Jay Kyoo Choi Deposition — Byer v. City of La Palma

Deposition 2 of 7

Jay Kyoo Choi

City employee · La Palma Police Officer, Byer's former shift partner

Transcript excerpts reviewed

Deposed: August 4, 2025
Called by: Plaintiff (Petronelli)
Pages reviewed: 11, 16–17, 25, 27–28, 32, 39–51, 54–55, 58, 87–88 (of 96)

Who he is

Choi is a current City of La Palma police officer, hired in March 2022. He has about ten years in law enforcement, including prior positions with the City of Imperial (2016–2019) and the City of Baldwin Park (2019–2022) before joining La Palma. He testified he is Korean-American. For roughly four months, Choi and Byer were shift partners on Beat 2, both reporting to Sergeant Koh.

Connection to the case

As Byer's beat partner under the same supervisor, Choi was in a position to directly observe how Koh assigned work between the two officers. He testified that Koh had a practice — referred to within the department as "sergeant specials" — of personally making traffic stops and then assigning the resulting paperwork to an officer on patrol. Choi confirmed Koh assigned him five or more sergeant specials over the period, but assigned noticeably more to Byer, though he couldn't give an exact count. Choi testified he twice volunteered to take a sergeant special off Byer's plate — at least partly because he wanted the arrest statistic for his own record — and that Koh denied the request at least once.

Key testimony

Choi testified he never heard Sergeant Koh say anything about race, national origin, or an "all-Korean" shift or department, and never heard Koh give a directive to racially profile citizens. He also testified no one — not Wilkerson, not anyone else in HR, not anyone in the police department — ever contacted him, before or after Byer left, to ask about Koh's treatment of Byer or the concerns Byer had raised. Choi said he never observed Koh treating him and Byer differently in tone or expectations, had a positive opinion of Byer's performance, and was "sad" to learn Byer was leaving the department. He also testified that Crystal Wilkerson — the HR analyst who took Byer's complaint — is married to Ron Wilkerson, who was a City of La Palma police captain during the relevant period and later served roughly a year as police chief before retiring in mid-2024.

Possible relevance to the verdict

Cuts both ways: Choi independently corroborates one specific, observable piece of Byer's claim — that Koh assigned him disproportionately more "sergeant special" stops than a comparable officer — from a witness with no apparent stake in the outcome. At the same time, Choi flatly did not corroborate the racial-profiling directive or the "all-Korean shift" comment central to the discrimination theory; he said he never heard either. His testimony that no one from HR or the department ever asked him what he'd observed, despite being the officer best positioned to know, reinforces the "no investigation happened" pattern established by Wilkerson's testimony above. The Wilkerson–Wilkerson family relationship (HR analyst married to a captain, later chief, in the same small department) isn't itself evidence of wrongdoing, but is a relevant structural fact for readers weighing how complaints were handled.

This summary is based on selected excerpts (highlighted portions of a 96-page transcript, not the complete document). It does not reflect the full testimony, cross-examination in its entirety, or any context the excerpted portions omit.

View full deposition excerpt (PDF) — Jay Kyoo Choi