Point / Counterpoint : The Issue: Screening the Crowds at Magic Mountain : AGAINST

Magic Mountain’s screening of what it calls potential troublemakers and gangs from its crowds is being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union. In April the ACLU filed a lawsuit alleging that four Latins were unjustly barred from the Valencia amusement park. The suit came after a Christian youth group charged that guards searched them because they are black. At The Times’s request, Magic Mountain and the ACLU have written about the issue. Defending the policy is Joseph R. Schillaci, president to the park. Against it is Carol Sobel, staff attorney for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

Summer holidays and vacations are coming up, and for many that means outings to local amusement parks. Unfortunately, those planning a day at Magic Mountain may be in for more than they bargained.

Last year, four Latino cousins from Hawthorne planned an Easter Sunday trip to the park with a visiting cousin from Mexico. Their trip to Magic Mountain was the final step on a weekend long tour of area tourist attractions

But for these young people, their day at Magic Mountain turned out to be anything but a vacation.

Driving up in their van, they heard security guards single them out immediately. What had they done? Nothing. To the guards, however, they were a “bunch of Mexicans” and that, apparently, is enough to create suspicion at Magic Mountain. Their “crime” was that they looked like everybody’s stereotypical image of Latino youth and therefore might be gang members.

So, based solely on this, they were pulled out of line, taken behind a wall with their arms twisted behind their backs and subjected to a lengthy and humiliating search.

Ignoring the groups’s persistent denials of any gang involvement, parks guards maintained that Latino youths from Hawthorne had to be members of a gang. What did the search turn up? No weapons, no drugs, no unruly behavior. Nothing, unless you consider a 13-year old boy in a polo shirt with an alligator emblem on the front and his bicycle club’s name on the back worthy of suspicion. And yet the Hernandez family was barred from entering Magic Mountain.

When they arrived home in their neighborhood, their friends and family naturally wondered why they had returned so soon. But when they explained, it came as no surprise. It seems this was not an unusual experience for Latinos from Hawthorne who go to Magic Mountain.

In recent weeks, calls have come in to the American Civil Liberties Union’s offices from others who were treated with the same suspicion. All the calls were from blacks of Latinos, and all reported seeing only other blacks or Latinos being searched.

The callers all expressed a common desire that gang violence be stopped but drew the line at submitting to police-state tactics every time they ventured out of “their neighborhoods.”

Sadly, we are becoming a society increasingly divided geographically by class and race. However, the use of so-called “gang-identifier” profiles only exacerbates these divisions, adding a layer of stereotyping based on dress and presumed associations. It stigmatizes blacks because they look like blacks, Latinos because they look like Latinos. What’s the crime?

Whatever legitimacy such profiles might have in alerting law-enforcement personnel to potential criminal activity is lost in the hands of amateurs simply seeking to identify “troublemakers” and prevent them from entering the amusement park.

What do you look for? Race? Dress? Mannerisms? It just might work in only we could count on gang members to look and act like gang members and not like anyone else.

For example, baseball caps were once the province of Dodger fans and anyone who wanted to shade their eyes from the sun. Now, it is one of the first items mentioned on the list of gang-identifiers. The same is true of jeans.

The problem is illustrated by other recent reports of discriminatory treatment at Magic Mountain. Just a few weeks ago, nine black males were singled out for a particularly humiliating search at Magic Mountain. The boys and one of their counselors were part of a larger contingent visiting the park from a Christian youth group in San Diego. But only the black males fit the “gang-identifier” profile.

How were they dressed? A newspaper photographer showed a group that looked like any other group on an outing to Magic Mountain: jeans, sneakers, jackets and sweaters. As one of the youths described, “like Bill Cosby would wear.”

What’s wrong with all of this preventive action? Shouldn’t a business have the right, even an obligation to provide a safe environment? Of course it does. But it does not have the rightto exclude someone or search anyone just because it doesn’t like how they look.

In another recent call to the ACLU, that is exactly what was reported. About six boys out of 40 youths from a South Central Los Angeles group were stopped as they got off their bus and started to enter the park. When one of the adults traveling with the group asked why they could not come in, park guards responded that they just did not like their looks. No search, no unruly behavior. No reason at all. However the six were wearing baseball caps: They are all members of a community baseball league.

As a nation, we have lived through repeated periods in our history when fear seemingly justified suppression of an individual’s human rights based on some generalized group suspicion. The most recent, and perhaps most shameful, example was the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Our collective conscience now understands that to have been wrong.

In a criminal context, these practices would be rejected, as well. A decade ago, San Francisco police instituted a practice of stopping and questioning every black man to find the “zebra” killer. The courts said “no” to that practice. In condemning such tactics, the courts emphasized that individualized suspicion is the foundation of our system of liberty. The fear that some members of a particular ethnic or racial group are suspected of criminal activity does not create an invitation to suspend the rights of all members of those groups.

We must begin responding to our concerns over violence with reason, not fear.

There are reasonable alternatives for a large amusement park concerned with keeping out weapons. One which does not lend itself to subjective racial and ethnic bias would be to require everyone to go through a metal-detection system, as in an airport. If park officials believe alleged gang members are coming from a specific neighborhood, they can ask for identification first. And of course, the park still has the right to search anyone park officials reasonably believe is about to or has engaged in disruptive conduct.

But it is unreasonable to exclude someone or single that person out for a search based on suspicions that are, at best, suspect. Our state civil rights law, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, ensures that each of us will be free from such arbitrary discrimination in business establishments. Nothing less.

So far as the American Civil Liberties Union is concerned, checking in your privacy and your pride is too high a price for admission to Magic Mountain.