The Vallejo Police Department is reeling from a series of scandals and a highly unflattering new Netflix documentary, and interim Police Chief Jason Ta is reportedly leaving the department for a permanent job in Salinas.
The litany of police scandals coming out of the Vallejo Police Department has been a non-stop parade for years, since long before California AG Rob Bonta put the beleaguered department under state oversight four months ago. The Vallejo PD has had a reputation for being trigger-happy, and forced the City of Vallejo to pay their second settlement of $5 million or more last month over police shootings. And now a new Netflix documentary American Nightmare, which covers the botched investigation into Denise Huskins’s 2015 kidnapping, is bringing so much national scorn onto the department that KPIX reports their social media accounts are overwhelmed with negative comments.
Want to get away?
BREAKING: Vallejo’s interim police chief plans to step down after less than 16 months in the position, Open Vallejo has learned.
— Open Vallejo (@OpenVallejo) February 13, 2024
Jason Ta is the second police chief to leave Vallejo since 2020, when the California DOJ began scrutinizing the agency. https://t.co/sLLeDSkgDV
Apparently, interim Vallejo Police Chief Jason Ta does want to get away. The independent news website Open Vallejo has a new report saying Ta is set to resign from the department and take the permanent police chief position in Salinas. Ta has been serving as Vallejo’s interim chief of police since the abrupt resignation of Chief Shawny Williams in November 2022.
Open Vallejo reports that “A source with knowledge of the matter characterized Ta’s hiring in Salinas as all but a done deal, subject to a background check, a standard practice for law enforcement and executive-level government positions.”
Salinas closes in on new police chief: report | Click on the image to read the full story https://t.co/Whhlcj3OUq
— KSBW Action News 8 (@ksbw) February 13, 2024
This is somewhat backed by a follow-up report from Salinas’ KSBW saying “The Interim City Manager for Salinas, Jim Pia, would neither confirm nor deny the name out of ‘respect for the confidentiality of the process.’”
But pointedly, neither Ta nor the City of Vallejo denied the report.
Open Vallejo is a smaller and independent news site in Vallejo, but has a solid track record of breaking Vallejo police news developments well before larger Bay Area news organizations manage to pick them up. They were the first with stories of the Vallejo PD bandage-bending scandal where officers reportedly celebrated shooting suspects “with beers, backyard barbecues, and by bending the points of their badges each time they kill in the line of duty,” and that the whistleblower on that scandal getting a $900,000 settlement over his firing.
Image: Vallejo Police Department
