Garden Grove Settlement Restricts Police Photographing of Detainees

Settling a federal lawsuit over tactics police use to fight gangs, the Garden Grove Police Department has agreed not to take photographs of people they detain unless they have the person’s permission or provide a written record of why they suspect the person of criminal activity.

In addition, the Police Department will pay $85,000 to five young Asian Americans who claimed that the practice of photographing suspected gang members in street encounters violated their civil rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of young Vietnamese Americans residing in the area of Orange County known as Little Saigon after two high school honor students complained that police had snapped their pictures, then falsely accused them of being gang members, solely because of their ancestry and their fondness for baggy pants and tight-fitting blouses. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, but reassigned to a Los Angeles judge.

Under the settlement, the Garden Grove department will allow people who have had their pictures taken involuntarily to challenge the police action and have their pictures purged from police files if their challenge is upheld. If a challenge is denied by the police chief, it automatically will be forwarded to a three-member panel that will review the decision.

Although both sides have agreed to the terms of the settlement, U. S. District Judge William D. Keller in Los Angeles on Monday delayed its final approval, stating that he wanted the parties to submit briefs about his role in approving the agreement.

Attorneys for both the ACLU and the Police Department praised the new procedures, saying they would protect people’s constitutional rights but allow police to continue efforts to suppress violent street gangs.

“Before this settlement, innocent people were being caught in the net,” said Mark Silverstein, an ACLU lawyer who helped craft the agreement ending the suit. “The new procedures will instead focus the attention on the people who are actually committing gang-related crimes.”

Bruce Praet, a lawyer who represented the Garden Grove department, said the lawsuit was monitored by police agencies throughout California. “A lot of other police departments in the state can now use this settlement to tailor their policies,” said Praet, who represents about three dozen police departments in the state.

Police departments across the nation for decades have photographed people they regard with suspicion, but the practice of stopping suspected gang members and taking their pictures has become more widespread as the gang population has mushroomed.

Police officers long have been required to have “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity before taking someone’s photograph, but the Garden Grove settlement adds the requirement that they provide a written explanation.

Monday’s settlement involved a lawsuit filed on behalf of Minh Tram Tran and Quyen Pham, who were both 15 in July 1993 when police took their pictures outside a Garden Grove shopping strip where they were waiting for a ride.

The girls said investigators accused them of wanting to cause trouble and ordered them to stand against a wall where they were each photographed with a Polaroid camera. The police, they said, took down their age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, home addresses and schools. Neither of the girls was ever charged with a crime or cited in connection with the stop.

The girls took their case to the ACLU, which decided to challenge the Police Department’s practices. Three other youths also were brought into the lawsuit as plaintiffs.

Under the settlement, the five will receive letters from Garden Grove Police Chief Stanley Knee apologizing for “any misunderstanding or inconvenience your contact with our department might have caused.”

Praet, the Police Department’s attorney, said the department’s decision to settle was “purely [a question of] economics.”

Praet said ACLU lawyers had put thousands of documents relating to police stops by Garden Grove officers “under a microscope.”

“With this as a potential class-action suit, if a jury had at some point decided that even 1% of these cases did not meet the reasonable suspicion standard [to justify a stop], then we could be facing some damages,” he said.