- Police Brutality Watch

Originally published in the San Jose Mercury News on March 15, 2005 [here]

By Jessie Seyfer
Mercury News

Albert Hopkins' violent, late-night encounter with two Palo Alto police officers in the summer of 2003 took only a few moments. But the beating he took sent shock waves through the community that continue to reverberate.

Brutality. Racism. Police incompetence. The incident has raised concern about all those issues, adding fuel to an already heated debate over how police in Palo Alto treat minorities.

Starting this week, Santa Clara County jurors will begin to decide for themselves whether what happened that night was a case of two officers dealing responsibly with someone who was out of control, or two officers beating and pepper-spraying a 59-year-old black man for no good reason.

Officers Michael Kan, 27, and Craig Lee, 42, have been charged with felony assault under color of authority. If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison. Jury selection in the case starts today in San Jose.

``People in Palo Alto are concerned about this,'' said LaDoris Cordell, a city councilwoman and retired Santa Clara County Superior Court judge who is African-American. She said people of color are ``dismayed'' about the Hopkins case, while also noting that despite Palo Alto's liberal reputation, ``You can go to any city and find allegations like this.''

All sides agree on the basic facts. On that night, July 13, Kan and Lee -- who had been on the force less than a year -- were patrolling the city. About 10:30 p.m., Lee noticed Hopkins sitting in a parked car in a residential neighborhood on Oxford Avenue near El Camino Real. He approached Hopkins and asked him for identification. Hopkins refused to show any.

Kan arrived, and the officers demanded that Hopkins get out of his vehicle. Hopkins, who has said he believed he was the target of racism, again refused. Lee tried to pull Hopkins out, and the officers pepper-sprayed and beat him with their service batons. Hopkins was taken to a hospital, released and not charged with any crime. The officers were placed on leave and later were criminally charged.

Leaders in the black community asked the district attorney's office to make sure the officers were prosecuted to the fullest.

``When people abuse the privileges the community has granted you, there should be no leniency, especially when you carry a gun,'' Rick Callender, president of the San Jose Silicon Valley NAACP, said at the time.

This week, Santa Clara County prosecutor Peter Waite is expected to argue that the officers had no legal reason to demand identification from Hopkins, to order him to exit his vehicle or to use force. Waite will try to portray Kan as an officer eager to show his superiors that he could aggressively take control of a situation, having been criticized for failing to do so on prior occasions.

Waite is expected to call Hopkins, now 61, to the stand. During the preliminary hearing last summer, Hopkins testified -- sometimes combatively -- that the officers behaved like ``sharks going at blood.'' Waite will tell jurors that the beating has caused lasting damage to Hopkins' knee. It's also likely that the two Palo Alto detectives who conducted the criminal investigation into the incident will testify.

Attorneys Harry Stern and Craig Brown, representing Kan and Lee respectively, will tell the jury that the officers had the legal authority to demand identification from Hopkins because they were investigating a suspicious-person complaint and because there had been recent burglaries in the area. Kan and Lee used force, the attorneys say, only because they believed Hopkins was reaching for a weapon and because Hopkins took a fighting posture with them.

Further, Stern and Brown will try to portray Hopkins as a belligerent man who has accused police of racism in the past. The officers, who are Asian-American, will take the stand, as will some of their supervisors, who will talk about training standards.

The jury will not hear about several key developments in the case because Judge Andrea Bryan, who will preside over the trial, deemed them irrelevant. Those points include the fact that Hopkins accepted a $250,000 settlement from the city of Palo Alto on the condition that he not sue; that an internal police department investigation found the officers had done nothing wrong; and that Hopkins was accused of sexual harassment at a previous job.

The trial comes amid a great deal of public discussion in Palo Alto over how police treat minorities. In 2003, police department data indicated that Latinos and blacks were searched far more often than whites, but further police analysis showed that a majority of those searches followed an arrest.

The department continues to gather data on its contacts with the public. Earlier this month, the Palo Alto City Council endorsed the creation of a police review body that would hear citizen complaints. The proposal has been criticized for not giving members the authority to investigate misconduct allegations.