April 29--A Los Angeles County judge on Friday strongly criticized the Long Beach Police Department's practice of conducting sting operations against gay men cruising for companionship, saying the policy was "indicative of animus toward homosexuals."
In a closely watched case, Superior Court Judge Halim Dhanidina made the remarks in Long Beach while invalidating the arrest of Rory Moroney for lewd conduct and indecent exposure.
Moroney was arrested in a bathroom at Recreation Park in October 2014 after allegedly exposing himself to an undercover Long Beach police detective, said Bruce Nickerson, the man's attorney.
Moroney began sobbing as soon as the judge finished reading his decision.
"It was really hard to ... come out and be the voice, but I had to do it because I believe that Long Beach is discriminating against gay men," he said outside of court.
Moroney, 50, of Long Beach, would have been required to register as a sex offender if convicted.
A Long Beach police detective seated in the courtroom simply shook his head. A city prosecutor and the detective declined to comment after the hearing.
It was unclear if there would be an appeal, or if the ruling would prompt changes to Long Beach police practices.
"Today, a judge dismissed a case where police officers conducted an investigation after receiving complaints of lewd conduct in public bathrooms," Long Beach City Prosecutor Doug Haubert said in a statement. "Until we review the judge's ruling we cannot know whether there is any basis for believing the police did anything wrong."
Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia was not available for comment on Friday, according to his staff. A city police spokesman said the department planned to issue a statement later on Friday.
Dhanidina said a review of evidence showed that Long Beach's vice unit engaged in discriminatory practices because the squad uses only male officers as undercover decoys in lewd conduct stings. Several officers who testified at an evidentiary hearing earlier this month all said they had arrested only male suspects for lewd conduct in their time working as vice officers, according to the judge.
Dhanidina rejected prosecutors' arguments that Long Beach based its policing tactics on citizen complaints about lewd conduct, saying that the agency provided little to no evidence of citizen complaints about such conduct at men's public restrooms where the bulk of the stings took place.
The department "intentionally targeted men who engaged in homosexual sex," the judge said.
West Hollywood Councilman John Duran, an attorney who is openly gay and testified as an expert in Moroney's case, said the tactics described in Long Beach are emblematic of the way he and others in the LGBT community believe police use vice squads to unfairly target gay men.
"The practice of vice entrapment of gay men in lewd conduct cases is one of the very last government-sanctioned forms of discrimination against gay men by law enforcement," said Duran, who has represented defendants in lewd conduct cases for decades.
Moroney was arrested in a restroom known to be a hot spot for "gay cruising," Nickerson said. Nickerson argued, and the judge agreed, that Long Beach's vice officers routinely send flirtatious signals to suspects and induced the crimes for which they later arrested men like Moroney.
"It appears that the presence and tactics of the decoy officers actually caused the crimes to occur," Dhanidina said.
Nickerson, a longtime civil rights attorney who has won cases against similar police practices in Manhattan Beach, San Jose, Mountain View, Modesto and Contra Costa County, said Friday's ruling should come as a warning bell to police departments across the state.
"This should send a message to police in the rest of California not to do these kinds of ridiculous, silly, sting operations," he said. "The scope of this, I hope, to be huge because essentially the principles (of the ruling) apply to lewd conduct sting operations all across California."
Both Nickerson and Moroney said their fight against such practices is far from over. Scores of gay men in California have been forced to register as sex offenders after they were convicted of lewd conduct under similar circumstances, a practice both said ruins lives and unfairly lumps such men in with rapists and child molesters.
"Those officers and detectives aren't saving lives," said Jim Key, a spokesman for the Los Angeles LGBT Center. "They're destroying them by branding innocent men as sex offenders."
Duran said he has never seen police departments order undercover female vice officers to bait straight men into lewd acts outside of prostitution stings. Cruising and consensual sexual activity is not prostitution, he said, and female undercover vice officers are not used in this manner "because the community would not tolerate female vice officers trying to entrap straight men into sexual scenarios."
If an attractive undercover female vice officer went up to a straight man and said, "hey, are you interested in sex," many men would say of course, Duran said. But the community at large would call it entrapment.
Duran said police could curtail cruising by simply posting uniformed officers near known hotspots. Undercover stings that target gay men, however, are a holdover from a time when police took a much harsher line on the LGBT community, he said.
"This came out of the era when homosexuality was criminal," Duran said. "This is kind of a leftover from the last century that's still a practice in some police departments."
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