title:  Long Beach Police Have Discriminatory Policy Targeting Gay Men, Judge Says (VIDEO)
text: On April 29, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Halim Dhanidina overturned the conviction of Rory Moroney, a gay man arrested by an undercover Long Beach police officer in October 2014.In overturning Moroney s conviction, the judge confirmed what LGBTQ advocates have been saying for years: that gay men are routinely targeted by members of the Long Beach vice squad.The judge agreed with Moroney s attorneys, who sought to have their client s conviction on charges of  lewd conduct and indecent exposure thrown out,  citing the discriminatory nature of Long Beach  lewd conduct stings. During the stings, male officers are sent out into the community to specifically target gay men.In Moroney s case an undercover officer made gestures toward him in a public restroom. Moroney was arrested after responding to what he presumed to be sexual advances on the part of the officer by exposing himself.Dhanidina found that  the presence and tactics of the decoy officers actually caused the crimes to occur. The judge also found that  Long Beach s vice tactics are discriminatory because the squad uses only male officers as undercover decoys in lewd conduct stings. He went on to say that the police department intentionally targeted men who engaged in homosexual sex,  during the stings.While the police department claimed that the stings were only done in response to citizen lewd conduct complaints, the judge shut down that argument after they failed to show evidence of citizens complaining.LGBTQ activists and civil rights attorneys have long criticized the tactics used by police to arrest gay men.Jim Key, a spokesman for the Los Angeles LGBT Center, told the Los Angeles Times that police who use these tactics  aren t saving lives, they re destroying them by branding innocent men as sex offenders. John Duran, West Hollywood councilman and expert witness, said the lewd conduct stings  came out of the era when homosexuality was criminal,  calling them  a leftover from the last century. While the judge s decision is a step forward, both for Moroney and others who have been entrapped by Long Beach police, these same tactics are unfortunately used to persecute gay men all across the country.Last year police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana finally apologized for destroying hundreds of lives after they entrapped and arrested gay men using a ban on sodomy struck down by the Supreme Court almost 15 years ago.Watch video from The Young Turks, which talks about how police targeted and trapped the victims of these false arrests:Just as we have a long way to go in the US to eliminate institutional racism, we still have a long way to go to eliminate institutional homophobia, which includes a multitude of tactics used by police and lawmakers to profile, target, entrap, criminalize and imprison members of LGBTQ community.Photo by Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images