Empire strikes back

Gay activists and advocates for the homeless protest the city's attempts to rid downtown of its 'undesirables'

by David Andrew Stoler

Like any city, downtown Providence has its share of problems. Walk around the Empire Street area at night, and among the flourishing arts complexes and coffee bars of Trinity Rep and AS220, the frayed edges of the shadier side of Providence come into view. Outside the strip clubs and adult bookstores here, scores of people hang out on the street in the sickly yellow light of downtown. Some are homeless, some are street kids, some are drug addicts. Loitering, officially, but what's loitering when you don't have anywhere else to go?

Others are up to less benignly solitary behavior. Empire Street is known as one of the city's cruising spots, and every so often a car passes by a bit too slowly, a bit too often. The hustlers know the cue -- after establishing eye contact, they lean into the car window. Then they walk around the corner to a quieter street, one not directly in front of the Providence Police headquarters, to finish their business.

Coincident with Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci's much lauded downcity redevelopment plans, activists working downtown allege that the police have begun an aggressive cleanup campaign in the area of Empire and Washington streets -- an area that has been a city center for cruising bars, purveyors of pornography, and other establishments high in the smut factor. The cleanup, activists say, is focused on pushing the "unwanted" elements of urban life out of downtown -- and out of the way of Cianci's pristine vision of the city's arts and entertainment scene.

Adrienne Marchetti, assistant director of Amos House, a South Side homeless and battered women's shelter, says that the reasons behind the new pressure are clear. "We all know what they're trying to do down there. They're trying to make it a tourist draw, bring tourists downtown. And if you hide [problems with the homeless and with prostitution], people don't know about it," she says.

But far from improving the situation, this pushing has made it harder for activists trying to get those in need off the streets -- activists like AIDS Care Ocean State outreacher Hugh Minor IV, who goes downtown two or three times a week to distribute food, clothing, medical advice and counseling. "[The police are] pushing the people away or arresting them, and not offering them any services. They're just treating a symptom of the problem," Minor says.

Worse, say some gay activists, the police may be targeting and entrapping gay men -- using beefcake undercover agents to initiate sex-for-money transactions and then interpreting arrestee's responses as solicitation. Many of these men weren't doing anything wrong at the time, say the activists, but were simply downtown to visit an area that includes gay bars and other parts of the alternative lifestyle's social scene.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time the Providence Police Department has been accused of entrapment -- of using loosely worded solicitation laws to unfairly arrest gay men, falsifying the reports of those arrests, and taking advantage of people who are either too embarrassed to fight solicitation charges or who have no way to speak out against unfair tactics by the police.

But that all changed in July, when the police arrested Rodney P. Davis for solicitation of prostitution. Davis, a well-respected former president of the Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, says he was set-up. And he brought the debate public when he successfully fought the police charges.

Today, Davis's willingness to talk about the incident has raised the questions of whether the mayor's lauded renaissance plans for downtown might not have some unseen victims, and whether the police, in an effort to "clean up" downtown, have yet again taken to targeting gay men.

The Providence plan

The Packard building, on the corner of Empire and Washington streets in downtown Providence, is historic not simply because it is old but because, really, the place has history. Once a showroom for the now-defunct automobile maker, the Packard was also the home to numerous bars (some of them known centers of prostitution), plus the Foxy Lady and an adult bookstore. What's more, the Packard is right in the middle of the downtown arts scene -- it sits across the street from Trinity Rep and a few blocks from both the Convention and Civic centers.

Given its location, then, when the city announced plans to claim the site by eminent domain, renovate it, and turn it into an upscale restaurant in the Alforno mould, it seemed like just another logical progression in the area's redevelopment. But there is more than a little concern that the downtown cleanup plan may have a dark side to all its glitz and glitter.

Community advocates and activists, for instance, note that police have been putting more pressure on their constituents downtown. Marion Avarista, the president of Traveler's Aid, a nonprofit advocacy group for the homeless and people in transition, says that the police "are constantly trying to move our people around. With the new construction, they're trying to clean up the area."

But when asked about these charges, the city's response has been muddled. Cianci, for one, says that the increase in police presence has been unilateral throughout Providence. "What people are seeing is that there are more police officers in general. They have been increased all over the city," he says.

But Captain John Ryan, spokesman for the police department, denies that there has been either a shift of focus or an increase in pressure. "There have been arrests, but no more than usual. We have the same amount of resources devoted to that as we always do," he says. Ryan also points out that the police go anywhere that people complain of a prostitution problem.

Activists, however, disagree, and say that what's happening is obvious. The police are specifically targeting downtown, shifting hustler action to the Amos House neighborhood, says Marchetti. But then, when she and her neighbors complain, nothing gets done. "Police are unresponsive to us. In South Providence, we have tremendous prostitution and loitering issues, but it takes forever to get the police out here," she says.

Jim Radford, a member of AIDS Care Ocean State, contends that not only is there a larger police presence downtown but that this presence is adversely impacting important work that his group is trying to do with male hustlers in the area. "People disappear, people we've been dealing with all summer are gone now. They're just gone, and we can't keep access to them," he says.

What irks gay activists even more, though, is that it seems like the police are "cleaning up" specifically gay areas, that homosexuals seem to be bearing the brunt of the pressure from police. Empire Street, for example, is a known gay cruising spot, and there are several gay bars in the area.

Kate Monteiro, current president of the Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, says that her group does "not believe that it is a coincidence that this is going on near bars that target gay men. [The police are] unfairly targeting men who are presumed to be gay."

River Road redux

Of course, this is not the first time the Providence Police Department has come under fire for possibly discriminating against gays. In 1995 there were reports that police had intensified their presence at another gay cruising spot, the East Side's River Road. After a series of complaints about possible entrapment of gay men (critics charged that undercover police would pose as hunky gay men, approach and solicit men who they thought were predisposed to prostitution, then arrest them for solicitation), the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island (ACLU) and the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) demanded to see arrest reports from River Road. Although those reports were supposed to be public property, the police refused to comply, so the ACLU and GLAD filed an open-records lawsuit against the police department that has yet to be resolved.

Since then, though, Cianci has taken steps to improve communication between the gay community and the city. He is one of the few mayors in the country, for instance, to appoint a gay and lesbian liaison, Fitzgerald Himmelsbach. "I am one of the strongest supporters of the gay community -- I was at the [gay] Pride parade when no one else was out there. I'm the only mayor in the area to chair the gay Alliance, to appoint a liaison between the mayor's office and the gay community. I even flew the gay flag over city hall," says Cianci.

Himmelsbach, too, says he has been working hard to educate the police against stereotyping, "making sure they don't go for entrapment, are not trying to make up solicitation from a vehicle."

But activists say these efforts haven't been very effective. Radford, for example, contends that the police prejudice is clear. "There's no question that they are targeting our target group. The perception is different between female and male hustling -- they get different treatment. The corner [of Empire and Washington] is a big gay hustling spot, right around the police station, and usually July and August are quiet months," he says. But this year, Radford suggests, the pressure has moved from River Road to Empire Street. "Police have been busting [gay men] pretty quickly," he says.

Cianci, though, adamantly denies this. "That's not true. That's bullshit," he says.

Indecent acts

At the heart of the issue are Rhode Island's laws concerning solicitation, loitering, and prostitution -- laws that are incredibly vague. The law against "loitering for indecent purposes," for example, says, "It shall be unlawful for any person to stand or wander in or near any public highway or street...and attempt to engage passersby in conversation . . . for the purpose of prostitution or other indecent act[s] . . . . "

So what does "indecent act" mean? Jennifer Levi, staff attorney for GLAD, says that the term "is not more clearly articulated anywhere else" in Rhode Island law books. In other words, it is up to the police to decide what an indecent act is, and the police have been accused of using loose interpretations of the statutes to make arrests, of entrapping men by either offering them sex for money or by interpreting simple pickup talk as solicitation.

Davis, the former president of the Alliance, contends that he was entrapped by a police sting when Providence officers arrested him for soliciting for prostitution this summer. He says that he was on his way home one night when he noticed strange activity on the corner of Empire and Westminster. As an AIDS activist, Davis knew that what he saw on the corner was not typical of hustler behavior -- the hustler "looked too good, dressed too well." So he stopped to see what was going on.

After a brief exchange with the hustler, during which Davis identified himself and his activist work, he says he confronted the man. "I said, `You are just too cute. That's why I've been driving around. Are you a cop?' "

The hustler said "no," then added that "he was cheap and that for $20 he would give [Davis] a blow job." At that point, Davis said he had to leave and drove around the city a few more times. Soon after, he was approached by undercover officers and arrested.

The police report tells a different story, however, one that bears a striking resemblance (including the prices for sex) to those told in the reports of controversial arrests made on River Road. The report says that when an undercover officer approached Davis's car, Davis asked how much he charged for oral sex. When the officer said $20, Davis allegedly agreed to the price and was arrested.

The disagreement as to who took how much of the first step is the kernel of the issue. ACLU director Steve Brown says that "[the] police can take too much of the initiative in drawing people into their web."

What's more, Monteiro says, the police operate on stereotypes about gay men and, as a result, are too ready to interpret a gay man's responses as solicitation. "The police are making assumptions on characteristics about individuals -- where they are, how they look, that they are gay -- and then [those individuals] are targeted and essentially entrapped. [The police] think that gay men are always looking for sex and then they question them and read an awful lot into their answers," Monteiro says.

On River Road, police were thought to arrest people based on stereotypes and without evidence, counting on the fact that most of those charged would be too embarrassed to fight the allegations in court. Instead, the police hoped, the alleged perpetrators would simply pay their fine and not come back. If a perpetrator did fight the charges, they were often dropped. And Davis's case, too, was recently dismissed.

Himmelsbach admits, "There are some underlying issues, officers who are doing what they shouldn't be," but he contends that steps are being made to improve the situation.

City officials, meanwhile, seem to be rolling over anyone who doesn't fit into their image of what downtown should be -- the police are out, arresting people for loitering when they don't have anywhere else to go, coming down hard on hustlers and possibly entrapping gay men.

The perception, too, is that the police aren't doing enough to improve their anti-gay reputation. Says Davis, the police "have had an aggressive policy toward the gay community. There haven't been friendly overtures." So if the Providence Police Department wants to shake a rap that they just can't get away from -- that they target and entrap gays, that they want them out of the city -- perhaps these overtures are long overdue.