A Question of Deadly Force

This part of the televised Valentine’s Day chase of Hong Il Kim is clear: With a car on either side of his red Toyota 4-Runner, two police cruisers behind, a concrete wall in front and officers surrounding him with their guns drawn, Kim had nowhere to go.

But when four officers shot the 27-year-old Korean national to death--while TV cameras rolled--the incident became muddled with doubts.

Did police have to shoot? Was it necessary for Kim to die?

Officials from Orange, Westminster and the California Highway Patrol, the agencies involved, have said their officers acted appropriately.

But some who viewed videotapes of the pursuit, including at least two police chiefs from Orange County and some of the country’s top criminal justice experts, don’t think so.

“This was an avoidable shooting,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminal justice professor who has helped write the deadly force policies for dozens of police departments, from Dallas to Aiken County, S.C. “Judging by the video, there was absolutely nowhere [Kim] could have gone. . . . I’ve seen a lot of bad shootings. This is one of them.”

One Orange County chief, who requested anonymity to protect his relationships with other chiefs, agreed: “By God, who are we to take a life if we can come up with other strategies and plans to take a person into custody instead? . . . It appears it could have been resolved without the death of the individual.”

The same troubling conclusion has rallied a rare coalition of Asian American and Latino advocates, as well as the South Korean government, to challenge authorities’ justification for the shooting and to demand a review of deadly force policies.

Investigations by the Orange County district attorney and the departments involved aren’t expected to be completed for months.

But an anguished debate over Kim’s death continues in police squad rooms and in private conversations among top cops, who shudder to think it might have happened in their city.

The deadly pursuit of Kim has highlighted startling differences among the policies of police departments on when officers can--and shouldn’t--shoot to kill.

Officials from the three agencies whose officers were involved maintain the shooting was appropriate, because Kim was gunning the engine of his truck--”a 3,000-pound lethal weapon”--at two plainclothes Orange detectives standing in front of it.

“I don’t know if [the officers] could’ve dove off to the side,” said attorney Bruce Praet, a former cop who regularly represents both the Orange and Westminster police departments. “If they hadn’t, you’d have two officers that are hood ornaments or plastered against that wall.”

But Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters said that if officers in his city had been involved in the same fatal confrontation, it would have been a questionable shooting.

“On its face, that’s the way it looks,” said Walters, whose department has a restrictive policy on use of deadly force.

Five police policy experts who reviewed the television footage of the pursuit and shooting at the request of The Times all said the officers committed a series of tactical errors that cost Kim his life.

The deadly force policies of many police departments say that officers should not shoot at a moving vehicle, and some specifically state that officers should never place themselves in the path of a vehicle to begin with.

“Given a similar situation in our city, where there’s no route for [the suspect to] escape, we would consider this a questionable shooting,” said Dallas Police Sgt. Jim Chandler, who investigated officer-involved shootings for 10 years. “When you move yourself out into the path of the vehicle, then there’s reason to question an officer’s actions.”

*

Had it not been for a citizen’s outraged prodding, the 30-mile pursuit of Kim might not have happened.

A Westminster patrol officer was en route to drop off a bicycle at the station when Kim cut off several nearby motorists to make a right turn.

“The turn was so blatantly reckless that one of the drivers made eye contact with the officer, as if to say, ‘What are you going to do about that?’ ” Westminster Police Capt. Andrew Hall said. “At first, [the officer] didn’t even want to make a traffic stop. He was in a hurry to get rid of the bicycle that was sitting in his trunk.”

What started as a reluctant chase quickly escalated, reaching speeds of 100 mph and attracting more than a dozen officers from various agencies--including Orange and the CHP--and a squadron of police and television station helicopters.

Kim led the caravan of police cruisers into the parking lot of an Orange mini-mall. While Kim tried to evade police, a plainclothes officer jogged alongside the truck, pounding the passenger-side window with the butt of his gun.

Police eventually cornered the 4-Runner, ramming it into a parking space with their patrol cars.

With police cars behind Kim, and parked vehicles on either side, four police officers, guns drawn, circled the truck on foot. Two Orange plainclothes officers stood in front, with a CHP officer to the side and a Westminster officer behind.

After Kim jammed his vehicle into low gear and began moving slowly forward, the officers in front opened fire, followed by officers behind and beside the 4-Runner. When the fusillade ended, the truck was riddled with at least 20 bullet holes and Kim had been hit eight times, according to a pathologist hired by the family. No officers or bystanders were injured in the cross-fire.

Police said after the shooting that they did not find a weapon in the vehicle.

Police are withholding further details pending the outcome of investigations and have refused to release the names of the officers involved.

Criminal charges are almost never filed against officers in such shootings. The district attorney’s office, which investigates all officer-involved shootings in Orange County, has not filed charges in any of the last 56 homicides attributed to police.

“Criminal law is: If a police officer believes his life is in danger at the time he pulls the trigger, it’s justified,” said James Fyfe, a criminal justice professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

But Fyfe and other criminal justice experts say officers and their departments can face severe civil penalties if juries agree that officers unnecessarily put themselves in situations that cause them to fear for their lives.

Unlike most police-involved shootings, this one unfolded on TV newscasts in the living room of Kim’s family and those of hundreds of thousands of TV viewers, some as far away as South Korea.

To Praet, the videotape represents strong evidence that the officers had no choice but to shoot.

“I’m very pleased that there’s a visual record of the incident,” Praet said. “[Kim] was about to run over the officers. . . . I think the videotape bears that out.”

To others, the same recorded scene is frightening proof that Kim didn’t have to die.

“Why did [the] officers place themselves in that position, between the wall and in front of that vehicle?” asked the Orange County police chief who spoke only on the condition he not be named. “Here you had a person who had already demonstrated that he will run you over, so why put yourself in a position that will force you to use deadly force? . . . It defies all logic to me.”

*

Among those who have studied the tape, no one believes the officers wanted to kill Kim.

What concerns them is what they call a disturbing series of errors in judgment.

Most troubling for these officials and experts was the involvement and actions of the plainclothes officers who appeared on the scene at the end of the pursuit.

Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph P. McNamara, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, said the “cowboy actions” of the plainclothes detectives “endangered everyone. . . . This became a life-threatening situation because of them.”

All five experts who reviewed footage of the pursuit said one of the most egregious violations of procedure occurred when a plainclothes officer rushed at the moving vehicle on foot soon after it entered the parking lot.

“The absolute idiot is the guy who runs up and bangs on the door” with the butt of his drawn pistol, said Alpert, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina. “To go out in the middle, with no cover, and expose yourself. If this guy [Kim] were crazy, and had the desire to shoot, [that officer] put himself in enormous jeopardy.”

From that point, Alpert and other experts said the adrenaline-pumped detectives appeared to abandon basic safety procedures.

Once Kim was boxed in, Alpert said, “all the officers had to do was take cover. . . . They never should have been in front of the car in the first place. There was plenty of opportunity to take cover.”

McNamara said he believes Kim was either homicidal or suicidal, and he doesn’t doubt that the officers feared for their lives. But, he stressed, no one had to die.

“That was the shame of it,” he said. The uniformed officers “did such a superb job. They really corralled [Kim]. It would have been routine after that point.”

Other law enforcement officials who viewed the videotape also questioned whether it was necessary to have more than two patrol cars chasing Kim.

“Every time another unit joins in, it increases the danger of collateral collisions, not to mention danger to the public,” said San Francisco Police Lt. William Davenport, commanding officer of the city’s internal affairs division.

At one point in the chase, Westminster had three police cars in the pursuit, later joined by the CHP, Orange County sheriff’s deputies and Orange police officers. Officials from those departments said they summoned the number of patrol units deemed necessary, including some to block roads to protect the public.

Criminologists said the problems continued after the pursuit ended and Kim was surrounded. When the four officers--positioned in a semicircle around the truck--opened fire, they also could have easily shot one another, they said.

Westminster’s Hall said the cross-fire aspect will be addressed in his department’s internal investigation.

“That’s something we’re taught not to do from the first day of training. But invariably it occurs,” Hall said.

*

For one member of the law enforcement community, there is no debate over whether Kim had to die.

For most of his life, Rodney Chai, Kim’s brother-in-law, has held an unflinching belief in the justice of his adoptive country, as pursued by the government, the courts and its enforcers.

That’s why he joined the U.S. Army when he was 19, six months after immigrating to the United States from South Korea. That’s why he headed into law enforcement himself, working for the last eight years as an inspector for the U.S. Customs Service.

And that is why he is now torn, pulled on one side by loyalty to his fellow lawmen and tugged on the other by his sense of right and wrong.

The 42-year-old Buena Park resident has viewed the video of the final minutes of his brother-in-law’s life countless times. Forward and backward, in slow motion and freeze frame. He’s come to the agonizing conclusion, he said, that his fellow officers “abused” their color of authority and needlessly killed Kim.

“It is so very difficult for me to accuse my fellow officers of this,” Chai said. “But they did this, they executed him when they didn’t have to. And they have to be held responsible.”

Kim’s family is planning to file a wrongful-death lawsuit against the departments involved, he said.

Chai is leading the family’s crusade for justice, meeting with dozens of Korean American community leaders and activists from other ethnic groups, asking that they support him in demanding a federal civil rights investigation.

But they’re not leaving the matter there. Chai and his wife, Hong Yun, have circulated petitions in their neighborhood, at their workplaces and in their church, demanding answers from the district attorney’s office and police departments involved. One question that obsesses the family is why police released what they consider to be misleading information about Kim’s arrest record the day after his death.

Kim had many run-ins with law enforcement. They resulted in three misdemeanor convictions, two for theft and one for carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle, authorities said. But in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Orange police said Kim had “an extensive criminal background” involving more than a dozen criminal violations. What the police did not say was that many of those charges were later dropped.

Orange Police Sgt. Barry Weinstein said some media misinterpreted what was made public, and he said he released Kim’s record because Kim was dead and “no longer [had] a right to privacy.”

Angela Oh, an attorney whom Kim’s family has retained, said Kim’s background had no bearing on the incident because police didn’t know who he was when they shot him.

“These are professional people; they know this was irrelevant to the case,” she said. “They knew they screwed up and they needed to cover themselves.”

The quest for answers has consumed Chai’s life.

This month, he met with three coalitions and recounted the events that led to Kim’s death. At each meeting, Chai ended his narrative with the same words: “My brother-in-law was not an angel. And the police are not devils. But they didn’t have to do it. They didn’t have to shoot him down.”

*

For the officers from Orange, the policy on deadly force amounts to two paragraphs, where the policies of some departments fill pages.

In essence, the Orange policy directs officers to use deadly force when it “reasonably appears necessary to the officer . . . to protect themselves or others from bodily harm.”

Just down the freeway, Santa Ana has a more detailed policy, including a special section on using deadly force against occupants of moving vehicles. It instructs officers not to shoot at a moving vehicle unless “there are no other safe and viable alternatives available,” specifically, “the [officer’s] inability to move out of the way.”

Miami, with one of the more lengthy and explicit policies, directs its officers to “make every effort not to place themselves in a position where a threat of death or bodily harm is created when attempting to approach, pursue or stop a motor vehicle.”

In cities such as Miami and Dallas, the deadly force policies grew out of a series of questionable police-involved shootings. Dallas officials began tightening policies after 25 people were killed in 50 shootings in 1985.

“Some of the shootings involved situations that the officers fired at vehicles that were coming at the officers,” said Dallas Police Sgt. Chandler. “The officers were found not at fault because there wasn’t a policy in place. . . . You can’t hold an officer accountable for policies that didn’t exist.”

Many of the 20 policies from departments nationwide that The Times examined, including the CHP’s, specifically prohibit the use of deadly force to stop misdemeanor or traffic violators--such as Kim.

The vast differences among policies are one reason criminologists, and others who study police-involved violence, say there need to be clear-cut guidelines that establish limits for police officers.

“The more information that’s available to the officer means that there’s less of a chance for that officer to lose his or her cool under pressure and start shooting,” said Bill Geller, co-author of “Deadly Force: What We Know, A Practitioner’s Desk Reference.”

Former San Jose Police Chief McNamara said, “In fairness to the employees, the rules have to be specific so the officers know what’s expected of them.”

McNamara said he imposed explicit policies regarding moving vehicles in San Jose after several incidents.

“The officers would say, ‘The guy was going to run me down.’ And that was often used as an excuse to blast away,” McNamara said. “We said, ‘We won’t accept that as an excuse if you purposely put yourself in front of a car and then are forced to shoot.’ ”

Experts say that detailed policies help officers make one of the most difficult decisions of their job: when to shoot. The pressure on officers is heightened by the increasingly frequent presence of television cameras, recording confrontations for public scrutiny.

Fyfe, a former New York City police lieutenant, said that’s when an explicit policy could remind the officer: “I’ll be held accountable for what I do.”

Fyfe noted that many departments shunned detailed policies after the Long Beach Police Department lost a lawsuit that hinged on one of its policies. A motorcycle cop had fired into a moving car, accidentally killing a hostage.

Since then, some smaller departments have avoided detailed deadly force policies, fearing that they could be used against them in court.

Orange Capt. Dean Richards said his department has a more general policy, in part to protect itself from civil liability.

“If you violate your policy and your policy is too restrictive, that’s something the court’s going to look at,” he said.

The courts, however, have ruled that departments can be held equally liable if their policies do not properly direct employees, Fyfe said.

Santa Ana’s Walters said his department introduced its moving-vehicle policy seven or eight years ago “to give the officers the guidance they need before the shooting rather than afterward.”

Richards and Westminster’s Hall said their departments’ guidelines do not address specific situations because police work is so unpredictable.

“How can you dictate what you can do in a guideline when no shooting is the same?” asked Richards.

“The shooting didn’t happen because [officers thought that] the truck was stolen,” Hall said. “It didn’t happen because they wanted to stop the truck. The shooting happened because the driver was about to run over somebody.”

Both departments said they rely on extensive training and their officers’ good judgment to ensure they react properly in the field. The guidelines must be working, Richards said, because his officers are seldom involved in fatal shootings.

“We’re not out there quick-drawing on citizens,” he said.

And Richards pointed out that Orange simply does not have the big-city tensions that might require more specific regulations. “You adapt to your city’s needs,” he said. “Orange is a pretty safe city.”

Both Orange and Westminster police officials stress that their shooting policies are more limiting to officers than what is legally defensible under the state’s Penal Code.

If the officers were in the wrong, Richards added, “the district attorney and civil litigation will be the test of time.”

Under the law, officers have no duty to retreat from a confrontation with a suspect and cannot be held criminally liable if they don’t, Praet said.

“I’m not saying that officers never have to back off,” he said, but the law doesn’t say they must.

CHP officials say their policy, however restrictive, allows officers the latitude to shoot if their lives or someone else’s is at stake.

“If you ask, ‘Why didn’t the officer just dive out of the way?’ ” said CHP spokesman Steve Kohler, “then you also have to ask, ‘Why didn’t [Kim] just pull over in the first place?’ ”

*

By now, videotapes of the chase and its deadly conclusion have circulated well beyond the corridors of police stations.

Footage is repeatedly played in the community room of the Korean American Assn. of Orange County in Garden Grove. It was dissected by more than 20 Asian American attorneys and activists from other ethnic groups in downtown Los Angeles earlier this month.

It has escaped no one’s notice that the shooting has drawn together divergent groups in a way that is unusual within communities that rarely challenge law enforcement.

In the past month, leaders from the Korean American community met with the Orange police chief to demand explanations. Los Amigos of Orange County, a support group that provides legal counseling to Latinos, has written a letter calling for the county grand jury to conduct its own probe. The Orange County Freedom Network--a newly formed coalition of Asian American and Latino activists--also has weighed in with its demand for action.

On March 15, South Korean Consul General Tae Hee Park met with Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi and personally requested that a “just and fair” investigation be conducted into the death of one of his nation’s citizens.

The shooting has struck a chord within various Asian Pacific communities because it challenges their long-held belief that the police are their unquestioned protectors, Oh said.

“Once upon a time, the people believed in the concept [that police] serve and protect,” said Oh, who emerged as a spokeswoman for the Korean American community following the Los Angeles riots. “Now, when you see kids being tagged as gangbangers [because of their race] . . . and people being brutalized, well, all this contributes to a change in attitudes toward law enforcement.”

Oh believes the Kim shooting will serve as a catalyst to bring ethnic groups together to question more pointedly the actions of law enforcement.

Dr. Koo Oh, president of the Korean American Assn. of Orange County, is gratified that some Koreans are voicing outrage. “The Korean community is very quiet; most people are just trying to work hard for their families and lead quiet lives,” said Oh, who is not related to attorney Angela Oh. “But we realize in this case that if we’re not making noise or trying to find out what’s happened, it could happen again.”

Times staff writer Len Hall contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Comparing Policies

Police policies nationwide are generally similar in stating that officers may use deadly force when they fear for their own lives or those of others. But many also restrict deadly force in situations such as the one seven weeks ago, when officers from the Orange and Westminster departments and the California Highway Patrol shot to death a man they had been pursuing for a traffic violation. Some department policy excerpts:

DALLAS

* Discharging firearms at a moving or fleeing vehicle is prohibited unless it is necessary to prevent imminent death or serious bodily injury to the officer or another person.

* Officers will not voluntarily place themselves in a position in front of an oncoming vehicle where deadly force is a probable outcome.

* When confronting an oncoming vehicle, officers will move out of its path, if possible, rather than fire at the vehicle.

MIAMI

* Shots fired by an officer at a moving vehicle are generally ineffective in stopping the vehicle; and a vehicle, whose driver has been shot, may go out of control and endanger lives.

* Police officers will make every effort not to place themselves in a position where a threat of death or bodily harm is created when attempting to approach, pursue or stop a motor vehicle.

LOS ANGELES

* Officers shall not use deadly force to effect the arrest or prevent the escape of a person whose only offense is classified solely as a misdemeanor under the Penal Code.

* Firing at or from moving vehicles is generally prohibited. Experience shows such action is rarely effective and is extremely hazardous to innocent persons.

SANTA ANA

* An officer shall not discharge a firearm at or from a moving vehicle except as the ultimate measure of self-defense or defense of another when the suspect is using deadly force other than the vehicle.

* When the vehicle is the deadly force, a firearm is not likely to safely stop the assault and is discouraged unless it reasonably appears to the officer that there are no other safe and viable alternatives available; e.g., the inability to move out of the way.

WESTMINSTER

Discharging a firearm at or from a moving vehicle is rarely effective and is discouraged except as the ultimate measure of self-defense or defense of another.

ORANGE

* Police officers may resort to the use of deadly force, which is in conformance with law and when such action reasonably appears necessary to the officer.

* Force should not be resorted to unless reasonable alternatives have been exhausted or would be ineffective under the particular circumstances. Officers are permitted to use that amount of force which reasonably appears necessary to protect others or themselves from bodily harm.

* Does not address use of deadly force at or from a moving vehicle.

Source: Individual police departments; Researched by TRACY WEBER and THAO HUA / Los Angeles Times

Hong Il Kim

* Born Sept. 11, 1968, in Seoul, South Korea.

* Immigrated to U.S. in 1985, to live with family in Buena Park.

* Attended Western High School in Buena Park.

* Worked in family-owned restaurants in Orange and Los Angeles counties; also did odd jobs and painting.

* Returned to South Korea in 1992 and worked for a moving company and on construction crews.

* Came back to Orange County on Feb. 9 to visit father, who was recovering from heart surgery.

Source: Kim family

Fatal Climax

A 30-mile chase on freeways and Orange County streets began when Hong Il Kim refused to pull over for law enforcement officers. During the final minutes of the chase:

1. Kim drives into Orange mini-mall parking lot. Plainclothes officer approaches the vehicle and attempts to break front passenger-side window with butt of his gun.

2. Kim’s vehicle creeps forward while officers surround it and order him to give up.

3. Officers pin the vehicle into parking space and block it from behind with police cars; two Orange plainclothes officers assume shooting stance in front.

4. When Kim moves vehicle forward, officers open fire. Kim fatally shot.

View of a Shooting

Five experts in police use of deadly force who reviewed a videotape of the Feb. 14 shooting of Hong Il Kim at the request of The Times say the shooting was avoidable and that the officers committed a series of tactical errors that cost the Korean national his life:

*

“The [plainclothes] officers put themselves in a position where they had to start shooting, and when they did, they also risked shooting other officers in a cross-fire. . . . Somebody should have been attempting to coordinate this.

[Kim] should have been treated as a dangerous person, there’s no two-ways about that, he was either desperate or mentally unstable. But if you have somebody surrounded, then you can treat that person as a barricaded subject. . . . They should have waited that person out.”

MICHAEL SCOTT, co-author of “Deadly Force: What We Know. A Practitioner’s Desk Reference” and current chief of the Lauderhill (Fla.) Police Department

*

“Probably when [Kim] accelerated, the officers feared for their lives, but clearly they put themselves in jeopardy. . . . In terms of the officers’ need to shoot this person, there was none. They never should have been in front of the car in the first place. . . . You take cover and wait for him to come out. There is no reason to be in front of the car.”

GEOFFREY ALPERT, University of South Carolina criminal justice professor; has helped dozens of departments nationwide write deadly force policies

*

“The behavior of those plainclothes officers is indefensible. . . . The uniformed officers would have ended it without bloodshed. They had done a superb job of boxing that guy in. Control was lost with the cowboy actions of the plainclothes police. . . . They should never have gotten in the way. . . . The first officer that went up and tried to break the window [with his pistol butt] was in violation of every police procedure.”

JOSEPH P. McNAMARA, former police chief of San Jose and Kansas City, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford

*

“The foremost rule is you don’t put yourself in front of the vehicle. . . . It seems to me that the officer that was firing from the front of the car shouldn’t have been where he was. [Kim] had nowhere to go. . . . The defense will be made that, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know how it was.’ The real question is how’d you get there? Why were you there? What would have happened if you didn’t put yourself in the situation?”

JAMES FYFE, Temple University (Philadelphia) criminal justice professor and former New York City police officer; has helped departments, including New York, write deadly force policies

*

“A basic rule of survival is to seek cover rather than placing yourself in harm’s way. That’s one thing these officers failed to do. There were two plainclothes officers in front of the vehicle as it made a turn and headed up into the parking space. In looking at the tape you’ll notice that one of the officers, the one on the left, moved over to the left, out of the way of the vehicle. The second officer stood his ground and didn’t move. After the second officer began to fire, shots were fired by other officers who were not in danger of being run over.”

JIM CHANDLER, Dallas Police Department sergeant and chief spokesman; investigated officer-involved shootings for 10 years

Source: Times interviews