DAVID RYAN wasn’t having sex when he was arrested at Volunteer Park in June. But the protests that he and other men have raised about the Seattle Police Department’s conduct in the park have made a quiet police operation into quite the sexy topic.
This week, gay community leaders held a confab to strategize about an upcoming meeting with Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske on the issue. Last week, City Council member Richard Conlin met with Captain Nick Metz, who oversees the park as the East Precinct’s chief, to discuss the councilman’s concerns about police conduct. Meanwhile, police have suspended their “plainclothes operation” in the park while the city examines the statutes under which undercover cops are making arrests.
One of the strangest things about the laws under which city police arrest men for having sex in the park is that, technically, public sex is not illegal. The city’s lewd conduct statute was long ago ruled unconstitutional. Instead, police now rely on a charge of indecent exposure. In the year ending June 2001, police made 60 arrests for the crime of indecent exposure in Volunteer Park alone.
But are those arrests justifiable police activity or harassment of gay men? The police report in David Ryan’s case states that Ryan and another man had their penises out and were masturbating one another. Ryan, a 36-year-old Capitol Hill resident, tells a different story.
According to Ryan, he was flirting casually with another man under a tree. “There was physical contact, but nothing was exposed and we weren’t groping each other. Then I heard others approaching from behind, so I said, ‘Let’s take this someplace else.’ At that moment I was grabbed from behind by [an undercover] police officer,” he says. “I was thrown to the ground, my face and chest pressed to the dirt.”
Officer Keith Swank slapped handcuffs on Ryan’s wrists and placed Ryan under arrest. Swank told Ryan he was being arrested for public nudity. “Had we been doing what he said we’d been doing,” says Ryan, “something would have still been hanging out of my pants.” Ryan spent the night in jail, posted $640 bail, and went home the next morning. The charges were later dropped. Other men tell similar stories.
Early last month, Conlin wrote Kerlikowske. “I have heard anecdotally that there have been an increasing number of patrols that use entrapment to attract gay men in park,” he wrote. He asked Kerlikowske to “ensure that the [police] department’s activities focus on public safety issues, and do not go over the line to harassment of Seattle’s gay population on the basis of sexual preference.”
Kerlikowske denied that entrapment tactics have been employed. “We are not using officers in plainclothes to arrest individuals in the park for a law violation,” he wrote.
But Captain Nick Metz says, “We have been doing plainclothes operations in the park. We’ve not tried to hide that from the community, but people are accusing us of setting up ‘stings.’ That’s not what we’re doing.” The distinction, according to Metz, is that a ‘sting’ would involve undercover police luring men into sex, whereas in the plainclothes operations, undercover police stake out the park but do not actively seduce men into committing crimes. But some men, including some who talked on record, say they were lured into physical contact with undercover cops and then arrested for assault. Without addressing specific instances, Metz says he sees no evidence of systemic harassment.
Officer Kim Bogucki, who checks the park about once a day, says that she consistently receives complaints about sexual activity from neighbors and park visitors. She remembers one complaint from the father of an 8-year-old boy. “While [the boy] and his father were at the park, they walked in on five men who were involved in sexual activity in the bathroom. In front of the boy, the men asked the boy’s father if he wanted to join them.”
According to Bogucki, sexual activity is not confined to the nighttime hours. “The bathrooms are pretty active during the day. There’s one bathroom near the kids’ wading pool that has a glory hole in the wall. We’ve covered the hole three times. The fourth time we had to solder the screws down. The other day I walked in on a 300-pound man trying to pull out the screws with a crowbar.”
After Metz met with council member Conlin last week, he said, “My plan is to start working on some new strategies with the community.”
As for David Ryan, he is strongly considering suing the city and has also filed a formal complaint. He plans to continue to address the issue openly. “There’s such a stigma about being in the park,” Ryan says. “A lot of people are not in a position to be vocal—because they’re married or are in a committed relationship. So maybe that’s why so much of [the police officers’] inappropriate behavior in the park goes unchecked: Nine times out of 10, nobody’s going to say anything.”
