Court: Police Questioning of Minorities is Illegal

On Friday morning, April 9, 2019,  a police officer patrolling a high crime neighborhood in Pierce County, Washington, noticed a car parked near the entrance to a church with both the driver and the passenger asleep.  The officer knocked on the window for a while and the driver slowly woke up.  The officer asked the driver, Palla Sum, if he owned the car, and the driver responded that the car was not his.  The officer then asked both the driver and the passenger for their names and date of birth.  Sum gave the officer a false name and birthday, the passenger gave his correct name and date.   As the officer returned to his patrol car to check the names, Sum drove away at high speed, running stop signs and multiple red lights before crashing onto a yard.   Police found registration in the car indicating the Sum was the owner.   They also found a handgun.  In a unanimous ruling last Thursday, the Washington Supreme Court held that, because Sum was a minority (Asian), the police questioning of him was illegal.

In her ruling Justice Mary Yu writes,  “Today, we formally recognize what has always been true:  In interactions with law enforcement, race and ethnicity matter.  Therefore, courts must consider the race and ethnicity of the allegedly seized person as part of the totality of the circumstances when deciding whether there was a seizure.”

Hans Bader has this piece in Liberty Unyielding  where he notes that the;

court has overturned the conviction of a man for lying to police, because the man was non-white. If he were white, his conviction for making a false statement would have been upheld, because there was no dispute that he lied, and the questions he was asked by a police officer were typical attempts to gather information.  But the court ruled that the police officer’s questions to him effectively detained him, because his race, in the court’s view, made these questions (such as what his name was) more coercive to him than if he were white. It ruled that the criminal was detained by these questions, regardless of whether he felt detained, simply because, as an Asian or Pacific Islander, he was non-white.

Although Sum did not behave as if he were seized or detained — indeed, he drove away — the state Supreme Court ruled that Sum’s subjective perception did not matter:  “it is irrelevant that Sum drove away when Deputy Rickerson went back to his patrol vehicle to check Sum’s identity. The seizure analysis is not based on the subjective viewpoint of the allegedly seized individual,” said the court. It also ruled that even if the cop had not intended to seize Sum by merely asking him questions, they still amounted to a seizure of Sum. “The ‘subjective intent of police is irrelevant to the question [of] whether a seizure occurred,” the court said.

….there is no reason to think that police racially profile Asians, who have low crime rates…the state supreme court did not cite any evidence of racial profiling against Asians. Instead, it said such evidence was unnecessary.

This ruling raises federal constitutional questions and it is possible that it will be appealed.  What is most concerning, particularly for those living in Washington, is that apparently no one of sense currently serves on the state supreme court.