Ridding the MTA of Pests

Why, Tom Brown asked himself, is that creepy guy standing on the bus when there are empty places to sit, and why is he rocking his lower body back and forth into the shoulder of that seated teenage girl?

In his backward baseball cap, baggy T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, Brown might be mistaken for a low-budget tourist. But packed under his beach-casual garb is a gun, and in his pocket his Los Angeles Police Department badge--which Brown flashed at the sullen man, a 35-year-old cook, before hauling him away in handcuffs and booking him on suspicion of lewd acts on a minor.

In crowded mass-transit systems, female riders have long suffered the torment of getting pinched, fondled or rubbed against by sleazy men. For the last three years, a tiny unit within the 350-officer Metropolitan Transportation Authority police force has been trying to put a stop to it.

Brown and five colleagues were originally dispatched to catch pickpockets. But the undercover officers soon noticed behavior similar to that of pickpockets in a different breed of criminals. These characters--virtually all men, except for the occasional teenage boy--also stared at other riders, then aggressively moved in to make bodily contact. Like pickpockets, they focused at the level where wallets are typically tucked or purses worn--the waist and below. It helped them that female passengers, while visibly agitated, often did nothing to stop them.

This year, the Pickpocket Detail, as it’s still called, is making four sex-offender busts for every pickpocket arrest. In its history, it has made 140 arrests for sexual offenses-- 62 so far this year, 44 last year and 21 the year before that.

Los Angeles is not alone in being concerned about transit perverts. Seoul subways have broadcast warnings against seamy behavior. Train operators in Tokyo, where riders are often crammed together so tightly that they can hardly breathe, have set aside cars for female riders to create a groper-free zone.

In New York City, the subway’s 3,000 patrol officers made more than 400 sex-crime arrests last year, 285 of them involving incidents of public lewdness. There are no special crackdowns in New York on transit perverts per se, but the conduct is discouraged through a “strong uniformed presence” on station platforms, said Deputy Chief Ronald Rowland of the Police Department’s transit bureau.

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Special Assignment

Transit law enforcement experts believe Los Angeles is unique in assigning undercover officers to hunt actively for gropers on buses and trains.

Other agencies might have officers “trolling for illicit behavior in all manners ... but nothing aimed directly” at sexual predators, said Kurt R. Nelson, author of the 1999 book, “Policing Mass Transit.”

The suspects whom Los Angeles officers have cuffed range in age from 17 to 82, and include day laborers, businessmen, a chemical engineer, a teacher’s aide, a gynecologist and a pastor. An estimated 80% are married with children.

The offenders’ behavior seems compulsive. Officers have busted the West Los Angeles gynecologist twice and the North Hollywood pastor three times. Going up and down a bus aisle, left and right, an offender might leave several victims in his wake in a single ride.

There is a clinical explanation for what such men do. Frotteurism or frottage is a sexual deviance defined as a recurrent urge to engage in “touching and rubbing against a nonconsenting person” for sexual arousal and gratification, according to the American Psychiatric Assn.’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

All the known cases of people with this disorder are male. Los Angeles transit police note that every victim they know, except for a long-haired boy who was mistaken for a girl, is female.

Habitats for such men tend to be crowded public places, such as buses, subways, elevators and spectator-heavy events. Frotteurism “is a very impulsive behavior, frequently not planned ... and it has an aggressive component to it,” said Martin Kafka, a psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

Others say the behavior can be driven by a desire for power and control.

“In some cases it has to do with anger,” said Charlene Steen, a Napa psychologist who has written three books on sex offenders. “In a lot of cases it has to do with people who don’t know how to make appropriate contact with females.”

Treatment options include cognitive behavioral therapy, antidepressants and drugs that reduce sex drives. Unless there is intervention, experts say, men with this condition are likely to prey on women again and again.

That’s why officers believe that keeping track of suspicious characters can pay off.

Take the case of the guy officers dubbed “Clark Kent.” A few months ago, an officer saw the man, wearing thick black-framed glasses, grope a woman on a bus. But the Spanish-speaking victim refused to cooperate with authorities--who needed her statements to press charges--so an arrest couldn’t be made.

Officers soon began having “Clark Kent” sightings. They watched him park his car at a supermarket parking lot just so he could take buses up and down the same street. A couple of months after the fondling incident, an officer came upon “Clark Kent” rubbing up against a female passenger, and he was finally arrested.

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Disguising Intent

Sexual predators like to prowl buses in search of victims because the swaying motions of the vehicles help mask what they are trying to do, officers say.

The perpetrators seem especially emboldened during rush hour, when riders are elbowing and jostling each other for room to stand. Officers say they realize some contact can be incidental, and say they take pains to arrest only men whose conduct is obviously sexually motivated.

Most of the men arrested by the undercover agents wind up being charged with misdemeanor sexual battery, if the victim is an adult, or felony lewd conduct, if the victim is younger than 18.

The defendants usually end up pleading out, with sentences ranging from probation for first-time offenders, who are usually sent to a treatment program, to prison for repeat offenders or felons.

Police and transit experts believe that sex crimes like these are vastly underreported.

Victims are often too intimidated to stop the offenders, and later too embarrassed or unsure about what happened to tell authorities about it. The molester may never get caught unless an officer is watching and can intervene immediately.

“Undercover work has a very important place in policing work of this nature,” said Greg Hull, director of operations, safety and security programs for Washington, D.C.-based American Public Transportation Assn.

Research shows that many, though not all, of those obsessed by lecherous touching also engage in other deviant sexual behavior, such as exhibitionism, voyeurism or pedophilia. When booking suspects, officers often find a history of criminal activity such as rape, child molestation or peeping. Outstanding arrest warrants sometimes turn up for such offenses as felony lewd acts.

“The ‘bumper and grinder’ ... that’s a person who we can have an ‘Amber alert’ on three years from now,” said Paul Lennon, the MTA’s chief of security and law enforcement, referring to the system that has been used repeatedly in recent weeks, interrupting broadcasts and using digital freeway signs to post urgent messages about child abductions. “Take them off the street before they escalate.”

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Sending a Message

Female bus riders say police crackdowns are necessary to allay their fears and to send a message that such behavior is not acceptable.

“If they can do it to me, they can do it to others,” said Briselda Guerrero, 30. The Los Angeles nanny first met undercover officers in June 2001, when they caught a man victimizing her during a bus ride. Recently, officers intervened again as she used her arm to block another predator.

A female passenger on a different bus, 15-year-old Alejandra Trejo, said she frequently encounters such prurient men but never reported them because she didn’t think it would do any good.

That changed on a recent bus ride she and her mother took through Koreatown.

The Los Angeles girl felt someone repeatedly press against her, she said.

It was, police said, the 35-year-old cook whom Officer Brown had been watching. Another officer immediately approached the girl and asked her what had happened.

Brown said he had become suspicious when he saw the suspect hover over Trejo and remain, even after seats around him opened up. The man allegedly continued pressing into the girl’s shoulder through three bus stops. “It’s repulsive and disgusting,” Brown said.

The cook eventually entered into a plea bargain that resulted in a sentence of nine days in jail and 18 months’ probation.

“There are a lot of guys like that. Some of them do worse things on buses,” Trejo said.

Her mother, Josefina Romero, who was sitting in a different seat on the crowded bus and hadn’t seen what happened, was elated at the arrest.

“It’s great,” Romero said, beaming at the officers. “They are protecting my daughter.”