point from which we may never recover.”

The VPOA frequently has blocked actions to make changes in the department. It has been holding up the city’s reform efforts by submitting a grievance in 2021 to block the city’s attempt to hire an interim police auditor, which the city never did. Negotiations with the union over an ordinance that would establish a police oversight commission have gone on for seven months.

Mayor Robert McConnell acknowledged that the union may attempt to block efforts to address the staffing shortage during Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re going to need extremely talented and knowledgeable legal guidance on this, otherwise we're going to get hit with an unfair labor practice,” he said. “The city is going to need to be much stronger than it has been in the past.”

The proclamation followed up on a presentation that Ta gave to the council in March, when he said that he was already considering drastic steps to address shortages in patrol officers.

Ta said that the 2022 average response time for top priority calls — when a person is at immediate risk of physical harm or a property crime is in progress — was just over 11 minutes from the time a 911 call goes to dispatch to the time an officer arrives on scene. Ta said that an adequate response time is six minutes.

Ta said that five officers have left for other agencies since March. As of last week, there were only 34 officers assigned to patrol, not including supervisors. He said that when officers start their shifts they often have 30-40 calls to respond to. “They are going from call to call to call,” he said.

Residents upset at lack of police response

Many residents of Vallejo have voiced frustration at a lack of police response. Local business owners have said that they struggle to get police to respond at all after burglaries. A veterinarian said that she would leave town after she was attacked by a client, a dispatcher hung up on her, and an officer shrugged off her complaint. Solano Sheriff's deputies responded to a call a year ago after Vallejo police did not respond for over two hours, which resulted in a deputy shooting and killing Jason Thompson.

One step that Ta said he is moving forward on is to eliminate the department’s response to burglar alarms. He said that 98% of those calls are false alarms and waste police resources. But, a city ordinance requires the department to respond to burglar alarms, so Ta said he is seeking to change that ordinance, starting with a series of town hall meetings. The first of those meetings will be held on Aug. 8, Ta said.

Ta said that he may consider reducing service for other types of calls under the proclamation. He pointed to Stockton, which he said eliminated police response to reckless driving — unless it involved sideshow or other repeated behavior — as well as for hit-and-run collisions, financial crimes, vandalism and non-violent disturbances.

Ta said that the proclamation could also be a way to open a conversation with outside law enforcement agencies. In March, he said he was considering asking the Solano County Sheriff’s Office for help.

"We have not entered into any formal discussions with any other law enforcement agencies, but I feel that conversation needs to occur soon," Ta said.

Risner said that the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services wouldn’t even have a discussion about adding assistance until after the proclamation passed.

But while Ta said that he wanted to raise public awareness of the crisis the department is facing, Councilmember Peter Bregenzer expressed alarm that the department was announcing that it was taking such drastic steps to reduce services. “We’re just inviting more crime to happen because we're advertising that we have no police,” Bregenzer said.

Troubles recruiting new officers

Ta did not address why the department has had such a drastic reduction in officers except to say that departments across the region are facing similar difficulties recruiting. But as the five officers who have left the department since March were recruited by other agencies, Vallejo is facing unique challenges in hiring and retaining officers.

Last year, the union blamed the leadership of then-police Chief Shawny Williams for creating a culture that did not respect officers. But Williams resigned in November, and since then the union has redirected its ire toward the city’s political leadership.

Civil rights attorney Melissa Nold said during the public comment period that the “degenerates in the command staff” were to blame for the department’s failure to recruit.

“The reason why officers are not in the Vallejo Police Department is because of the officers who are in the Vallejo Police Department,” she said.

While she did not name any officers in particular, several officers in the command staff have been named in scandals in the past, such as Lt. Steve Darden — who has faced a series of accusations that he has harassed and bullied subordinates — and Lt. Sanjay Ramrakha,  who was named as participating in the department’s badge bending scandal.

Two other lieutenants — Lt. Michael Nichelini, president of the VPOA, and Lt. Herman Robinson — were reinstated after they were fired.

Nold also pointed to a lack of qualified detectives, and mentioned former Detective Jason Scott, who left the department after alleging that investigations supervisor Sgt. Mat Mustard made racist jokes and called Scott, who is Black, “boy.”

Nold said that since the departure of Williams she is seeing an uptick in civil rights complaints. “How are we going to find new officers until we fix these problems that have been plaguing the department for a long time?” she asked.

A mother who spoke during the meeting and said that her son was recently murdered also pointed to a lack of adequate investigations and said that she had been treated discourteously by Vallejo police. She complained that more resources were being devoted to investigations into an officer shooting a burglary suspect last month than her son’s murder.

"Why is an officer-involved shooting more important than my son's life?” she asked. “That officer is alive. That burglar is alive. No one is looking for who killed my son.”

"I understand that they're overwhelmed, but they're not even able to show compassion when I reached out to them,” she said. “I was beginning to feel hopeless.”

Other department resources have stalled

Renee Sykes with the organization Common Ground, which helped draft an ordinance that would establish a police oversight commission, said that she supported the proclamation but expressed concern that the city has not started the process of recruiting a permanent police chief since Williams left more than seven months ago.

“This current short-term order deals with the here and now,” she said. “It does not address the fact that we have not started the process of finding a permanent police chief. We've seen some of the politics removed, but we have not seen movement on hiring a permanent chief.”

Other efforts that the Vallejo Police Department have taken to lighten officers’ load have gone nowhere. During Tuesday’s meeting, Ta said that a planned Integrated and Health Resource Team (IHART) that would respond instead of police to behavioral and mental health crises has yet to find a qualified operator.

The department announced that it had received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to implement the program last October. But Ta said that after posting a request for proposal twice, the city received only one applicant and was still evaluating to see whether they were qualified.

The council passed the emergency proclamation unanimously, while limiting it for one year, requesting regular updates to the council, and specifying that it cannot be used to relocate police resources to a new location without council approval.

Plans for new police station still murky

The last caveat came after the council rescinded an order from a meeting last month that would have moved the police dispatch center to 400 Mare Island Way, the controversial proposed site of a new police headquarters on the city’s prized waterfront.

Vallejo backed off the plan to move the police to the city-owned building — which it purchased for $13.5 million in 2019 to house the new police headquarters — after community outcry over the plan. By the time the city shifted plans, the police department had already moved its investigations and professional standards divisions to the new building.

After the Vallejo Sun reported last month that the dispatchers were moving to the new building without a vote during a public council meeting, concerned residents alleged that the council may have violated state open meeting law. At Tuesday’s meeting, the council rescinded the decision and then passed it again to allocate funds for new dispatch equipment, while stating that a location for a new dispatch center has yet to be identified.

Malone said that he expects to bring a new proposed location to the council in November, and it may be 400 Mare Island Way.

During the public comment period, resident Anne Carr, who sent a cure and correct notice to the city arguing that the previous decision violated state law, said she was “incredulous” that the city continued to try and move police resources into 400 Mare Island Way.

“It was an impulse purchase to begin with, and really if the city isn't going to sell it, they need to lease it,” she said.

As chief, Williams had pointed to the deteriorating facilities in the department’s current headquarters as a source of low morale and said the move to 400 Mare Island Way was an important step in officer retention.

The city is currently studying the feasibility of building a new headquarters at the site of the department’s current headquarters.