Parents, Leaders Assail Police Photos of Youths

About 100 parents, youths and civic leaders gathered at a Vietnamese community center here Saturday to protest the police practice of photographing Asian youths and others for gang “mug” files and find out how to protect their constitutional rights.

“There’s a lot of stereotyping. Police base who they stop on the clothes, which is really unfair to us. It’s just a fashion, like bell bottoms,” said Jeff Huang, 19, of Huntington Beach.

Huang, an Orange Coast College student, recently joined the Alliance for Asian Rights and Responsibilities, which sponsored Saturday’s “Copwatch” forum.

The gathering came in the wake of a class-action federal lawsuit filed last month against the City of Garden Grove and its Police Department on behalf of two Vietnamese American girls.

The girls say they were stopped and photographed solely because of their baggy clothes--a police practice that community activists say is on the rise and smacks of discrimination. Police counter that the mug books have helped solve crimes, and say they only stop and photograph youths if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that the teens are affiliated with a gang.

Forum organizers said they hoped to set up a countywide “Copwatch” network to monitor police activities, and form support groups for Asian parents, as well as high-school age youths who might be photographed.

They also passed out wallet-size cards Saturday instructing youths that they have the right to say “no” if police officers attempt to photograph them without making an arrest.

The card advises youths to report all such incidents to the alliance, known as AWARE, and is inscribed on the back with this declaration: “I do NOT give permission to police or other law enforcement personnel to take any photographs of me.” The card has a space for a signature, and a parent’s signature if the youth is under 18.

“In school they’re taught to say ‘no’ to drugs. Well, we’re asking them to say ‘no’ to police abuse,” said Daniel Tsang, a founding member of the group, which grew last September out of a Fountain Valley organization formed to fight that Police Department’s mug book policy.

Tsang said the card will work better than merely requesting police to seek parental permission before photographing youths, because, he said, “Asian parents would just give police permission,” believing that their children must have done something to warrant the police stop.

Sitting at a table draped by a banner emblazoned “End Racist Mug Files,” Van Pham, the mother of Tustin High School honor student Quyen Pham--one of the two girls who sued last month--appealed to audience members to support their children.

She told parents who gathered at the offices of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California to teach their children that they do not have to consent to be photographed.

“Something is not right,” Pham said. “Even after they screened my daughter on the computer and it came up clear, they still photographed her. . . . We are trying to change the policy for innocent, good kids.”

Organizers stressed that the community remains indebted to police officers for their services, but people resent what they see as tendencies to stereotype all Asians as either model minorities or gang members.

“It’s not an anti-police issue. It’s an anti-policy issue,” said JoAnn Kanshige, who founded the Fountain Valley group that gave rise to AWARE after her 20-year-old son was photographed by police two years ago.

Kanshige said all minority groups are affected by the photo policy, practiced by police departments in some Orange County cities, including Garden Grove, Westminster and Fountain Valley.

On Kanshige’s invitation, members of the Latino community also attended Saturday’s forum, which was supported by Los Amigos of Orange County, the Mexican American Legal and Educational Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among other groups.

Javier Cortez of the Chicano Poets Society addressed the group, which had thinned to about 20 people by the end of the afternoon, with a fierce poem he titled “Miranda Forgot One.” The one neglected Miranda right, his poem declared, was the “right to say ‘no’ ” to a mug file Polaroid.

Woo Song, a 20-year-old economics and political science major at UC Irvine, called the event “eye-opening.”

He said he understands how the photos can be helpful to the police, but he said the mistrust the policy is fomenting in the community outweighs any potential benefits.

“I think just because of the trust issue, it’s something that needs to be stopped,” he said.

Others echoed that sentiment, saying that “good” youths have become embittered toward police and mainstream society by the photo stops.

“When a child is thinking he’s the proper student, the proper citizen, and then is told, ‘No, you’re not,’ what kind of psychological effect will that have on a child?” said John Hirano, executive director of the Westminster-based Asian-Pacific Leadership Council, who brought his younger sister and brother to the event.

“I think there’s a possibility of deep psychological core problems. I think it could lead kids into doing bad.”

Huang, the Orange Coast College student, agreed.

“They’re really rude to us,” he said. “That’s why our attitude toward police is bad. If none of this had gone on, we wouldn’t feel this way.”