Benchslaps

Police Get Benchslapped Over Bias

Judge slaps at police department targeting gay men.

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01-angry-judge1-300x221In practice, the police have a whole bunch of latitude to do their job, plus you know, they have guns. Given the power society willingly cedes to them, it is incredibly important that the safeguards built into the system actually hold the police accountable for their actions. Otherwise policing the police is left to the Coast Guard.

That is why a recent decision from Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Halim Dhanidina is so good. Judge Dhanidina (unrelatedly, the state’s first Muslim judge) slaps back against the the Long Beach Police department for targeting gay men for arrest for lewd behavior. One of the men targeted by the police’s sting, Rory Moroney, fought back after his arrest and went after the police department for this bias. The department was forced to turn over their records which detailed systematic targeting of gay men. Slate details the police’s practices:

[T]he department zeroed in on a handful of public bathrooms that were known to be frequented by gay men seeking to cruise. The vice detail trained officers to mimic cruising rituals, acting as decoys in order to lure men into cruising them. Often, vice officers would stand at toilets with the stall door open for lengthy periods, their bodies positioned to give the impression that their genitals were exposed, seeking out eye contact with other men. When their targets took the bait, nearby officers moved in for the arrest—though not always right away; at least once, an officer watched a suspect masturbate for 45 seconds before he was arrested.

Judge Dhanidina was having none of it, and offered a stinging rebuke to the police’s regular practice of discrimination:

[T]he Long Beach Police Department for “harbor[ing] animus toward homosexuals in its undercover investigations of lewd conduct.” The department, Dhanidina found, consistently lied in its police reports, ensnared gay men in a borderline entrapment scheme, and “deliberately singled out” gay men for arrest “on the basis of [their] sexuality.” This “discriminatory prosecution of men who engage in homosexual sex,” Dhanidina held, is barred by the Equal Protection Clauses of the federal and state constitutions. His decision is a startling reminder that anti-gay animus continues to infect policing in 2016—even in those liberal bastions where gay men feel most safe.

The judge went on to note that the practices did not happen in a vacuum and linked them to political rhetoric claiming to act on behalf of children while actually engaged in blatant discrimination:

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“This position only finds support in the rhetoric of homophobia that seeks to portray homosexual men as sexual deviants and pedophiles. To the extent that the Long Beach Police Department has tried to appeal to this view by gratuitously referencing school children in the reports of their lewd conduct investigations, the court rejects it wholeheartedly.”

How unfortunate that we live in a world where this sort of discriminatory behavior is condoned, but at least we have a hero judge unwilling to stand for it.

The Stingers Get Stung [Slate]

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