Tracey Kaplan/Mercury News
In a sign that national concerns about the use of force by police have spread to San Jose, a federal jury 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.
A photo taken on August 28, 2015 shows a police officer with a handgun in his holster in Amiens. A police officer in San Jose shot and paralyzed a man and the jury awarded him $11.3 in damages. (Photo: PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images)
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 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.
The ethnically diverse eight-member jury, including six Asians but no Vietnamese, decided on $11.3 million in economic and non-economic 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.
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.
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.
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