Former Field Training Officer & Corporal; currently OC Sheriff's Department — Deposition 7 of 7, Byer v. City of La Palma.
Former City employee · Field Training Officer & Corporal, La Palma Police Department (2015–2024); currently Orange County Sheriff's Department
Transcript excerpts reviewedWho he is
Lopino worked for the La Palma Police Department full-time from approximately 2015 to 2024 — about nine years, and his first position as a sworn officer, following roughly five years of part-time law enforcement work and a stint as a teenage Police Explorer. He left in 2024 for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, testifying the move was driven by "a plethora of reasons," including greater opportunity at the Sheriff's Department and difficulties at La Palma. Over his time at La Palma he held several collateral assignments — armorer, range positions, and, most notably, field training officer (FTO) and corporal — and estimates he trained roughly ten new officers over about seven years as an FTO. He reported to Sergeant Won Koh for seven of his nine years at the department. He identifies as white, of Italian, German, and Swedish or other European descent.
Connection to the case
Lopino was Ross Byer's field training officer for Byer's third training phase and his final "ghost phase" — the stage where a trainee patrols essentially unsupervised while the FTO rides along without intervening. He personally completed Byer's daily observation reports and both end-of-phase written summaries, and testified he wrote them himself, without assistance, based solely on his own observations. He also had some role training Officer Jay Choi at an earlier point in Choi's onboarding, though he could not recall the specifics, and was separately supervised by Sergeant Koh — the accused supervisor at the center of the case — for most of his tenure, including during the period Koh also supervised Byer.
Key testimony
On Byer's training, Lopino testified Byer "performed well" and "satisfactorily," with report-writing style and structure — not accuracy or content — as his only noted area for improvement; he recommended Byer be advanced first to phase four and later to solo patrol status. Asked to compare Byer's and Choi's performance, Lopino testified the two were "very similar," that "one didn't absolutely outshine the other," and that both were signed off to work solo without issue, though he noted Byer had more life experience and came across as more comfortable interacting with the public.
On Sergeant Koh, Lopino gave an extended, independent account of the "sergeant special" practice — corroborating the mechanism Choi and Koh each separately described, but adding detail from his own experience as one of the officers he says was targeted by it. He testified Koh would personally pull over vehicles in an officer's beat and then hand off the resulting paperwork, ostensibly to give newer officers training reps, but that in practice Koh spared officers he personally liked — naming one four-to-six-year officer, Bradley Stene, specifically — while repeatedly dumping specials on veteran officers he didn't favor, including Lopino himself. Lopino testified he pulled his own activity statistics from the department's records system (referred to as "Spillman" or "Flex") and compared them to Stene's over a four-month window, finding he had substantially more traffic stops and other self-initiated activity than Stene despite receiving far more "sergeant specials" — directly undercutting the stated rationale that the specials were about proactivity or training need. He testified "[t]here was no level of proactive you can be to satisfy him if he did not like you."
Lopino also testified that officers could once cross-check these statistics on a shared drive, until administration restricted access to it around 2022 or 2023, after Officer Zachary Goble used the same records to show that a negative evaluation he'd received was inaccurate. Lopino testified he learned secondhand from a dispatcher that Captain Amend had directed a records employee to lock the file specifically after Goble's use of it. Separately, Lopino testified he served as a witness in an internal-affairs investigation into Koh that resulted in Koh's sergeant probationary status being extended and a delayed pay raise; Koh confronted him afterward at a courthouse, telling him "you cost me money," which Lopino said marked an escalation in "sergeant specials," negative evaluations, and close GPS monitoring of his patrol vehicle. He described one specific incident in which fear of a negative evaluation over insufficient vehicle movement — monitored via GPS by Koh — led him to keep driving in circles rather than pull over for a break during a night shift, until he fell asleep at the wheel with his foot on the brake at a red light for what he estimated was several minutes, waking only when a passing car alerted him. He testified he reported the incident to Captain Amend and asked to be moved to a different shift; Amend's only response, according to Lopino, was that he "need[ed] to grow up and learn to get along with people," with no shift change and no corrective action taken regarding Koh's conduct. Lopino testified he raised concerns about Koh with Captain Amend two or three times, always verbally and never in writing, and that "on no level was it ever handled" — the behavior "either continued or sometimes got worse." He also testified that a workplace survey he'd been told was anonymous evidently wasn't, since Koh confronted him in a hallway shortly afterward about something he'd written in it. Asked directly, Lopino did not attribute Koh's treatment of him to race or national origin; he characterized it as arbitrary personal favoritism, and separately testified he believed Koh favored Choi in a similar way.
Possible relevance to the verdict
This summary is based on selected excerpts (highlighted portions of a 59-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.