The Vallejo City Council unanimously rejected proposed amendments to a hard-won police oversight ordinance Tuesday, signaling a rare rebuke of Vallejo’s police union, which had sought the changes.
Nearly 20 public speakers spoke at Tuesday’s city council meeting to oppose a series of proposed amendments to the ordinance that established the oversight commission. The changes arose from a draft settlement with the powerful Vallejo Police Officers’ Association following a January 2023 labor dispute. Opponents of the changes, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Vallejo NAACP, said the agreement would dilute what some have argued is an already anemic oversight ordinance.
The proposed amendments included language that would have recast the commission’s “recommendations” as “opinions,” made video recordings of post-incident interviews optional, and extended the time the police chief has to forward complaints to the commission from two days to 10.
“We stand very strongly, ten toes down, that we want you to take a look deeply and reconsider,” said local NAACP President Patricia Hunter during the public comment period of Tuesday’s city council meeting. “Our recommendation remains the same — our recommendation, not our opinion.”
Tuesday’s vote follows an at-times tense oversight commission meeting Monday, in which commissioners and the public openly criticized the City Attorney’s Office and the Vallejo Police Officers’ Association. Kris Kelley, whose brother Mario Romero was killed by Vallejo police in 2012, accused city attorneys of prioritizing the police union’s demands over the need to protect the community from violent officers.
“Anytime a group of self-confessed badge-bending murderers get together in a room and decide that they want to change the wording, there’s something going on,” Kelley said at the Monday meeting. In 2020, Open Vallejo revealed the existence of a macabre ritual in which officers bent the tips of their star-shaped badges to mark fatal shootings.
Commissioner Cameron Clark expressed frustration that the commission had been left out of discussions between the City Attorney’s Office and the police union.
“I’m not going to be a commissioner on this board to say ‘okay’ about everything that you guys have going on,” Clark said to City Attorney Veronica Nebb and Assistant City Attorney Randy Risner. “I want to understand, and I want to know, and I want to be informed about what’s taking place so that we can get to where we need to be.”
The proposed changes to Vallejo’s police oversight ordinance were the result of a more than 2-year-long labor dispute with union leadership that has now spanned two different city councils.
Weeks after the city passed the oversight ordinance in December 2022, police union leadership filed an unfair labor practice charge with the state Public Employment Relations Board. The complaint alleged that the city passed the ordinance without first conferring with union leadership, a move that Mayor Andrea Sorce, who took office in January, said occurred with the prior council’s knowledge that doing so could delay implementation of the ordinance.
“I’m sick of being put in impossible situations, and if we keep feeling like we’re forced into a decision, we need to stop and reject that decision so that we won’t be forced into decisions in the future,” Sorce said. “We need to set a hard line and say ‘no more.’”
Between September 2023 and November 2024, negotiators for the city and police union met on 15 occasions, including three times with a mediator from the Public Employment Relations Board, according to a presentation by Risner at Tuesday’s city council meeting.
The settlement agreement rejected by the council Tuesday had come before the previous city council in a September 2024 closed session. However, the council decided to punt the decision to the new council in a closed session after the November election — a move former councilmember Tina Arriola apologized for at the Tuesday meeting.
“That was not our intention to get rid of it and push it off,” Arriola said during public comment.
The police oversight commission has been unable to start work since the commissioners’ appointment in February 2024, as the city has not provided them with training required by the ordinance. One member’s term expired in February; another, Mike Nisperos, resigned earlier this week.
Nisperos, a longtime police oversight advocate and former California State Bar prosecutor, characterized the delays in training as an intentional effort to undermine police reform in Vallejo and called for a grand jury audit of the City Attorney’s Office in his resignation letter. Sorce called his departure a “tremendous loss” for the city.
In an email statement to Open Vallejo, city spokesperson Sharon Lund said Nisperos’ claims were unfounded and that the city was working as fast as possible under the constraints of California labor law. Nisperos said he would not return to the commission unless changes were made in the City Attorney’s Office.
“I’m impressed with the action they took, and somewhere down the road, it might change my mind,” Nisperos said in an interview regarding the Tuesday city council vote. “But it’s certainly not going to happen as long as they have the same players in place — as long as Veronica Nebb is the city attorney.”
