After three-decade career, Vacaville police chief to retire
(Photo: Vacaville Police Chief John Carli speaks to reporters with other community and civil rights leaders after a meeting with President Barack Obama at the Eisenhower Executive Building in Washington, D.C. on July 13, 2016. Still frame courtesy C-SPAN Networks/Graphic by Solano NewsNet)
Vacaville Police Chief John Carli will resign his position and retire after a 32-year career in law enforcement, city officials said in a press release on Friday.
Carli has spent much of his three-decade career in law enforcement in Vacaville where he joined as a patrol officer and K-9 handler in 1989. After several promotions, he was appointed to the position of police chief in 2014, where he has spent the last six years commanding a staff of over 170 sworn law enforcement officers and civilian employees, officials said.
“It has been my honor to serve Vacaville all these years,” Carli said in a statement. “I am thankful for having the privilege to work alongside the finest police officers and professional staff in what is truly an incredible community. I will sincerely miss being with such incredible staff.”
City officials promoted several of Carli’s accomplishments during his tenure as Vacaville’s police chief, including the formation of a Community Response Unit that focuses specifically on quality of life concerns, including the issue of homelessness within the city.
He also focuses special attention on “uniting community groups and faith-based organizations to address social issues,” city officials said. At a recent meeting with faith-based leaders, Carli relayed information that Vacaville police officers had seen an increase in calls for service in 2020 compared to the previous year, marking an active and busy time for the officers who are under his command and punctuating a need for the type of community-focused policing Carli has promoted.
In 2016, he was one of several law enforcement officials invited to meet with then-president Barack Obama to discuss his progressive actions within the Vacaville Police Department. His meeting came at a time when law enforcement’s relationship with citizens was starting to fray in the wake of several high-profile incidents, including the fatal shooting of Missouri resident Michael Brown and the killings of five Dallas police officers.
“Vacaville is doing something right,” Carli told a newspaper reporter at the time. “Most agencies only focus on crime. We focus on prevention.”
But the agency under Carli has not been exempt from its own share of criticism, including recently when a K-9 officer was caught on video punching a police dog in training. Through a spokesperson, the police department defended the officer’s actions, even as animal behaviorists and training experts denounced it. An internal investigation is under way; in the meantime, the officer — who has never been identified, but was separated from the dog — remains on the job.
The Vacaville Police Department has also been targeted by a fringe group of activists who have held weekly anti-police rallies in front of the agency’s headquarters and neighboring City Hall since last summer. During one recent rally, a splinter group broke from the rally and vandalized both buildings, causing between $20,000 and $30,000 in damage.
No one has been arrested for the incident, but officers sent a strong message the following week when several demonstrators were arrested at the end of a homeless outreach event at Andrew’s Park, with police confiscating the cellphones of several participants.
Both issues point to recent growing pains within the Vacaville Police Department as the world gets smaller thanks to social media and the community it serves undergoes a demographic shift as more people move inward from the San Francisco and Sacramento regions. For years, Carli and his officers have enjoyed elements of pro-police conservatism that are hallmarks of small towns like the one Vacaville used to be, with self-proclaimed “Vacavillians” and the local newspaper more than accepting the official narrative from local law enforcement without much challenge while recent transplants — who are often more comfortable organizing and expressing themselves on Internet forums — are quick to scrutinize them through the lens of extreme (and, sometimes, militant) progressivism.
How the agency overcomes these problems and find middle ground with a community that is rapidly changing is something Carli’s interim successor, Captain Ian Schmutzler, will have to tackle once the police chief officially retires in mid-April. Following his retirement, the city says it will begin the search for a new chief of police.
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