Police Mug Files of Asian-Americans Hit : Law enforcement: Youths say albums are harassment and have complained to the Fountain Valley department that they are wrongly accused of being gang members.

FOUNTAIN VALLEY —  A common police practice of compiling photos and records of people they suspect to be gang members is drawing criticism from some local Asian-Americans who contend that it is harassment and unfairly stereotypes many young men.

About 15 young men have filed complaints with Fountain Valley police, contending that officers have wrongly accused them of being gang members and taken their photographs without consent for a police “mug” file.

Fountain Valley police declined to discuss the complaints, but Police Chief Elvin Miali said that his department, like many in Orange County, uses the photos to track gang members. Police said the mug shots are a valuable tool in fighting increased criminal activity by gangs in Orange County.

In Fountain Valley, police say these pictures are taken only with the verbal consent of the person being photographed or during an arrest.

But those who question the practice say that police do not request permission to take photos and that some Asian-American youths are being unfairly branded as gang members. Critics say the practice infringes on people’s civil rights.

“They’re trying to say Asian is synonymous to gang, “ said JoAnn Kanshige, whose sons have filed complaints against the Fountain Valley Police Department. “These kids are dressed as well as the hakujin (Caucasian) kids, yet the Asian kids seem to be pulled over more often.”

Kanshige’s sons, Mark, 25, and Jason, 18, say they have been stopped by officers without probable cause. They and about a dozen others have formed a grass-roots group, the Orange County Asian-American Youth Alliance, to address the issue.

The group has begun circulating a petition calling for Fountain Valley police to halt photographing youths in public without making an arrest. It also calls for the release of the police mug files.

The alliance has the support of some established community organizations, including the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations and the local chapter of the Japanese-American Citizens League. In addition, attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union are trying to gain access to the police files on the group members.

“We do think the rights of young men, particularly young minority men, have been abused by the practice of putting their photos in a police mug book,” said Paul Hoffman, legal director for the ACLU of Southern California.

It is legal for police to take photos of people in the field as long as they have probable cause. The police said they follow a set of criteria to determine whether a person warrants a picture.

“We have to suspect some type of criminal activity,” said Capt. Scott Jordan of the Garden Grove Police Department. “We can’t just stop some guy walking down the street.”

Some law enforcement scholars wonder whether such an aggressive police tactic could backfire.

By wrongly branding someone a gang member, “all you’re doing is forcing them into a gang because the gangs are treating them better than the police,” said Wilbur Rykert, director of the National Crime Institute at the University of Louisville.

Critics of the practice cite a case in San Jose, where police had compiled an all-Asian mug book to help solve a rash of violent home invasions in the Vietnamese community. The book was scrapped last year after community leaders denounced it as illegal and racially insensitive.

But the abolishment did not come soon enough for Ted Nguyen, a self-employed construction contractor who was picked out of the photo album by a victim of a home robbery.

The 27-year-old San Jose man was acquitted after a jury trial, but not before he spent three months in jail because he could not raise $500,000 bail.

Under cross-examination, the victim admitted that she was not certain that Nguyen was the assailant. The defendant also offered a reason why he could not have committed the crime: He was getting medical treatment for an eye injury at the time.

Nguyen is suing San Jose and its Police Department for unspecified damages, contending that his constitutional rights were violated and that his reputation was ruined.

Miali said the Fountain Valley department’s mug file is kept for gang intelligence and identification purposes only, and is not shown to the public. Only booking photographs, taken after a person is arrested, are shown to victims, Miali said.