Battling The Bias

A senseless murder made the point. A gang of Houston teenagers allegedly clubbed Paul Broussard, 27, to death last summer in a parking lot. The young banker's offense? He was gay. In response to public outrage, police launched Operation Vice Versa, an undercover sting in which cops posed as gay men to entrap bashers. On national television, the officers talked about how shocked they were at the level of violence against homosexuals--and gay-rights advocates heralded a new age of police sensitivity in Houston. But when police suspended the high-profile sting two weeks later, promising to reinstate it from time to time, gays felt unsafe again. As if to confirm their fears, this month a self-professed homophobe shot another gay man in the head in the same neighborhood. Waving HATE KILLS Signs, gay protesters stormed city hall.

Gay activists are pounding at the door of their longtime antagonists--big-city cops. With bias crimes against homosexuals on the rise , gay-rights leaders demand that police not only provide more protection, but hire gay cops and offer sensitivity training to the law-enforcement rank and file. In some cities, especially where gays have political clout, activists have made inroads with police. But in others, they risk deepening the divide: the combative tactics of radical groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation have alienated many cops. A report from some key battlegrounds:

Nightmare scenarios:

In many cities, gays complain that cops are, at best, dismissive of their concerns. Last summer Milwaukee provided a tragic example of police indifference when it was revealed that cops surrendered a naked 14-year-old Laotian boy to the custody of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer--and later laughed off the episode as "a boyfriend-boyfriend thing." Sometimes the cops themselves are accused of gay bashing. In Cincinnati last September, a city police patrol car stopped Steven O'Banion, who has AIDS, and a friend for jaywalking. When one of the cops allegedly suggested that the men were "faggots," O'Banion, 40, says he replied "Cowabunga, dude." The officers hauled him off to jail where, O'Banion says, county corrections officers beat him, fractured his nasal cavity, and deprived him of medication. The officers say O'Banion intentionally spewed blood from a nosebleed on four people. Next month O'Banion stands trial for attempted murder--with the AIDS virus. (The Hamilton County sheriff's department has refused to comment on the case.)

'We're here. We're queer.':

Nothing has altered the image of the gay-rights movement as decisively as the rise of the radical fringe. "That ACT-UP group, they advertise out front that they're coming to cause problems," says John Dineen, president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago. "They're biting officers, saying they've got AIDS." Since September, police in Los Angeles and San Francisco have faced a sporadic siege by activists protesting Gov. Pete Wilson's veto of a gay-rights bill. Activists have broken windows, set small fires, destroyed government papers and harassed the governor at public events. When authorities effectively contained a rowdy anti-Wilson demonstration in Sacramento, Queer Nation leaders lobbed charges of police abuse. "Sacramento has traditionally relatively brutal on lesbian and gay protests," says Queer Nation's Jonathan Katz. But so far there have been no formal complaints against police. Says Sacramento police spokesperson Betsy Braziel: "It went very well from our perspective."