OnPolicing Blog

The Vallejo Police Department has commissioned a promotional video of the California city that it serves and protects. The eight-minute video examines the department’s relationship with the community, both the good and the bad, and addresses the need to reconnect to its roots, hence the name of the video — “Reconnecting” — which can be viewed below and on YouTube.

What’s particularly interesting about this effort is that while VPD paid for the video, it gave complete editorial control of the final product to the local company that recorded, edited and produced it. VPD did not give input or influence to the video. The reason for this was VPD wanted an honest, documentary-styled review of its relationship with the people of Vallejo, which has a population of nearly 120,000.

In an interview with the local newspaper, Sgt. Brent Garrick, VPD’s community engagement officer, said the goal was to tackle the city’s negative reputation to people outside of Vallejo.

“We recognized that when you put the city of Vallejo and the police department into the search engines, a lot of negative material and negative publicity that has been uploaded by private parties, really permeates the internet,” Garrick told the Vallejo Times-Herald. “We sought to balance that by helping to promote the positive attributes of the city of Vallejo and what better way to do it than to highlight some of the positives rather than the negatives that we see in the media.”

Vallejo Chief Andrew Bidou is an executive fellow with the National Policing Institute.