It’s a dirty job nabbing horny guys in the park, but somebody’s gotta do it
A balding, middle-aged man sits in an Oldsmobile, parked trunk first in a spot in a Penn Valley Park lot. It’s lunchtime midweek, and he’s eating tacos from a fast-food bag. Trash is piled high in the backseat. The Oldsmobile and the surrounding asphalt, if viewed from the top floor of the glaringly white One Park Place condominium tower at the southernmost edge of the park, would appear as a mere fingernail scrape against a Crayola-green landscape. The grassy humps of the 130-acre park ease up to the grounds of the World War I Museum, where the Liberty Memorial’s grooved monolith joins the downtown skyline.
A man approaches the driver’s-side window of the Olds.
“How are your tacos?” the man outside asks.
“Fine,” the driver answers.
“Are you looking for something?”
“Of course,” the driver says.
“What do you like?”
By way of response, the seated man shifts his ample gut to unfasten his khakis and fish out the head of his penis.
The standing man says he has a house nearby. The Olds follows the other man’s vehicle out of the park, past the fountain that honors fallen firefighters and into 31st Street traffic. They have driven less than half a mile when a Kansas City Police Department patrol car flashes its red-and-blue lights and signals the Oldsmobile to pull over. The leading vehicle keeps on driving.
Soon, the man is handcuffed and slumped next to his car, his weathered face cast downward. This is what happens when you expose yourself to an undercover detective.
The KCPD’s vice squad spends a couple of days a month conducting covert stings to ferret out men seeking sex in public parks. When things go right, the job is predictable. Hiding in plain sight, the detectives observe men committing brazen — and, some argue, victimless — crimes. Filling out the citation paperwork roadside, the detectives then endure the often laughable excuses.
It’s not tackling robbers or finding lost children, but members of the squad believe that making the parks safe for the average taxpayer is a noble civic duty.
Also, it can make for a fun afternoon.
The KCPD’s vice squad — four detectives under Sgt. Brad Dumit — is a tightknit, busy unit. Its members watch for code and ordinance violations at body-piercing and tattoo parlors, track illegal gambling, crack down on unlicensed party houses, monitor strip clubs, ensure that businesses aren’t selling liquor or tobacco to minors, investigate escort services and massage parlors, and arrest street prostitutes and pimps and johns.
Lately, Dumit’s crew has been working the parks hard in response to increasing complaints, even during the winter months, about park sex. The longer that such action is left unchecked, the bolder the actors become, Dumit says. With the coast clear, what once was consummated in the relative privacy of a public restroom moves into the open. After that, dog walkers and Frisbee throwers visit a park less frequently.
Skateboarders are a little hardier, but some who frequent Penn Valley Park’s professionally designed skating area aren’t oblivious to the steady stream of traffic snaking through the parking lot.
Tom Wyker, a veteran skater at 32, has been solicited by men in Penn Valley Park. “We’ve heard that two dudes got caught doin’ it in the bowl” — the kidney-shaped basin that skaters use like a drained SoCal pool to execute air stunts — “and there are condoms splattered all over. It sucks.”
Sean Croker, a 25-year-old skateboarder, considers the area’s non-skateboarding activity an annoyance. “We’ll get done skating and be bullshitting with our friends, and those dudes will be patrolling the parking lot like sharks, and we’re the bait,” says Croker, who once saw two men engaged in oral sex while touring the park with a friend.
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Wyker and Croker aren’t homophobic, but they do fear for the safety of the younger skaters. “It sucks for them to see that going on,” Wyker says. “It should be a place you can drop your kids off at, but this is not that park.”
Some of the men busted here have criminal records already for sexual offenses and won’t just get a ticket and a Municipal Court date. The man in the Oldsmobile, the arresting officers discover, was busted for sodomy and prostitution years ago. He’ll have to post bond downtown. The cops take his picture with a digital camera and call for a police van to pick him up.
While waiting, he tells a Pitch reporter that, yes, he did unzip his pants. He still thinks his arrest is unfair. “I feel like it’s entrapment,” he says.
Though he wears no wedding ring, he’s married. His wife, he says, will be surprised.
Is he gay?
“No,” he says.
Why did he come to Penn Valley Park?
“I pulled in here to eat my lunch on my lunch break,” he says. “It’s a nice day. I work in a 4-foot-by-6-foot cube. I get a little claustrophobic.”
Every major city has a sex park. In Denver, it’s Cheesman Park. Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park is so infamous for “doin’ it after dark” that there’s a song about it.
Back when being openly gay was less acceptable than it is today, public parks provided a sanctuary for closeted meet-ups. Nowadays, older men tend to fit the profile of those arrested in park-sex stings — throwbacks to a more conservative era.
Penn Valley Park didn’t gain its reputation overnight. Kansas City’s unofficial gay historians agree that it’s been the spot for as long as anyone can remember. For one thing, there’s Penn Valley’s proximity to downtown. Long after this cowtown’s raucous “open city” days were over and sidewalks emptied at nightfall, a handful of gay bars still clung to existence on streets where there was hardly any other nightlife.
But in these smartphone-enabled times, horny guys don’t need to scan the horizon for phallic landmarks. Squirt.org provides a guide to wanking wonderlands all across the country.
The Web site’s lengthy how-to section for newbies begins, “Cruising for sex can be totally fun and satisfying. But there are tons of ways to cruise safely and responsibly, to ensure that we are taking care of ourselves, each other, and our local communities while we’re out having a good time.”
A whole section of squirt.org is devoted to parks, where, the guide advises, one should “Show some skin, show some cock!” Cars can be a handy place to disrobe, but if one is outside, “Take a piss and let him get a look.”
But even squirt.org has boundaries. Littering is frowned upon. “Responsible cruisers” do not leave used condoms or lube bottles on the ground. “Not only does this destroy the beauty of the park,” the site reads, “it threatens cruising spaces. Litter is evidence to our enemies as to exactly what is going on and where.”
Of course, the best resource for such “enemies” is squirt.org itself — vice cops bookmark the site. Dumit can tell that his team is doing a good job when the Kansas City-related forums are abuzz with warnings that police are lurking.
From May 2008 to May 2009, the vice squad conducted nine operations targeting sex in parks. In Penn Valley Park, the stings resulted in 26 arrests for exposing genitals or masturbating, six arrests for soliciting prostitution, two arrests for patronizing prostitution, nine arrests on outstanding warrants and one arrest on a federal warrant. In Minor Park, in south Kansas City off Red Bridge Road, the squad made 38 arrests for indecent exposure or masturbating and two arrests for patronizing prostitution. The squad made four additional indecent-exposure arrests at other parks it randomly chose for stakeouts.
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As the complaints keep coming, the squad keeps stinging — and the men keep showing up.
“This isn’t Peter Puffer-in-the-park patrol day, is it?” a police officer hollers, one beefy forearm extending from the cab of his truck as he rolls through the KCPD’s South Patrol Division lot at 11109 Hickman Mills Drive. It’s just after 10 in the morning, and a cluster of plainclothes detectives are about to move out. Today, the vice squad is targeting Mill Creek Park.
Detectives Flounder and Polski jump into Flounder’s personal vehicle, while Ruby and Ralph each take to theirs. (For this story, the KCPD requested that The Pitch withhold the real names of the detectives in Dumit’s squad.)
Dumit, a Kansas City native, cracks a fresh Mr. Pibb and steers out of the police lot, vowing to beat the rest of the squad to the park.
“Everything’s a competition,” he says with mock seriousness. Because so much vice work requires tedious surveillance, Dumit and his detectives are masters at making little games of mundane activities.
Dumit’s list of bad habits is short (excluding his yen for junk food before noon). He’s a married father of three who rarely drinks alcohol. He has long since quit chewing tobacco, and he stopped riding a motorcycle when he began wondering if he was having too much fun. Yet his laid-back nature sets him apart from the Type-A sergeant stereotype. And as a vice cop, he can unload a string of curses as blue as the eyeliner on an Independence Avenue hooker.
Today’s operation has attracted the attention of KCTV Channel 5 reporter Betsy Webster. Dumit makes a detour to pick up Webster and cameraman Chuck Prewitt in the parking lot of Lipari’s Sun Fresh on Holmes.
Dumit explains some of the ground rules to the news crew. They’ll be keeping a close watch on cars parked backward, for instance, because it’s one way that fellow cruisers signal interest. “But I always back my car in, everywhere I go!” Prewitt says, shaking his head.
Dumit’s radio crackles.
“You already have a deal?” Dumit radios back. Affirmative.
In a prostitution sting, a deal is when a suspect agrees to pay money for sex. In this case, a deal also is when a police decoy — an officer posing as a cruising man — catches someone engaging in sexual activity or exposing his genitals. Flounder just saw a man doing the latter.
“Yeah,” Flounder says over the radio. “He was masturbating.”
Three minutes later, word comes over the radio that a second arrest is pending. Prewitt and Webster pile into Dumit’s vehicle and head into the park. Along Red Bridge Road, just off the road’s namesake bridge, elementary-school kids are cleaning up litter along the creek.
“Can we get a shot of that?” Webster wants to know. The answer is yes, but she’ll have to wait.
Dumit steers into a parking lot at the head of several trails leading back into the woods in Minor Park. Half a dozen cars are parked here already, among them an army-green Range Rover, a primer-gray Ford and a two-tone beater driven by a black man who looks hard at Dumit as he passes. There aren’t any kids in this area or any other parkgoers at all — just men, cars and stares.
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The vice squad changes its male decoys frequently so their faces don’t become recognizable to park regulars. Vice often picks up decoys from different KCPD patrol units. Though there’s no extra pay involved, it’s never hard to find a street cop willing to step up for decoy duty. Many consider vice an enviable assignment; offering oneself up as a vice decoy is a rite of passage for an officer who wants to get a foot in the door with Dumit’s team.
But luring the fellas isn’t as easy as it sounds. A decoy from East Patrol who practiced swishy, affected mannerisms spent an entire day striking out at Penn Valley Park. He might as well have been in uniform.
Flounder is a Zen master of decoy duty. The detective’s advantage might come from what seems like a bottomless well of patience — nothing says “cop” like overeagerness. It could also be his frame, which is a little on the doughy side, or his lack of a telltale buzz cut. Today, he’s back in the woods, waiting for another mark.
The rules are pretty simple: Decoys don’t have to admit that they’re cops if asked. In the woods, Flounder can do almost anything, short of engaging in illegal activities himself without straying into entrapment. (Unzipping his own pants, for instance, is off-limits. But he can ask to see another man’s penis.)
Of the people they arrest, Dumit says. “We give ’em plenty of time to back out of it.” Dumit also says these stings aren’t meant to single out homosexuals. During arrests, the detectives make the same point to the men they bust. Polski says that in his six years on the squad, he has encountered a heterosexual couple just once having sex in a park.
The crackdowns are meant to protect those seeking sex, too. Polski once came to the aid of a doctor who was mugged for his checkbook and wallet in the Penn Valley woods. Ralph, a former homicide detective and trained hostage negotiator, can recall many a battered body found at Penn Valley Park whose former occupant lived “a high-risk lifestyle.”
So it’s about public sex, not gay sex. As if on cue to prove this point, the black man who stared at Dumit is now motioning for Ruby to get out of her car. Though she’s here as a backup rather than a decoy, she slips into the working-girl role and scores a deal in no time. The guy doesn’t want to pay her cash, but he offers to buy her a McDonald’s hamburger if she lets him perform oral sex on her. An agreement to exchange something of value is as good as currency.
During a quick lunch break, a uniformed officer — another take-down driver — asks whether Flounder carries his radio or gun with him into the woods. Flounder says no. The officer is aghast. What would Flounder do if he were out of Polski’s sight and someone tried to jump him? “I’d kick him in the nuts and run like a bitch,” Flounder says, and the group erupts in laughter.
After lunch, Dumit drops off Channel 5’s Webster near the creek so she can interview the schoolteachers whose kids are still picking up trash. Meanwhile, Flounder catches another deal with a man in a black Hyundai, so Dumit and the cameraman momentarily leave Webster behind to check out the arrest. By the time they arrive at the spot on Red Bridge Road where the Hyundai is pinned between police cars, the offender is already out of the car, shaking visibly. He shrinks from Prewitt’s camera.
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Turning his attention to the trembling man, Polski says, “You look like you’re about to pass out,” and sets him on the curb. The man’s name and tags come back clean for warrants and previous arrests, and in less than five minutes, he’s driving away with a ticket, a court date and a lesson presumably learned.
Dumit drives back to the creek to pick up Webster, who’s alone and sitting primly on a stump by the road. Aside from the story she’ll run on tonight’s broadcast, she’s got a personal story to tell: A man in a pickup truck offered her a ride while she waited. Was he “one of them,” she wants to know?
“Oh, yeah,” Dumit tells her. “See how rampant it is?”
“Should I have said yes and asked how much?” Webster asks. She thinks for a moment. “I didn’t know how soon you were coming.”
When they trickle into Kansas City Municipal Court to face a judge, the people busted in park stings don’t face the same punishments set for prostitutes or johns, says city prosecutor Lowell Gard, whose career at Kansas City’s municipal courthouse spans more than 25 years.
Prostitutes and solicitors of prostitutes usually pay their debts to society with some combination of psychological treatment, classes on public health and safety, and a fine. “But the indecent exposures in the parks, those are kind of hard to just generally categorize as a common offense with a common plea agreement or treatment offer,” Gard says. The range of punishment depends on the circumstances of the arrest, like whether there were kids present and the individual’s criminal history.
Gard says he rarely hears arguments of entrapment by way of defense. “Vice [cops] know what entrapment is,” Gard says. “The legal standard for entrapment is pretty high and hard to meet. You essentially have to prove that the defendant, but for the enticement and encouragement of the officer, would not have committed the act.”
Coulter Devries, a defense lawyer whose bassoon-deep twang is a familiar sound in the Municipal Court halls, disagrees with Gard’s assertion that entrapment is rarely evoked in these cases. When he represents men netted in park stings, Devries says he looks carefully at the arrest reports to determine whether it was his client or the cop who initiated the encounter.
“There’s some real good case law all the way from the United States Supreme Court about whether or not police officers, in their undercover activities, essentially created the bad behavior that they’re now saying the defendant did which is criminal,” Devries says.
City ordinance violations all carry the same penalty: up to a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. A first-time offender rarely receives the full sentence, especially for a nonviolent offense.
Another important distinction for a city ordinance violation of indecent exposure: Convictions won’t trigger registry on any sex-offender list. (Felonies and misdemeanors in state court are another story.)
If his client is an otherwise stand-up citizen, Devries says, he can usually get a judge to agree to what’s known as a suspended imposition of sentencing. The terms of such an agreement might include staying out of parks and attending counseling sessions for a probationary period, after which the sentence goes away. (The counseling, Devries says, is to provide guidance on making safer choices, not to change a client’s sexual orientation.)
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But if the offender violates the terms of probation, the judge can decide to impose the original sentence. “I tell my clients, ‘Look, don’t make that judge mad,'” Devries says. “‘If you come back, and he gets mad, he’s going to spank you and he’s going to show you who the judge is.'”
But there’s no such thing as a suspended imposition of matrimonial groveling. Is it possible for a man to be caught with his pants down in the park and keep it from his family?
If a client successfully navigates the probationary period of a suspended sentence, Devries says, the criminal record closes. The police records, however, might be accessible if subpoenaed — in divorce proceedings, for example.
Gard says, “It’s surprising how many of them are married, yeah.” Asked to consider the question of secrecy, he says, “We don’t put ’em on TV or try to track ’em down at home or anything like that.”
Gard pauses for a moment, then adds, “I guess if you are sneaky enough, you can hide a lot of things from your family.”
It’s a quarter to 11 in the morning at Penn Valley Park. Three vehicles idle side by side: Flounder and Polski on one end, Ruby in the center, then Dumit. This spot conveniently overlooks the skatepark while affording some cover from the parking lot below. Three decoys are down there somewhere (where Ralph is stationed), and so are at least a dozen other men who have arrived separately.
Dumit shakes Junior Mints out of a box and washes them down with Mr. Pibb, then absently chucks one of the candies left-handed through his window. It sails over the roof of Ruby’s vehicle and through the open window of Flounder and Polski’s, landing on the passenger seat next to Polski, who picks it up and pops it in his mouth.
Flounder waits for Polski to swallow, then says, “That landed where the crack whore was sitting,” referring to a recent prostitution sting in which Flounder posed as a john. Polski pretends to gag.
Dumit recalls the days when one sting would net dozens of arrests. As a result, the targets have become more careful. “The more we do this stuff, the harder it gets,” he says.
Ralph remembers when trying to clear the parks of cruising cars was “like pushing water.” At the sight of arriving squad cars, vehicles fled like a parade, bumper-to-bumper, only to return as soon as the coast was clear. The parking lots don’t get as full now, Ralph says. But as long as there are complaints, he and his squad will keep stinging.
A two-door, blue Ford Focus with temporary Kansas tags enters the lot. In mere minutes, the decoy hiding in the woods has a deal with the driver, a twentysomething man who recently moved here from Mexico. “Thirty dollars, with him on the bottom,” the decoy reports.
A little while later, another report comes in on the radio: “These two guys in the blue Audi are jerking each other off.” But the decoy can’t get close enough to the windows to get a glimpse of flesh without being noticed. “I know damn well what they were doing,” the decoy reports after a few more minutes. “One had his whole upper torso inside the car. I’m pretty sure he was blowing him.”
Dumit tells the decoy to give up on the Audi’s occupants for now — the squad ought to squeeze in a quick food run before the park fills up with its own “lunch rush.”
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Immediately after lunch, Decoy 1 — one of three cops borrowed today from Central Patrol — lands a deal. Decoy 1 and Decoy 2 are both young, fit and tall. Decoy 3 has a boyish face and red hair. You can’t help but feel a little sorry for the men trolling the park today. They have no idea what they’re up against.
The deals come in quick succession: A GM worker driving a black Chevy Blazer offers a decoy $20 for a blow job. A private security guard in designer glasses, caught urinating and then masturbating in the woods, keeps repeating “my fucking career” and fretting that the KCPD will alert his bosses to his offense. An attorney with a high-profile law firm is arrested for exposing himself and argues when the police computer indicates a prior arrest, then suddenly remembers being arrested in Minor Park for the same crime. A Jeep driver wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt and Doc Martens, pulled over at a busy intersection after exposing himself in the park, shows no sign of embarrassment, staring impassively into the distance, as though he’s being ticketed for speeding. A stout man in a T-shirt from an Optimist’s Club rodeo tells Polski that Decoy 3 asked to see his penis, then remains willfully oblivious to Polski’s advice on finding safer ways to pick up dates. The stout man insists that Decoy 3, the redhead, was “adorable.”
By afternoon, the mood among the vice cops is light. In Flounder and Polski’s car, Polski alternates between singing Bobby Brown songs and making bad puns. Some of the parked vehicles in the lot below head toward the exit, only to be replaced by new arrivals.
“We’re gonna have us a logjam,” Polski says.
“You’re an idiot,” Flounder teases him.
One of the day’s last arrests is also the easiest. Over the radio, Decoy 1 explains that he was crouched in the back of Decoy 2’s vehicle when a scruffy man walked up to the driver’s side window and offered to perform oral sex on Decoy 2 for $10.
“That was completely unsolicited on our end,” Decoy 2 says.
“That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Decoy 1 says, laughing.
The squad calls it a day by 4 p.m. As the cops file out of Penn Valley Park, a new shift of vehicles slides in. Each car contains a single man. Most park trunk first.
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