A northern California county accused of pervasive and systematic racial discrimination against Asian Americans has agreed to policing reforms and independent oversight.
Siskiyou, a sprawling rural county in the state’s far north, has for years been the site of conflict over water rights, marijuana and policing practices.
Illegal marijuana cultivation has long proliferated in the county. Local leaders have said the industry has led to disastrous impacts on the environment, and argued for the better part of a decade that one subdivision in particular, largely home to Hmong Americans, bears much of the blame.
But Hmong-American residents have said they are being unfairly demonized, and subjected to discrimination and harassment by officials and law enforcement. Since 2021, Siskiyou and its sheriff’s office have faced legal action from residents over these allegations as well as claims that the regulations that officials said they adopted in order to curtail marijuana had cut off their access to water.
Data obtained by the ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus, the groups representing plaintiffs, found that although Asian and Pacific Islanders are just 2.4% of Siskiyou’s population over 18, Asian drivers amounted to 28% of traffic stops by the sheriff’s office.
Some plaintiffs in the lawsuit said they faced repeated targeting by law enforcement while driving to the grocery store or taking their children to school.
“[One plaintiff] was subjected to about a 30-minute traffic stop by enforcement where she was pulled out of the car and very aggressively questioned about what she was doing in the county,” said Emi Young, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, adding that the client was pressed into submitting to a search.
The plaintiff was released after the search, Young said, but was stopped other times, including while the litigation was under way.
“It’s really representative of what we viewed as frankly harassment of Asian American drivers simply because they fit a particular profile because of their race.”
Late last month, the board of supervisors, the county’s governing body, and the sheriff’s office agreed to a partial settlement, the ACLU of Northern California announced in a statement. The county committed to instituting traffic stop reforms and to stop issuing property liens to collect unpaid cannabis fines, while claims regarding water access are still in litigation.
“We see this as being a very significant settlement,” Young said. “In northern California, and the state of California, more generally, this is the only recent case that I am aware of that has resulted in the kind of relief we obtained here.”
Under the agreement, the sheriff’s office is required to adopt a traffic stop policy that bans race-based stops and prohibits deputies from using “stops to harass residents or pressure them into consenting to searches”, the ACLU of Northern California said in a statement.
If deputies request a search, they must activate their body camera, state the reason for any stop, and provide an interpreter for non-English speakers. They cannot stop drivers just for being present in areas with high rates of crime, or for driving a vehicle with out-of-state license plates, according to the statement.
The county also agreed to independent oversight and is required to pay an auditor to monitor its compliance, and hold community meetings each year.
One plaintiff, Susanna Va, said she hoped that the settlement meant that the county would accept the Asian community and see them as residents.
“To include us as one and treat us as the same, to not see us by the color of our skin or how we look, but as human beings who live here. Not just for me, but for my children and other people who come here and want to treat this as their home,” she said.
Siskiyou county and the sheriff’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
