Palm Springs blowback to police entrapment and prosecutions: Police Chief Dominguez abruptly retires, D.A. Pacheco voted out of office

Palm Springs "White Party" attendees, not involved in police sting

Phil Willon, of the Los Angeles Times, reported on a June, 2009 Palm Springs sex sting conducted against gay males in the Warm Sands neighbor­hood. A co-founder of that neighbor­hood's association, Robert Stone, called the sting an egregious case of entrapment.

     Animosity had lingered against the mayor and those mem­bers of the gay-majority council who had stead­fastly defended Police Chief David Dominquez or remained silent. Dominguez suddenly retired after acknowledging that insultingly anti-gay remarks captured on tape during the sting were made by him.

"The whole council, the whole political leadership, will suffer for this," said Hank Plante, a former San Francisco television news anchor and political reporter who retired to Palm Springs with his partner a year ago. "What you heard a lot was what's the good of having a majority of gays on the council if they don't stick up for the community?"
     ...During the police sting, the undercover officer called out to men, prodded them to expose themselves and then spoke a trigger phrase — "Uncle Willy would like that" — to signal arresting officers.
     Police said the sting was triggered by numerous complaints from the Warm Sands neighborhood.
     "If you read the police report, it sounded like the residents were running down the streets with pitchforks," said Roger Tansey, a public defender representing six of the men arrested. "But I looked into it, and there were not complaints, not one anyone could show me."
     Worse, Tansey said, the Palms Springs Police has not, as far as he could determine, conducted a similar sting against heterosexuals, despite complaints about sex in public places.
     "What I believe is the Palm Springs Police Department intentionally targeted gays," Tansey said.
     Tansey said prosecutors charged the men with indecent exposure, an accusation usually reserved for flashing and other predatory acts on unwilling victims, instead of lewd and lascivious behavior. A indecent exposure conviction requires defendants to register for life as sex offenders.
     Former Riverside County Dist. Atty. Rod Pacheco's hard-line prosecution of the Warm Sands cases, which have yet to go to trial, rallied many in the Palm Springs gay community to pour money into his challenger's campaign in the June election. Pacheco lost to Superior Court Judge Paul Zellerbach by 8,400 votes.