Police Excess

During arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court over Edward Lawson’s challenge to the California vagrancy statute, Justice Byron R. White pointed to an earlier high court decision that police may not request identification from persons whom they have no reason to suspect of criminal activity. “There is a constitutional right to anonymity,” White said.

The San Diego Police Department apparently doesn’t think so. Its gang detail has a practice of stopping and photographing Vietnamese youths on the streets or in places where they congregate. Without making any arrests, police sometimes require the youths to remove their shirts and be photographed front and back.

Balancing the rights of the individual with the rights of the general population to be protected from crime is often difficult. But this seems like a clear case of the police singling out one segment of the population for different treatment, if not harassment. It certainly strains the imagination to think that a white businessman in coat and tie would be told to strip to the waist on a public street to be photographed by the police.