By John Woolfolk
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Arguing public interest outweighs privacy concerns, San Jose officials Wednesday ordered release of 911 emergency dispatch recordings and police reports on a May incident in which officers fatally shot a mentally ill man while responding to reports he had attacked a family member.
A committee chaired by Mayor Chuck Reed voted unanimously for release of the actual 911 recordings and police reports in the Daniel Pham case. The reports will be redacted to protect the identity of witnesses; council members rejected a suggestion from police and city attorneys to release only transcripts of the recordings and synopses of the police reports to ease concerns about privacy and clarity.
Pham’s family and many in the city’s large Vietnamese-American community have demanded the release of the reports, in part to determine whether emergency dispatchers told officers that Pham, who had cut his brother’s throat with a knife that day, was mentally ill. Police have insisted the officers didn’t know, despite previous visits by other officers to the home.
“There are lots of reasons not to release information,” Reed said at the meeting of the council’s Rules and Open Government Committee. “I don’t think any of those outweigh the public interest in getting it out.”
Reed said the city would post the two 911 recordings and police reports online at noon Nov. 13, allowing time for redactions. It will mark the first time in recent years the city has released recordings of calls to the emergency dispatch system.
The decision was a key test of Reed’s and the city’s commitment to more openness regarding police records at a time when the department faces heightened scrutiny over use of force and arrest practices involving immigrant communities.
Mercury News reports have found the department arrests a disproportionate number of Latinos on public-drunkenness charges and that officers are unusually quick to use force in cases involving minor offenses.
Last month, a council majority led by Reed narrowly rejected a proposal from a community task force calling for routine release of many police records. Police opposed the idea, arguing it would make witnesses and victims fearful of coming forward. But Reed said the city would consider releasing more records than it has in the past on a case-by-case basis through the Rules Committee, which he chairs.
Others on the committee include Vice Mayor Judy Chirco, Councilwoman Nancy Pyle and Councilman Pete Constant, a retired police officer.
Reed had previously called for releasing the Pham records requested by the Mercury News and several community groups once the investigation into the matter had concluded.
Many in San Jose’s Vietnamese-American community have been outraged by the May 10 killing of Pham, 27. The case has reopened wounds from a similar 2003 tragedy in which a city officer fatally shot a mentally disturbed Vietnamese mother in her home when she grabbed a large vegetable peeler.
Police say they were summoned to Pham’s Berryessa home after he slashed his older brother’s neck. They said officers were forced to shoot Pham when he refused demands to drop the blade and after Taser stun guns failed to subdue him. A grand jury cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing, but its hearings were not public, as many in the community had wanted.
Pham’s father has asserted that officers knew or should have known of his son’s mental illness, given prior visits, and held their fire. He and others hope the police records will clarify what the responding officers actually knew and why they acted as they did.
A lawyer for Pham’s family said Wednesday they wanted to hear the 911 recordings before they are released publicly, a request the committee said the city would honor.
Police Chief Rob Davis said a neighbor who had made one of the two 911 calls on the Pham incident did not want the actual recording released as the voice would be recognizable to people in the community. He argued a transcript would protect the caller’s identity and prevent others from having second thoughts about phoning 911. The other call came from the Pham home, and family members at the time indicated it was from the wounded brother’s girlfriend.
Davis also cited concerns that releasing the redacted police reports rather than a detailed synopsis could create a misleading picture of what happened that day because the reports are “nonlinear” and “not chronological” in describing events.
But community activists and civil rights groups argued that transcripts and synopses created after the fact amid ongoing controversy about officers’ actions would not be credible. Richard Konda of the Asian Law Alliance, one of several groups that had requested the records from the city, noted that “many members of the community have lost faith in the Police Department.”
Chirco and other committee members suggested that the neighbor’s voice should be electronically altered to mask his or her identity and allow the release of the actual 911 recording. Chirco agreed that transcripts and synopses prepared after the fact would do little to mollify critics, noting that the possibility police might “modify the information is a concern.”
Copyright 2009 San Jose Mercury News