Open Vallejo has won the 2024 Excellence in Journalism Award for Ongoing Coverage from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, marking the newsroom’s third consecutive EIJ award and its sixth SPJ NorCal award overall.
This year’s judges recognized Open Vallejo for its investigative series, “‘No responsive records:’ How Vallejo hid killings by police.” The investigation revealed how senior officials in the Vallejo Police Department and City Attorney’s Office concealed violent in-custody deaths by treating them as accidents, used juvenile records laws to shield officers from accountability, and illegally destroyed evidence in multiple police shootings. In June, this newsroom published a story uncovering how local officials kept one man’s death a secret for nearly a decade.
Open Vallejo obtained many of the records on which the series is based through a public records lawsuit filed against the city of Vallejo in September 2021. The newsroom is represented by attorneys from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and Microsoft through the Protecting Journalists Pro Bono Program.
Many of the destroyed records were set for disclosure under California transparency laws. Each of the six cases in which officials destroyed evidence involved at least one officer involved in the agency’s “Badge of Honor” scandal, revealed by Open Vallejo in 2020, in which a secretive clique of officers bent the tips of their badges each time they killed a civilian.
Days after Open Vallejo published the evidence destruction story, the city of Vallejo launched a third-party investigation from which the city attorney’s office was forced to recuse itself. Last May, Solano County Superior Court Judge Stephen Gizzi ruled that the purge violated state law and ordered the city to disclose other records sought by this newsroom.
In early October, the Vallejo Police Department released a handful of records previously labeled as destroyed. The city of Vallejo has yet to explain how the records, which represent a small fraction of the illegally purged files, were recovered.
Reporting by former Open Vallejo reporter Laurence Du Sault also revealed the deaths of five unarmed men of color who died during encounters with Vallejo police. Local officials claimed that each of the men died accidentally, and on this basis blocked the release of records for years. Open Vallejo’s investigation revealed that four of these men were held in a dangerous prone restraint moments before they died: Charles Khristopher Gordon, Otis Edward McPeters, Michael Todd White, and Darryl Dean Mefferd. Four were also Tased while struggling with officers. Through its litigation, this newsroom forced the city of Vallejo to disclose records in all but the Mefferd case, which remains a point of contention in the lawsuit.
The city successfully blocked the release of some records despite Open Vallejo’s ongoing lawsuit. Judge Gizzi denied this newsroom records related to the Vallejo police killing of 17-year-old Jared Huey in 2012, ruling that because Huey was a minor when he was killed, juvenile privacy laws prohibited their release. The court applied the same law to protect records in the 2010 killing of 34-year-old Guy Jarreau, Jr., allowing police to withhold the entire investigative file because officers detained teenage witnesses.
Open Vallejo then published an analysis of how police use juvenile records laws to shield officers from scrutiny. In response, the author of a landmark 2019 state transparency law, State Sen. Nancy Skinner, condemned the ruling in Open Vallejo’s case as it applied to juvenile records; a co-sponsor of the bill similarly called it “bullshit” and pledged to address the issue in subsequent legislation.
Since 2020, Open Vallejo has earned 13 national and regional journalism awards, including the University of Southern California’s Selden Ring Special Citation for Investigative Reporting, the First Amendment Coalition Free Speech and Open Government Award, the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice Journalistic Integrity Award, and two Institute for Nonprofit News Community Champion Awards.
