This year’s Mardi Gras events take place as the community grapples with the tragic deaths of Jessie Baird and Luke Davies. Many non LGBTIQ mates of mine have asked, why has there been such anger and frustration directed at the police?
How have the murder charges against a gay police officer, accused of killing Mr Baird and Mr Davies, caused such a reaction against the police force generally?
This case has certainly exposed potential failings in recruitment and the monitoring of police weapons. But for the gay community, it has reignited the fear and distrust that has built over decades and is still not resolved.
I have seen it and experienced it myself.
Starting with some basics: the first Mardi Gras, held on 24 June, 1978 and operated by the Gay Solidarity Group, was a day of events in Sydney to encourage activism against the discrimination they routinely experienced. It was violently broken up by police. I have close friends who were there in 1978.
In Melbourne on August 7, 1994, just 30 years ago, 463 patrons at the LGBTIQ club Tasty were detained for seven hours. They were stripped and cavity searched – no people were permitted to leave. They were dragged, frogmarched, screamed at, abused, bullied, humiliated, and intimidated. Two charges were laid, but later dropped. I have close friends who were at that raid.
In 2014 and 2018, I ran for State Parliament in Victoria for the Labor Party as one of the first out gay men to run openly for a winnable seat. During this time my campaign office was attacked by a neo Nazi group, and my campaign manager and I were stalked by a far-right malicious character who had various songs made by the firing of guns on his Facebook page.
In reporting this to the police, both the lack of interest and lack of concern was scary. The onus was on me to go to court and get a public safety order granted, with no police interest or support.
This experience is not dissimilar to what many women have faced when reporting domestic violence or predatory behaviour.
In 2016, when I was living in Sydney, my then-partner and I attended a gay dance party. As we were approaching, we noticed a police dog. We all stopped for a few moments so we could all walk in together. We didn’t turn around, we didn’t leave – yet we were all thrown against a wall and searched by officers. Nothing found.
As we approached the entry after being searched, the drug dog sat down next to my then-partner. The police wanted to search him again. But instead of doing it where we all were, and in front of the club which had CCTV, they moved him around a corner where nobody could see. Upon finding nothing on him, they then went to enter his details.
I told them, “you can’t enter his details unless you are arresting him”. The officer aggressively turned to me and said, “I should be arresting you for interfering with a police operation”. I reported it all, the result was the officers didn’t even get a warning.
In May 2019, a bungled police raid in Victoria ripped a gay guy’s arm from his socket at a gay bookstore in Melbourne’s inner north – apparently “excessive force” was not used.
Every time I go to a gay dance party I see more police dogs than I ever see at non-gay events – and while I know drugs are being used at these events, I can assure you there is also drug use at Melbourne Cup, or any number of “straight” festivals than don’t seem to have the same level of scrutiny.
This year, while the NSW Police Commissioner was quick to apologise for the more than 30 cases of gay hate crimes between 1970 and 2010, the police have not accepted the recommendations of the inquiry and the force was found to be adversarial, unnecessarily defensive and caused the inquiry to face “significant and unexpected challenges”.
If your son, brother, or friend was one of those 30 people murdered or missing, would you want closure? Would you perhaps want the police to accept the recommendations, or at least not interfere with the inquiry? Many of those missing people are still not found.
Then you have a on-duty police officer allegedly using a NSW police issue gun to murder two gay men. After the NSW Police Commissioner took days to speak publicly, she referred to it as a “crime of passion” – often used to downplay domestic violence against women (and now clearly LGBTIQ community members).
So, when you look at the LGBTIQ community response to what has happened in NSW, it isn’t an isolated incident. It is 50-plus years of heavy-handed policing, profiling, and distrust. While mechanisms exist to review police behaviour, time and time again they favour the police over anybody else and are almost never independent. It is often even worse for other minority communities as well.
Given the distrust going back 50 years, and even my experience of the police protecting themselves over the community, independent review does need to be bought into the review of what happened in NSW police presently (as Alex Greenwich MP has suggested).
With all that said though, the police do have LGBTIQ community members, and we should be supporting them also – the Inquiry in NSW showed that serving LGBTIQ police are still facing discrimination and bullying today in the NSW police force (and I am sure other forces) – and they deserve our support.
For that reason, I think the NSW police should still be able to march, but perhaps this year they could have considered marching under their Union banner, perhaps out of uniform, or under a general emergency services banner to recognise the community hurt and to assist lowering the temperature ahead of what is usually the happiest time of the year for the gay community.
Neil Pharaoh was the former National Co-convener of Australian Rainbow Labor, and Labor Candidate for Prahran in 2014 and 2018.