Task Force Being Formed to Tackle L.A. Pornography

“Positive steps” have been taken to form a local federal task force to crack down on the production and distribution of hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner said Friday at a workshop in Newport Beach on obscenity and child pornography.

Such a task force was requested three months ago by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. An estimated 80% of the nation’s pornographic videos are produced in Los Angeles.

The task force would include investigators and prosecutors from the city and county of Los Angeles, postal inspectors, and FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents, he said.

“We can have a more significant impact by acting collectively rather than each going our own ways,” Bonner said. He did not indicate when the task force would begin operating.

Thirty-nine of the nation’s 45 major producers of hard-core pornography are located in Los Angeles, primarily in the San Fernando Valley, Bonner said. A significant number have “demonstrable ties to organized crime,” he added.

Playboy, Hustler Exempted

Targets of the crackdown would be producers of “extraordinarily graphic” videotapes and films that may include children, rape or suggested rape, or “deviant sexual behavior.”

“We’re not interested in Playboy or Hustler. Certainly that kind of material is not a focus,” he said.

In the past five years, technology has turned porno films, available only at adult bookstores, into porno videos, available at respectable neighborhood shops, he said. “Obviously, it’s an extraordinarily profitable business. They’re making billions.”

The two-day training workshop Friday was attended by about 100 Southern California prosecutors and investigators and sponsored by Bonner’s office and the San Diego district of the U.S. attorney.

The luncheon speaker, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, head of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese, offered the services of “literally thousands” of activists to picket X-rated movie houses or to support anti-pornography measures. They already support “family video stores” that don’t carry X-rated videos by giving them decals for their windows, he said.

Nearly 80%, or 20,000 of the nation’s 25,000 video outlets, carry X-rated or unrated videos, Mahony said, but Video Store Magazine reported that only 7.3% of video consumers ranked X-rated videos as “very important” in their choice of a store.

The Video Software Dealers Assn., which Mahony said condones rental or sale of X-rated videos, is “dominated by First Amendment absolutism and the pro-pornography syndrome,” the archbishop said.

“Videos depicting the sexual degradation of women,” he declared, “are no more a constitutionally protected form of speech than are libel, inciting to riot, deceptive advertising or giving false information to a law enforcement officer.”

Community effort is “extremely helpful” in closing pornography shops, said Donald Smith, a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department’s vice division. Five adult bookstores in Los Angeles’ Harbor Division were closed because of picketing, he said.

Bonner said the public attitude has changed in recent years as citizens’ groups have been joined by feminists who “recognize that all hard-core pornography is based on the premise that is extraordinarily degrading to women.”

Commercial boycotts are not the “be-all and end-all” to stopping pornography, Bonner said. If stores stop carrying X-rated videos, the product “will be forced back to a more limited adult retail outlet.”

Bonner said the task force’s test for obscenity will be that determined by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973: Whether the material as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex, whether it is patently offensive in its depiction of sex, and whether it lacks significant artistic value.

A similar task force on child pornography was instrumental in wiping out the production and distribution of such pornography in the United States, Bonner said. Now, the only pornographic materials featuring children are either imported from Denmark or made and distributed by a network of pedophiles, he said.

The war on obscenity will be tougher to win, he said. “There’s more money involved. We have to educate the public and we have to educate judges about the harm to people exposed,” he added. “We need more significant sentences.”