THE REAL CRIMINALS -. WHO ARE THEY

Los Angeles Top-Cop Edward Davis has been openly disdainful of Gays and other minorities. It was reportedly his hard-line, Bible-belt narrowness that won him the chiefdom in mid-1969 over James Fisk, whose committment to Community Relations disturbed the Police Commission hacks.

Fisk, who scored highest on the qualifying exams, was twice passed over. Each time, a local homosexual group calling itself HIC or Tangents, had mystified the Gay Community by hysterically demanding Fisk's rejection.

Davis took office with threats to "close down porno shops and fag bars." When several Gay leaders petitioned him for a meeting (to help prevent further incidents like the fatal beating of an alleged homosexual by police at the Dover Hotel, in front of dozens of witnesses) Davis let an underling reply that the LAPD did not "deal" with criminals, but would enforce the anti-homosexual laws to the fullest. The day our letter was delivered to Davis, police murdered a Black homosexual a few blocks away. We were told to take any further complaints to the nearest police station.

When application was made for Hollywood Blvd's first (1970) Christopher Street West Parade, Davis said he'd sooner see the street opened to "thieves and robbers." He insisted that the Police Commission demand, for any such permit, a $1,500,000 bond from participating Gay groups, for police protection. Long-time ONE Attorney Herb Selwyn soon got the permit, without the ridiculous protection money.

Last August, when Chicano protesters tried to tell City Hall that no one would listen to their objections about police brutality in the barrios, conservative City Councilman Arthur Snyder, an outspoken defender of the LAPD, invited them and other complaining citizens to address his Police, Fire & Civil Defense Committee. When representatives of the new Gay Community Alliance (a non-partisan group aimed at making the local Gay community politically effective) described, at Snyder's bi-weekly hearings, the pattern of false arrests, illegal raids, beatings and perjury used against Gays, Davis' spokesmen accused Snyder of conducting a mock-trial. of defenseless officers.

However, lower eschelon LAPD officials have often expressed to us their lack of enthusiasm for Davis' views and policies.

Meanwhile, HELP, a conservative Gay legal defense group in Los Angeles, had set up liason with the Sheriff's Department, which has long tended to limit its function more to keeping the peace and combatting real crime, rather than excessive enforcing of outmoded moralistic notions.

A letter to Davis penned by this writer repeated my request, which three Councilmen had received with apparent approval, that Davis appoint a liason officer to lessen frictions between Gays and the LAPD — as Officer Blackstone has long done so successfully in San Francisco.

Again, as in 1970, a Davis underling replied that "it is the policy of the Chief of Police not to conduct liason with any group which deliberately engages in criminal actions."

While Davis' proxy answer was in transit, Snyder wrote Davis strongly suggesting that, despite the technical illegality of homosexual acts ("quite a high percentage of the heterosexual community has as well violated the various laws" covering sexual behavior), most members of the Gay community were law abiding citizens, and, if Davis does not deal with

? By Jim Kepner

those Gay groups (GCA and MCC) which believe in working with the establishment, he might be forced to deal in other ways with more militant Gays.

Davis' stinging reply to Snyder insisted that he would not deal with criminal elements, charged that homosexuals made all city parks unsafe, traded off their sons for sexual purposes (?) and ruined property values in "the Selma Avenue ghetto." He added that homosexuals are "to be pitied, and where possible, helped," but "It's one thing to be a leper; it's another thing to be spreading the disease." He clearly implied that Snyder was doing just that.

GCA President Dave Glascock had read a 10-point demand addressed to the LAPD and written by GCA founder Craig Hanson, at one of Snyder's hearings. GCA issued a rewrite (by this writer) of these demands, calling for an end to entrapment and enticement, harassment, verbal abuse, beatings and wholesale and arbitrary arrests; removal of pathologically or religiously anti-homosexual officers from contacts with the Gay community; prosecution of officers who perjure themselves; an end to LAPD lobbying against law reforme; the appointment of a full-time, qualified and sympathetic liason officer; and the impeachment or removal of Davis for "demonstrated incompetence, for flagrant bias against minority groups, for bringing the LAPD into disrepute, and for presuming to act as God's mouthpiece rather than as a Constitu-

tional officer of the law."

When GCA, HELP and MCC called a week-long fast on the steps of the new Federal Building in Civic Center, with intermittent picketing at the nearby police headquarters, demanding Davis' removal, the Chief added several new epithets for the Gay Community. He charged that Gays were "the real criminals," "number one on his wanted list" and that Gays were murderers, "responsible for most unsolved murders." Repeatedly, he called us lepers, and prostitutes, saying that all the demonstrators had made their money on Selma Avenue. One such "leper," John Platania, a Director of the Gay Community Service Center which provides housing and other services to homeless Gays, gave a surprise ending to a poorly attended "We Love Our Police" rally on City Hall steps. While the Chief's bodyguard surrounded well-known Gay militant, Morris Kight, Platania, wearing a long black cape and a “natural” red hairdo, stepped up to Davis and embraced him, wishing him, "on behalf of my brothers and sisters in the Gay community, a very Merry Christmas.”

That night, 80 persons were arrested in and near local Gay bars on "sex" charges, and 30 others on "dope" charges, according to HELP. But "the heat" lasted only one night, a busy one for HELP's officers.

Meanwhile, Perry, Platania, Glascock, Bob Diamond, Mike Manning, Paul McTiernan and Danny O'Connell fasted and slept on the Federal Building steps no food or drink for

seven days — until Christmas Eve. Others joined the fast, all the way from South Pasadena to Sacramento.

Several City Councilmen visited the fasters, and several wrote Davis supporting the Liason proposal. There was heavy radio and some TV coverage but press coverage was limited to the ADVOCATE, GAY and the FREE PRESS. The L. A. TIMES, sharply critical of Davis generally, blacked out this, like almost all Gay news since ONE won its Supreme Court case back in 1957. (Recently the TIMES has compensated. for its nearly total blackout of Gay activities by a rare but