After Open Vallejo revealed that Vallejo officers bent their badges to mark fatal shootings, Fairfield police pledged to investigate “immediately.” Instead, the agency took more than a year to investigate a former Vallejo officer in its ranks — and only began after he retired.
The announcement comes just one day after Andrew Murray’s latest performance review in a closed session of the Vallejo City Council.
A UC Berkeley grad vanished for two years after leaving his life behind to join the Zizians, a cult-like group now allegedly linked to six deaths nationwide. His parents believed he had been brainwashed.
He posted $15,000 and left a Maryland jail on Friday.
The California State Bar has opened a confidential inquiry into the Vallejo City Attorney’s Office, Open Vallejo has learned, adding a new front in the mounting scrutiny of the office. City Attorney Veronica Nebb wrote in an email Friday that her office is unaware of any investigation.
When officials rush to comment on police shootings before the facts are in, they risk corrupting investigations and eroding public confidence in law enforcement, according to experts.
Officer Brad Kim had run toward the front of the vehicle as the driver, Jamazea Kittell, tried to leave. Kim landed on the hood, shot Kittell in the face, then fired more rounds as the car drove off and crashed.
Both men survived.
The policy change came days after a Vallejo officer fired into a car that struck him during an early morning burglary call.
Since 2023, Vallejo police policy has prohibited shooting at moving vehicles — unless the occupant poses a deadly threat separate from the vehicle itself, like a firearm.
How should courts evaluate police shootings when someone tries to drive away? A unanimous Supreme Court ruled last May that courts must consider the totality of the circumstances — not just the moment before an officer pulls the trigger.
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We filed amicus briefs supporting @aclu-norcal.bsky.social in a case that successfully challenged Vallejo's attempts to keep a long-hidden report into badge-bending under wraps, five years after Open Vallejo first revealed the practice. The case expands access to public records statewide.
We published a guide to help residents find free groceries during the federal shutdown — and exposed how Solano County had allocated almost no funds for hunger relief. Following our reporting, the city of Vallejo convened a meeting to plan for future cuts.
We continued to build the Vallejo People's Archive, a free, searchable public resource now comprising over one million pages of local historical records. The model is designed to scale to other communities as we expand.
We revealed that a Vallejo SWAT officer posted dashcam footage of a high-speed pursuit on Instagram, accompanied by rap music and a swaggering caption. The city denied our records request. We obtained and published the footage anyway.
We showed how prosecutors charged an advocate for the unhoused with six counts of "offensive words" after he criticized officers and asked for badge numbers. Our analysis of charging data from all nine Bay Area counties found that the obscure statute is typically used to plead down serious felonies.
We held two police oversight officials accountable when they made public comments about the shooting that experts said threatened the investigation's integrity. One immediately resigned in response to our reporting.
We exclusively obtained footage from an August police shooting that the district attorney refuses to disclose, in violation of state law. With the help of Covington & Burling, we're suing to end this illegal practice.
Our investigation into a man's 2016 death in police custody prompted four outside agencies to release records. With the true facts in hand, the man's family sued Vallejo. A federal judge rejected the city's statute of limitations defense, crediting our reporting with bringing the incident to light.
We reported that for years, Vallejo police used a secret filing system to conceal officer misconduct records from courts. A civil rights attorney alleges the city fraudulently hid 150 incidents in prior litigation. The revelations could also upend criminal cases, including past convictions.
We published deposition testimony in which Vallejo's first Black police chief alleged he resigned after receiving anonymous threats the city refused to investigate — and that the City Attorney's Office tried to intimidate him before his testimony.
We broke a major national story connecting the suspect in a Vallejo killing to a person charged in the killing of a federal agent in Vermont. In the process, we uncovered the cult-like #Zizians, who authorities allege are linked to half a dozen deaths nationwide.
Our small team produces sophisticated, weighty investigations that rival reporting from outlets many times our size. Here's some of what we accomplished in 2025. 🧵
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