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Port government settlement will end covered bathroom patrols


Miguel Mejia arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on a warm summer evening eight years ago with a new tattoo plan in New Jersey. Before catching the bus, he did what he thought was a quick stop at the men’s restroom.

But at the urinal, Mr. Mejia felt he was being watched and, glancing to his right, he saw a man in blue shorts smirking at him. Mr. Mejia ignored him and walked out. Then a knock on the shoulder: Port Authority police officers say he is under arrest.

“I was like, ‘What did I do? What is the reason? “” Mr. Mejia, now 51 years old. “They said I knew what I did.”

Mr. Mejia was charged with public lewdness, including exposing himself or performing sexual acts in public, but was acquitted at trial. Later, he learned that others had similarly disputed the accounts of Port Authority officers. So in 2017, he joined a class-action lawsuit arguing that the agency engaged in a pattern of “unlawful discrimination, fake targeting, and arrests.”

The Port Authority Police Department has now agreed to end plainclothes bathroom patrols, update sensitivity training for new officers and improve the officers complaint process, according to a statement. agreement reached this week.

Marlen Bodden, an attorney at the Legal Aid Association’s special litigation unit who worked on the case with the Winston & Strawn firm, said in a statement that the agency has long been involved in “serious misconduct” resulted in many Blacks and Latinos being falsely arrested “when they simply used the restroom while commuting.”

“This settlement not only ends those practices, but opens the door to important reforms to address discriminatory practices in the future,” she said.

The agreement comes at a time when the issues are at the heart of the case – plainclothes police and treatment LGBTQ officers’ men – has been under close scrutiny for many years. Sting’s activities, which often target gay men for public sex in bathrooms or parks, have been criticized in some statesconsists of Californiawhere six years ago a judge called the police department’s tactics discriminatory.

In the Port Authority case, attorneys representing the plaintiffs said the behavior officers describe often never took place – and innocent people were trapped.

The settlement, the lawyers said, – which also involves changes such as designating one-stop bus station restrooms to be gender-neutral – will help ensure such problems do not recur. .

The agency said in a statement Wednesday that over the past few years, officers have stopped patrolling plainclothes because of public lewd behavior in bus terminal restrooms and are committed to maintaining public safety standards. high standards for its employees.

The agency’s police force, with more than 2,200 uniformed members, is the subject of numerous lawsuits over LGBTQ issues. Last summer, a transgender officer sue the agency, accused his colleagues of calling him “it”, deliberately calling him by his old name, and making other derogatory remarks. The case is ongoing.

In 2005, a grand jury in a federal case found that officers routinely led raids for lewd behavior “without regard for probable cause” at a Lower Manhattan PATH station. The lawyers said some changes were made after that. Now, the agency has agreed that it will only re-initiate plainclothes controls for public lewd behavior with the approval of senior officials.

In Mr Mejia’s case, an officer claimed that he was trying to initiate a meeting with another man. Mr Mejia said he thought officers might have targeted him because of the piece of jewelry he was wearing that day – a gold chain and a pendant.

Another plaintiff, 35-year-old Cornell Holden, was arrested two months earlier, also in a Port Authority bathroom, for public lewdness, charges later dismissed. He said he overheard the officer making him call a colleague – who Mr Holden said was standing next to him at a urinal – “gay whisperer”.

Others have reported similar experiences, including a man who was in a 10-year relationship when he said he was falsely accused. He recalled an officer remarking “you guys are gay” when he was arrested and saying the experience had taken a toll on his mental health.

Several other plaintiffs said in the affidavit that police tactics involved seduction, with officers looking over urinal dividers, moving their arms suggestively, and maintaining verbal communication. eye.

Since then, arrests for public lewdness have dropped, even as the litigation continues. And a former Port Authority police chief, John Fitzpatrick, previously admitted that complaints about sex in men’s rooms are now “few and far-fetched”.

John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University, who analyzed years of agency data for this case, notes that such arrests spiked around 2014, accounting for about 13% of all arrests that year. Otherwise, they typically account for less than 3% of annual arrests.

The difference may not be explained by increased enforcement, Pfaff writes, as other types of arrests have decreased. He found that only five police officers, including those who arrested Mr Mejia and Mr Holden, accounted for seven out of 10 public lewd arrests in 2014.

Busts also occur at times of day when such acts are least expected at bus terminals – the nation’s busiest – such as during the morning and evening rush hour, he wrote. .

“These results certainly suggest that the spike in public lewd arrests is the result of deliberate policy choices,” he said.

Michael Coan, a former deputy director of the New York Police Department’s detective office who served as an expert witness for the Port Authority on the case, disagrees, writing in his own report that the officers “acted act right and execute the right tactics”.

For Mr. Mejia, the settlement represents a satisfactory solution to a long and frustrating case. But the moral loss of the capture and the battle that followed will continue, he said.

Mr. Mejia never returned to the Port Authority bathroom where he was arrested, he said in an interview last week. And he has retained “a bit of paranoia” about it, he said, feeling uncomfortable around law enforcement and seeking to avoid the terminal altogether. It’s been over a year he hasn’t passed the station.

“Even now, to this day, if I go through there, I’ll probably look behind me,” he said.

“Yes, there needs to be some peace of mind,” he said, now that the case has been settled. But then he added, “But what happened to me still happens to me.”



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