ACLU Community Meeting on Policing

“Thank you to those of you who were able to join us at the end of August for the ACLU community meeting on policing in Vallejo. On behalf of my colleagues, I want to thank you for taking the time to share your experiences, concerns, and ideas with us. We heard and witnessed the palpable pain from years of police abuse, corruption, and lack of solutions available to the community.

Specific issues that you shared with us are:

• The fact that police not only do not promote public safety in Vallejo, leaving people to fend for themselves, but the police actively terrorize people and make the community far less safe;
• The need to hold individual officers accountable for misconduct and find ways to work around the limits on the statutory decertification process; and,
• The indifference and lack of meaningful action taken by city leadership with regard to Vallejo’s policing problem.

Based on what we heard, we are taking some time to research:

• The possibility of seeking decertification for some of Vallejo’s most notorious and problematic officers;
• How we might influence the State Department of Justice regarding a possible consent decree that would provide court oversight of the Vallejo Police Department; specifically, we will be working on proposed policy revisions and other reforms that we could urge the Department of Justice to implement;
• Whether the Vallejo City Charter needs to be amended or revised to allow for more transparency and oversight of the VPD, or whether we can achieve more under the existing charter; and,
• What the implications are for the current emergency declaration for VPD hiring and oversight.

We would like to reconvene next month [this meeting s is now scheduled for October 4]  to share what we have learned and present a few paths forward where the ACLU has expertise and person-power to lend. We believe that meaningful change may take a long time, building on the years of advocacy by so many in the community, but we are committed to planning a strategic course and seeing it through, however long it may take.

If you are looking for more information about the Kenneth Ross Jr. Police Decertification Act of 2021 (SB 02), please visit this site where you can learn about the law https://www.aclunc.org/campaign/police-decertification-california–how-it-works and watch a webinar about how it works.

In community,

Date/Time

Date(s) - Wed, Oct 4, 2023
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Location

Solano Community College Vallejo Center
545 Columbus Parkway, Vallejo