The Culture of Impunity, Violence, and Aggression in Việt Nam's Law Enforcement

“Working in Việt Nam's prisons, this is bound to happen.”

The case of Lê Quốc Tuấn, a police officer in Hồ Chí Minh City suspected of shooting five people dead, has forced a difficult conversation in Việt Nam. Many agreed with the sentiment, arguing that those working in the police force tend to think of violence first. Others disagreed, calling such generalizations sweeping and lacking solid evidence.

Still, this line of thought raises an intriguing and necessary question: Does the professional environment of the police force cultivate a more aggressive temperament? Lacking a specific study on Việt Nam, a look at global research on the working conditions and psychological impacts of policing can provide a crucial starting point for an answer.

The “Shoot First, Ask Later” Training Model

First, it must be said: police tendencies to rely on force are not unique to Việt Nam.

In the U.S., for example, a 2014 incident saw a Black man named John Crawford shot dead by police in a Walmart. He had been examining a non-lethal BB gun he picked up from a shelf. While the media focused on racial tensions, some pointed to another overlooked factor: police training.

Journalist Joshua Holland, writing for The Nation, noted that the officer who killed Crawford had recently undergone training that promoted a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach when dealing with armed suspects. The program taught that intervention must be “fast, surprising, and aggressively proactive,” and even instructed officers to imagine the suspect threatening their own family. The officer followed his training to the letter; surveillance footage showed Crawford was killed just seconds after police stormed the store.

These revelations alarmed researchers. The Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, surveyed 280 police departments and confirmed that training was heavily skewed toward combat. On average, cadets received 129 hours of training in defensive and offensive tactics like firearms and batons, but only 24 hours in practical decision-making and 48 hours on use-of-force policies.

Even more telling, according to The Washington Post, cadets received just eight hours of training in crisis intervention, stress management, and de-escalation techniques. Without political will or civilian oversight, the natural tendency to resort to force remains entrenched.

These findings provide a useful basis for examining Việt Nam. What does the Việt Nam People’s Police Academy curriculum include? How many hours are devoted to stress management and non-violent techniques? This would be a strong starting point for analyzing why officers may so often think, “How can I subdue the suspect?” and rarely, “How can I de-escalate the situation to ensure that no one gets hurt?”

At present, information on training programs for the Vietnamese police is treated almost like a state secret. Addressing transparency and public access to such information would be the first necessary step.

The Impact of Workplace Stress on Police Mental Health

Another often overlooked dimension of research into police aggression is the officers’ mental health.

A UK study by professors at the University of Glasgow found that policing comes with an exceptionally stressful work environment. Beyond usual workplace pressures, officers also face direct dangers to their life and health. The research concluded that such conditions heighten risks of stress, anxiety, depression, emotional numbness, and suicidal thoughts which can partly explain the violent behavior of some officers.

In Việt Nam, police abuse is well-documented. The picture above details an incident in 2019, where officers in Tuy Hòa, Phú Yên were filmed assaulting a citizen inside their police station.

Dutch sociologists have also provided important insights. In a classic study, researchers Nicolien Kop, Martin Euwema, and Wilmar Schaufeli found that police violence often extends beyond working hours, highlighting the concept of “occupational burnout.”

According to the study, this is a state where officers become emotionally exhausted and cynical. Repeated exposure to crime and the minutiae of policing gradually erodes empathy, and citizens begin to be viewed as depersonalized objects, lowering the threshold for violence. Emotional exhaustion also diminishes an officer's willingness to seek cooperative solutions, making them more likely to rely on force.

These studies provide a theoretical framework for Vietnamese researchers to examine how police work pressures affect officers’ psychological health, and how this, in turn, fuels violent tendencies.

Police Violence Without Accountability

A particularly pressing issue in Việt Nam is the sense of impunity within the police force—a phenomenon sometimes compared to “kiêu binh,” or arrogant soldiers. While this observation is anecdotal, it is fueled by a stark reality: unlawful police violence often goes unpunished, effectively encouraging its continuation.

Numerous suspicious deaths have occurred in temporary detention centers, only to be officially attributed to suicide or illness—despite families reporting visible bruises and signs of beatings. Even in cases with overwhelming evidence, such as the incident in Ninh Thuận where five officers beat a detainee to death, accountability has been minimal. The officers were charged not with murder but with “using corporal punishment,” a lesser crime carrying a maximum penalty of only seven years. 

More recently, in late March 2024, during a police raid on the indigenous Khmer Krom at Tro Nom Sek Pagoda in Vĩnh Long, officers arrested four monks and reportedly dragged “Venerable Dương Khải from the temple by force and beat him.” Violent beatings and torture were also used to extract confessions from death row inmates Nguyễn Văn Chưởng and Lê Văn Mạnh, both of whom have always maintained their innocence. In his letters, Nguyễn Văn Chưởng alleged that Hải Phòng police stripped him naked, hung him upside-down, and brutally beat him to force a confession.

Unsurprisingly, state media deny these claims. This is consistent with a broader pattern where thousands of torture allegations surface every year without any meaningful investigation or resolution. It is entirely plausible that the judicial system’s persistent tolerance of police misconduct has played a direct role in fostering the very violent tendencies it should be preventing.

Breaking the Cycle of Violence

Ultimately, the problem is not that Việt Nam’s police are uniquely violent, but that the system around them rewards aggression and shields it from scrutiny. A profession built on authority but deprived of accountability will, over time, confuse obedience with justice and control with safety. When acts of brutality are dismissed as “occupational hazards,” and when victims’ families are met with silence instead of truth, violence ceases to be an exception; it becomes institutional culture. Genuine reform must confront the deeper architecture that normalizes abuse: secretive training programs, opaque investigations, and the near-total absence of independent oversight. 

Until Việt Nam dares to face that truth, every new case of police brutality will remain a grim inevitability, a cycle of perpetual violence that traps both police officers and the citizens they are meant to serve.

Võ Văn Quản wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on Jan. 31, 2020. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.