Darryl McAllister
Chief of Police (Retired), Union City Police Department
& Course Facilitator and Instructor
Darryl McAllister’s policing career spans 37 years. He devoted the first 32 years of service to the Hayward, California community, rising through the ranks and receiving numerous prestigious honors along the way. In 2013 he migrated to the city next door to serve as the chief of police in Union City. Throughout his entire career, his passion has been to edify police-community engagement to build meaningful relationships and to foster trust and transparency between police and the communities they serve.
McAllister is also an educator. He served two years as faculty and four years as lead faculty area chair at the University of Phoenix, and since 2016 he has continued to teach criminal justice and community-relations courses at Chabot College and Las Positas College, both in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to teaching college courses, he also taught three years in POST’s Executive Development Course, and he currently serves as coordinator of the California Police Chiefs Association’s Executive Certification Program.
For over two decades he has served as a board member of several community organizations, including as president of the board of directors of the St. Rose Hospital Foundation, and as a member of the advisory board of the University of San Francisco's International Institute of Criminal Justice Leadership.
He is a two-time nominee and one-time recipient of Hayward’s Police Officer of the Year Award, a 2007 Recipient of the “Hayward Pearl Award” honoring volunteer service to the community, and he was also awarded in 2013 as University of Phoenix’s Faculty Member of the Year for the San Francisco Bay Area Campus region. In 2015, while serving as police chief, he was selected by the San Francisco East Bay Area/Southern Alameda County branch of the NAACP for its most prestigious award: “Person of the Year”.
In early 2019, immediately following his retirement from a storied law enforcement career, he began a new calling to provide healthcare safety and security management. Initially overseeing security and safety operations for one of Sutter Heath’s major medical centers, he served the second half of his two-year tenure working in Sutter’s corporate offices as the enterprise’s security plans and programs manager, developing policies and rolling out new security programs and innovations. On April 5, 2021, a new chapter of his private sector leadership emerged when he was selected as the director of corporate safety and Security for Pixar-Disney Animation Studios. He also serves a senior associate with Meliora Public Safety Consulting—a company that provides a suite of services to clients across the United States for continuous improvement and implementation of contemporary practices in the field of public safety.
He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Occupational Studies from California State University, Long Beach, and a Master’s Degree in Administrative Development from Alliant International University. He has completed the first two years of his pursuit of a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Saint Mary’s College of California. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia and an alumnus of the California Command College—a graduate level futures study program of the California State Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.