A balding, middle-aged man sits in an Oldsmobile, parked trunk first in a spot in a Penn Valley Park lot. It's lunchtime midweek, and he's eating tacos from a fast-food bag. Trash is piled high in the backseat. The Oldsmobile and the surrounding asphalt, if viewed from the top floor of the glaringly white One Park Place condominium tower at the southernmost edge of the park, would appear as a mere fingernail scrape against a Crayola-green landscape. The grassy humps of the 130-acre park ease up to the grounds of the World War I Museum, where the Liberty Memorial's grooved monolith joins the downtown skyline.
A man approaches the driver's-side window of the Olds.
"How are your tacos?" the man outside asks.
"Fine," the driver answers.
"Are you looking for something?"
"Of course," the driver says.
"What do you like?"
By way of response, the seated man shifts his ample gut to unfasten his khakis and fish out the head of his penis.
The standing man says he has a house nearby. The Olds follows the other man's vehicle out of the park, past the fountain that honors fallen firefighters and into 31st Street traffic. They have driven less than half a mile when a Kansas City Police Department patrol car flashes its red-and-blue lights and signals the Oldsmobile to pull over. The leading vehicle keeps on driving.
Soon, the man is handcuffed and slumped next to his car, his weathered face cast downward. This is what happens when you expose yourself to an undercover detective.
The KCPD's vice squad spends a couple of days a month conducting covert stings to ferret out men seeking sex in public parks. When things go right, the job is predictable. Hiding in plain sight, the detectives observe men committing brazen — and, some argue, victimless — crimes. Filling out the citation paperwork roadside, the detectives then endure the often laughable excuses.
It's not tackling robbers or finding lost children, but members of the squad believe that making the parks safe for the average taxpayer is a noble civic duty.
Also, it can make for a fun afternoon.
The KCPD's vice squad — four detectives under Sgt. Brad Dumit — is a tightknit, busy unit. Its members watch for code and ordinance violations at body-piercing and tattoo parlors, track illegal gambling, crack down on unlicensed party houses, monitor strip clubs, ensure that businesses aren't selling liquor or tobacco to minors, investigate escort services and massage parlors, and arrest street prostitutes and pimps and johns.
Lately, Dumit's crew has been working the parks hard in response to increasing complaints, even during the winter months, about park sex. The longer that such action is left unchecked, the bolder the actors become, Dumit says. With the coast clear, what once was consummated in the relative privacy of a public restroom moves into the open. After that, dog walkers and Frisbee throwers visit a park less frequently.
Skateboarders are a little hardier, but some who frequent Penn Valley Park's professionally designed skating area aren't oblivious to the steady stream of traffic snaking through the parking lot.
Tom Wyker, a veteran skater at 32, has been solicited by men in Penn Valley Park. "We've heard that two dudes got caught doin' it in the bowl" — the kidney-shaped basin that skaters use like a drained SoCal pool to execute air stunts — "and there are condoms splattered all over. It sucks."
Sean Croker, a 25-year-old skateboarder, considers the area's non-skateboarding activity an annoyance. "We'll get done skating and be bullshitting with our friends, and those dudes will be patrolling the parking lot like sharks, and we're the bait," says Croker, who once saw two men engaged in oral sex while touring the park with a friend.
Showing 1-24 of 24
