Police accused of homophobia for posting faces of park sex sting arrestees

The police department of East Point, Georgia has been accused of homophobia for posting the mugshot images and names of five Black men arrested for allegedly “inappropriate illicit” sexual activity at a popular family park.

In a now-deleted Facebook post, the police department wrote, “Please say hello” before revealing the names and faces of five Black men who were “arrested in broad daylight” for sexual activity at the park. Each man had been charged with “public indecency and loitering for prohibited behavior,” police wrote.

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Police said they had received “hundreds of complaints a month from residents” about “people allegedly having sex… on tables, in the woods, and throughout the park in front of children,” according to an October 4 report by WXIA-TV. The news station said nearly “two dozen people” had been charged for these acts over the past few months.

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“We’ve been setting up surveillance in the area, but also the use of social media and some of the sites that they use for meetups. We’ve been monitoring those as well,” East Point Police Sgt. J. Watkins said in the aforementioned news report. Neither police officers nor the news station mentioned the arrestees’ sexual orientations.

However, Dr. T. Anansi Wilson — a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota — was one of several web commenters who accused the police department of homophobia, saying that the department hadn’t posted any other arrestees’ mugshots on social media since 2022.

“Mugshots as we know them began as fliers for runaway enslaved people & later antiBlack propaganda after reconstruction,” Wilson wrote in an October 3 tweet. “They also disproportionately continue to mark Black people as criminal, long before and after any criminal proceedings or findings of guilt exist.”

“And these sting operations cost money,” Wilson continued. “It cost money to pay police to impersonate BlaQueer people looking for consensual intercourse, bait others into it and then joyfully arrest them & make snarky, defamatory fb posts. Money that should be spent on missing and murdered Black women in the area, domestic violence cases, murder, rape, child abuse, rampant shootings across East point… but alas, it’s the c**shot in the woods we gotta worry about lol.”

“The reality is, the police do our dirty work: the work of dis/ordering society, disassembling the lives of the unwanted, dis/ordering the living and dying of those at the margins, performing public floggings, subjugation and murder for our private gratification,” Wilson concluded. “The badged officer serves at/for the pleasure of a quite sick citizenry. Many of you get off to this require it to sustain your sense of (true) self and (false) safety.”

Responding to criticisms, the department removed its post and Chief Shawn C. Buchanan (who is Black) wrote in a public Facebook post that his “department does not engage in discrimination or harassment of any group, or class of people. We believe in fairness and equality for all.”

“Parents cannot walk their kids in the park. Children cannot walk their dogs are playing in a park. Citizens cannot enjoy a peaceful day in the park,” Buchanan wrote, saying that locals had been “terrorized” by the men. “We have made arrests, upgraded patrols, and assigned officers to that park, all to no avail. We post pictures of arrested persons as a last resort effort to discourage illegal behavior and activity. This practice is not new, and is in fact employed in several jurisdictions.”

“We do not want any group of people to believe we are targeting them,” he continued. “At no point have we mentioned any lifestyle in the post, nor are we aware of these individuals’ lifestyles…. The lewd behavior in the park has caused some residents to threaten to take actions into their own hands. We value the safety of all of our citizens and highly discourage any violence on any individuals…. I truly wish all readers could understand the gravity of this matter.”

However, one Facebook commenter, Nathan Etheredge, wrote, “East Point Police Department you want everyone to safe but you haven’t posted a single murderer, domestic abuser or pedophile. Ok East Point, we see you. Also, no one is arguing that they shouldn’t have been arrested. They def should’ve been. You were wrong because you wanted everyone to look and laugh at the gays. Hope you get every lawsuit coming your way.”

Another, Ethan Smith, wrote, “This department has posted no other mugshots – not of murderers, child predators, domestic abusers – since a single mugshot back in early 2022. They chose this one incident to post mugshots of in order to shame and potentially force these individuals out of the closet.”

Over the past decade, many municipalities have abandoned their anti-gay sex sting operations in favor of uniformed officers and better lighting. That, coupled with the popularity of cruising apps like Grindr, has made these sorts of stings seem like part of the past.

However, such sting operations have occurred over the last several years. In August 2019, Washington D.C. police officers posing as horny gay men arrested 26 men in a sex sting. The men’s lawyers said that undercover officers were enticing men to have sex and then arresting them for sexual assault.

A 2017 sting in Volusia County, Florida resulted in the arrest of 17 men for lewd activity. Police there publicly released the men’s full names, ages, and home addresses.

Lambda Legal then-Director of Constitutional Litigation Susan Sommer told NBC Out that such public shaming may violate the men’s constitutional rights to due process and also endanger their lives.

“Men have employers who suddenly suspend or fire them, places where they live try to drum them out, news cameras and vans are staked outside their homes and they’re shunned,” Sommer said. “It causes people to be suicidal. It far exceeds any kind of police response to any other alleged nuisance activity.”