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Judge Backs Westminster in Video Store Suit

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

A former Westminster video-store owner who prompted massive demonstrations by displaying a Vietnamese flag and a portrait of communist leader Ho Chi Minh in his shop two years ago has lost a legal challenge of the city’s response.

U.S. District Court Judge Carlos R. Moreno this week granted the city’s motion to quash the lawsuit filed last year by Truong Van Tran. The court concluded that Tran’s constitutional rights were not violated, the judge wrote in an 11-page decision released Thursday.

Neither Tran nor his lawyer could be reached for comment.

The former Little Saigon shopkeeper became the center of controversy in early 1999 when a display of the Vietnamese flag and poster of Ho inside his shop sparked 53 days of protests by crowds numbering as many as 15,000, mostly Vietnamese refugees angry over deaths, imprisonments and family separations caused by the communist takeover of South Vietnam. Police, sometimes in riot gear, made 52 arrests over seven weeks and racked up more than $200,000 in overtime.

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The saga ended in March when Westminster police entered Tran’s shop to investigate theft of the communist items and discovered 15,000 illegally duplicated videotapes and more than 100 videocassette recorders. Tran, who eventually lost his business, was later convicted of video piracy and sentenced to 90 days in jail.

In his lawsuit, filed a year later, Tran accused the city of Westminster and Police Chief James Cook, among others, of violating his constitutional right to free speech by failing to protect him adequately from the protesters.

Moreno wrote in his ruling that the evidence, “even when interpreted generously, hardly permits the conclusion that the officers were negligent let alone reckless or deliberately indifferent.”

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