E-Mail This Article to a Friend Idling while brown (continued)

While Mendiratta’s phone rang, he stood before the Secret Service agents as they made not-so-veiled threats. "They told me, ‘Show us the pictures or we’ll have to take you in’ and ‘You can do this the easy way or the hard way,’" according to Mendiratta, who had never been in trouble with the law before. Intimidated and anxious to meet his friend, he says he agreed to show the agents his camera. But when he lifted it up to his eye, he says, they snatched it from his grip and began advancing through the digital images.

Then Mendiratta’s worst nightmare happened. The officers quickly cuffed him, ordered him to spread his legs, patted him down, and muscled him into the cruiser. He was carted off to a downtown police station just seconds away. (The BPD’s Ford says the department has no record of more than one detention during the DNC; however, she says, "If a second person was detained by the Secret Service, it’s very likely he was brought over to District One.")

Inside the station, a Secret Service agent and three other federal officers fired questions at him — about his profession, his roommates, and even his political beliefs. And they kept mentioning the "suspicious pictures" on Mendiratta’s camera. Befuddled, Mendiratta says he pled his innocence. Indeed, his camera had stored in its digital memory pictures that were several months old. "The only thing I could imagine," he says, "was a picture at a party with a joint in the background or something."

Eventually, the agents tipped Mendiratta off to what concerned them. It was a photograph of his MIT lab that he had taken some six weeks earlier. His lab partner, a Japanese student who speaks in broken English, had written him an oddly worded note warning him about a hot plate. The note read: "Now, the plate is hot." When Mendiratta saw the sign, he "had to laugh because it was funny," he says. He also snapped a photo of it as "a bit of workplace humor."

At the station, Mendiratta explained as much to the federal agents. Then, in hope of gaining his release, he offered to elaborate on the circumstances behind the rest of the photographs — all 100 or so of them. Some of them depicted a recent trip to Montreal. Others a summer house party. Still others a lazy day with his girlfriend. After walking the agents through the contents of his camera, Mendiratta says he was allowed to leave. He had been held by federal authorities for approximately three hours.

Later that afternoon, he caught up with McCullough at the protest pen, and confided to him what had just occurred. McCullough, who met Mendiratta through a MIT peace and social-justice mailing list and who describes his friend as "just a quiet guy," was stunned. Then, he says, "Someone pointed out that Arjun has a serious permanent tan there. Could that have something to do with why he was detained?" At that moment, McCullough observed all the people with cameras milling about in the pen. "It hit me," he says. "Arjun was singled out because he matches the profile of our imaginary enemies — he has a beard and dark skin."

DOUGAN, OF THE Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, sees the DNC detentions as part of a larger pattern of racial profiling that has become all too apparent in the post-9/11 era. "The federal government," she charges, "has embraced racial profiling as domestic policy these days." As a result, people who look like they could hail from the Middle East — Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis — are getting caught up in the government’s widening net, all cast in the name of homeland security. People of color are becoming suspect.

What she — and many other legal experts — describe as "the ineffectiveness and inappropriateness" of using racial and ethnic profiling as an intelligence-gathering tool is illustrated in the reported details of the DNC detentions. In Sahni’s case, for example, the Secret Service agents pinpointed him for special security searches even though he didn’t actually own the camera in question — indeed, as he told the Phoenix, "I didn’t even take the pictures." Such facts, Dougan explains, "if true, tell me that the Secret Service is interested in race, religion, and nationality," as opposed to behavior.

Even when law-enforcement officials claim to focus solely on behavior, they are often homing in on people of a different race or ethnicity to begin with, according to Carol Rose, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts. How else to explain the fact that three bearded, South Asian men, behaving no differently from any of the hundreds of tourists at the DNC, wound up tagged as "suspicious"? More likely than not, Rose says, "Behavioral profiling was being used as an excuse for racial profiling." And when that happens, she adds, "There’s no guarantee that people of color are being protected from clear civil-liberties violations," such as unreasonable searches and false detentions.

Whether such civil-liberties violations took place during these particular DNC detentions remains a question for the federal and state courts to determine, naturally. But legal experts suspect that they did. Already the ACLU has reached out to Sahni in hopes of pursuing possible legal action, while the organization is following up on the other cases. And Shah — who has a list of corroborating witnesses to his detention — is intent on seeking legal recourse. Pavlos, his attorney, confirms that he is considering "a laundry list of various legal actions including civil-rights violations," although he has not filed a formal lawsuit yet.

For now, each of these men seems committed to spreading the word about his DNC ordeal to show how innocent South Asian people can be wrongfully detained. On the one hand, they cannot quite fathom the absurdity of what happened to them. On the other hand, they fear that they — or, for that matter, any South Asian — will find themselves labeled a suspect for no good reason. Based on their experiences, they’ve each gotten one message: "If you have a beard and brown skin, you cannot be trusted," says Shah. He then notes, "But if that isn’t racist, I don’t know what is."

Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com