SAN JOSE — In a sign that national concerns about the use of force by police have spread to San Jose, a federal jury here has awarded the largest law enforcement payout in the city’s history — $11.3 million — to a Vietnamese man shot in the back by a San Jose cop last year and paralyzed from the waist down.
The landmark award came Monday afternoon after Hung Lam’s attorneys argued that he was holding a knife but only threatening to hurt himself in early 2014 when officer Dondi West, who wasn’t wearing her glasses, overreacted and fired.
While the city may appeal the landmark award, it also plans to review police practices — as it typically does after such cases — and discuss ways to prevent similar shootings in the future and ease concerns within San Jose’s large Vietnamese community about police use of force.
Lam’s case was bolstered by a key witness who lived next door — retired San Mateo County sheriff’s deputy Helen Anderson — who said West should have taken the time to back off and try to calm the situation, as Anderson herself was trying to do. In the past, the jury may have given the officer the complete benefit of the doubt, Lam’s lawyers said, but growing public concern about excessive force has led to a sea change in attitude.
“Certainly, the national spotlight has raised the knowledge level of everyone about police conduct, including jurors, which is helpful,” attorney John Burris said Tuesday. “Before, people sat with their arms folded.”
City attorneys argued during the three-week trial in U.S. District Court in San Jose that the 25-year veteran patrol officer shot Lam, now 38, out of genuine fear for her life. But the jury found the officer was mostly to blame, and under the law the city is wholly responsible for the damages.
The ethnically diverse eight-member jury, including six Asians but no Vietnamese, decided on $11.3 million in economic and noneconomic damages after the city urged the panel to award only $4 million, while a plaintiff’s expert witness said Lam deserved at least $20 million.
San Jose City Attorney Rick Doyle is now weighing whether to file post-trial motions to reduce the damages or appeal the judgment, which he agreed was influenced by the political “climate nationwide.”
“It’s fairly obvious — there’s a lot of press about police and excessive force,” Doyle said.
The outcome of the three-week trial could also affect the way police handle such calls, which has been of particular concern to many of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese-Americans in San Jose. Doyle said he plans to meet with police officials to discuss “possible changes or responses, lessons learned.”
Many Vietnamese residents are afraid to report crime here, partly because police in Vietnam are seen as agents of the communist government, not protectors, said Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP. But several high-profile incidents in San Jose also have reinforced that distrust, including the 2003 fatal police shooting of Bich Cau Thi Tran, a mentally ill mother who was clutching an Asian vegetable peeler. That incident sparked concerns that officers weren’t trained adequately to deal with nuanced cultural and mental-health issues.
“There is great fear in the Vietnamese community of police coming and using force,” Moore said. “As a result, there is grave underreporting of domestic violence and gang brutality.”
In Lam’s case, he had just returned home on Jan. 3, 2014, to the house where he lived with his lover on Cape Horn Drive after being taken into custody by police a few days earlier on a psychiatric hold, Burris said. When he began once again began exhibiting “bizarre paranoia” and possibly suicidal behavior in the front yard, the husband of the retired sheriff’s deputy called police, the lawyer said.
It didn’t help that West, who is nearsighted, wasn’t wearing her eyeglasses, Burris said.
“Had she just waited and listened, she would have seen what was going on — that’s the tragedy,” he said. “The officer’s outrageous display of excessive force sentenced Hung Lam to a lifetime in a wheelchair, as a paraplegic.”
Lam, a professional cook who barely speaks English, was initially charged with assault on a police officer but pleaded to a misdemeanor, obstructing an officer, for failing to drop the knife.
Tuesday evening, San Jose police Chief Larry Esquivel released a statement saying, “Officer Dondi West has been an officer with the San Jose Police Department for over 23 years and has had a stellar career with this department. She is an outstanding officer and will continue to work her regular assignment with this department as our City Attorney’s Office researches the appeal process.”
Since July 2004, San Jose has paid more than $19 million in damages for claims of excessive force by police, not including this week’s award to Lam, according to the City Attorney’s Office. Many of the payouts were much smaller, but in 2013, San Jose paid almost $5 million to settle a lawsuit by a man injured by police gunfire when they found him passed out drunk at a hotel after a costume party and mistook his gold-colored toy gun for the real thing.
Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com/tkaplanreport.
