LOS ANGELES (AP) – The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has filed a complaint accusing Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies of racial profiling after they detained and searched 33 black students in October.
In the complaint filed Thursday, the organization said officers engaged in egregious racial profiling. The group is seeking declaratory relief and monetary damages for the students.
The Sheriff’s Department said it was looking into possible drug dealing on the Los Angeles Trade Tech College campus when the incident occurred Oct. 16.
“You saw them coming from every opening,” Dominique Rivers, one of the students detained, said of the responding sheriff’s deputies. “They were only stopping African-American students.”
Deputies sat the students on the ground and told them “to shut up and let them do their job,” Rivers said. Students later said they felt humiliated by the incident and worried their fellow students now look at them as though they have done something wrong.
No arrests were made.
Attorneys for the ACLU said they decided to file the complaint after the Sheriff’s Department refused to issue a public apology or change departmental procedures.
“They know what they did was wrong,” said ACLU racial justice director Catherine Lhamon.
Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said Thursday that Sheriff Lee Baca told the Los Angeles Community College District board that “the individuals deserved to receive an explanation and an apology from him.”
Transcripts, however, show the sheriff saying he was “unhappy” with the incident. He did not directly say the event was wrong or that the students deserved an apology.
“He has said this was not the best policing,” Whitmore said. “But he also said very clearly that it had nothing to do with race.”