The cellphone video starts at approximately the moment Vallejo Police Department officer David McLaughlin draws his gun from its holster.

Adrian Burrell, a former Marine and documentary filmmaker is holding the phone and standing on his porch on January 22, watching the traffic stop of his cousin, Michael Walton, happening in Burrell’s driveway.

“You have a gun, and I have one, but it’s in the form of a camera,” Burrell recalls thinking. “This is the only thing I can bring to the fight.”
When McLaughlin turns and notices he’s being filmed, he orders Burrell to “get back.”

“Nope,” Burrell responds from his porch about 20 to 30 feet away.
Filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, as long as it doesn’t interfere with police duties. But McLaughlin strides onto the porch—holstering his gun and turning his back on Walton, a man he just moments ago appeared to consider a possible deadly threat—and starts to handcuff Burrell. “You’re interfering, so you’re going in the back of the car,” he says.

What happens next isn’t caught on camera, but McLaughlin tells Burrell to stop resisting. “I’m not resisting,” Burrell insists.
According to Burrell, McLaughlin then swept him to the ground and slammed his head against a wooden pole, giving him a concussion. McLaughlin detained Burrell before eventually releasing him, Burrell says, after finding out he was a veteran.
“I spend my whole life trying to avoid this, and it came to my house,” Burrell thought as he sat in the back of the squad car.
Like many recorded instances of police misconduct over the past five years, Burrell’s cellphone footage, uploaded to Facebook, went viral, sparking national media coverage. But it was only one of a string of high-profile police incidents in recent months that have inflamed long-running tensions in Vallejo—a diverse, blue-collar city north of Oakland, California—between the city’s police department and its citizens. Almost all of the recent incidents have been caught on cellphones or police-worn body cameras. Local activists say they finally show what lawsuits and protesters have complained of for years.
Vallejo has paid out millions of dollars to settle civil lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, brutality, and misconduct over the past decade. According to Claudia Quintana, Vallejo city attorney, there are currently 35 pending claims and lawsuits in connection with the Vallejo Police Department, 16 of which allege excessive force. There have been accusations of police retaliation against victims who have come forward, the police chief resigned in April, and the mayor has asked that the Justice Department come to town to try to mend the frayed relationship between police and the community.
The Vallejo Police Department says it is underfunded and dealing with high crime and high unemployment; the city never really recovered from the 2008 recession.
But Vallejo has one of the highest per capita rates of fatal police shootings in the state, higher than neighboring cities with similar crime problems, and one of the highest amounts of lawsuit payouts in the Bay Area. And while the number of police use-of-force injuries may be small compared to the overall number of arrests, for the first time, many of them are being caught on tape.
“Vallejo’s been problematic for a long time,” says Melissa Nold, Burrell’s attorney. “I’m from here, I’ve lived here my whole life, and the police department’s always been problematic. I think a lot of the increase for us recently has been the videotapes.”

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