Police, Gays Patrol Violence-Prone Area

It was an uncommon sight, reflecting an uncommon partnership: Three police officers and about 14 gay men, most clad in leather, together walking the dimly lit streets of Silver Lake.

The two groups collaborated Friday night to patrol the community’s gay bars, which homosexuals complain are common sites for “gay-bashing,” violence against homosexuals because of their sexual orientation. Police and gay community leaders say they hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Or a friendship, period.

“I definitely think it represents progress,” said Mark Haskins, an organizer of the Silverlake Neighborhood Action Patrol (SNAP), a 1-year-old, struggling effort to deploy volunteer patrollers about once a month in hopes of curbing gay-bashing. “It’s two groups that have a history of adversarial relationships, going into a new era of commitment to licking the problem of gay-bashing.”

Friday night’s foot patrol marked the first time in Silver Lake that police and gay activists have directly joined forces to address attacks on homosexuals. Northeast Division police officers accompanied SNAP volunteers on a late-night trek through Sunset Junction, a graffiti-scarred area around Sunset, Santa Monica and Griffith Park boulevards and Fountain Avenue.

Bill Capobianco formed SNAP in February, 1989, after a homosexual employee of his Silver Lake clothes store was beaten after leaving a bar.

In the beginning, the patrol was heavily supported and volunteers walked the streets every weekend, said Capobianco. But after a few months, support waned. And last year, after one patrol was shot at with an air gun that shoots paint balls--usually used with protective clothing in mock war games--and another was harassed by a gang, volunteers became less willing to participate.

Now, many volunteers, including Haskins, say they will not patrol Silver Lake unless police accompany the group.

The patrons of Sunset Junction’s five bars say they long have been the target of assaults, verbal abuse, intimidation or derogatory graffiti. One study shows such incidents may be on the rise. The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Rights, in a report released in February, recorded 86 hate crimes last year against homosexuals. That number was up 41% from 1988, and two-thirds of the incidents involved assaults, the study found.

Most gay advocates said even that number is conservative, because many incidents are never reported to authorities. The Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Hollywood, which operates a hot line for gay-bashing victims, last year received about 170 complaints. Many of those involved incidents in Silver Lake, center officials said, but they could not give specific figures.

However, “gay-bashing” is an elusive subject, difficult to define or quantify. About one-third of the incidents reported to the gay and lesbian center were complaints about police who homosexuals considered overzealous in their patrols of gay bars for health and safety violations.

Northeast Division police, on the other hand, do not perceive gay-bashing as a major problem.

Officer Ben Lee, whose beat includes the Sunset Junction area, said he cannot remember the last time he received a gay-bashing complaint.

In fact, police seldom receive complaints about the Silver Lake bars, he said, and generally leave them alone. “They pretty much take care of their own and kind of police themselves,” Lee said.

“The only reports I get,” he said, are complaints from homeowners about homosexuals “cruising in cars or walking around in neighborhoods after the bars close.”

Northeast Division officers are instructed to make a note on their reports any time racial or sexual hatred is a motive in a crime.

“I haven’t seen a huge number of those incidents occurring,” said Detective Rob Watters, who reviews those reports. “I think there was one I was aware of in the last six months. There was one in Rampart,” the adjoining police division, he said. “I don’t see it as a huge problem in the Northeast area at this time.”

Homosexuals are reluctant to report the attacks to police--often because they don’t believe their complaints will be taken seriously, said Donna Wade, co-chairperson of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force.

Police and gay advocates in the past have also disagreed on what constitutes gay-bashing. When Mario Martinez, 26, was shot between the eyes on Feb. 28, 1987, and robbed of his leather jacket after he left a Silver Lake bar, the gay community angrily demanded protection from gay-bashing. But police considered it a random robbery, not a homosexual-targeted crime.

Another difficulty in quantifying gay-bashing, even members of the gay community agree, is that the assailants are sometimes homosexuals themselves, who are picked up at Silver Lake bars or on the “cruise” and who beat their partners after going home with them. The county commission’s study found that more gay-bashing incidents occurred in residences than in public or at places of business.

In spite of the scarcity of solid documentation, the perception of vulnerability remains extremely high in the Silver Lake gay community, activists said.

Gay-bashing also occurs in West Hollywood, the other gay enclave in Los Angeles, gay advocates said. But they said attacks may be more violent around Sunset Junction.

The bars’ clientele, mainly gay men, attract attention in an area where gang activity abounds, Haskins said. And the density of the bars--all within walking distance of one another--makes the area a prime location for crimes aimed at homosexuals.

In spite of the gay community’s uneasiness with the police, SNAP’s leaders decided to appeal to police for help. With assistance from Councilman Michael Woo, a meeting was set up last month.

Officers Paul Afdahl and Lee attended. They told the group the Police Department supports neighborhood patrols by community groups. Without promising to make it a practice, they agreed to accompany the group on a trial patrol.

As a result of that meeting, 14 gay male volunteers joined three police officers Friday night. Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo, whose 13th District encompasses Silver Lake, also joined the patrol.

As Woo and Haskins led the group past graffiti-marked walls, down dark streets and past an old mattress blocking a cracked sidewalk, Lee and Officer Paul Afdahl chatted comfortably with the volunteers, most of whom wore leather jackets and jeans and were members of the Avatars, a club for men who like to dress in leather. They were accompanied by Officer Glenda Browne.

The patrol passed several bars--the Detour, Cuffs, the Gauntlet, Red’s--and virtually every man interviewed told of being accosted or attacked while visiting one of them. Mark Acuna, a Claremont artist, said he had been jumped twice by youths while in Silver Lake, motivating him to join the patrol. Friday was his third time as a SNAP volunteer.

“For years we were good little boys and kept quiet,” said Acuna, a burly 51-year-old who wore a leather jacket and knitted cap. “Well, some neighborhoods have decided to take back their streets. We’ve decided to take back ours.

“To get from a bar to your car, you do it with a feeling that anything might happen to you,” he said. “But I’ve personally never been afraid. I think to be afraid is to submit that they can get away with it.”

During the first tour of the area, the patrol saw none of that. Few people walked the sidewalks and passengers in cars offered only quizzical stares.

But at the end of the route, the patrol stopped suddenly in front of a dark, narrow alley. Two young men drinking in the shadows were startled, then embarrassed as the police officers ordered them to dump out their beers.

A quick frisk produced a “fist dagger”--a thick, T-shaped steel spike with a two-inch blade--on one of them. The sight of it made members of the patrol grimace. One youth was arrested for possession of a deadly weapon. The other was questioned and released.

There was no evidence, however, that the pair were laying in wait to attack gay passers-by.

But the members of the patrol had their suspicions. “If there had been just one or two people walking down there, it could have been a very ugly situation,” said Dana Atkinson, an organizer of the Avatars.

Later, Woo capitalized on the night’s only incident.

“I saw with my own eyes a great example of why this patrol is needed,” said Woo, as the group finally returned to the coffee shop at which it had met two hours earlier. “Who knows? Perhaps we prevented some violent attack from taking place because we were on the patrol.”

The two officers were more guarded in their assessment.

“This is the first coordinated, visible effort between the police and the gay community,” Lee said. “The first time is very important as image setting. Because of our limited manpower, we can’t do it every week. But I think it’s a good first step in establishing a better rapport.”

Capt. Frank Patchett, commander of the Northeast Division, said the division lacks the resources to maintain regular foot patrols with the gay group, but would do its best to provide support any time the group schedules a walk.

“I don’t have enough officers to put a foot beat in that area,” Patchett said. “I’d like to have that luxury, but we don’t.”

As an alternative to a foot beat, Patchett said, he has worked out an arrangement with the Rampart Division, which is responsible for the south side of Sunset Boulevard, to deploy a special weekend patrol of the gay bar area in unmarked police cars.

He said he has two objectives, to discourage young adults who may be planning to harass homosexuals and also to discourage the activities of gay men that annoy residents of the area.

“We get a lot of complaints from residents in the neighborhood of gays driving around and committing sex acts,” Patchett said.

“The other side-benefit of this is that the gays will probably go someplace else. I hope the neighborhood will quit complaining about the gays and the gays will have some sense of safety being able to walk around the streets.”

After two hours with the gay volunteers Friday, Woo and the police left. The remaining volunteers set out on a second tour of the area, with two of the men driving a car alongside the patrol.

This time, three separate groups of hecklers in cars shouted derogatory comments and whistled. Without the police and Woo, muttered Charlie, a La Crescenta hardware store clerk, the patrol “gets a little more serious.”

When the group stopped to talk to Rudy, a security guard who strolled the parking lot of a popular bar, the heavyset, bearded Latino warned of the influx of gangs.

“Be forewarned what you’re getting into,” Rudy said sternly. “If you want to control the turf, there’ll be blood spilled. Be prepared.”

There wasn’t any that night. At about 2 a.m., the group returned to the coffee shop. The men slapped each other on the back, hugged and applauded the four-hour effort. For many, the event meant overcoming both their fears of the street and the police officers whose assistance they had sought.

“It was uncomfortable to a certain extent,” said Gerald Caponi, a 28-year-old from Orange County. “When I see a police officer around the area I don’t know what their attitude is. I feel endangered from both ends.

“But we’ll go through anything to protect our territory,” Caponi said.