- #VIETNAM PHOTO POLICE CHIEF DRIVERS#
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I was 18 years old and helping my dad pay rent,” Vu said.īut the summer after his senior year, he got a job as an aide at the Garden Grove Police Department and was assigned to help a court liaison. “I didn’t get the chance to think of big dreams, like going to fancy colleges and becoming this or that. His experience with poverty led Vu to pick one of the most practical of all possible futures: He would study biology at UC Irvine and become a chiropractor. He and his brothers and sisters helped pay the rent, did their own laundry and cooked their own meals, usually spaghetti, or Spam and rice or ramen. At home he translated medical reports, insurance payments and utility bills for his father. While Vu’s sisters went to parties and shopped for stylish clothes, Vu worked.
“He had to become the man of the house,” Maidyne said. After his older siblings moved out and with six kids still at home, everyone looked to Vu.
#VIETNAM PHOTO POLICE CHIEF FULL#
Vu’s father quit his job to take care of her full time. When Vu was in the fifth grade, his mother suffered a stroke. “You learned very early that work is the only way to get what you want,” Vu said. When he needed clothes for the high school dance, he worked extra shifts. When he made the basketball team, he had to buy his own shoes. “When he wants something, he just puts 110% and gets it.” Everyone in the household was responsible for themselves at an early age, said his older sister Maidyne. Then he sold clothes at Ross Dress for Less. Then he sold VCRs at another sister’s video store. Next, he mixed salsa and rolled tacos at Naugles, a now-defunct taco chain. Then he stocked refrigerators at his sister’s liquor store. He did well, and it became a paper route. His second job came at age 12, selling newspaper subscriptions door to door. After the work was finished, they’d gather around the dinner table, read from the Bible and sing. He does not recall what they were making, only that the family was paid by the weight, and whatever the pay was, it wasn’t much. After doing homework, Vu and his siblings would gather in the living room and spend hours inserting a black plastic piece into another rubber piece. Vu’s first job was helping his mother assemble odds and ends for her manufacturing job. With so many mouths to feed, all the children worked from an early age, Vu said.
Vu was age 3.Īfter short stays in temporary homes in Guam and Camp Pendleton, they landed in Orange County, where they eventually settled into a modest home in Westminster. The family of 13, desperate to escape the turmoil of the Vietnam War, fled onto the open ocean and floated for two weeks before a Navy warship picked them up. Vu’s journey to police chief began on his father’s fishing boat in the choppy waters of the South China Sea off Vietnam. Timothy Vu, a 23-year veteran of the Westminster Police Department, was named chief of the Alhambra Police Department in April. It’s a job that he’s been training for ever since he was a boy in Orange County, the eighth of 11 children in a family of Vietnamese refugees. Police work, Vu believes, is about shouldering a multitude of modest and sometimes monotonous responsibilities. “The best thing we can do is get out of our car and explain.” “Ninety-five percent of this job is just talking to people,” said Vu, 46.
#VIETNAM PHOTO POLICE CHIEF CRACK#
Among other goals, Vu wants to improve pedestrian safety, crack down on vehicle theft and identity fraud, and engage the community - objectives that will require officers to educate the public, show their faces in the community and get used to getting out of their police cruisers. His goals as chief aren’t sexy, but they befit the busy San Gabriel Valley town of about 85,000 with relatively low rates of violent crime. That made him, very likely, the first Vietnamese American police chief in the nation. Vu, a 23-year veteran of the Westminster Police Department, was named chief of the Alhambra Police Department in April.
#VIETNAM PHOTO POLICE CHIEF DRIVERS#
He’s staring down one of the city’s most pernicious public safety issues - a long line of cars snaking down a two-lane road for nearly half a mile, frustrating drivers and endangering pedestrians. Timothy Vu grips the wheel of a police cruiser and casts a grim gaze south on Atlantic Boulevard in Alhambra.
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