A Gay Officer’s Lonely Patrol : Former Policeman Mitchell Grobeson’s Suit Against LAPD Raises Questions About What Makes a Good Cop

In the summer of 1985, police officer Mitchell Grobeson responded to a silent alarm at a jewelry store on Sunset Boulevard.

Normally, black-and-whites would converge from all over the Rampart division to back up an officer answering a reported robbery in progress, Grobeson said. But that day, despite the dispatcher’s repeated pleas, no one showed.

At the Los Angeles Police Academy four years earlier, Grobeson’s fellow cadets had elected him class president. Now he stood alone, crouched in the street behind his squad car with his shotgun aimed across the hood, wondering why an entire watch was disregarding the cardinal rule of police work: Back up your brother officer.

At least that’s how Grobeson tells the story, and he’s been telling it often in the last few months.

One of the Best

Because of that and similar alleged incidents, Grobeson, by all objective criteria one of the best officers on the force, resigned from the Police Department on June 13, 1988. On Sept. 28, he filed a 22-claim lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, Police Chief Daryl Gates, the Los Angeles Police Commission, 15 named police officers and 100 John Doe officers, charging that they effectively forced him to resign from the force because he was suspected of being homosexual.

With the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and law enforcement agencies nationwide under pressure to recruit gay officers, Grobeson’s story is stirring up considerable interest in the homosexual community.

But his story goes beyond one group’s concerns about the issue of how thoroughly a police agency represents the diversity of the community it protects; even those who don’t believe his charges are likely to find themselves pondering more basic concerns, such as, “What makes a good police officer?” and “What makes a good police force?”

The Police Department and Police Commission refer all questions about Grobeson’s suit to the City Attorney’s office. In its written response to what Grobeson said is the first suit of its kind, the office argued that his claims are unfounded or are stated so vaguely that a response requires more information.

“Let me be frank,” Deputy City Atty. Arthur Walsh said this week. “The city and the Police Department don’t like this lawsuit. We don’t have a policy of discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation--as a matter of fact there are city laws and ordinances (mandating) directly the opposite.

“We don’t think (Grobeson’s claims of systematic harassment and endangerment) took place, and we’d like to do something to make Mr. Grobeson, who was a good cop, feel better about the treatment he received when he was a police officer. On the other hand, we’re not about to give away millions of dollars of city money.

”. . . The city’s position has been that we didn’t do the things Mr. Grobeson said. If we did, if it can be established that there was an official policy, albeit a secret one, there will be some serious changes made throughout the Police Department and city government,” Walsh said. “. . . If it turns out that individual members in fact acted inappropriately toward Mr. Grobeson or anyone else, disciplinary measures will be taken.”

Grobeson says he’s heard that before.

Ten months after he turned in his badge, Grobeson still looks and acts like a television cop. His posture exudes confidence. His voice projects authority--even as he tells audiences that he still is being “harassed” by Police Department internal affairs investigators and that he fears his lawsuit may have put his life in danger.

A moment later, though, he sounds more like a police recruiter than a dissident.

Police officers, he says, are the only real altruists.

“When it comes down to it, there’s only one class of people that risk their lives to help others. . . . There’s only one profession that truly saves lives. That’s police work.

“And LAPD,” he maintains, “is the finest force in the country.”

Grobeson doesn’t recall playing cops ‘n’ robbers much as a kid. But he did know early on that he wanted to help people, he said. When he got the chance at age 15 to join the first Explorer Scout Law Enforcement unit in his hometown of Culver City, he signed up.

Not that he was lacking in activities.

“I kind of broke all the records in high school,” he said, rattling off an adolescent vita worth a million Brownie points.

Twice he was elected student body president at Culver City High. He edited the school newspaper, wrestled on the junior varsity team, served on the YMCA board; he was appointed to a seat on the Culver City Board of Education; and he pressed for and received a student seat on the Culver City human relations commission.

“I graduated with more honors than any other person,” he said with his standard “just the facts, ma’am” delivery.

At Chapman College, he earned a degree in criminal justice, graduating “with more honors than anyone--at least with more honors than anyone I knew.”

His father drove a catering truck. His mother was an executive secretary, and Grobeson worked to help support himself from age 15 as a camp counselor, a meat cutter, a stock boy, a security guard at Bullock’s, and an appliance salesman at J.C. Penney.

Given that schedule, he never had time to socialize, let alone date; in retrospect, he thinks his hyper-achieving was in part a smoke screen to distract his peers--and himself--from his growing uncertainty about his sexuality.

From age 8, Grobeson knew he was “physically and emotionally” attracted to men. It didn’t take an anthropologist, though, to know such attractions were taboo.

So Grobeson kept his feelings buried.

For years, he figured they would go away. By high school, though, he began to suspect otherwise. So he worked even harder in other areas of his life.

On Sept. 9, 1981, he arrived for his first day at the Police Academy with a new haircut and a new suit. Immediately, instructors ordered the cadets to drop to the floor and do push-ups for an hour.

It bothered Grobeson that cadets “were treated like dirt,” but he decided, “I’m going to beat them at their own game.” And when he graduated as the “honor cadet,” with the highest scores overall, Chief Gates shook his hand and presented him with awards in academics, physical fitness, self-defense and shooting.

To top things off, Grobeson put on the academy graduation dance at the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey. “The guy who puts on the dance doesn’t need to have a date,” he said.

No one suspected he was gay, and, in fact, “I didn’t have any gay identity yet,” he said. “So outside of being lonely, it wasn’t awkward for me.”

Grobeson had his first sexual experience after he left the academy, he said. But there was nothing in the way he lived to draw attention to his sexuality, he said.

“I gave up my social life to be the best police officer I could. . . . I know you’re supposed to have a life that’s separate (from your work). I’m just not sure I did.”

Digging though a cardboard box filled with Lions Club and YMCA awards and stacks of documents about his career, Grobeson pulled out a letter of commendation from his probationary year in Central Division, which covers some of the city’s meanest streets, from Skid Row to the corridors of City Hall.

Dated Jan. 24, 1983, the letter describes how he and another officer responded to a call about an assault with a deadly weapon in a downtown apartment. A man had gone on a rampage with a steak knife, slashing and stabbing his 5-year-old child and an infant.

As his partner drove to the hospital, Grobeson placed his notebook on the baby’s bloody chest and began two-finger CPR. According to the commendation, signed by a deputy chief, “throughout the Code Three run to the hospital, Grobeson cuddled the wounded child and continued artificial respiration.” The child died at the hospital. But the letter commended both officers for their compassion.

Like most new officers, Grobeson was unprepared for his sudden exposure to the full spectrum of human behavior. He sensed the protective layers of cynicism building. But an old training officer at Central showed him the wisdom in treating everyone “as if they were a member of your family,” he said.

That approach served Grobeson well. In late ‘84, he was promoted to training officer himself, and was to transfer to the Rampart Station, which oversees Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district.

Just before his transfer, he was stopped in West Hollywood by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s sergeant. Because he was with another man in a predominantly gay area, the sergeant assumed they were lovers, Grobeson said.

Discovering a police ID, he immediately called the Police Department. Grobeson said he remembers the sergeant’s message well: “Send a supervisor, your man’s a fruit.”

In the next days, Grobeson charges in his suit, officer J. J. Williams at Pacific division called officers at Rampart and told them “a faggot” was transferring in. Sgt. Jake DeLeon then announced that accusation to the entire Rampart watch, Grobeson said--charges that both officers deny in a response filed by the City Attorney’s office.

Grobeson said that when he arrived at Rampart, a supervisor took him aside in a police car and asked him if he were gay. Grobeson said no, to which the supervisor reportedly replied: “Good. Because there are two types of people who can’t do the job--gays and women. They’re too emotional.”

“The macho mystique of cops has never appealed to me,” Grobeson said. “I think it’s probably the greatest problem that the Los Angeles Police Department has going against it. . . . If you’re macho, you’re not supposed to have feelings, and if you don’t have feelings, you can’t empathize--with criminals, victims or the community you’re hired to serve.”

Which is not to say that Grobeson doesn’t have a Dirty Harry streak, as revealed when he recently spun his favorite war story--with more than a touch of melodrama--to a gay and lesbian student group at California State University, Northridge.

A Latino gang called Aztlan had, in effect, been holding hostage an apartment building in Rampart division, he said. The gang was so brazen, its leaders placed a placard over the building and signed their names to it.

No Partners

By then, Grobeson said, he was having a difficult time finding partners, so he took it upon himself to rout the gang. “Every day I’d go put a new one in jail, a new one in jail, until finally . . . I got the leader.”

He climbed a ladder and took down the sign. As he walked through the building courtyard, a mother with two young children stepped out of her apartment for “the first time ever,” and thanked him: “Gracias, official. “

Even as that gang bust was unfolding, though, word continued to circulate among officers at the Rampart station that a homosexual was in their midst. Few suspected him at first, because they knew he was a sharpshooter, which would have been impossible for “someone with a limp wrist,” he said sarcastically.

But slowly the station house graffiti began to focus on Grobeson; it followed him as he was promoted and transferred to other stations.

Someone glued his locker shut. Someone taped a picture of Rock Hudson to it, with the inscription “To Mitch--Love, Rock Baby.” He received a package marked “AIDS Survival Kit,” and someone wrote “BEWARE” in the dust on his squad car. Moreover, Grobeson contends in his suit, several supervisors encouraged the harassment.

His problems intensified in summer 1985, when he decided to break the legendary police “code of silence” after a confrontation between police and a crowd of revelers at an outdoor fair.

An officer had clubbed unconscious a man involved in a fight, and a near-riot resulted, Grobeson said. He chose to testify to internal affairs investigators, he said, because he believes in telling the truth and because as an instructor in baton technique, he felt that the officer’s repeated “head shots” could have killed the suspect.

But the main reason he testified is because he watched the accused officer “get so caught up in his emotions, that he risked the lives of his fellow officers. The point wasn’t to burn him. He endangered the lives of his fellow officers by turning the crowd on us. . . .

“There are people who became police officers because they like bullying people, beating up on people,” Grobeson said. “The good cops became cops because they care about people.”

But skewed notions of machismo have engendered a process for selecting law officers that systematically eliminates a whole segment of the population--including some who are drawn to police work for all the right reasons, Grobeson said.

Los Angeles Police Department candidates, for instance, must take the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory test, which he and gay activists contend is designed to rate people on a scale of heterosexuality and homosexuality based on antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity.

Grobeson took the test in college, and “I didn’t come out as high as I would have liked in the masculine categories,” he said. “Consequently, when I took it for the Police Department, when there came a question like, ‘Do you want to be a florist?’ I answered no. . . . Literally, the way they eliminate people who are homosexual is by eliminating people who want to be florists.”

When answers are suspicious or when candidates raise suspicions about sexual orientation during the background investigation, the department invariably finds an unrelated reason to reject them, Grobeson charges.

No Open Homosexuals

The result, he said, is that there is not a single openly gay or lesbian officer among the 7,000 officers in Los Angeles department, nor is there one among the 20,000 peace officers in more than 100 Southern California agencies.

“To the best of my knowledge . . there is not an openly gay (officer) on the force, and as a matter of sheer statistics, there certainly must be a significantly large number of them,” said Walsh of the City Attorney’s office. “Why they choose not to be open is another matter. Whether it is because of fear of the treatment they would receive, as Mr. Grobeson seems to think, or simply because they wish to keep it as part of their personal life and not advertise it, I don’t know.”

Grobeson said gays and lesbians hide their identities for one reason: “They live in absolute fear for their lives and careers.” And anyone who is found out, he said, is driven from the force.

He decided that wouldn’t happen to him. But things “got worse and worse every day.” At one station, officers posted his photo with the caption: “Would you buy a used (sexual device) from this man?” Someone put up a sign reading “Faggot Get Out!” at another, he said. And more than once he found himself chasing bad guys with the supposed good guys refusing to back him up, he said.

For a while, “I considered eating my gun,” he said. But finally, “I decided this is completely wrong, and started documenting the harassment.”

In 1986, Grobeson transferred back to the Pacific division, where he was put in charge of a controversial effort to address the Venice Beach homeless problem. As the situation improved, Grobeson began showing up on national telecasts and in newspaper stories. Commendations and more than 100 citizen letters poured in.

In one case, lawyer Stephen Yagman, the police gadfly who recently won a judgment against Chief Gates, witnessed an arrest Grobeson and other officers made on the Venice boardwalk and wrote a rare letter of praise. The letter is in Grobeson’s file, with a note from Gates: “You have impressed the unimpressible.”

But even as the praise rolled in, Grobeson alleges, several officers, encouraged by supervisors, stepped up efforts to undermine his “perfect package.”

In 1987, a habitue of the Venice Beach drug scene filed a complaint against him. A letter signed by Capt. Vance Proctor states that on Nov. 12, 1987, Grobeson “failed to take appropriate action” in detaining the suspect and he caused him “to partially disrobe.”

Grobeson denied the charges and demanded that the case go to a trial board. At the trial, his accuser testified under oath that eight officers had told him Grobeson was “a faggot,” and that he was granted preferential treatment for filing the complaint, Grobeson said.

Acquitted, Grobeson asked the trial board to investigate the officers who allegedly had solicited false testimony. The investigation never occurred, and evidence was destroyed, he said.

On June 13, 1988, Grobeson turned in his resignation and a complaint demanding that Lt. Al Corella be investigated and punished for allegedly asking officers to solicit complaints against him; for following Grobeson when he was off duty, and for repeatedly taking him into an interrogation room and grilling him about his sexuality--charges Corella has denied in a formal response to Grobeson’s suit.

Instead of punishment, “every supervisor that was assigned to harass me, every single one with the exception of one, has been promoted,” Grobeson alleges.

He went to the Police Commission, Chief Gates and the mayor but he could not get anyone to investigate his charges that his civil rights had been violated by 3 1/2 years of harassment, he said.

In September, with the backing of a group called National Gay Rights Advocates, he filed his lawsuit and began speaking out about his case, which is becoming a cause celebre in the gay community. (Tonight, for instance, he will participate in a UCLA panel discussion on constitutional protections for gays and lesbians with three homosexual men and women who have filed suit against branches of the U.S. military.)

Virtually everyone agrees, apparently, that Grobeson was an excellent policeman.

“When he resigned, everyone who commanded him recommended that he be rehired,” attorney Walsh said. But the city maintains it has yet to find any credible evidence to suggest that Grobeson was hounded off the force.

“There’s a big gap between perceiving yourself to be discriminated against and proving that specific individuals did bad things to you or the city had a policy of doing bad things to you,” Walsh said. “. . . One thing we need to resolve is, how much (of the alleged harassment) was just the sort of broad humor that would take place in any predominantly male organization like a police force?”

A large photograph of Mitch Grobeson at his bar mitzvah hangs on one wall of Grobeson’s mother’s home. Over a bookcase is a large framed photograph of Marilyn Grobeson seated on the hood of a squad car, as her uniformed son stands proudly behind the “Serve and Protect” emblem on the door.

To transform himself from the boy in the first photo to the policeman in the other, Grobeson “worked hard, he sacrificed,” his mother said.

As a child, she recalled, he watched the Sheriff John show on television and told her that’s what he wanted to be. “He couldn’t say ‘policeman,’ so he said ‘peace man.’ I remember that, ‘peace man.’ ”

His mother learned that her son was gay two weeks before he resigned. That wasn’t easy to hear, she said, but “him being gay was not as difficult to deal with as the fact that his life’s dream was shattered.

“In our religion, there’s a book called ‘The Ethics of the Fathers,’ ” she said. “In it, there’s a saying: ‘Where there is no man, be one.’ Mitchell has always stepped out to fill that role. The fact that he is gay makes him no less a man.”

If other gay and lesbian Los Angeles officers stepped forward and supported Grobeson in his litigation, there’s a chance the case, which is now expected to take roughly four years to resolve, could be expedited through the courts as a class-action suit, his lawyers have said.

As it stands now, Grobeson is still on his own, squared off against those he perceives as bad guys, with no backup in sight.

Peter Johnson in the Times Editorial Library contributed to this story.