Cops Do Not Serve Gays, or Anyone Else

I found Rad Geek’s recent post on worldwide incidents of police brutality to be almost unreadably grim, and did not make it all the way through on my first attempt. Then, just when I thought it was safe to get back on the internet, I stumbled upon the following in Dan Savage’s column today:

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: The police in Fort Worth, Texas, marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion by raiding a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge. One of the men arrested, Chad Gibson, was so brutally assaulted by the police that, as of this writing, he remains hospitalized with a life-threatening brain injury.

Police Chief Jeff Halstead claims that the men at the Rainbow Lounge made lewd advances toward his officers and specifically accused Gibson, a slight 26-year-old, of groping one of his cops. This preposterous claim is contradicted by eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence.

We can’t let the police in Fort Worth use the Gay Panic Defense (“That fag touched me, so of course I beat him nearly to death!”) to excuse this brutal violation of the civil rights of Fort Worth’s gay community. If you’re on Facebook, please show your support by joining the Rainbow Lounge Raid group (www.tinyurl.com/lavecu). And please e-mail or call the mayor of Fort Worth—Mike Moncrief, 817-392-6118, mike.moncrief@fortworthgov.org—and demand a full investigation into the raid on the Rainbow Lounge.

The Facebook group has quite a following already, with 10,439 members as of this writing. I presume it is in part because the combination of homophobia and police brutality is politically explosive, especially among the younger, socially networked set. And I hope some justice comes of it, though I am quite skeptical. It is difficult enough to get justice for members of politically mainstream groups, much less marginalized ones that are losing all kinds of battles. I mean, there’s a movie coming out tomorrow that satirizes them (along with lots of other groups, to be sure, but I do see how gay men would laugh at Bruno one way while straight men laugh at him in another.)

Of course, the cheap homophobia evident in what Savage calls the Gay Panic Defense is laughable. But many of the victims on Rad Geek’s list don’t have their own Facebook group and were also abused on the flimsiest of pretexts. Here’s just one:

Northern Territory police pulled a former journalist named Greg Plasto off the street and forced him into the hospital for a mental health assessment because they thought he was acting strangely, in their arbitrary judgment, which apparently is good enough to put you in a psychoprison these days; after he had been forced to wait nearly two hours in an ambulance, he got up and said he wanted to go outside. Rather than asking him why he wanted to go outside, or just letting him get up and walk around, a gang of up to six cops tackled Plasto, who, again, had not been accused of any crime at all, then wrestled him to the ground, smashed his head into the ground, and held him down on the ground for four minutes while he turned blue and smothered to death. The coroner who reviewed the case says that the problem is that police need better training.

Then there’s the drunken, injured ER patient who went on the attack (according to his attacker):

In Chicago, Officer William Cozzi, a 15-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, was caught on video handcuffing a stabbing victim to a wheelchair, in the hospital emergency room, and beating him with a sap. He was called into the emergency room help the man out after he had been stabbed by a female companion. But his victim was drunk, and Cozzi was busy Investigating, so he got frustrated at the alleged beneficiary of this investigation, and decided to deal with his frustration by shackling the man to a wheelchair and beating him with a sap. Then he made up some complete lies for his police report about his victim having attacked him and hospital workers. After the video came out, Cozzi plead guilty to misdemeanor charges and got 18 months of probation.

To sum up, the police are not only dangerous to gays. As with the battle over gay marriage, however, I think there will be a focus on homophobia as the sole issue, rather than that of unchecked state power to destroy individual rights. This is not to say that homophobia isn’t an issue; it’s to say that marginalized groups are all the more vulnerable to abuse in an inherently corrupt system.

Rad Geek concludes that the problem is indeed systemic:

So if the courts don’t police the police, who does?

The answer is, of course, that most of the time, nobody does. Other arms of the government hardly ever hold government police accountable for abuse because they fob off responsibility to the discretion of their legally-privileged-and-immunized enforcers. The government police hardly ever hold other government police accountable for abuse because they have no incentive to restrain the conduct of their fellow government cops, and a distinct professional interest in giving their colleagues as much latitude as possible in the exercise of unchecked power over their chosen targets. And nobody outside of government can hold police accountable for abuse, because government refuses to recognize the right of any independent person or association to sit in judgment of its own actions, and so has legally declared the State and all its agents accountable to none save God alone. And if you want to know why, week after week, you see the same pattern of rampant, relentless, unchecked, unaccountable, unrepentant, overwhelming and intense violence, committed by government cops against people who are obviously harmless, helpless, or defenseless, in the defense of police prerogatives and inflicted against the very people who they are allegedly being privileged and paid to Serve and Protect — well, that’s pretty much why.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Chad Gibson was clearly helpless, and may have been made so for life. And he won’t be the last.