The former Oakland police captain at the center of a misconduct cover-up scandal last year claims in a new federal lawsuit that he was unfairly blamed for a subordinate officer’s mishandling of an internal affairs investigation.
Wilson Lau lost his job with the East Bay Regional Park District police after the explosive Oakland Police Department scandal came to light. He is seeking damages from both agencies, which are listed as defendants in the complaint.
Lau, who joined the Menlo Park police force in January, claims he was wrongly accused of ordering a subordinate Oakland officer, Sgt. Chan Lee, to omit key details in an internal affairs investigation of a 2021 hit-and-run committed by another officer, Sgt. Michael Chung.
It also alleges racial discrimination by both Oakland and East Bay parks, suggesting he was fired because “some OPD personnel accused Captain Lau of failing to carry out a rigorous investigation of the accusations against Sgt. Chung due to their joint Asian ancestry.”
“Those allegations,” the lawsuit states, “were completely without merit and demonstrate unlawful racial bias.”
The former captain first filed a claim opposing his firing last year. Judge Rita Lin in February dismissed an earlier version of Lau’s lawsuit, determining — among other conclusions — that Lau hadn’t “plausibly” alleged that he was treated unfairly by his employers.
Lau’s new complaint is the latest bit of legal blowback Oakland has faced from the internal scandal last year that led to the firing of former Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who has also filed suit against the city.
An independent arbitrator who heard Armstrong’s appeal last year said the ex-chief probably shouldn’t have been disciplined, though Mayor Sheng Thao, who fired Armstrong, maintains she did so because of statements he made to the press while on paid leave.
Lau, meanwhile, has hired longtime East Bay civil-rights attorney Dan Siegel, a frequent critic of police and a 2014 mayoral candidate in Oakland, to represent him.
Michael Chung, an Oakland police sergeant placed on leave last year amid a misconduct investigation, attends a press conference on March 22, 2022. (Facebook)
Lau claims he was told by city administrators in Oakland that if he were rehired to OPD any time in the future, it would “resume the termination, discipline process.”
He also alleges it was Sgt. Lee who omitted key details of Chung’s hit-and-run in a report presented to Chief LeRonne Armstrong while Lau was on an end-of-year vacation.
Lau told outside investigators he had discussed Chung’s hit-and-run with Lee, noting that he remarked, after reviewing the initial evidence, “there seems to be some issues here, uh, potential misconduct issues,” according to the investigators’ report.
But he and Lee both agreed they didn’t think Chung — who claimed to have been unaware that he collided with a parked Mercedes in a San Francisco residential garage — was lying, the outside investigators said.
The internal affairs report ultimately described the hit-and-run as simply a traffic collision, and made no mention of Chung dating a subordinate officer who had been riding in the OPD vehicle with him.
Lau said he wasn’t aware the report contained errors until federal officials who oversee OPD’s affairs asked him about the hit-and-run in May 2022, when Chung was being investigated for a separate incident where he fired his service weapon in an OPD elevator.
Lee is still employed by OPD, and so are two other officers who initially had been placed on leave after a San Francisco law firm — Clarence, Dyer and Cohen — first brought details of the internal failures to light.
Lau, meanwhile, was hired in January to be a police commander in Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Daily Post reported.
In response to questions about Lau’s past, the city’s police chief David Norris told the Post that he had personally consulted “several very reputable police chiefs who have direct experience working” with Lau.
All of them “provided resounding recommendations of (Lau’s) ability to perform as a police leader,” the chief said.