The Associated Press
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - Wilmington police are taking pictures of people who have not been arrested for any crimes, raising questions among attorneys and civil liberty groups.
Pictures of a growing number of people, along with their names and addresses, will compose a data base to help police investigate potential suspects for future crimes, said Police Chief Michael Szczerba.
Police have taken pictures of at least 200 people, most of them minority men, The News Journal reported on Sunday.
State and federal prosecutors say the tactic is legal. But criminal defense attorneys and the American Civil Liberties Union disagree.
“We should enforce the existing laws, but not violate them, to catch the bad guys,” said Theo Gregory, City Councilman and public defender. He said the practice was unconstitutional. “We’ve become the bad guys, and that’s not right.”
Mayor James Baker said the practice was perfectly legal and criticism was “asinine and intellectually bankrupt.”
“I don’t care what anyone but a court of law thinks,” he said. “Until a court says otherwise, if I say it’s constitutional, it’s constitutional.”
Baker said no one has yet challenged the photographs in court.
The pictures are being taken by two Wilmington police squads created in June to arrest street-level drug dealers. The police units are known in some neighborhoods as “jump-out squads” because they jump out of marked and unmarked vehicles and make arrests in seconds.
Police routinely line people against a wall and pat them down for weapons. The “Terry stop,” named for a 1968 Supreme Court decision, Terry vs. Ohio, allows officers to stop, question and frisk someone they find suspicious.
On one recent shift, officers stopped a group of men and told them they were violating loitering laws, which bar anyone from blocking public places. Police took their names and addresses, snapped their pictures, then let them go.
Carl Klockars, a professor in the University of Delaware’s Criminal Justice Department, said officers have the right to take a picture unless there is a local ordinance to the contrary.
Defense attorney Joseph A. Hurley, however, said police cannot take a picture of someone they are temporarily detaining.
“The second they say, ‘We’re the police, put your hands against the wall,’ the photos become wrong,” he said. “They’re unconstitutional. Bad idea.”
Drewry Nash Fennell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, said the new police practice is disturbing.
“I don’t want the police intimidating people who are lawfully assembled and intimidating them on the basis of loitering laws,” she said. “And the retention of photographs is intimidating.”