Dr. Susan Block \nLOS ANGELES - She's a familiar name in the adult entertainment community, she hosts Radio Sex TV for HBO, and her broadcast studio and art gallery were raided Feb. 26 by a SWAT team from the Los Angeles Police Department on a tip that Hispanic gunmen who had robbed and kidnapped someone were seen forcing their way into the facility.
A press release from Block's offices says this was the second time an LAPD SWAT team had raided the facilities. Block and her associates say the team found no trace of the gunmen within a few minutes even though they actually stayed in the building for over two hours and interrogated Block, staff, and guests about "the nature of the show, which half the officers said they watched."
In January 1998, a SWAT team had raided the facilities with no charges being pressed then, either, according to Block spokesmen.
They say the SWAT team showed up Feb. 26 heavily armed, augmented by helicopters with night-vision technology flying overhead. Security camera film, they say, shows LAPD officers with guns on The Dr. Susan Block Show's executive producer Max Lobkowicz, art curator Kim Mendoza, and several other staffers - as well as Block herself, when she stepped out of her dressing room. She was questioned separately for about twenty minutes before she was allowed to do her live Internet radio show.
Staffers say officers "blocked off access to critical Internet broadcast servers and other equipment. Vice specialists searched through the film archives. Other officers looked through the studio refrigerator, searched the bathrooms, combed through the books in the library, monitored…(the) mixing of the live show, and checked out the erotic art in the galleries."
Block and her staff criticized Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and LAPD Chief Bernard Parks for allowing "this kind of anti-culture, anti-art, anti-sex police action" to "become a major stumbling block for redevelopment and economic growth of downtown Los Angeles, not to mention an assault on our basic freedoms as individuals."
They're demanding Riordan and Parks investigate the SWAT operation and plan a demonstration against it.
