The Vallejo police department has been under intensifying scrutiny since the fatal shooting of Willie McCoy, the 20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car when police unleashed a barrage of 55 shots.

But behind the 6 March killing lies a pattern of racial discrimination and brutality routinely exhibited by police, allege a group of Vallejo residents who are suing the city. These incidents don’t make international headlines, but they amount to constitutional violations by the California city’s police force, say civil rights attorneys.

On Thursday, attorneys for the residents filed multiple new lawsuits that they hope will lead to a systematic reform program.

“Frankly we are disgusted with the city of Vallejo police department,” said civil rights attorney John Burris, who is representing three people who claim they were recently beaten and wrongfully arrested. “In our view, it is an out of control police department.”

Delon Thurston, a massage therapist, is one of those suing. She says she was driving home from work last October when a Vallejo police officer pulled her over for allegedly making “an abrupt left turn” and then along with another officer “dragged” her out of her car and threatened her with a Taser. The officers then forcibly searched her body, touching her breasts and genitals, she alleges

“I honestly felt like it was a Sandra Bland moment,” Thurston said, referring to the 28-year-old black woman who died of apparent suicide in a Texas jail cell after being arrested during a traffic stop in 2015. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me and I had to breathe all the way through it and be antagonized all the way to the station and I never got read my rights as they were pushing my face to the cement.”

Deyana Jenkins, another plaintiff, alleges that on 15 April a group of officers pulled her over at gunpoint for no apparent reason, then forced her from her vehicle and shocked her with a Taser before arresting her.

Jenkins is the niece of Willie McCoy. She said she feared that during her encounter with police, she would also be killed. “I was thinking, don’t do any sudden movements because I don’t want his to be the last moment of my life,” she said.

Adrian Burrell, meanwhile, alleges that he was standing on his porch on 22 January and filming a Vallejo police officer who had stopped his cousin Michael Walton and was holding Walton at gunpoint in the driveway. The officer, Ryan McLaughlin, then demanded Burrell stop filming and go inside. According to video taken by Burrell, when he declined to stop filming, McLaughlin handcuffed him and threw him against a wooden post where he hit his head.

Adrian Burrell at a press conference announcing the lawsuits. Photograph: Darwin BondGraham/The Guardian

“These are not new issues, these are decades old issues,” said Melissa Nold, an attorney who is also representing Jenkins, Thurston, Burrell and several other Vallejo residents.

Nold, who grew up in Vallejo and still resides there, said it has been “an unwritten rule that the Vallejo police department is enforcing a policy that it’s illegal to be black in Vallejo”.

She said the department’s culture of condoning brutality and racial profiling hasn’t changed because of a flawed internal affairs system that rarely disciplines officers.

“There’s been a long pattern of failing to discipline police officers when they engage in this 1950s-style policing where African American people, men and women, on their way home from work, are being stopped and questioned by officers on fishing expeditions.”

Nold said Jenkins, Thurston and Burrell have no criminal records and that officers were abusing their authority and breaking the law when they arrested them.

Burrell said he’s moved out of Vallejo because he fears being harassed by the police. A US marine veteran, he is currently living in Palo Alto where he’s starting school at Stanford in a few days.

Vallejo’s city manager and mayor did not respond to questions about the new lawsuits, or the idea of having their police force placed under court oversight.

“The City of Vallejo has not received the lawsuits referenced today by a plaintiffs’ attorney,” Vallejo city attorney Claudia Quintana told the Guardian. “We cannot comment on pending litigation, but we will review any filings made and will then respond as required by court procedures. We are confident the fact-based litigation process will determine the truth in these cases.”

Earlier this year, Vallejo residents and civil rights attorneys, including Burris and Nold, asked California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, to conduct a civil rights investigation of the Vallejo police and consider using his powers to reform the department. However, it is unknown whether his office will act. “To protect its integrity, we are unable to comment on, even to confirm or deny, a potential or ongoing investigation,” a spokesperson for the attorney general told the Guardian.

Burris has succeeded before in having police agencies placed under federal court oversight, even without the help of the state attorney general or federal justice department. In 2000, he and another Oakland civil rights attorney, James Chanin, sued the Oakland police on behalf of 119 black men who alleged the department engaged in a pattern and practice of civil rights violations.

The city settled the case in 2003 by agreeing to have a court-appointed monitor watch over a list of institutional reforms. This reform effort is still ongoing and has cost Oakland millions, but the city’s police force went from having one of the highest rates of police shootings in the state, to one of the lowest.

Thurston said she hopes her lawsuit helps make the case for a systematic reform push so that things change in Vallejo.

“It’s gang-type of behavior that has to stop.”