Enhanced video: Phuong Ho was not resisting

The grainy cell phone video of the police beating a Vietnamese student, once enhanced by a forensic expert hired by the San Jose Mercury News, confirms that Phuong Ho was not resisting, just going for his glasses – reports the paper here.

The video, taken by a roommate of Ho’s inside their house, shows Ho saying over and over, “I’m just looking for my glasses … I’m looking for my glasses” as he is struck. Ho’s glasses had fallen off earlier in the encounter as an officer shoved him.

Click on the picture to view the enhanced video.

In it, the San Jose State University math major repeatedly apologizes as the officers strike him and asks officers not to stand on him.

A transcript of the enhanced version of the September incident, created by an audio and video-forensic analyst hired by the Mercury News, also indicates one of the officers said at one point, “I wanted to punch that (expletive) in the mouth.”

Click here to read the transcript, made by Gregg Stutchman of the Stutchman Forensic Laboratory.

None of the details of these verbal exchanges between the officers and Ho had been clear in the raw version of the video, which was first reported by the Mercury News in October.

Terry Bowman, a lawyer representing officer Kenneth Siegel – the one who whoopped Ho with his baton – said, “It’s not a defense to say ‘I wanted my glasses,’” Bowman said. “It’s not the officers’ duty or responsibility to assume the most innocent intent. That’s how officers get killed.”

Which has a point, if coupled with some modicum of evidence showing Ho resisted.

All the facts known so far, however, are consistent with what Ho has said since the beginning, and that is we have a situation somewhere in the gray area where Ho was not obeying orders, but then he wasn’t resisting at all.

The question is whether the beating administered by Siegel and the Taser by Steven Payne Jr. are justified when the evidence appears to be that Ho was not fighting back, not doing anything to the officers, and not posing any threat at all.

If it’s no excuse for Ho to just say he’s going for his glasses, it’s also no excuse for the police just say “he’s not turning over so I beat him senseless.”

The police responded Sept. 5 to a disturbance call that stemmed from a dispute that Ho was having with a roommate. At one point, Ho, an exchange student Vietnam, picked up a knife and said to the roommate, “I could kill you” for having slopped soap on Ho’s steak. As shown on a separate cell phone video, Ho then dropped the knife, and some roommates laughed, but one called the police.

Ho was not armed when Officers Siegel and Payne arrived. As he tried to follow Siegel into his bedroom, Ho was knocked to the ground in the hallway when he disobeyed the police order not to follow them, their reports show. Then, another roommate began taking a cell phone video of the incident, as Siegel repeatedly struck Ho with a baton, and Payne shocked him with a Taser gun.

The beating of Ho prompted widespread criticism. San Jose City Councilwoman Madison Nguyen calls for police to begin wearing bodycam. Vietnamese-American elected officials from the other end of the state, including Assemblyman Van Tran, Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen, and Garden Grove City Councilman Andrew Do, sent letters to the city of San Jose calling for a thorough investigation.