Maybe we can be friends with the bullies

(Title credit to @glengyron.)

In the wake of the murder of Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, the debate around whether cops should march in Mardi Gras has become a proxy for a bigger argument: whether bodies like NSW Police can be reformed, and whether marginalised groups like the LGBTIQA+ community should engage with institutions that oppress them.

A similar debate has been going on for a long time in Muslim and Middle Eastern communities — whether to work with police and intelligence agencies on “deradicalisation” measures that criminalise people based on their religion and appearance; whether to invite politicians who traffic in Islamophobia to speak at the mosque or come to the Lakemba night markets; whether appearing on Sky News or writing op eds in the Daily Telegraph will convince their audiences that Muslims and people of Middle Eastern heritage are human beings. Over the last four months, this debate has become especially urgent.

Both communities have a tension between often-younger, more “radical” activists who believe that such outreach is a waste of time, and more establishment figures who open their arms to the cops, the politicians and the reactionary media, and who are anointed as “community leaders” by these institutions in turn. The boycott of Lakemba mosque by hundreds of Muslims who object to the mosque’s leadership inviting politicians to speak without holding them to account has a lot in common with the fight over cops in Mardi Gras, which has been going on for years.

I’m not a part of either community, but I do have a bit of experience that might be relevant to anyone thinking about this tension and which side of it they fall on.

One of the weirder chapters of my professional life happened in 2013, when I was hired as a reporter and later the editor of The Star Observer. It was a very odd pairing. The Star Observer was, and still is, the oldest and most reputable LGBTIQA+ news outlet in the country. I was a 22-year-old failing Arts student with no job and $40 in my savings account.

They had a position going and I had rent due, so I sent in my CV. Two weeks later I was at get-to-know-you drinks, telling my politely baffled new coworkers about my then-girlfriend. None of them ever said anything about it, bless them. If they’d fired me I probably could’ve spun it into a regular column at the Australian about how straight white males are the new persecuted class.

One of the biggest stories during my time there was that of Jamie Jackson, the 18-year-old kid who was bashed by a cop during that year’s Mardi Gras. It was huge — it was the first time I can remember a program like A Current Affair mentioning homosexuality in a way that wasn’t designed to scare suburban mums.

A few weeks later the superintendent of Surry Hills LAC fronted up to a community forum organised by Alex Greenwich. Attendees, including many 78ers, let him have it for all the usual reasons — the public strip searches, the sniffer dogs, the morality-policing of clothing, all the assaults that weren’t filmed.

But the most anger was directed at Fahad Ali, a young activist of colour who told the forum that any effort to reform the cops was a waste of time; that the police, as an institution, would always be fundamentally hostile to LGBTIQA+ people. (Incidentally, Fahad is now one of the most prolific organisers of action for Palestine in Sydney.)

He got shouted down by the rest of the room, which was overwhelmingly white. Speaker after speaker, Greenwich included, stood up to denounce the idea that all the outreach work the community had done with the cops since 1978 — the LGBTIQA+ Liaison Officers, the NSW Police floats in Mardi Gras, the endless community forums and parliamentary reviews and internal inquiries — was for nothing.

At the time I agreed with them. I was 22 and pretty sheltered and doing a job I shouldn’t really have been doing in the first place. Eleven years later, with another two gay men dead at the hands of a cop, it strikes me how many of the stories I worked on back then, or variants of them, are still around.

Around the same time I did some reporting on the death of Scott Johnson in 1988. A journalist hired by Johnson’s brother to investigate his death told me he was worried the cops were failing to investigate it properly because Scott was gay and was found dead at a known beat. He had been bringing the police evidence of dozens of historic gay-bashings around Sydney, which they rarely if ever followed up on.

Ten years later, after Johnson’s death had been solved and his killer imprisoned for manslaughter, it came out that senior NSW Police officers resisted efforts by Johnson’s family to reopen his case and overturn their original finding that Johnson died by suicide. NSW Police also refused to cooperate with the subsequent parliamentary inquiry into gay hate crimes, and have resisted implementing any of its recommendations.

That’s the context in which NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb responded this week to criticism of cops marching in Mardi Gras with the words “haters like to hate”.

Prominent LGBTIQA+ figures like Alex Greenwich, Kerryn Phelps, NSW Liberal MP Jacqui Munro and longtime rights campaigner Rodney Croome argued this week that engaging with police over decades has measurably improved relations between cops and the LGBTIQA+ community, and that doing so has made LGBTI+ people safer around police. Despite the rage, grief and hurt LGBTIQA+ people are feeling, and despite the callousness of NSW Police’s response, they argue that the community must keep engaging to keep the hard work of reform going.

Hearing those arguments, a few questions come to mind. Given the continued hostility and contempt NSW Police have demonstrated toward the LGBTIQA+ community, what evidence is there that the police have reformed, or even can be? What is the timeframe for “reforming” the police? What concrete demands does “reform” entail? And if the police refuse to change, what will be the consequences?

Which other oppressed groups should follow the advice of these LGBTIQA+ community luminaries and recommit to “reforming” institutions that have spent decades brutalising them? Should Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, who learned this week that NT Police’s tactical response group have an annual awards ceremony called “C**n of the Year”? Should Palestinians and their supporters keep “engaging” with governments that refuse to back a ceasefire in Gaza and sign weapons contracts with Israeli arms companies?

The decision by Victorian and NSW Muslim peak bodies this week to boycott the annual Premier’s iftar dinners is only the latest sign that Muslim and Middle Eastern communities are tired of asking these questions and getting no answers. The old assumption that the Labor Party’s Islamophobia needs to be borne for fear of a worse alternative no longer carries any weight. Across western Sydney and elsewhere, people are organising to tell politicians like Chris Minns, Jason Clare, and others that their days of taking Muslim and Middle Eastern voters for granted are over.

More and more people of vastly different backgrounds and experiences are coming to the same realisation: that our most powerful institutions will never reform. They don’t want to, and will meet any attempt to reform them with vicious resistance. They can only be confronted — either forced to change, or stripped of the power which they have abused for so long. It’s my personal hope that there are many more cancelled Premier’s iftar dinners to come.

What I’m looking at

• A Palestinian socialist is running for office in Australia

• The story behind the New York Times October 7 exposé

• This tweet