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Dear Friends,
Help us raise $15,000 by December 31, and #NewsMatch will double your support of our local investigative work.
I founded Open Vallejo on February 9, 2019. That evening, six Vallejo police officers fired 55 bullets at 20-year-old Willie McCoy as he slept in his car in a Taco Bell drive-through. In a city of 125,00 people, he was the 33rd person killed by Vallejo police in just under two decades.
Jim Crow racism stalks the descendants of the shipyard workers who came here during World War II. This is a city displaced from space and time, a sundown town 45 minutes north of San Francisco. Before us, Vallejo was also an investigative news desert.
I am from Vallejo. This city is one of the most diverse places in the country, but it is also where mostly-white cops hurt and kill people at rates higher than almost any other department in California. In 2020, Open Vallejo exposed a macabre ritual here, in which cops bend a tip of their star-shaped badges for each person they kill. Averaged out, police here have shot a civilian once every four months for 20 years.
But that is changing.
Open Vallejo exists to shed light on one of the most corrupt and brutal city governments in the country. Our scrappy outfit is meticulously ethical, deeply analytical, and fearless. Since 2019, with scant few resources, our investigative reporting has hastened the departure of two police chiefs, several assistant and deputy chiefs, and the city attorney. It cost the chief deputy city attorney, who has been forced out of several cities and sanctioned for fraud on a federal court, promotion to the permanent position. It flipped the mayor’s race from a convicted domestic abuser endorsed by the state Democratic Party. Cops who ran roughshod over the community found themselves under investigation for past fatal shootings, and many have left the department; this includes the first known firing of a Vallejo police officer for a shooting.
Our reporting has inspired protests and petitions. Civic participation in Vallejo, once repressed, is now robust. Our works have informed state legislation to decertify bad cops and sparked precedent-setting litigation that restricted cities’ purchases of powerful surveillance technologies. The California Department of Justice has stepped in to investigate the police, who have not shot anyone for more than two and a half years.
We have also engaged in strategic impact litigation ourselves. This includes a public records lawsuit that settled favorably in 2020, and another, ongoing lawsuit that has resulted in the disclosure of thousands of pages of records about police killings of civilians.
We hired — and promoted — our first full-time investigative reporter, Laurence Du Sault. In partnership with ProPublica, we published two of our biggest investigations ever, which you can find on the homepage of our website. We forged strong relationships with Stanford University and Columbia Journalism School and became a proud client of the new Protecting Journalists Pro Bono Program, a joint program from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Microsoft, and the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine.
Open Vallejo also won the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter Excellence in Journalism Award for Community Journalism, as well as the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice Journalistic Integrity Award, which is only presented “when truly merited,” according to the group.
Open Vallejo is just the beginning — a laboratory for local interventions all across the state. We plan to open-source our model, providing trainings, toolkits, technology and other interventions to people who are trying to make a difference in their own cities and towns. We will tirelessly report on matters of public concern, identifying and addressing gaps in democratic self-governance, hold space, and act in harmony with similar efforts.
We have accomplished all this with a single full-time investigative journalist and me, acting as journalist, editor, and running the day-to-day operations. We urgently need your support to multiply our areas of coverage, expand our editorial team, and generate even more impact. We want to grow our organization, Informed California Foundation, allowing Open Vallejo to become a creative engine for pro-transparency interventions throughout the state.
We can do this together. Now through December 31, NewsMatch will double your donation up to $1,000. If you sign up as a monthly supporter, your donation will be matched for the entire year, also up to $1,000.
Partner with us and show the power of local journalism. Help us shine the light of truth.
Best,
Geoff
Geoffrey King
Executive Editor