The Homosexual and the Police

by

Frank C. Wood, Jr.

Part Two of an address on Search & Seizure given at ONE's 1963 Midwinter Institute

I would like to speak for a moment about the police practices in the State of California, and especially in the Los Angeles area, as I know them. I think that all citizens should know what is going on. There are several

areas-

-you might call them hot areas -where concerted drives are being made against homosexual persons. One is the Long Beach area, the site of the Bielicki case. Another one is in the Hollywood Blvd. area, in the vicinity particularly of Selma street, where there are alleged to be many homosexual bars and where, I think, there are sometimes more vice officers than other persons. I really believe it would be difficult in that vicinity to ask a man for a match or to strike up a conversation with a stranger and not at least run a fifty-fifty chance that you were really talking to a police officer.

Be the situation as it may, we know that a great many arrests come from the Hollywood Blvd. area. The usual practices followed go something like this: someone will strike up a casual conversation with you and then try to get you to say one of the magic words maybe a nice old AngloSaxon word or some word which we all know pertains in one manner

or another to sex. All you have to do is say the magic word and that someone who struck up the conversation will be transformed into a vice officer and his brother officer will startlingly appear from nowhere and swear that with his excellent pair of ears he was able to overhear everything that went on. And these two vice officers will stick together, and they will arrest you, and they will take you down to the police station and book you on Section 647 Subsection A or 650 and one-half, both of which are acts outraging public decency, the first being a sex registration offense and the second not. The police will generally book you on both counts in the hope that you may be persuaded to "cop out" on the lesser of the two charges, 650 and one-half, because you believe that your troubles will be over by so doing.

Let me assure those who may think that this is the end of the trouble, that it simply is not so. I have one client who was and "was" is the word-a doctor. He has left the country and left a federal grant involving a very vital type of work in medical research, due to the fact that he plead guilty to 650 and one-half. As a result of his plea his grant was taken from

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