The city denied the various allegations in its answer to the lawsuit. A jury trial is set for October.
At a rally in front of Vallejo City Hall in February, Saddler and other families gathered amid a sea of posters with pictures and messages about loved ones who died in police shootings.
"There is no justice for the daily hell that we're living," said Paula McGowan, whose son, Ronell Foster, 32, was fatally shot in 2018 during what police said was a
"violent physical struggle" with an officer — who would be one of the six involved in this year's shooting of McCoy. (A lawsuit is pending against the city by Foster's family, and the city in its response has denied all allegations of unreasonable and excessive force. A district attorney's investigation remains ongoing.)
"Something is rotten within the Vallejo Police Department," added John Burris, an Oakland civil rights attorney who grew up in Vallejo and represents several of the families suing the city of Vallejo.
When it was Saddler's turn to speak, she clasped her cellphone in her hands and trembled.
"I never imagined it would be the police that would come and kill my brother," she said. "Why are so many people dying at the hands of these officers? My family has lost all faith and has nothing but fear in our hearts when it comes to cops."
Police did not respond to Saddler's comments. Seven months after Ramos' death, Jacobsen would be involved in another shooting. He and four other officers fired at a man who led them on a high-speed freeway chase and got out of the car holding up a machete and screaming, "Kill me." The officers — believing he was a threat to the public — shot him 41 times, according to the coroner's inquest report. A jury at an inquest hearing last year ruled his death a suicide by police, and found there was no wrongdoing by officers.
Among the officers involved in that case was David McLaughlin, who joined Vallejo's force in 2014 after two years in Oakland. Earlier this year, McLaughlin was in the spotlight again for confronting Adrian Burrell, the black Marine veteran who was filming a traffic stop from his front porch involving his cousin about 30 feet away.
Cellphone video shared by Burrell shows McLaughlin ordering him to "get back" and accusing him of interfering with the stop. He then approaches Burrell and tells him to "stop resisting," at which point Burrell told NBC News he was slammed into a wall and swung into a pole, where he knocked his head and sustained a concussion. He was then handcuffed. Only after McLaughlin learned that he was a veteran with no police record, Burrell added, was he released from the back of a police car.
Bidou called for an "expeditious" internal affairs investigation after Burrell's video began circulating on social media. McLaughlin remains on leave following the incident.
Burrell said he feels fortunate it didn't turn out worse — with him getting swept up in the criminal justice system or losing his life — but he wants to shine a light on the police department after filing a legal claim alleging false arrest and negligence.
The city has yet to respond to that claim.
A 'PROBLEMATIC CULTURE'
The prevalence of cellphone recordings and officer body cameras has opened up Vallejo to increased scrutiny in other cases — and exposed what some say is a web of connections between them.
For instance, an officer in the McCoy shooting, Mark Thompson, was also involved in an alleged use-of-force incident in July 2017 involving a white man named Carl Edwards.
Edwards, 49, said he was tinkering with his fence outside of his woodwork shop when a group of officers "worked in concert" to "viciously beat him," according to a lawsuit filed last September against the city, the police department, the police chief and the four officers.
Bodycam footage purportedly taken from one of those officers, Spencer Muniz-Bottomley, appears to show him pulling up to the scene, walking up to Edwards at his fence and commanding him to "put your hands on your head, bro." NBC News does not know what, if anything, occurred before the footage was shot.
As Edwards begins to question the officer, using an expletive, Muniz-Bottomley immediately pulls Edwards down, and in a matter of seconds, other officers are on top of him. His face and hands are bloodied on the pavement. He shouts repeatedly, "I didn't do anything!" and "Why are you laughing?"
Edwards obtained the video as part of his case, and later found it had surfaced on social media, his attorney, Michael Haddad, told NBC News. According to the lawsuit, Edwards suffered multiple injuries, including head trauma, a broken nose, and cuts and bruises across his face and body.
Haddad said that police were investigating a call about a man using a slingshot on children, and that Edwards was misidentified as a suspect. In addition, he said in the lawsuit, the officers falsified reports claiming Edwards had been identified as having thrown the rocks. Charges of assault with a deadly weapon and resisting an officer against Edwards were dismissed last summer.
Muniz-Bottomley, who was hired in Vallejo in 2015, was
no longer with the department last fall, although police officials have not said what led to his departure.
"There's a clear, very problematic culture in the Vallejo Police Department," Haddad said, adding that "I suspect that a lot of community members feel powerless."
"This kind of rampant brutality and lawlessness in the police department can't go on without enablers in the city government," he said.
The city has denied the allegations of wrongful or negligent conduct in Edwards' lawsuit. Efforts to reach Muniz-Bottomley for comment were unsuccessful.
Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan referred questions about policing practices and the city's financial costs to the city manager's office and the police department, which did not immediately respond to follow-up calls and emails.
The toll that questionable police conduct takes can be counted in a less apparent way: a city's bottom line.
"One of the most astonishing things to me is when you look at the big cities, they pay out tens of millions of dollars a year, every year," said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a police oversight scholar.
For instance, in Oakland, whose police department has been under federal court monitoring since 2003, roughly $3 million was spent annually from 1990 to 2014 to settle police lawsuits, according to an analysis by the independent reporting project
Oakland Police Beat.
In Vallejo, civil rights lawsuits and claims in connection with the police department have cost the city more than $7 million in settlements since 2011, according to city settlement records examined by NBC News. (Still pending are about a dozen other cases and claims indicating potential lawsuits.)
The settlements don't imply wrongdoing by the city, but they can be an easier and cheaper alternative than going through the courts.
Last year, City Attorney Claudia Quintana told the City Council that "escalating costs of defending claims and paying claims" were leading Vallejo to drop out from its municipal insurance pool, which it had belonged to since 1987 and helped shoulder the costs of litigation.
Previously, the city's risk fund was responsible for paying up to $500,000 of a settlement, and the insurance pool would cover the rest. But the pool's board voted to raise the city's deductible amount to $2.5 million because its losses were "large and disproportionate" compared to other cities. Vallejo, instead, joined a
new insurance pool in July.
The financial hardships resonate deeply in Vallejo, which was mired in bankruptcy from 2008 to 2011 as it struggled with a reputation for crime and remained relegated to the fringes of the region's tech boom. Residents lament that the money set aside for lawsuits could have instead gone to pot-holed streets, social services, schools or even additional officers.
The city was paying its officers and firefighters six-figure salaries before last decade's deep recession, after which the police force fell from a high of 158 officers in 2005 to fewer than 95 in 2012. There are now about 100 officers in Vallejo, although local leaders have acknowledged in recent years that the department was "woefully understaffed."
