By Mark Arner, San Diego Union-Tribune
Ten days ago, the man picked to be San Diego’s next police chief stood before 200 angry Vietnamese residents incensed over the fatal San Jose police shooting of a young Vietnamese woman.
San Jose police Chief William Lansdowne calmly listened to the heated comments, said he was concerned about the woman’s family and promised a thorough investigation.
Nine months before that, Lansdowne yanked four of his officers from a Drug Enforcement Administration task force after it raided a Santa Cruz medicinal marijuana clinic.
“The voters in the state of California have decided this should be legal and we are clearly in conflict with federal law,” he said.
Although only 5 feet 8 inches tall, Lansdowne is not shy about standing up to controversy.
“Law enforcement is empowered by the community,” he said. “The more they trust the department, the easier it is for us in law enforcement to do our job.”
At 10 a.m. Tuesday, the San Diego City Council will be asked to ratify City Manager Michael Uberuaga’s selection of Lansdowne as the city’s 34th police chief. Lansdowne would replace David Bejarano, who left the department April 25 to head the U.S. Marshal’s Office in San Diego and Imperial counties.
Lansdowne, who once headed the Richmond Police Department, would manage a department with 2,100 officers, about 700 civilian employees and a $272 million budget. San Jose has 1,437 officers, 429 non-sworn personnel and a budget of $211 million.
Not everyone thinks highly of the chief. Many criticize his handling of the July 13 shooting that has spawned a preliminary FBI investigation.
According to reports, an officer responding to a call of an abandoned child shot the distraught woman in her kitchen less than a minute after entering her home. Police said the officer thought the woman was about to attack him with a cleaver. The 90-pound woman was holding a dao bao, a vegetable peeler with a 6-inch blade.
Community activist Madison Nguyen, a member of the Franklin-McKinley school board, described Lansdowne as “very cordial and cooperative” when she asked him to speak to a crowd that had just marched on police headquarters to protest the shooting.
He talked to the protesters for several minutes, she said, expressing sadness about the killing and its effect on the woman’s family. He also promised a thorough investigation.
A day earlier, however, he had defended the shooting in a televised interview, saying the officer had few options.
“If he was defending this officer before the facts came out about the shooting, how impartial will the department be when they finish the investigation?” Nguyen said.
“Personally, I’m not satisfied.”
Lansdowne also caused a stir in October 2002, when he pulled four of his officers from a DEA task force that had raided a Santa Cruz medicinal marijuana clinic.
He said he would do the same thing, if something similar happened in San Diego.
“They used my officers without talking to me about it,” Lansdowne said yesterday.
“We have a problem in San Jose with methamphetamine, not with medicinal marijuana. The officers I took out of the DEA task force, I put on a state Narcotics Enforcement Bureau task force and on local narcotics cases, where they can focus on reducing the use of methamphetamine.”
It is that sort of conviction that has endeared the chief to many. San Jose police praise him for his weekly routine of joining his officers on patrol. He also rides in a police cruiser every Christmas Eve.
“Other chiefs we’ve had would come in Dec. 10, and wish everybody a Happy Christmas and take three weeks off and say ‘See you in January,” said Jeff Ricketts, chief financial officer for the San Jose Police Officers Association.
Ricketts credited Lansdowne with playing a role in securing contracts calling for annual pay raises of 6 percent for each of the last three years, and a 4 percent raise for the fiscal year that began July 1.
Others say Lansdowne routinely gets into work before 5 a.m. and stays well into the night. He often attends community meetings and is credited with being accessible to the residents he serves.
“That type of accessibility is important if you’re going to be chief,” he said. “In many cases, you need to find out for yourself what happened.
Thuan Nguyen, president of the San Jose Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, said he appreciated Lansdowne’s efforts at a meeting with protesters.
“I think the meeting was a step in the right direction. I think some sort of dialogue had to begin . . . People are willing to sit down to find ways to prevent shootings like this.”
Lansdowne - who would take over a department that ranks near the top of state and national lists of officer-involved shootings - said he is committed to finding the truth about the July 13 shooting. He said he supports an open grand jury hearing into the matter.
“I’m in total agreement with (Thuan) Nguyen,” he said. “We need more dialogue. The difficulty we’re having with the community is we can’t present all the evidence yet, and we can’t refute all the misinformation until it gets to the grand jury.”