P-town/Truro/NPS ... [Archive] - Striper Talk Striped Bass Fishing, Surfcasting, Boating

fishpoopoo

09-20-2007, 02:09 PM

"gaytona beach" :laugha:

seriously, this stuff ought to be done in private.

i mean, i gotta walk and fish that area, it's bad enough i get poop on my boots, but potentially biohazardous man-custard? :yak:

Undercover tactics

Park criticized for using sneak approach to nab nudists, stop sex

By Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff

Something about being on the wide open sandy beaches of the Outer Cape, feeling the hot summer sun and the tickle of gentle seabreezes, can make people want to fling off their clothes and sometimes fling other people's clothes off, too. But they risk getting more than just a sunburn if they are on beaches in the National Seashore.

Nudists, amorous couples and others who used the Seashore as their pleasure ground this summer were shocked when they were served $75 to $175 citations for baring their bodies and/or engaging in sexual acts in public. It was not the tickets that bothered them so much as the manner in which they received them.

"It was crossing the line as far as I am concerned," said Susie Maguire, a summer visitor. Maguire said she and a friend were walking up South Pamet Road in Truro on July 27, fully dressed, when a young park ranger drove up in his truck. “He got out, walked down to us and as he was walking said, ‘You two just hold it right there. I’m giving you a ticket for public nudity.’”

The ranger proceeded to ticket Maguire for having been nude on the beach earlier that afternoon. She had, indeed, been sunbathing in the buff for three hours in an isolated spot south of Ballston Beach. But how had the ranger seen her? Was he “peeping” from the dunes? Why had he waited until she and her friend had walked all the way back to the parking lot and up the road to their car before approaching them? Maguire said she had been asking herself these questions.

“When I have something like that happen, I’ve been invaded,” she said. “He wasn’t nasty at all, he was a very nice guy. But the whole thing was bizarre.”

She was not the first beachgoer to be caught off guard by a ranger. One man, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he and his partner were dallying in the reeds in a remote spot near Herring Cove in Provincetown one day last month when suddenly a park ranger sprang upon them. The ranger was in plainclothes and had appeared to be just “another gay man” ambling by, which is one of the reasons why the man and his partner didn’t stop having sex. They were given a $175 ticket for disorderly conduct.

Other visitors to Herring Cove have reported seeing undercover park rangers, dressed as though they were just there to enjoy the beach, stop and ticket people for nudity or sexual activity.

“I observed this practically the whole summer,” said Ron Raz, a New York resident who comes to Provincetown often. He said there were four plainclothes rangers, two in T-shirts, khaki shorts and carrying backpacks and the other two in “just shorts,” one with “pierced nipples and everything.” He said the undercover rangers will comb the beach between the breakwater and the parking lot at Herring Cove, which is “mostly the gay guys’ beach.” Sometimes, “they’ll just sit and wait.” When a man makes a move on the undercover rangers, they ticket him or serve a summons. Raz said it seemed like entrapment to him.

“I would see people leaving the beach in tears,” he said.

Some beachgoers even claim they have been “harassed” by the undercover rangers when they identified them to other people on the beach. Kevin Berry, of Dorchester and Provincetown, said he was tackled by plainclothes rangers at Herring Cove on Sept. 9, 2006, after revealing their identity to another beachgoer. After threatening him with pepper spray, the rangers handcuffed him and issued him a ticket for “interfering with agency functions,” Berry wrote in his complaint to the Massachusetts ACLU last year.

In a phone interview on Monday, National Seashore Chief Ranger Steve Prokop acknowledged that the park does in fact employ undercover rangers to enforce some of the illegal activities going on in the park (nudity and public sex are prohibited by law in the Seashore). He said the Seashore has received a number of complaints from visitors to the park who have come across couples or even groups of people having sex in plain view. “The tenor of the letters has been, this is appalling behavior and what is the park going to do about it?” Prokop said.

One letter of complaint, written in July by a woman who had gone hiking near the West End breakwater, relates how she and her husband stumbled upon a large number of men “engaging in nude, group sex acts in broad daylight on a scale I can only describe as something I only thought possible in a fictional movie.” Altogether they witnessed about 30 men in different areas, “engaging in oral sex, anal sex, and mutual masturbation in the marsh and on the dune ridge.” Shocked at first, the couple later became “a little angry,” the woman wrote.

“Why should these people have the right to block my access to and enjoyment of the National Seashore?”

Another letter of complaint written in June by a Truro resident talks about how the sex on Longnook Beach in Truro, which “has been going on for a long time,” now is “getting a little out of hand.” The letter suggests that the Seashore get some park rangers together in plainclothes and “make some type of raid on the beach.”

Other complaints submitted to the park mention nudity at Head of the Meadow Beach, homosexual pornography posted in the bathroom at Pilgrim Heights, masturbation in the Pamet cranberry bog and more.

These activities hardly seem to mesh with the “G-rated” experience Seashore Supt. George Price said he expected people to find in the park. In his response to the Truro resident’s complaint, Price wrote, “When I receive this type of letter explaining that your walks on the beach are being impacted by the illegal activities of others, I take it to heart.” Price then pledged in the letter to assign additional patrols to that area to “try and curb the illegal activities.”

Prokop said that while it may seem to some park visitors that the Seashore has only recently stepped up its enforcement of nudity and public sex, these park ranger operations have been going on for about 10 years. He said that while the rangers do, “on occasion,” dress like regular beachgoers and walk the beaches, by no means are they engaging in any kind of entrapment.

“Unfortunately, it is not difficult on a hot sunny day for the rangers to come upon very overt sexual activity, especially as you move away from the beach parking lots. The activity is taking place in full view,” he said. He said the reason they go in cognito is because if the offending parties see a uniformed ranger coming from a long way off, “they’ll stop the activity. So the only way we’re able to contact people who are engaged in illegal activity is to be in plainclothes.”

As for the Maguire incident on July 28, Prokop said it was “not typical practice” for the ranger to wait until after the subjects had dressed and left the beach to issue the citation.

North District Ranger Craig Thatcher, who had the paperwork on the incident, said the ranger in that case had been patrolling the bluffs over the beach for a different reason and had caught sight of Maguire in his binoculars. He had not been able to approach the women right away because there was a 150-foot drop from the bluff to the beach.

Regarding those who say they’ve been harassed for identifying the undercover rangers, Thatcher said he knew nothing of that and that the only reason he could think someone might get in trouble for interfering with official agency business would be if they were “trying to yell to other folks in the vicinity” or if someone was “trying to stir it up to cause a riotous situation.”

klum@provincetownbanner.com