The lawsuit is stunning for several reasons.
The suit was brought against the City of Chula Vista by Roxana Kennedy, the city’s longtime police chief. Kennedy’s complaint, filed in San Diego County Superior Court in May, alleges that city leaders secretly conspired to oust her — a remarkable accusation against any city.
But the complaint also relies on one incendiary claim in particular: that members of the City Council’s Latino majority had tried to push Kennedy out because of her age and “ethnicity.”
In Chula Vista, 60% of residents identify as Latino, including four of the city’s five council members: Carolina Chavez, Jose Preciado, Cesar Fernandez and Michael Inzunza. Kennedy, who is white, accused several council members of “secretly vetting a younger, Latino law-enforcement official in a nearby jurisdiction,” according to the suit.
The suit names all four council members as defendants, along with City Manager Tiffany Allen. It does not name the City Council’s fifth member, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, as a defendant. (A city spokesperson did not provide McCann and Allen’s racial identities.)
Most council members declined to comment on the allegations, citing the pending lawsuit. But Fernandez, the city's deputy mayor, told KPBS he had no idea where the allegations were coming from. He said he was disappointed by the accusations — especially coming from someone who he felt he had a good relationship with.
“It was hurtful and very upsetting for me to hear,” Fernandez said in an interview last month. “It felt like you're pointing the finger at me because I'm Latino. And I've done absolutely nothing that's been alleged.”
In a statement, a Chula Vista spokesperson said Kennedy’s claim that city officials conspired to replace her was entirely false and relied on “a racist assumption that Latino leaders cannot act with professionalism and integrity.”
Legal experts said Kennedy’s complaint left them with more questions than answers.
KPBS spoke with three law professors who study civil rights and discrimination law. All three said the initial court filing included little evidence for Kennedy’s discrimination claims. And they pointed out that the complaint comes amid the Trump administration’s aggressive push to focus on so-called “reverse discrimination” claims against white men.
Khiara Bridges, a professor of public law at UC Berkeley, said the suit essentially asks the public to conclude that the City Council would want to have a Latino person in Kennedy’s role — purely because they are a majority-Latino body.
“I think that's a dangerous kind of conclusion that we're being invited to make,” Bridges said. “I would hope that more evidence would be offered over the course of the litigation.”
Kennedy’s attorney, Cory Briggs, declined KPBS’ request to speak with the police chief. In an email, Briggs said Kennedy looked forward to presenting her evidence in court.
A holiday party and an investigation
Kennedy has led Chula Vista’s Police Department for nearly a decade.
She graduated from the Southwestern College Police Academy in 1992 and quickly rose through the ranks of the Chula Vista Police Department, according to her city bio page. In 2016, she became the first woman to lead the department.
According to her lawyer, Kennedy’s allegations against the city stem from an interaction she initiated with a younger officer at a police union holiday party in December.
Kennedy’s lawsuit itself doesn’t describe the party, stating only that Kennedy had attended “a private event outside the City of Chula Vista.” But Briggs, her attorney, described the party to KPBS in March.
At the party, several off-duty police officers were taking part in a contest and began dancing, Briggs said. One officer took off his shirt and started swinging it around his head.
At that point, Kennedy stood up, Briggs said. She placed a dollar bill in each of the officer’s front pockets, before returning to her seat.
In her complaint, Kennedy calls the interaction “perfectly lawful off-duty conduct.” In it, she also says Allen, the city manager and “other Defendants” were at the party and “expressed support for” her behavior.
Fernandez, the council member, said he also saw the interaction.
In an interview with KPBS last month, Fernandez said he was sitting at Kennedy’s table with his wife. Allen was also there, he confirmed, along with her second-in-command and Kennedy’s husband.
As Kennedy returned to the table, Fernandez said, the chief appeared to try and explain the interaction. He said the chief told them it wasn’t a “big deal” and that she had known the officer and his parents since he was a kid.
“I was just like, ‘Well that's, you know, that's great,’” Fernandez said. “Like, why are you explaining yourself?”
Soon after the interaction, Fernandez said he noticed that the city’s upper management had immediately left the party. The council member said he took that as his cue to leave as well.
Kennedy stayed behind, he said.
Kennedy alleges ‘hostile’ and ‘oppressive’ workplace
According to Kennedy’s complaint, city officials began a campaign of retaliation five weeks later.
Allen, the complaint says, accused the chief of putting the city “in a negative light” and prompting multiple complaints. (Kennedy’s suit disputes that anyone ever filed complaints over her conduct.)
The city manager ordered Kennedy to make a written plan to correct the alleged damage and threatened to audit the police department, the complaint says. Allen also allegedly shared private personnel information about Kennedy and made false statements about her performance at work to at least one member of the public.
In February, Kennedy sent a letter demanding that city officials preserve evidence. In response, her complaint says, the city launched investigations into her claims and allegations that Kennedy had violated the city’s workplace harassment policies.
Kennedy was on medical leave at the time, her lawsuit says. Still, city officials forced her to sit for interviews with investigators, saying she could be fired if she didn’t participate. (In a statement, Chula Vista spokesperson John Cihomsky said Kennedy had specifically been out on “approved personal leave.”)
They also froze Kennedy’s access to the city’s digital workplace programs, the complaint said, meaning she couldn’t access pay stubs or other personal information.
City officials, Kennedy says in her suit, were trying to make it “too hostile, oppressive, and toxic” for her to stay. On May 11, she filed a discrimination complaint with the state Civil Rights Department. The next day, she filed her lawsuit against the city.
According to Kennedy’s complaint, the city’s investigations against her were meant to obscure their true goal: to force her to retire.
“Despite her groundbreaking law-enforcement career, including serving as (the) city's first female Chief of Police, city leadership secretly decided to force her out of her job in order to replace her with someone younger and of different ethnicity,” the suit reads.
It's unclear from the complaint why Kennedy believes that — and why she blames particular council members. The Chula Vista City Council doesn’t have formal authority to fire the head of the Police Department. That task falls to the city manager, who has the sole power to appoint and remove the city’s police and fire chiefs.
Cihomsky, the Chula Vista spokesperson, said the city was deeply concerned by the allegations and planned to vigorously defend itself in court.
“The suggestion that there is a conspiracy to replace the Chief is entirely false, and the implication that this is due to her ethnicity is inherently offensive,” Cihomsky wrote in an emailed statement.
Allen declined to speak with KPBS through a city spokesperson. But in an emailed statement, she said none of the city council members had tried to sway her.
“The suggestion that any member of the City Council attempted to improperly influence me regarding Kennedy’s employment, or in any other aspect of this matter, is completely false,” Allen wrote.
Fernandez denied ever considering leadership changes at the department.
“The City of Chula Vista, by-and-large, really trusts the police department,” the councilmember said. “So it never ever crossed my mind to change anything.”
“I sit comfortable every day knowing that there is absolutely no basis for this,” he added.
Chavez, another councilmember named as a defendant, declined to respond to Kennedy’s allegations, citing the pending lawsuit. But she said she had an excellent relationship with the department’s officers.
“What I can say is that I respect and value our Chula Vista Police Department,” Chavez told KPBS last month. “They put their life on the line to protect us, and there's a reason we honor and respect them.”
Inzunza and Preciado, the other two council members named in the suit, both declined to comment on the record citing the pending litigation. McCann, the mayor, also declined an interview request.
Chula Vista City Attorney Marco Verdugo did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Very, very little detail’
Despite the remarkable accusation, experts said Kennedy’s complaint offers little evidence to support her claim that the City Council conspired to oust her because she is white.
Bridges, the UC Berkeley professor, said she thought the lawsuit was extremely vague.
“There’s very, very, very little detail contained in this complaint,” she said. “I mean, there are no statements there, there are no documents there — there are no conversations that she can point to.”
David Oppenheimer, also a law professor at UC Berkeley, said that’s not necessarily unusual at this stage. He said some attorneys do take the approach of only providing the minimum amount of information that the law requires.
Oppenheimer also emphasized Kennedy’s claim that city officials discriminated against her because of her age — and, potentially, other aspects of her identity as well.
“It suggests a number of possibilities,” he said. “The first thing that occurred to me was to look further at whether there's evidence that they are treating her as they are because of that combination of age and sex.”
Chula Vista’s City Hall has seen clashes over workplace culture before, including an accusation of discrimination by a white official against a Latina colleague.
In 2022, Voice of San Diego reported that then-Councilmember McCann had filed a workplace complaint against then-Mayor Mary Casillas Salas after she referred to him as a “gringo.” The news outlet described McCann as white and Salas as Latina. McCann called the phrase a racial slur and accused Salas of discrimination and harassment. (An outside investigator eventually found the term was inappropriate for the workplace but didn’t constitute discrimination or harassment.)
However, Kennedy’s lawsuit also comes as the federal government has focused intensely on prosecuting discrimination cases against white Americans.
Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University, said the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) — the federal agency that investigates workplace discrimination complaints — has made an aggressive push to hone in on these so-called “reverse discrimination” cases.
In May, the agency sued The New York Times, accusing the newspaper of not granting a top editorial job to a white man because of his race and gender.
“You're in an environment where the federal government is essentially seeking to encourage more of these lawsuits,” Hansford said. “There may be folks who are emboldened to bring suits that they may not have brought three years ago.”
Kennedy has filed a claim with the EEOC, her attorney told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
U.S. civil rights laws have always protected all Americans — including white people — from racial discrimination, all three professors said. But the overwhelming evidence is that discrimination against white people is very rare. Instead, white workers continue to hold large advantages over people of color in the workplace, particularly over Black and Latino Americans.
“It’s illegal, there's no question about that,” Oppenheimer said of discrimination against white Americans. “But if you're trying to identify a social problem that we need to address, it's not nearly as serious a problem as racial discrimination against minorities.”
Bridges also pointed out that the U.S. has a long history of taking laws meant to eliminate race-based discrimination and turning them against racial justice efforts.
“There's nothing new about this claim,” she said of the lawsuit. “What is new is the attention, the devotion of resources, that have been put towards vindicating these claims of antiwhite discrimination.”
Will Chula Vista get answers?
The biggest question now, Bridges and Oppenheimer said, is what evidence Kennedy and her attorney will put forward.
Oppenheimer said he would want to know if city council members named in the suit have said anything that indicated bias, what their conduct looked like towards Kennedy, and whether there were any patterns of termination of white employees or older employees.
“Those would be the things that I'd start with in trying to better understand whether she is right,” he said.
Bridges thinks Kennedy’s most compelling claim is actually about the fact that she was on medical leave and was allegedly forced to take part in the investigation.
“Perhaps part of the reason they wanted her to retire earlier than she wanted to was that they wanted a person who did not have (that) medical condition,” Bridges said. “Again, she just needs some evidence to back it up.”
At this point though, it’s unclear when new information might emerge.
Fernandez, the councilmember, said he has spoken to city investigators about the case and is open to sharing that information publicly. But the city has yet to file a response to Kennedy’s complaint in court.
Bridges thinks Briggs, Kennedy’s lawyer, will have to file an amended complaint with more detail. Otherwise, she thinks a judge would be likely to throw the lawsuit out.
“I think it would only survive if it's amended to add some teeth, some evidence,” she said.
Oppenheimer, though, cautioned that most civil cases settle, meaning the parties find a compromise long before ever going in front of a jury.
A settlement though, he said, could mean that the public might never get to see the full facts of what occurred.
“It would be better for the public if there were an explanation, even when there's a compromise,” Oppenheimer said. “But the nature of compromise is that that won't happen.”
The first hearing in Kennedy’s case is scheduled for October.
