Search
Close
Search
Advanced Search
Search Menu
AI Discovery Assistant

Extract

Late one night in October 1961, Los Angeles police officers V. C. Dossey and C. H. Watson thought they had made a legitimate arrest when they charged Betty, a white woman, with disorderly conduct. The officers were in their radio car, patrolling a predominantly black neighborhood in South Los Angeles—an area, according to police, “plagued by females” engaging in suspect sexual practices—when they observed Betty “cruis[ing] in a manner designed to attract” the attention of men. When Dossey and Watson stopped to question Betty, she became “hostile” and refused to identify herself. A search of Betty's belongings turned up more evidence of her sexual criminality, including a “contraceptive kit.” Later, when officers interrogated Betty at the police station, she delivered in “the most vulgar and profane language … her opinion of ‘blue coats.’”1

Prior to World War II, the incriminating combination of a white woman in a black neighborhood carrying items associated with nonreproductive sex and daring, above all, to disrespect police officers would very likely have been sufficient to yield a conviction. But, in a surprising twist, the charges against Betty were dismissed by the city attorney's office. A deputy for the city prosecutor advised the police department “to be very restrictive and conservative” in their enforcement of this morals misdemeanor—in other words, officers should lean on the side of nonenforcement, because the city prosecutor was newly “reluctant” to pursue these cases. In a rare admission of error, the chastened Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) leadership admitted that “it would have been wiser to have released” Betty without pressing charges. Betty's case is emblematic of an important turning point in the twentieth-century history of sexual policing: marking a deepening racial inequity of morals enforcement, through the gradual decriminalization of white women's presumed nonmarital straight sexual practices, and the intensifying targeting of black women for allegedly engaging in these same activities.2

Issue Section:
Articles
You do not currently have access to this article.
Download all slides