Community Essay : Is ‘Innocent Until Proven Guilty’ a Lost Principle? : Taking photos of teens and linking them to gangs because of what they’re wearing reveals lack of sensitivity by police.

Hysteria over gangs, including Asian ones, has reached epidemic proportions in Southern California. In Orange County, supervisors have begun planning a “summit” to fight gangs. Westminster has begun enforcing a judge’s order banning gang members from associating with each other. This has the unforeseen, if ludicrous, consequence of barring biological brothers who live under the same roof from publicly hanging out together.

Fountain Valley police have detained and photographed Asian youths merely on suspicion that they belong to gangs or are “gang associates.” And Monterey Park police crossed county lines to raid a Japanese-American household in Fountain Valley at dawn, handcuffing the whole family outdoors while seeking to arrest one son.

Both Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and Westminster Councilman Tony Lam have called for swift deportation of any refugee gang member convicted of any major crime.

Recently, a group of Asian-Americans--including many youngsters--protested at a Fountain Valley City Council meeting over its police department’s alleged practice of keeping a “mug book” on Asian-American youths who have never been arrested. Although City Atty. Alan Burns denied the existence of such a mug book, he conceded that the police have the photos in a “gang file” containing almost 600 names. He called it “vigorous law enforcement.”

What happened to the principle of “innocent until proven guilty?” Since when has gang membership or association become a crime? Law enforcement of the sort practiced in Fountain Valley is more indicative of a police state than a democracy that values constitutional safeguards of free association and equal protection under the law.

The fact that Fountain Valley police modified their procedure this year after community protests does not make any difference. (Police there now supposedly ask kids to sign a card giving their consent to be photographed.) Innocent kids will still be terrified of the police; how many will say “no” to an officer? Besides, since when have kids had the legal right to consent? All photos of minors taken with such consent forms are illegal and must be purged.

A day after the Fountain Valley protest, two Southeast-Asian teen-agers telephoned me, saying that they and another girl had been questioned by police, this time in Garden Grove, and photographed, apparently because they wore “baggy clothes,” which many police identify with gang members.

If police have to take mug shots of Asian-Americans because they cannot tell us apart, then local police need to seriously think about sending their gang units back to school to learn vernacular languages and begin diversifying. Fountain Valley, for example, has only three Asia/Pacific-American officers out of 61 sworn personnel. The Orange County anti-gang “summit” planned for November will not succeed if Asians perceive the effort to be racist.

The rationale for the need to “document” gang members appears in an unpublished 30-page report on “Asian Gangs in Little Saigon: Identification and Methods of Operation,” although the writer never specifically mentions using photographs as a law-enforcement technique.

In it, the author, Westminster Police Detective Mark Nye, pointedly warns that “female gang members in some cases dress very similar to male gang members. They will wear baggy, loose-fitting clothing, baggy pants, oversized shirts, usually untucked, and in some cases baseball caps.” He also warned that in some cases, Asian female gang members “can be mistakenly identified as males.”

As a commuter who regularly drives through Fountain Valley on my way to Little Saigon, I would not want to be pulled over and photographed merely because I am an Asian-American wearing a baseball cap. Basing police work on stereotypes is hardly professional behavior. And taking photographs of innocent people is hardly cost-effective. And cluttering a crime database with irrelevant information is unproductive.

Seemingly, not only do Asians all look alike, cops can’t tell us apart and therefore need to take our photos. And here’s the latest justification: Asians look androgynous. Police can’t tell who’s male or female.

There is no evidence that mug shots of innocent people will deter crime or cut down on gang membership. In fact, the San Jose Police Department stopped using a mug book after the Vietnamese community protested that an innocent man, Ted Nguyen, was jailed for three months for a crime he did not commit. He had been misidentified by a witness from his photo in the department’s mug book.

There is another civil-liberties concern. The kids who called me about being photographed were told by friends who were arrested later that same evening for curfew violations that their photos had been posted on a Garden Grove police bulletin board. Who else has seen the photos of these purported gangsters?

With police hooking up electronically from their patrol cars to the National Crime Information Center database that will soon carry digitalized images of crime suspects, will mug shots of these kids be sent nationwide on the FBI computer?

It appears that high-tech Orange County is fast becoming the dossier capital of America. We must put a stop to this. Let’s speak out, at least for the sake of our youth.