A young man and woman stand between their attorneys at an outdoor press conference.

Disband the Vallejo Police Department

After Aaron Quinn’s girlfriend Denise Huskins was kidnapped, Vallejo police insisted that he had murdered her. When Huskins was released two days later, they accused the couple of making it all up.

Members of the Vallejo Police Department, including Chief Shawny Williams, Deputy Chief Michael Kihmm, and Captain Jason Potts pose for a photograph with the controversial "Blue Lives Matter" flag, which has been criticized for its associations with the white supremacist movement. The Vallejo Police Department posted the image to its official social media accounts on Dec. 25, 2020, but deleted it from Twitter following criticism. The photograph remains on the department’s official Facebook and Instagram pages.

Blue Life

Blue life is always under threat but can never perish. Blue life is what you get when you confuse a job for a social existence, an occupational hazard for an ontological crisis. Even more, it creates an equivalence between two disparate “sides” that are in fact not sides at all.

Introducing Open Vallejo

Open Vallejo is an award-winning, independent, non-partisan, nonprofit newsroom serving the public interest. We seek to illuminate a small city long burdened by police violence, neglect, and corruption. Our core team consists of journalists, First Amendment and open government lawyers, press freedom advocates, data scientists and other subject-matter experts. 

As the first project of the Informed California Foundation, Open Vallejo is also a permanent design laboratory for open source, high-impact, broadly-accessible frameworks for ensuring local transparency, accountability, and information justice.