The settlement in Quyen Pham et al v. City of Garden Grove et al was approved February 9, 1996 by U.S. District Court Judge William Keller of the Central District of California. This is just one of many cases of police harassment of Asian youth in Southern California. Garden Grove lies between Los Angeles and San Diego in Orange County, which has the largest Southeast Asian community outside Asia itself.
The $85,000 settlement in came almost three years after an incident involving three Southeast Asian teenagers, two of them high school honor students. Attired in baggy pants, they were stopped by Garden Grove police at the Euclid Retail Center, a strip mall, an area the police later claimed was frequented by gangs. The teens were questioned about gang affiliations, interviewed for "field interview" cards, and photographed without their permission. In a later incident, one of the girls, Minh Tran, was arrested for failure to carry a green card, even though she is a U.S. citizen and even though federal law only requires adults aliens, not minors, to carry immigration papers. The final settlement covers the three girls as well as two other claimants. The case garnered national attention when CBS Evening News profiled plaintiff Quyen Pham in its "Eye on America" segment back in December, 1993.
The final settlement covers five claimants in all: these girls plus Annie Lee, the third girl stopped with them in the mini-mall who later joined the suit, and two others, Lisa Hinh and Tram -Linh Ho, who were with Tran at a May 1994 Strawberry Festival w hen Garden Grove Police detained them.
The Alliance Working for Asian Rights and Empowerment (AWARE) was actually formed in September 1993 because of this incident. Lee and Tran saw a newspaper article of a 1993 protest against the "Asian Mugbook" practice in neighboring Fountain Valley and c ontacted me. The Fountain Valley Youth Alliance had filed 15 complaints against the police for similar "photo stops" and the Garden Grove case convinced activists that the problem was widespread enough to warrant a county-wide group. We sought support f rom the ACLU, who assisted the three girls in filing a civil complaint with Garden Grove City Hall (an act filmed by the CBS News crew). The ACLU eventually made this a class action lawsuit on behalf of all Southeast Asians or people appearing to be Sout heast Asian.
In settling the lawsuit, Garden Grove PD has issued newly revised "training bulletins" (which have the same legal force as its General Orders) covering field detentions and photography. Officers can now only detain someone if there is "reasonable suspicion" of a crime being committed or about to be, and photographs can only be taken if the person knowingly consents or, when there is no consent, if police are investigating a particular crime. Officers have to detail the grounds for the detention in a five-line narrative on a newly revised field interview card. If a person denies gang membership or affiliation, officers can probe no further on that subject, and must record the denial on the FI card. Officers are also barred from rummaging through a wallet looking for photographs or writings behind the photos or elsewhere in the wallet: They are only allowed to confirm an individual's identity. However, officers are warned that no law requires citizens or alien minors to carry i.d. except when operating a vehicle. Police also eliminated a loose criterion for recording "gang associate" data in the GREAT computer system that tracks gang activity in the Southland. Police Chief Stan Knee also wrote letters of apologies to the plaintiffs and claimants (five in all) and agreed to purge all records (including photographs) relating to the five. Many other photographs taken of other detainees before December 21, 1993, will also be destroyed.
For a period of one year, the ACLU will monitor the records associated with a field detention. Each month, the ACLU can request up to seven days of field detention cards to look at. For any cards that seem problemmatic, the police department is required to notify detainees about their right to seek review, under a new process that can lead to the Chief's Forum, a three-member outside advisory panel (only one of whom can be a city employee), looking over the file.
The settlement, of course, needs to be strictly monitored to ensure compliance by the police. Unfortunately, both ACLU attorneys who argued the case have left the ACLU of Southern California. Robin Toma is now a consultant with the Los Angeles Human Relations Commision, and Mark Silverstein is now the Legal Director of the ACLU Denver office. Garden Grove PD was, under the settlement, supposed to widely publicize the appeals procedures, but there is little evidence of that occurring. The field interview card revised with space for a five-line narrative still uses an archaic term for Asians: "Oriental." Two other Asian groups are specifically identified: Vietnamese and Samoan, even though the population of Samoans in the city is almost non- existent. Moreover, the "outside" panel is not truly a citizens review panel, but one that is hand-picked by the police. It is also only "advisory."
More seriously, the settlement continues to allow police to take photographs, with prior consent, but also without consent if the police are investigating a particular crime. The Alliance Working for Asian Rights, the local grassroots group formed originally to support the three girls photographed, and which took their case to the ACLU, takes the position that such widespread photographing of people of color youth is discriminatory and a barrier to improved community relations with the police. It continues to call for an end to any such photography. Even police asking people if they consent to a photograph is problemmatic: Who is likely to question an officer with a badge and a gun, especially in the middle of the night?
That scenario was highlighted when some half-dozen students at University of California, Irvine, all Asian Americans, complained recently about campus and Irvine and Newport Beach police harrassing them and some even having their pictures taken by city police. One complainant to University authorities said he was followed by undercover police as he was leaving an apartment complex in Irvine, and subsequently pulled over on the freeway by two regular police cars. Irvine police asked about his gang affiliations (he's not a gang member) and then photographed him, over his initial protests.
AWARE, in documents received after making a Public Records Act request, has discovered that the Irvine Police Department devoted a whole paragraph in its training bulletin on photographing field detainees to AWARE. The paragraph states that AWARE is "actively trying to stop police from photographing field detainees", and criticizes its "Know Your Rights" card as "denying" the right of the police to take photographs except under an arrest. In fact, the card allows the cardholder to sign (with parental endorsement as well) that it does not want his or her photograph taken. Created in 1994, over 3,000 cards have now been distributed; the text of the card also appeared in a news story that ran in the Orange County Register.
An AWARE appearance at Irvine City Council to request time on a future agenda to discuss the issue was met with the police chief saying he had not received any complaints, and councillors suggesting that it would be a good time for police to show off its new gang suppression unit. Two councillors, however, later expressed concern over the singling out of AWARE in the police procedure and promised to meet with the police chief over it. Irvine is currently considering not notifying parents when police seek to interview children about gang activity, a recommendation made by a special task force jointly created by the City Council and school board.
The Garden Grove PD settlement, unfortunately, only applies to Garden Grove, and there is no sign that police elsewhere in Orange County are rushing to revise their policies, even though Bruce Praet, the private attorney representing the Garden Grove PD, also represents many other police departments in the county. AWARE remains the only organization acting as Police Watch in Orange County.
A version of this essay originally appeared in Policing by Consent, April 1996, pp. 8-9, with the following notation: Daniel Tsang co-founded AWARE with JoAnne Kanshige, whose son was misidentified from a police photo and jailed for almost a year before being acquitted in a shooting case, and (with) community organizer Q.T. Nguyen. A social science bibliographer at UC Irvine, he also hosts Subversity weekly on KUCI, 88.9 FM. He's been active in anti-surveillance work for several decades, including work with the Public Eye network in the 1980's and CovertAction Information Bulletin (now Quarterly). Reach hm at AWARE, PO Box 28977, Santa Ana, CA 92799-8977, (949) 597-9766 or via e-mail at awaredt@hotmail.com. AWARE's web page address is http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware.htm.
To reach Tsang's home page, click here: Tsang