As the fall-out from police bashings at Mardi Gras continues, debate has turned to how the queer community should react to the incidents. Following the anti-police rally in Sydney, some advocates condemned protestors for holding a banner saying “All Cops Are Bastard”. The head of Community Action Against Homophobia called the actions of ‘left-wing activists’ “juvenile”. This week, in response to the situation, Sydney MP Alex Greenwich is hosting a community forum where the community and the police will discuss the issues.
After the footage of the police bashings came out, I posted a blog about how I think the police have never been friends of Mardi Gras, and whilst I was hoping to see more discussion like this, the response by many to the incident (including to my article) has worried me significantly. It seems like for many, the way to respond to police bashings is ‘let’s see how we can fix our relationship with the police’, rather than ‘let’s campaign to fix the police’.
I think the best way to think about this is to think really hard about what the police have done over the past couple of weeks, and how we would react if another organisation did the same.
The allegations against the police are serious. It involves bashing and arresting people without reason, conducting strip searches in public, and harassing people on the street who were just having a good time. And the incidences aren’t unusual. Harassment by police is common, and ask anyone who is Indigenous, working class or from an ethnic group, and you will know that it goes well beyond the queer community.
Despite all of this however, the police seem to be the only organisation in which we respond to systematic bashings of innocent people with requests for meetings, and demands that everyone to stay calm. When queer people are bashed on Oxford St we take to the streets, but when the police do it, we organise a community forum.
Now for many, this comes down to the idea that the ‘police are there to protect us’ and ‘this is just a few bad apples, and we shouldn’t taint everyone with the same brush’. The unfortunate thing about this approach is that it fundamentally ignores the insitutional problems within the police. Yes, there are cops trying to do good things within the police force, but the reality is that the violent culture of the force has clearly become so strong, that the bad outweighs the good for many communities.
At the protest in Sydney, a man was arrested for offensive language and behaviour. It was noted by some at the protest that the man only started getting aggravated after the police started harassing him and that it seemed like the police came to the protest with the ‘intent to arrest someone’. In other words, without cause, it seems like the police went to the protest with the intent to harass and arrest an innocent person.
When you think about it this way, you really have to ask who is causing more harm – the police, or the people who are pointing out their systematic violence? The police are the actual radicals here – the ones harassing, bashing and arresting innocent people. As long as this systematic violence continues, it is our duty to treat them as the radicals they are.
Meetings, forums, and ‘staying calm’ is not what’s going to achieve change. It is challenging police power and systematic violence that is, and that is how we need to approach these events.