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How a Deadly Police Force Ruled a City [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Shane Bauer']
Date: 2020-11-23
In the end, the committee’s recommendations included installing more surveillance cameras, establishing a daytime curfew for youths, increasing enforcement of parking violations, and using money from a new public-services tax to hire more cops.
Three years after the death of Romero, his family won a two-million-dollar settlement. Later that year, the police department completed its review of the case and declared that the shooting was justified. Officers told Open Vallejo that Kenney was initiated into the badge-bending group. In 2011, he was made a detective. One of his new duties was to investigate officer-involved shootings.
Reformers who have succeeded in getting rogue cops censured or fired often come up against a frustrating reality: because there are no national and few statewide indexes that track police terminations and disciplinary infractions, tainted officers often find new jobs in different jurisdictions. A recent study published in the Yale Law Journal found that about three per cent of officers serving in Florida had been fired from other state agencies. These cops, who typically moved to smaller forces that were desperate for experienced officers, were more likely than others to be charged with misconduct in their new departments. Sometimes a cop will resign before he is fired, thus avoiding any consequences. Before Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, in Cleveland, joined the city’s police force, he had resigned from his previous job, in Independence, Ohio, where supervisors noted his insubordination, lying, and emotional immaturity.
Officers can also transfer in order to escape reforms. In the past year, large numbers of cops in Seattle, Buffalo, Atlanta, and San Francisco have left. After four cops were charged with killing George Floyd, about two hundred officers in Minneapolis filed to quit the department, citing “post-traumatic stress.” Law Enforcement Move, a company founded in the wake of the recent protests, says that it helps officers “escape anti-police cities, and live in America, again!” Since June, its founder told me, the company has been contacted by more than a thousand cops, or their spouses, who are interested in relocating to more “police-friendly” communities.
Some of Vallejo’s most notorious officers transferred from Oakland, where a lawsuit brought on behalf of a hundred and nineteen plaintiffs claimed that police had routinely kidnapped, beaten, and planted evidence on people. In 2014, a court-appointed overseer announced that he would be tightening oversight on uses of force, and punishing officers who didn’t report misconduct by their colleagues. Within four months, six officers had left for Vallejo. Three of them were eventually involved in lethal shootings. All six were sued for excessive use of force.
Two of the former Oakland officers were the twin brothers Ryan and David McLaughlin, who often searched men of color in Vallejo on the ground that they smelled marijuana, even after it had been legalized. The brothers justified these searches as “compliance checks,” meant to make sure that people weren’t carrying more than the legal limit. “That’s maybe how they roll in certain other nations,” a judge later said in court. “But that is not probable cause.”
In 2018, David McLaughlin, while off duty, got into a heated confrontation with a man celebrating his son’s birthday at a pizzeria in Walnut Creek. He pointed his service gun at the man, then tackled him and punched and elbowed him until his face was bloody. (McLaughlin maintains that he acted within professional boundaries.) Five months later, McLaughlin pulled over a man on a motorcycle for speeding, then drew his gun on him. The man’s cousin, an African-American marine veteran named Adrian Burrell, filmed the encounter from his front porch. McLaughlin ordered Burrell to retreat. Burrell refused, resulting in a struggle that, he alleges, gave him a concussion. McLaughlin faces lawsuits in both cases.
Jarrett Tonn, Monterrosa’s shooter, joined the Vallejo force the same year as the Oakland cops. Tonn had been an officer in Galt, California, where he worked with his cousin, Kevin Tonn. One day in 2013, Kevin confronted a man who he thought, incorrectly, was a suspect in a robbery. The man pulled out a gun and shot Kevin, then shot himself. Jarrett rushed to the scene, but his cousin was dying.
A memorial for Sean Monterrosa in San Francisco, where he was from. Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Magnum for The New Yorker
Transferring to Vallejo might have seemed like an unlikely career move. Crime was high, the city was just a few years out of bankruptcy, and the school system had recently emerged from state receivership. But Tonn wasn’t going to live there. Even after the bankruptcy, Vallejo officers were some of the highest paid in California. Tonn’s base pay during his first full year in Vallejo was a hundred thousand dollars—thirty-six thousand dollars more than he made in Galt. This didn’t account for overtime and benefits. In 2018, he made twenty-seven thousand dollars in overtime and thirty-one thousand dollars in “other pay,” and received twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of benefits. In addition, his pension was funded with fifty-eight thousand dollars.
The year after Tonn started working in Vallejo, he chased an unarmed man who was driving a stolen car. The man crashed into someone’s front yard, then reversed into Tonn’s car. Tonn doesn’t remember feeling the impact, but in two seconds he shot eighteen rounds from his Glock into the car, injuring the man.
The officer who wrote the police review of the shooting was Kent Tribble, who once, when responding to a domestic dispute, went to the house of a Black man by mistake, Tased him through his bedroom window after the man shouted profanities at him, and later charged him with resisting arrest. On another occasion, when he was off duty, he pulled a gun on two men in Bend, Oregon, during a drunken confrontation after leaving a bar. (Tribble did not respond to a request for comment.) A couple of years later, Tribble was promoted to lieutenant. When he reviewed Tonn’s shooting, he wrote that Tonn had acted in accordance with his training.
In 2017, Tonn was paired with Sean Kenney, the officer who killed three people in 2012. One day, Tonn and Kenney were pursuing Kevin DeCarlo, a suspect in a pawnshop robbery that had ended in a homicide. (He was never charged in connection with the crime.) When DeCarlo stopped at a stop sign, Kenney rammed his car. DeCarlo rammed Kenney back, then got stuck in a ditch. Tonn fired at least eight rounds with a rifle at DeCarlo; other officers, including Kenney, fired at him as well. A witness told police that the scene resembled an execution. DeCarlo suffered four broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and the loss of two fingers. Tonn told investigators that he thought DeCarlo was reaching for a firearm, but DeCarlo had no weapon. (Tonn did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to the Pew Research Center, only a quarter of cops ever fire their weapon on duty, but this was Kenney’s fifth shooting in five years. A year and a half later, he retired. He started a consulting firm called Line Driven Strategies, which conducts training courses for police departments on the use of force and on how to investigate shootings by the police. Kenney declined an interview, saying that there was “too much negativity and hate in this climate.”
Five weeks after shooting DeCarlo with Kenney, Tonn chased a carjacking suspect down an alley, then fired at him from half a block away. Tonn claimed that the man was carrying a gun, but no weapon was found. The policeman who wrote the internal report of the shooting, Jared Jaksch, was one of the officers who had shot at DeCarlo. Jaksch is also on the board of the V.P.O.A. He wrote that Tonn had done nothing wrong, but recommended that adjustments be made to training “to ensure officers know that they must react in self defense without consideration for potential future civil unrest.”
I wanted to learn how Vallejo police officers viewed the perception that they act with impunity. Though no one on the police force agreed to talk to me on the record, I did find a body-camera recording in which an officer revealed his thoughts. On July 7, 2016, Josh Coleman and a partner were on patrol in Vallejo when they saw some twenty Black people standing in an intersection. For a documentary about Bay Area hip-hop, a Viceland reporter was interviewing Nef the Pharaoh, a protégé of E-40. Coleman assumed that they were shooting a rap video. He later told a court that, since he had seen guns used in rap videos, he thought this was sufficient cause to detain and search as many of the men as he could.
As an officer began to arrest a man with a handgun, Coleman ordered a group of onlookers to move across the street. (A judge later dismissed the charges, saying that there was no probable cause for a search.) A twenty-one-year-old woman, whom I’ll call Aliya, ignored him, so Coleman threw her against his car and arrested her.
Coleman spotted a rapper known as Cousin Fik, with whom he went to high school. Coleman believes that the main reason for street violence is “the music, plain and simple.” He admonished Cousin Fik for delivering a detrimental message. “Until men like you and people like I start delivering the same exact message, we are not going to be able to do anything,” Coleman said. “People are still going to get killed.”
At the police station, Coleman put Aliya in an interrogation room and asked her why she had refused to cross the street.
“Because that’s my baby daddy, and I don’t want nothing to happen to him,” she said. “All these police officers want to shoot a Black person. If you’re going to shoot him, I’m going to be right with him.”
“In the political climate today, do you think any police officer really wants to shoot a Black person?” Coleman asked.
“So why do they?”
“Listen, we can risk sending them back to school, but, honestly, these are the skills they’re going to need most in the new world.” Facebook
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Shopping Cartoon by Avi Steinberg
“We’re protecting our lives.”
“O.K., you’re cool today, but another officer would have had his gun out and automatically just shot him.”
“No, that doesn’t happen. Seriously, think about it logically. You think a police officer is willing to risk his one-hundred-thousand-a-year job, all of his medical benefits, because he wants to shoot somebody who’s Black and be on the news, and be accused of being a murderer, and now he has to live the rest of his life being a UPS driver because he can’t be a cop anymore?”
“I’m not saying you do, but you never know what these—”
[END]
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