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There was, in fact, an initiative on the November 1986 California ballot that would have authorized county health officials to quarantine people with HIV. Later, it’s revealed that the undercover officer’s actions were directed by an LAPD assistant chief who leads a secret fundamentalist Christian group within the department and who shares intelligence gathered by the department with other fundamentalist Christians who support the AIDS quarantine initiative.Īlthough fictionalized, very little of this is fiction. His assignment was to instigate QUEER to violent protest, thus discrediting the organization and creating a backlash against the gay community to increase the chances of passing the quarantine initiative. In the course of the novel (spoiler alerts here) Rios learns that the QUEER has been infiltrated by an agent provocateur from LAPD’s intelligence division. How does police spying intersect with a campaign fueled by AIDS hysteria and anti-gay bigotry? When one of the churches is bombed, and its pastor dies in the explosion, a member of the activist group is arrested and charged with first degree murder under the felony-murder statute. These organization include evangelical churches. Rios agrees to be “of counsel” to an AIDS activist group called QUEER opposed to the quarantine initiative-his job is to try to keep them out of jail when they demonstrate against organizations behind the initiative. Set in Los Angeles in 1986, it involves a campaign to pass a ballot initiative that would allow health officials to forcibly quarantine people infected with the HIV virus. The novel features my usual protagonist Henry Rios, a gay, Mexican-American criminal defense lawyer. This shameful history is a major thread in my latest novel, Lies With Man. LAPD, in particular, has a history of citizen spying that spans decades. There is, however, another long-standing form of police misconduct that has not generated the same attention: the use of police intelligence divisions to suppress legitimate political dissent by spying. The fall-out from the death of George Floyd at the hands-or, rather, the foot-of a Minneapolis police officer and the response of police departments, including LAPD, to the demonstrations triggered by his death has raised awareness of police abuses even among Americans ordinarily unaffected by them. The Los Angeles Police Department has long defined its mission in its motto: “To protect and to serve.” Now LAPD, like departments across the county, faces a new level of scrutiny about how it fulfills that responsibility, particularly to Black citizens and other citizens of color.