Crackdown on Cruising: Police Cite Deterrent Effect : But Critics Say Park Tactics Unfair to the Law-Abiding

Fullerton police believed that, increasingly, men were gathering in search of sex with other men in Hillcrest Park. So on Feb. 16, the crackdown began.

Uniformed officers increased patrols, and plainclothes detectives increased stakeouts.

For good measure, the SWAT team and the police canine unit trained in the park after hours. A press release trumpeted the crackdown.

Police jotted down car license numbers in the park and sent letters to the registered owners asking whether the drivers had noticed any lewd conduct.

After two weeks, police had arrested one man on suspicion of a sex felony and seven others on suspicion of misdemeanor lewd conduct. They had cited an equal number of people for leash law violations, and 35 others for being in the park after it closed at dusk.

Dramatic Reduction

The Fullerton Police Department pronounced the “Hillcrest Enforcement Program” a success, citing a dramatic reduction in the number of men cruising the park.

Patrols decreased. The letters stopped. The SWAT and canine units did not return to the park.

But police in Fullerton and other cities say cruisers, men in search of anonymous sex with other men, present a problem much like prostitution. The problem never entirely disappears, they say, and police crackdowns only make it less visible or chase it elsewhere.

In the mid-1970s, sex acts between men were rampant in Laguna Beach’s Heisler Park. In the early 1980s, the problem reached major proportions in Anaheim’s Pearson Park. And this year, police say, it was Hillcrest Park’s turn.

Major Effort

Police throughout Orange County make a major effort to curb lewd acts in public. But the effectiveness of their tactics, including the utilization of undercover officers and Fullerton’s use of letters, is the subject of some debate.

In 1983, the last year for which figures are available, police made 726 lewd conduct arrests in Orange County, more arrests than for felony drunk driving (532) and nearly as many as for felony marijuana charges (764).

Most gays do not condone the cruiser life style or public sex. But the county’s increasingly vocal gay community complains that such tactics as using undercover officers and writing letters to car owners needlessly traumatize cruisers and infringe on the rights of the law-abiding.

As an alternative, they suggest the approach adopted by Laguna Beach in recent years, where cooperation between the gay community and police virtually ended the city’s problem of sex in the park.

The use of plainclothes officers is a standard approach in numerous cities, including Anaheim in 1981 and 1982, where police said it was a tremendous success.

Anaheim Police Sgt. Jim Brantley said undercover operations are an effective deterrent because cruisers cannot be certain whether a policeman is present. Although it’s not the perfect answer, arresting cruisers does discourage them and is the most practical approach to the problem, police say.

After their crackdown, Fullerton police say, families and children returned in large numbers to Hillcrest’s 40 acres of steep, wooded wilderness, rising above Harbor Boulevard. But whether the crackdown curbed the problem, Police Chief Martin Hairabedian said, “depends on what you mean by curbed. Have we really made an impact? Yeah, some. Have we stopped it? No way.”

One thing is “absolutely” clear, he said. Men who had used Hillcrest’s public restrooms and secluded pathways for sexual encounters were chased elsewhere. For now at least, Hairabedian said, the problem has probably moved to other cities, other parks and other public restrooms.

“We just pushed them from one place to another place,” he said.

City and police officials received letters and telephone calls of praise and thanks.

Concern Expressed

But two City Council members were concerned about the letters police mailed to about 500 owners of cars spotted in Hillcrest.

Councilwoman Molly McClanahan learned of the letter by reading a news story. A day later, she received a telephone call from a man who was not happy. The man, who said he was gay, had visited Hillcrest driving “a family car,” and a letter had been mailed to one of his relatives, McClanahan said.

McClanahan said she believed the City Council should have been consulted about the letters before they were sent. “It has political ramifications and needs to be decided by a political body,” she said. Had she been allowed to vote, “I would have said, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” McClanahan said.

Randall Wick, president of the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, questioned the Police Department’s intent in mailing the letters:

“Is it really to find witnesses to some illegal activity which may or may not have occurred, or to harass anyone who happened to park near the park?”

Interpretation Offered

Wick said that soliciting tips by mailing letters may have indicated “the difficulty the Police Department seems to have in showing illegal activities have occurred” at Hillcrest.

Hairabedian said that police were “kind of disappointed” the letters generated only a few leads. But he stressed it was never the department’s intention to build “a dossier on a bunch of people.”

Councilman Chris Norby agreed with McClanahan that the council should have been consulted about the letters. “Whenever you get a letter from the Police Department you automatically assume you’re on the spot.”

But Mayor Alan (Buck) Catlin found “nothing wrong with what the Police Department did” in mailing the letters “to make the park satisfactory to family people who want to go up there.”

“My constituents don’t object,” he said. “You have . . . lewd behavior, sexual behavior, anti-social behavior--that kind of stuff. (It) has been going on in Hillcrest Park for years.”

Extent of Problem Questioned

But there is some question as to just how extensive the problem had been at Hillcrest.

Many Fullerton officials said they had a general sense that the problem in the park had escalated in recent years, roughly coinciding with a national gay publication’s statement in 1983 that the park was a safe meeting place for men in search of sex.

But city officials say they kept no log of complaints and could recall only a handful of specific complaints trickling in over several years.

Other Activities Cited

“People didn’t complain to us, they just stopped going there (to Hillcrest),” Hairabedian said.

Police initially stressed that the crackdown was prompted by increasing lewd conduct at Hillcrest. But after two weeks and only a handful of sex-related arrests, authorities talked more in terms of how effective the crackdown had been in stemming all types of illegal activity.

“It wasn’t just the open sex,” said Community Services Director Ron Hagan, but “alcohol in the park, drugs, juvenile behavior, intimidation of families and smaller children, running of dogs unleashed.”

Two weeks of stepped-up police work at Hillcrest resulted in 90 arrests, detentions and citations, including all the misdemeanors and infractions such as possession of alcohol by minors, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, and urinating in public.

Of the five felony arrests, only one was for a sex offense. It involved two males, one a minor, engaging in oral copulation.

Hairabedian said some of the other offenses, such as loitering near a public restroom, may have involved people who had come to the park for illicit sex.

“Our major concern,” said Randy Pesqueira, acting director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Garden Grove, “was that any kind of sweep like that, you’re always liable to sweep up some innocent people among them.”

Preference Expressed

Spokesmen for the gay community said they prefer the approach of Laguna Beach, where a large gay population works with local law enforcement.

“I got calls from (gay) people who were at (Hillcrest) park walking their dog, having ice cream and enjoying the day, who got letters” from Fullerton police, Pesqueira said. “These were people who were enjoying the park for the park’s own sake.

“If the police had approached us, we could have provided some assistance.”

Hairabedian said he made no effort to contact gay organizations before the crackdown.

“If there’s a (gay) group in Garden Grove and Laguna,” he said, “I’m not sure the same group is in Fullerton. I just don’t know the organization.”

Attorney’s Views

Over the years, Santa Ana attorney Marjorie Rushforth has represented about three dozen men arrested on suspicion of lewd conduct at Hillcrest Park.

She said Laguna Beach police have a different attitude about such incidents because of “a little more sophistication, a little more political pressure, a little more respectable gay presence” in that city than there is in Fullerton.

Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil Purcell said that several years ago, “it became increasingly difficult to justify the money and personnel (for a lewd conduct arrest) that boiled down to a suspended sentence, probation, $25 fine (and) charges reduced to a lower misdemeanor of disturbing the peace.”

Laguna Beach police began attending mandatory sensitivity training courses, and gays began walking beats with officers to defuse confrontations. Such efforts, Purcell said, have all but eliminated the problem of lewd acts in the city’s Heisler Park, where the problem once was widespread.

Rendezvous in Park

Purcell said he believes gay men continue to meet at the park but that they go to their homes for sex, rather than “go under a picnic table or into a bush as they used to.”

“The overt sexual acts have actually decreased, and I credit that with this mutual cooperation,” he said. “I’d say it’s declined 70%.”

Purcell no longer assigns undercover police to Heisler Park, reasoning that a uniformed officer is a better deterrent.

“I’m not demeaning or saying that practice is wrong in Fullerton,” he said, “(but) I’ll never go back to using plainclothes” officers.

Attorney Rushforth maintains that, unlike Laguna Beach police, officers in many cities go beyond the letter of the law when making lewd conduct arrests.

Definition Made

“It is not lewd conduct to ask someone in public to go home with you,” she said. “It’s not even lewd conduct to tell them what you want to do when you get home. It is only illegal to engage in sexual conduct in a public place when you know or should know someone is there (who will) be offended,” she said.

Police cases are often weak, she said, but “they get away with it because so few cases go to trial.” Rushforth estimated that less than 1% of lewd conduct cases reach trial, compared with about 10% of criminal cases generally. “Generally, we’re talking about closeted gays with fears that they will be fired from their jobs or alienated from their families,” she said. “Some of them are married to women, and some of them have a serious relationship with someone of their own sex, and are dreadfully embarrassed when they are caught.

“It is an incredibly stressful arrest. It raises suicidal thoughts in many, many people.” That alone, Rushforth said, is reason enough for police departments to be sensitive in their approach.

Practice Defended

But Fullerton Chief Hairabedian defended his use of undercover officers as part of a “balanced attack.”

Uniformed officers offer high visibility, he said, but the uncertainty of whether plainclothes detectives are present creates an added deterrent.

“I don’t want to intimidate the world,” Hairabedian said, “but when we have a problem we are going to take care of it.”

Rushforth said she would prefer a change in social attitude, “a society in which these men can be who they are comfortably, and they won’t be going to parks at all.”