O.C. Girl Challenges Police Photo Policy : Lawsuit: Attorneys contend youths’ attire, race made them targets of mug shots for gang file.

Ordinarily this is the frantic time of year when Tustin High School honor student Quyen Pham is hunched over exams. But Thursday morning she stood outside a towering courthouse with a timid smile full of braces and cheeks stained by tears.

She was little taller than the television microphones before her, dressed in baggy, black hip-hop pants, with a crushed blue velvet ponytail band, and a vogue “MTV” fashion look that her lawyers argue has thrust her into a pitched legal battle over constitutional rights, challenging an Orange County police department’s gang-busting strategy of photographing suspicious-looking youths.

“I used to look up to police officers,” said Pham, 16, whose photo, along with those of two of her girlfriends, is stored somewhere in a Garden Grove police file. “I thought they were here to protect us. But just because of the way we look and are dressed they’re accusing us of being gang members.

“I’m a good student,” she said. “I care about the environment. Just because I dress baggy does not mean I am a bad person.”

So Thursday, Pham’s retinue of lawyers--backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Alliance for Children’s Rights and law firms from Los Angeles and Philadelphia--took on the city of Garden Grove and its Police Department by filing a class-action federal lawsuit to halt the practice of snapping Polaroids of suspected gang members.

They are also seeking the return of the girls’ photographs, along with the destruction of all photos and information police collected during the disputed detentions.

“The Garden Grove police have gone too far,” said Robin Toma, an ACLU staff attorney. “By treating Southeast Asian youngsters as gangbangers just because they’re Asian and dress baggy, they rely on very dangerous racial stereotyping. . . . It teaches a civics lesson with the wrong message: Police can treat you as criminals and get away with it as long as they do it under the guise of fighting gangs.”

Some Orange County police departments have been photographing people they regard with suspicion since the 1970s, but the practice has become even more widespread as the estimated gang population has mushroomed to more than 16,800.

In Garden Grove’s case, police officers are required to have some “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity before taking photographs. Some photos have been used later to solve crimes, according to top police officials, who have declined to discuss Pham’s complaint because of the pending litigation.

Garden Grove City Councilman Ho Chung, the only member of Asian descent on the council, said police officials have assured the city that they are not targeting Asians for photo stops.

“What police told me is that sometimes, parents do not know their children are involved in gang activity. Sometimes it’s really hard to distinguish who’s in a gang. There may be some cases where mistakes are made, and that is absolutely wrong. But in most cases that’s just not true,” Chung said.

Quyen Pham’s brush with Garden Grove police dates back to a July evening when she and her friend, Annie Lee, and fellow plaintiff, Minh Tram Tran, went to Garden Grove to take part in karaoke singing at the Cafe Chu Lun, a mini-mall restaurant that serves nothing stronger than fruit shakes and iced coffee.

But they were quickly disappointed with the older crowd there. The girls said they left the cafe about 7 p.m., heading for a public telephone to call a friend while they waited for a ride home. In soft voices, they related what happened next as if reciting a history lesson.

“Then the police drove up in an unmarked car,” recalled Tran. “They sat us down on the curb.”

“And then they asked what were we doing there, what trouble did we want to cause,” added Pham.

“And I asked them, ‘Why are you detaining us?’ ” said Tran. “I mean, I was upset and I was like scared.”

Repeatedly, the girls said they denied they were gang members, but the answers were always treated with skepticism. “They said, ‘Yeah, well, if you walk like a duck and talk like a duck, then you must be duck.’ And we’re like: We’re not ducks,” said Tran.

Before the encounter was through, the girls said they were ordered to stand against a wall where they were each photographed with a Polaroid camera. The police, they said, also took down information about their age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, home addresses and the schools they attended. None of the girls was ever charged with a crime or cited in connection with the stop.

Since then, Tran was stopped a second time--at a Taco Bell in Garden Grove in January, when she said she was again accused of being a gang member. No charges were filed in connection with that incident.

But Tran said she cannot forget the words of an officer who she said scoffed at her complaints that he had no right to rummage through her purse and page through her personal telephone book. “He goes: ‘You have a problem with this?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And he goes: ‘If you have a problem with this, then don’t come to my city.’ ”

Tran said she replied: “This isn’t your city. This is America.”