The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors and the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office have approved a partial settlement in a civil rights class action lawsuit that claims Asian Americans were being disproportionately subjected to traffic stops.
According to a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union, the settlement “institutes sweeping traffic stop reforms and removes illegal property liens.”
In 2022, ACLU Northern California, Asian Law Caucus, and Covington & Burling LLP filed a class action lawsuit claiming that Asian Americans were being racially profiled for traffic stops.
The lawsuit claimed data showed “over 28 percent of Sheriff’s Office traffic stops targeted Asian drivers, even though Asian and Pacific Islanders comprised only 2.4 percent of the county’s voting-age population.”
Plaintiffs also claimed that they were subjected to “improper search and seizure practices” and “unlawful property liens.”
The settlement specifically requires the sheriff to “adopt a new Traffic Stop Policy prohibiting race-based stops and preventing deputies from using stops to harass residents or pressure them into consenting to searches.”
“This settlement reaffirms that no one should be singled out by police because of their race. Asian American community members of Siskiyou County came together and won their fight to live their lives without fear of being racially profiled,” Megan Vees, a litigation staff attorney at Asian Law Caucus, said in a statement. “The work is not yet over. Access to water, a basic life necessity, is still at the heart of residents’ concerns. We will continue challenging targeted and unjust restrictions to the community’s water access.”
The 2022 lawsuit also alleged that the county of placing discriminatory restrictions on water access by preventing large water trucks from driving on roads where the Hmong community resided.
“The transportation of water by trucks was limited according to only certain roads that were the roads that were the main thoroughfares to the two largest concentrations of Hmong communities in the county, coincidentally enough,” Glenn Katon, a litigation director at the Asian Law Caucus, told AsAmNews in 2022. “That was really causing a humanitarian crisis where people that were cutting back on their water consumption, couldn’t do their own gardening and keeping livestock.”
The water access claims remain in litigation.
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