- by Brenda Lee
On March 17, 2013 two Korean LAPD officers arrested Kim Nguyen for public intoxication. On the way to jail, Kim allegedly jumped or fell out of the car and suffered horrendous physical injuries with severe bruises on her face, shattered jaws, and broken teeth. Fortunately, Kim survived and filed a lawsuit against the officers for sexual assault, but the LAPD concluded that Kim had attempted to open the door while handcuffed, and the officers were only charged for negligence for not using the special locks when transporting a suspect. Furthermore, it was difficult to determine whether the damages such as bruises on the thighs and broken bra straps were from the fall or from attempted sexual assault, especially since Kim had no memory of the incident. Currently, the two officers part of this incident are not taken off the field and continue to patrol Koreatown. This tragic story of Kim is one of countless incidents where LAPD officers themselves commit crimes, killing or injuring law-abiding citizens, since officers have too much freedom when patrolling the streets. Whether the police departments implement professional policing or predictive policing, police officers tend to not follow through with the given tactics and strategies, but will abuse their authority.
Koreatown is a densely populated neighborhood surrounded by Downtown Los Angeles to the east, Beverly Hills and West LA, and Hollywood to the north. Koreatown is one of LA’s tourist attractions, with thousands of visitors coming to experience shopping, food and culture, and the dynamic nightlife. However, Koreatown experiences about 9.3 violent crimes and 32.3 property crimes per week. To combat such incidents, LAPD has been engaging in harsh policing strategies, arresting anyone that appears suspicious but ‘below’ reasonable doubt, and shooting suspects even when officers do not experience threat. In fact, LAPD, specifically the Koreatown division, is known for having the most corrupt and racist officers who practice police brutality.
Although incidents such as Kim’s accident is rare, there are many episodes where LAPD officers have killed suspects through open fire and are cleared of their wrongdoings. There were also at least three lawsuits of sexual allegations against LAPD officers in 2013. LAPD further engages in predictive policing, using software to find ‘hotspots’ to anticipate where crimes are likely to happen. From my perspective, the use of advanced technology is a valuable tool to fight crime, but police officers should keep in mind citizens’ legal rights and not stop and frisk without reasonable suspicion and not arrest without probable cause. However, having information that a crime is likely to happen at some specific time and location may bias officers to see a non-suspicious activity as suspicious, which has been the case when officers opened fire and killed innocent civilians.
The concern is that although predictive policing strategies and tactics are in place, officers do not follow the law-on-the-books. In reality, officers engage in whatever measures to prevent crime and have a lot of freedom when patrolling the streets, which them to arrest Kim even when she caused no harm. In addition, LAPD officers engage in racial discrimination by targeting Latinos for questioning when found walking around the streets at night. In neighborhoods like Koreatown where most crimes arise from the tension between Asians and Latinos and the division between the working force and business owners, the police should focus their efforts in proactive crime control, and correctly implement the tactics of predictive policing. As in Kim’s case, claim of ‘public intoxication’ is unreasonable, and we wonder whether LAPD officers are correctly fulfilling their duties.
Sources:
http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/koreatown/crime/
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/02/local/la-me-ln-handcuffed-woman-falls-lapd-patrol-car-20130902
http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201309061630/b
This article is a great example of how professional policing power are abused. The community gives power to police especially in the areas that they believe are dangerous. This might, instead of creating a "safe" feeling for people in the community, it actually makes people feel frightened, they don't know when the police will invade their privacies or abuse their power and get away with it. In this case, we could see that the police could get away pretty easily. Even though Kim wasn't really charged for anything but she's already had the feeling of mistrust and also people in the community would feel the same way. Professional Policing absolutely does give benefits to the society such as preventing crime, focusing on eliminating suspicious activities, to name a few. But when one's giving too much power, one could abuse it very easily. It should be a law created to really protects the citizen without bias against the police, or a very strong punishment to the police who abuse the power so they would think twice before they do it.
ReplyDeleteWarinya Rojanasuwan
This is certainly a tragic story. It is indeed natural to empathize with the victim, Kim Nguyen, and to blame the police entirely. In fact, considering the injuries that Ms Nguyen suffered, it makes complete sense to feel outrage toward the police. At the very least, the police were grossly negligent. However, there are a few inconsistencies in the story that cause me to wonder if we should immediately jump to conclusions. I am one to believe that guilt should be proven, and I am reluctant to brand these officers as corrupt before the investigation is complete. For one thing, while Ms Nguyen claims publicly that one of the officers attempted to sexually assault her, there is no mention of this in her civil suit. Her civil suit simply accuses the police of negligence. It would seem to me that, if Ms Nguyen was indeed the victim of attempted rape, this matter would be first and foremost in the suit, and the charge of negligence would be but a postscript. Yet, the totality of Ms Nguyen’s suit is thus: “Defendants J. Oh and D. Shin breached their duty of care to Plaintiff when failed to properly secure her within the patrol car or to secure the patrol car’s doors as to ensure that Plaintiff would not fall out of the vehicle.”* There is absolutely no mention of attempted sexual assault or any other abuse or misconduct in the suit. Why isn’t there?
ReplyDelete* http://politicalblindspot.com/demand-suspension-of-the-lapd-cops-who-kidnapped-and-sexually-assaulted-kim-nguyen/
JESSE RYCKMAN
This is a very interesting article. The LAPD officers obviously shouldn't have arrested Kim because she wasn't doing any harm to the public. There was a case in the 1900's where a girl was driving home from her boyfriends house and she was murdered. There were three suspects; the boyfriend, the gas station worker, or the police officer who pulled her over to give her a ticket. It turned out that the police officer had made her take an exit near the woods and murdered her. People give police a lot of power just because they feel protected but sometimes the police takes advantage of this. The police also gets away with a lot easily because they are a strong figure in our society, their also known as our heroes. I agree with the first comment though that if the police does abuse their power then there should be a law where the police is also punished.
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is a difficult situation to dabble into. On one hand, we as citizens want to trust law enforcement to maintain a sense of safety and order throughout the community. On the other hand, we must remain slightly skeptical of the sort of behavior that you mentioned. It is not unheard of for law enforcement to be extremely corrupt and to abuse their authority. However, there are also several instances where community members see law enforcement as "the bad guys" and they can occasionally be wrongly accused of certain claims. I'm not at all saying that the LAPD's actions were justified. They have clearly been overstepping some boundaries, but I also feel that we cannot totally categorize Koreatown as LAPD and their "victims." We must avoid looking at these situations through a bias lens. I personally believe that these situations fall somewhere in the middle, where both parties have right and wrong actions.
ReplyDelete-Kim Newton
I'd previously read about Kim Nguyen's story before, and reading it a second time is just as horrifying as it was the first time. Everyone knows that law enforcement in urban areas such as Los Angeles receives enormous amounts of scrutiny and pressure from the local communities and the media. However, the facts of Ms. Nguyen's case do not add up to the police officers' report. Especially suspicious is the officers' claim that the officer driving came to a stop at the intersection and that Nguyen fell out of the car as it accelerated to about 10 mph when a traffic video shows the patrol car traveling at a much faster speed, passing through the intersection without stopping or slowing. It is ironic that this discrepancy was caught by the same technology that the members of this police department employ. Surely the officers must have known about the general presence of surveillance cameras in the area, if not the specific locations. The resulting conclusions are either ignorance or apathy on the police officers' parts.
ReplyDeleteAnnie Choi
Thomas Smith
ReplyDeleteWhile I feel strongly about cases of police brutality and corruption, I’m not entirely sure it would be fair to jump to conclusions in this particular case and claim that the police officers were guilty of sexually assaulting Nguyen. If she was intoxicated at the time of the arrest, it’s very possible that her judgment was impaired and her read on her situation wasn’t entirely accurate. However, just because this one case is a little unclear doesn’t mean that corruption in law enforcement isn’t a major and growing problem. Policing professionalism has gotten out of hand, and it’s evident in the prevalence of policing tactics such as stop-and-frisk and in the number of innocent civilians and suspects getting shot and killed, all while the law enforcement officers receive little to no punishment for their misdeeds.
I agree that it is not correct to generalize and place ALL members of the LAPD under this category of being corrupt and racist. As our guest speaker explained during his presentation, there are occasionally officers that commit mistakes of the malignant heart. It is not reasonable to think that the department will hire officers who are purely good because this is impossible to determine. However, it seems that a more detailed investigation is needed in order to clarify what exactly happened in this case due to the inconsistencies that have already been pointed out.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Maria's comment that there had to be a more detailed investigation, since Kim Nguyen did claim sexually assault. It is interesting that this claim was not brought up in court, and normally I would like to jump to conclusions and scream "cover-up". But in reality one cannot simply jump to conclusions based from the evidence that we currently have, from what I read it is clear that the police officers were incompetent due to not securing Nguyen in the backseat. Some have commented on how these police officers (who abuse their power) have to be "punished", which I kind of agree with and this is already done in IA anyway. From the facts provided, I hope these police officers get fired, because of their negligence. And if IA goes further with their investigation, I hope the truth comes out eventually.
ReplyDeleteKevin Ramirez
As someone who grew up trusting the police, and not fully realizing how corrupt they can be, it seriously shocked me, when I came to Berkeley and experienced police violence and learned to mistrust them. But even though I feel nervous and uncomfortable around police now, there's some confusion, because as a lot of people point out, who are you going to call when something goes wrong? The police are supposed to be there to protect us. Because of that, we give them a lot of power, and incidents like this occur, and no one is punished. We don't really have a effective balance between giving police the power and authority they need to do their job while constraining them to reasonable levels and holding them accountable when they do break the law. I do believe that a lot of officers are good people, who truly want to protect and serve. But I am also not blind to, and have personal experience with, brutality and corruption. When it comes to a case like this, a full investigation needs to occur, because officers of the law should be held to the strictest scrutiny. In the system we have now, it's too easy to just sweep incidents like this under the rug; believe the possible aggressors, rather than the victim, merely because they have the title "Police Officer" behind them.
ReplyDelete~BriAnne Lynn
I agree that the LAPD has a very bad reputation and faces much scrutiny from the public, and it seems deserved. It seems that Koreatown can be considered one of the more dangerous neighborhoods of LA, which may cause the police to overreact when there are reports of crime occurring in the area. The extent to which the police act, however, is completely unacceptable. Their use of excessive force could be seen as a deterrent, but it is clearly not working. It is understandable that police officers would want to establish a certain level of fear amongst the public to deter crime, but it is unfair that they abuse their power and are rarely punished for it. We are taught as children to trust the police, but as we grow older and learn that police abuse their powers, it is difficult to continue doing so.
ReplyDeleteErica Au
LAPD has a long history of police brutality and racial discrimination. I think it is hard to tell whether Kim Nguyen was really sexually assaulted because there is little evidence to prove it. Police officers have the power to enforce the law within their own jurisdiction. But when do we draw the line to how much power police officers have? Police brutality and racial discrimination are not acceptable within any law enforcement agency and the use of force and corruption can make a lot of people view law enforcement in a negative way. However, I don't think of this blog post as a way to not trust law enforcement. As mentioned in one of the comments from above, police officers sometimes make mistakes and I agree to this. As human beings, we all make mistakes.
ReplyDeleteGood job Brenda!
- Jordan Ho
While I agree that there are rampant issues involving police corruption in cities across the nation today, I do not think that this case involving Kim Nguyen fits that mold. Public intoxication is a crime in some areas, whether you are a danger to anyone else or not. I imagine that the rationale behind this is something like that many families walk along the streets in big cities and do not want their children to see or be encouraged to engage in such behavior. Thus, the police were likely well within their authority to arrest Nguyen. If we ignore the alleged sexual assault for now, the police in no way abused their authority when arresting her. Yes, they were negligent in not using the special lock but that does not in any way indicate an abuse of power. If what truly happened was Kim trying to escape the car then she was committing another crime by resisting arrest. If the sexual assault claim is true, then yes, the police did completely abuse their power. We cannot, however, deem them guilty of this before they are found guilty of it in a court of law. This sort of jump-the-gun skepticism is a big part of public law enforcement's legitimacy crisis. How corrupt are the police actually, and how much of it is just us assuming that they are because we jump to conclusions?
ReplyDeleteColleen Johnson, Discussion 102.