Police officers continue to violently abuse their power and continue to cost cities billions, with a “b”, of dollars over the course of years. A Washington Post report stated that between 2012-2022, police departments settled nearly 40,000 officer misconduct claims that totaled $3.2 billion. Not only is the brutality criminal, immoral, and often bigoted, but on a more superficial level, it’s bad for cities and taxpayers.
According to Open Vallejo (OV), Nakia Porter, a Black woman, was beaten unconscious by Solano County Sheriff’s deputies Dalton McCampbell and Lisa McDowell after she and her father pulled over their car to switch seats. The subsequent lawsuit that Porter filed said that, without legal justification, she was handcuffed, thrown to the ground, knocked unconscious, and taken to jail. As a result of the Aug. 6, 2020, incident, the city of Vallejo agreed to a $17 million settlement, which is three times more than the biggest settlement the city has ever issued.
Some may find the following video disturbing.
As is typical in these types of cases, the settlement doesn’t come with any level of accountability and paradoxically comes with excuses or outright denial of any wrongdoing.
“The parties acknowledge that all claims and causes of action relating to the incident are disputed, including with respect to the underlying facts,” Solano County spokesperson Matthew A. Davis wrote in a statement to Open Vallejo Tuesday. “The County made the decision to settle after careful evaluation of the risks, costs, and time associated with protracted litigation.”
Pathetic. These feckless statements not only erode public trust, but they also insult our intelligence. Not a single person on this Earth with eyes and ears believes that a city would pay out eight figures to an individual where they were completely innocent. It’s nonsensical, irrational, and insulting.
To add further insult to this injury, OV reports that back in September, Solano County approved an $11.2 million measure to allow these same department of sheriff’s deputies to patrol the inner city. In 2022 the California Department of Justice launched an investigation into the City of Vallejo for the egregious number of officer-involved shootings that had occurred. Mysteriously, following that investigation, the city’s police department hasn’t killed a single person. Interesting, to say the least.
