HONOLULU — A police captain on the Hawaii island of Kauai has filed a lawsuit alleging his police chief discriminated against him for being Japanese American, including an episode when the chief squinted his eyes, bowed repeatedly and said he couldn’t trust Japanese people.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu last week names Police Chief Todd Raybuck, Kauai County, the Kauai Police Department, the Kauai Police Commission and multiple unnamed individuals to be determined.
The police commission in April suspended Raybuck without pay for five days for making discriminatory comments after an investigation found he mocked people of Asian descent.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, 55-year-old Paul Applegate, is part Japanese and has worked for the police department since 2000.
His lawsuit alleges multiple instances of Raybuck — who became Kauai’s police chief in 2019 after he retired from 27 years as a police officer in Las Vegas — squinting his eyes at Applegate and mocking Asians.
The lawsuit alleges the department internally announced a white officer had been selected as assistant chief of the administrative and technical bureau even though no formal selection process had taken place. When Applegate applied for the job anyway, Raybuck interviewed him one-on-one even though prior department practice called for two people to conduct such interviews.
When Applegate met with Raybuck afterward to discuss the selection process, criteria and scoring, the lawsuit said the chief mocked the appearance of Japanese people.
“Chief Raybuck proceeded to squint his eyes and repeatedly bow to plaintiff, stating that he could not trust Japanese people because they do not always tell the truth,” the lawsuit said. “He then stated that the Western culture ‘tells it like it us,’ whereas the Japanese culture says ‘yes, yes, yes’ to your face even when they think the person’s idea is stupid.”
Alden Alayvilla, a spokesperson for Kauai County, said the county was unable to comment because of pending litigation. Coco Zickos, a spokesperson for the police department, and Raybuck said neither could comment because of pending litigation.
