TORRANCE, Calif. – A Redondo Beach, Calif., man has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Torrance police, contending officers detained and fingerprinted him, took his picture and asked if he was a terrorist after he took photos of the ExxonMobil refinery there, according to a Copley News Service story in the Daily Breeze newspaper. Torrance is 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
In a lawsuit filed Dec. 14, Jim McKinniss says that at 4:25 a.m. on April 17 he was taking photographs from the sidewalk on Prairie Avenue of the refinery's fiery smokestacks as part of an assignment for a course he was taking at Otis College of Art.
The suit states McKinniss saw a security guard from the plant arrive in a vehicle, and seven minutes later two Torrance police cars arrived with their lights flashing. Four officers, not named in the lawsuit, approached him.
He reportedly told officers he was on public property and he did not think it was illegal to take photographs.
"One of the officers asked if McKinniss had heard about September 11th," the lawsuit states. The officer told McKinniss that since the 2001 terrorist attacks, it was illegal to photograph bridges, airports, and refineries, although no such law exists.
"One of the officers acknowledged that it was probably permissible to take photographs of a major tourist attraction, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, since so many people did so, but he did not otherwise retract or refine his statement that McKinniss was in violation of the law by photographing the ExxonMobil refinery," the lawsuit states.
Officers then ordered him to stand motionless with his hands clasped behind him. One officer patted him down.
"While she did so, one of the officers asked McKinniss if he was a terrorist. McKinniss replied that he was not," the lawsuit states.
Later, one officer took two or three pictures of him with a digital camera. Another officer took a print of his right thumb without his consent, the lawsuit states.
The suit said the encounter ended without officers telling him that the detention and investigation were over. But when the officers returned to their squad cars, one officer said over the speaker in his car, "Thanks, Jim."
"It's pretty apparent the Torrance Police Department unlawfully detained, searched, fingerprinted, and photographed a person who had every right to do what he was doing," McKinniss' lawyer, Robert Myers, said Thursday.
Myers said there have been similar complaints against police made by photographers across the country.
The lawyer said the main reason McKinniss filed the lawsuit is "to prevent this from happening to him again in Torrance. His major objective is not to make money off this lawsuit, but to make sure that he can go about taking photographs without being stopped by the Torrance Police Department."
The newspaper said the lawsuit also asks for punitive damages against the department, an order that the fingerprint and photographs of McKinniss be destroyed, and that department officials turn over a list of any law enforcement agencies that received information about his detention.
Lt. Rod Irvine, a spokesman for the Torrance Police Department, said he had not received a copy of the lawsuit, so he could not comment on it. But he did say that activity in the area near the refinery is "obviously a concern for us."
"It is a volatile location," Irvine added. "I think the federal government identified oil refineries as potential (terrorism) targets. It is one of our focuses of concern."
*************************************
I think that this photography ban thing has gone way to far, next it will be illegal to take pictures of our families
