ACLU Stance on Camera-Toting Cops Warrants Support

Those “traditional values” people over at the ACLU are at it again. Once again their reward for protecting people’s rights probably will be to receive a pasting from much of the local citizenry and power structure.

I just don’t get it. In a county that supposedly prides itself on traditional values, you’d think the ACLU would be most welcomed around here.

Oh well. I guess it’s all a matter of whose traditional value is being gored.

The American Civil Liberties Union has riled the feathers of Orange County’s conservative populace more than once over the years. This time, the organization is suing Garden Grove for the Police Department’s practice of taking pictures of suspected gang members who they encounter out on the street. The current case involves two Asian American teen-age girls who were photographed after being stopped by officers. The girls were not detained for any suspected criminal activity but were photographed anyway, all the while denying to the police they were gang members.

The ACLU jumped into the case (what took them so long?), arguing that the girls’ rights were violated. Garden Grove and other police departments that wield the Polaroid cite it as an effective tool in fighting the county’s mushrooming gang activity.

Everyone supports anti-gang measures, but it should make us nervous that police departments are photographing people on the basis of their suspicion that they might be gang members. One of the girls involved in the lawsuit against Garden Grove said that in addition to photographing her and her friend, police took down information about their age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, home addresses and schools.

Why doesn’t this give everyone the willies? Why isn’t Orange County’s corps of traditional values groups joining in to support the ACLU?

The answer is that “traditional values” are like Silly Putty. They can be shaped and hardened to fit the whim of whoever’s holding the microphone.

The ACLU has been bashed in recent years because the public often associates their lawyers with defending troublemakers. The ACLU’s most celebrated local involvement came in its longstanding fight with the Sheriff’s Department over better jail conditions for inmates. In Orange County, that isn’t the kind of crusade that will win you many friends, but it’s rooted in the traditional value of not stripping people of their rights.

Founded in New York in 1920, the ACLU attained prominence by supporting John Scopes, the Tennessee schoolteacher who wanted to teach evolution, even though Tennessee law at the time prohibited it. The organization has taken on a wide variety of cases, many unpopular, because they’re often siding with minorities up against the imposing weight of the system, such as their defense of Jehovah’s Witnesses who felt that their children saluting the flag in public schools violated their religious beliefs.

The group has been an equal-opportunity irritant. Locally, the ACLU has argued against publicly funded Nativity scenes but also opposed Hanukkah menorah-lighting ceremonies in a public park. The group went to bat for a young hemophiliac who was HIV-positive and who school officials wanted to ban from classes. The ACLU has challenged policies as diverse as sobriety checkpoints and a school district’s decision to deny free breakfasts to underprivileged children.

Through it all, the ACLU has been steadfast in supporting individual rights. In return, it has become a whipping boy for conservatives who apparently like some traditional values but not others.

Once upon a time, this country prided itself on individual rights. We gulped and said we’d rather let 100 guilty men go free rather than execute one innocent man. Those silly gooses over at the ACLU still believe stuff like that.

The ACLU is quite right on the police photographing question, no matter how unpopular it may be.

Theirs is a point of view needed to counter that espoused last week by Dan Quayle, in Orange County to promote his book. In his remarks, the former vice president referred at one point to the Clinton Administration in particular but no doubt meant to paint with a much wider brush: “They still have somewhat of a radical ‘60s mentality that believes in tearing down the Establishment, questioning the police, disdaining authority and trying to radically change our society.”

There is nothing unconstitutional or unpatriotic about questioning the police. It is not automatically anti-Establishment to do so nor the equivalent of anarchy.

I’m not paranoid about police but neither am I willing to grant them carte blanche to protect society.

I can live with them carrying guns and nightsticks.

They don’t need cameras, too.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.