Five California Men are Suing the City of San Jose after being arrested in a “gay sex sting.” The charges against them were eventually dismissed, but undoubtedly much damage was done regardless.

The men claim their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when they were arrested for “loitering” during a 17-month operation conducted beginning 2014 at a park known to be a meeting place for Gay and Bisexuals. In total, during the 17 months, only 19 men were arrested. Six fought the charges and ultimately got them dismissed, another was dismissed by the court for insufficient evidence. The rest took plea deals offered by the prosecutor.

The Mercury News reports that the men are seeking a million dollars in damages through their federal lawsuit. We hope they get every penny!

The entrapment victims were approached by an undercover officer who made lewd requests. If they responded, they were arrested. One of the six claimed to have rejected the offer – but was still arrested.

Attorneys for the men claim the police did not target females or who they perceived to be heterosexual men. The police also claimed they conducted the sting in response to citizen complaints, but records showed only one single complaint. Complaints against other crimes complained of, such as drugs, did not result in a 17-month sting.

The enforcement attempt screams discrimination and the judge in their criminal trials seems to have agreed. In his ruling, he wrote, “unpopular groups have too often been made to bear the brunt of discriminatory prosecution or selective enforcement.”

Now that the criminal charges against them have been dismissed, five of the six men are pursuing civil action against the City of San Jose. They may even be seeking to bring in other plaintiffs from other jurisdictions for a class action to end, so called, “bag the fag” operations.

A couple of months ago, similar stings were conducted in Florida, which according to this report yielded some very disturbing results. It wrote, “Unmentioned in news reports, Florida police have long tracked what they identified as sex deviants.  In 2012, a local gay publication, the South Florida Gay News (SFGN), revealed that the Palm Beach County police had conducted a five-year undercover operation targeting gay men cruising in local parks.  SFGN reported that “more than 600 arrests [were] made …”  It noted, “only a handful of the arrests – four to be exact — were between two men. The rest of them involved an undercover detective soliciting another man for sex using tactics that one lawyer called ‘disgusting,’ while another lawyer questioned the legality of the detectives’ behavior.

As individuals familiar with the “Craigslist sex offender stings” know all too well, police use some VERY shady tactics to entrap individuals into alleged behavior they never intended to commit. They will contact men in adult dating ads, engage in a thread of sexually suggestive correspondence with the target thinking they are communicating with an adult – then introduce a fictitious “underage” individual, only to finally take all the correspondence out of order and context to make it seem like the target was soliciting minors.

In the Counterpunch story, it was reported that in New York police “spied on men through the slats in the dividers in the men’s bathroom and then claimed the men were engaged in lewd conduct.” Never mind that the officer’s behavior in watching men through slats in a bathroom stall divider is illegal (and pretty sick) in and of itself!

These “stings” don’t prevent crime, they create hypothetical crimes. When the stings are created with the intent of targeting a disfavored group, they become especially heinous.

 

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