Sergeant, accused supervisor — Deposition 5 of 7, Byer v. City of La Palma.
City employee · Sergeant, La Palma Police Department (Byer's, Choi's, Goble's, and Genera's direct supervisor)
Transcript excerpts reviewedWho he is
Koh is the sergeant whose conduct is at the center of Byer's lawsuit. He supervised Byer directly and, at various points, also supervised Officer Choi, Officer Goble, and Officer Ryan Genera. This is the accused supervisor's own sworn testimony — not a third party's account of what he did.
Connection to the case
Koh confirmed that, aside from Byer, two other officers — Goble and Genera — had complained to command staff (Captain Amend and then-Captain Wilkerson) about the same core practice: Koh personally making traffic stops and then assigning the resulting paperwork to a subordinate. He placed Genera's complaint at roughly a year before this deposition and Goble's at roughly two and a half years before — corroborating, from the accused supervisor himself, the timeline and substance of Goble's separate testimony. Koh testified that Byer complained about him to Captain Amend, that he was told about it in a single in-person meeting in the chief's office with then-Chief Wilkerson present, and that Amend's entire message to him was that Amend "didn't like that I was making stops and basically having him handle those stops." Koh testified no one — not Amend, not Wilkerson, not anyone else at La Palma — ever told him he needed to change his behavior as a result.
Key testimony
Under direct questioning, Koh estimated he personally made stops in Officer Choi's beat and assigned them to Choi "about three times," but made stops in Byer's beat and assigned them to Byer "about nine" times over the same 2023 period — a roughly three-to-one disparity, by Koh's own estimate, between the two officers he supervised simultaneously. On Byer's negative annual evaluation, which Koh authored, Koh acknowledged criticizing Byer for failing to keep a detained person in a "seated position" while acting as a cover officer on one of Choi's stops — but admitted he never counseled Choi for the same conduct because he said he "never saw" Choi do it, and never asked the officers involved whose decision it actually was. Koh also testified extensively to a list of performance issues he attributed to Byer (sleeping in his vehicle, carrying his firearm while escorting an un-handcuffed prisoner, letting suspects get away, re-citing repeat offenders) but was not asked, and did not volunteer, any comparable scrutiny of Choi's record. Asked directly about the "all-Korean police force" comment, Koh denied ever saying that specific phrase, but volunteered, unprompted, that he might have said something close to it — naming himself, Choi, and two Korean reserve officers (Kim and Suh) and suggesting he could have said "if we had Officer Suh here today, we'd have an all-Korean shift." Koh confirmed the department's anti-retaliation and personnel-complaints policies cover bias-based policing, racial profiling, and unlawful discrimination, and agreed that Officer Choi was voted La Palma's 2023 Employee of the Year — a nomination Koh believes he personally cast. Koh confirmed no one from the police department or city manager's office ever asked him about the all-Korean comment or about racial profiling, and that he is not aware of any investigation into Byer's complaints having occurred before this lawsuit was filed.
Possible relevance to the verdict
This summary is based on selected excerpts (highlighted portions of a 167-page transcript, not the complete document), including some passages affected by a mid-testimony audio interruption that required a portion of the record to be read back. It does not reflect the full testimony, cross-examination in its entirety, or any context the excerpted portions omit.