A former police officer and prominent civil rights attorney will be filing a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a 71-year-old man who was injured by a Oklahoma City police officer during a traffic stop in October.
On Oct. 27, Lich Vu and Sgt. Joseph Gibson got into an argument over a traffic citation. Video footage showed Vu telling Gibson to “shut up” and touching him, with Gibson responding by slamming Vu into the ground.
After the altercation, Vu was hospitalized. He suffered a brain bleed, a neck fracture, and a broken bone in his eye. Vu also underwent surgery to have blood removed from his brain. According to KFOR, court documents reportedly showed that Vu was in poor health at the time of the incident, while Gibson’s health was in good condition.
Civil rights attorney and former police officer Devon Jacob now plans to take this case to the federal level. Jacob has previously taken on several high-profile cases and has worked on legal teams tied to George Floyd and Tyreek Hill.
“The incident should have been de-escalated,”, Jacob told KFOR, “It was clear that Mr. Vu was not a threat.”
“With absolute certainty I will say that this is an excessive force,”
Court documents acquired by KFOR reportedly showed that Oklahoma City police experts in de-escalation were consulted in a criminal investigation against Gibson. Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna later filed a felony assault and battery charge against Gibson, and the experts said that the force exerted by Gibson was unreasonable after reviewing the incident.
However, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond dropped the charges against Gibson in late December, saying that “Gibson acted within the scope of his training and that Vu shouldn’t have put his hands on him”.
“As a former police officer, I can certainly say that the force used is excessive. It was not objectively reasonable given the circumstances confronting the police officer”, Jacob said in a KOCO interview.
In regards to Drummond’s decision, Jacob also told KOCO that “His job is to enforce the law and not decide it, and that’s what he did. He decided the case from his desk,”
Jacob plans on investigating the incident further, and said that “There will be a civil rights lawsuit filed”
“It’ll be in federal court….I don’t care if it takes one year, if it takes five years. Won’t be my first case that lasts five or six years.”
Thuan Nguyen, President-Elect of the Vietnamese American Community of Oklahoma, told KFOR that he has been in contact with Vu’s family, and is a part of an effort to mend relations between the local Vietnamese community and the Oklahoma City Police Department (OKCPD). He and other community members and leaders met with OKCPD officials, where they asked tough questions regarding the incident with Vu, and discussed ways to prevent something like this from ever happening again.
“That’s ultimately what everyone’s goal is, is to make sure our community is safe,”, said Nguyen. “We were able to express a lot of our concerns and voice our concerns, and our hurt and our anger,”
Some of the topics discussed included officer training, cultural competency, and the use of translated pamphlets to prevent escalation due to language barriers. According to the discussions, investigators said it was unclear about how much longer the investigations into Gibson’s actions could take, but the community’s patience was encouraged.
According to KOCO, the OKCPD investigation of the incident. In the event that Gibson is found guilty, it is still possible that he can still keep his job.
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