No Longer Such Arresting Officers

Who but the hardest of heart could fail to shed a tear at the tragic break-up of one of the great love affairs of our time, at the parting of soulmates who had defied convention and prejudice to plight their troth and are now rent asunder? I refer of course to the police and the “rainbow people”, the gays and lesbians and transfolk, whose romantic idyll has been so abruptly cut short by acrimonious fallings out in Sydney and in Melbourne, leaving the gallant guardians of the law “disappointed” and hurt.

What went wrong? No one can presume to read the hearts of lovers but it appears that the rainbows, once so ardently courted by the keepers of our peace, have decided, as many a faithless spouse has decided before them, that they wanted out. They have even suggested that the police didn’t really love them at all. With shocking disregard for the countless times their paramours had done their best to spare them the slings and arrows of “homophobia” by having people prosecuted for “hate speech”, the rainbow community informed the police that their presence was no longer welcome at that pageant of refinement and good taste, the recent Sydney Mardi Gras. It’s as if Cinderella, having danced with Prince Charming at the ball, suddenly ordered the bouncers to throw him out.

There is always a reason for what Tennyson called “the little rift within the lute” and in this case it is a gruesome one. With a policeman accused of the Baird and Davies killings, a Mardi Gras official explained, police participation in the event would “add to the distress within our communities.” Obviously no one wants to intrude on someone else’s grief but surely banning the police en masse for the alleged crimes of one officer is just the kind of “stereotyping” the Left – and if the Mardi Gras has any political leaning it is to the Left – spend much time complaining about. You might call it, to use a locution congenial to wokeists – identity-shaming.

Nor is this an isolated tiff. The Sydney “disinvitation” was preceded by even uglier scenes between the now former innamorati during Melbourne’s “Midsumma”, a mini-version of the Mardi Gras, the principal event of which is the Pride March. This at some point dropped the “gay” from its label, which is just as well since gaiety was in short supply when about 50 angry marchers, one of them wearing a pig’s head mask for the occasion, rounded on the phalanx of police – which included the Chief Commissioner himself – in mid-procession, throwing paint bombs and shouting abuse. “F**k you, you don’t deserve to be here,” screamed one gay marcher. “Cops kill queers,” declared another.

It was all most unseemly, and to make things more embarrassing, the punch-ups were taking place outside the stately portals of Melbourne’s Pride Centre, a multi-million-dollar edifice whose purpose, in an era supposedly free of the bigotry of yesteryear, is hard to discern, although its porticos do provide shelter for the mainly Aboriginal rough sleepers who nightly congregate beneath its arches (and for whom proper beds and housing could have been provided with the funds squandered by state government and local council on this monument to identity politics and social division).

The now shattered police and rainbow love affair goes back to around the millennium when the former, heavily infected with the contagion of “diversity” then sweeping the Western world (wokery had not yet been invented), and having in mind that police forces in the past had not been exempt from accusations of “poofter-bashing”, declared themselves “in solidarity” with the LGBTQ etc “community” and even managed to unearth a few gay and lesbian officers among their ranks (the trans exhibitionists were yet to come). Contingents of uniformed coppers led by very senior officers took to striding down the street in exhibionist processions, to encourage, as Victoria Police put it, “inclusion, culture, respect, and pride”. They made a reassuring picture of harmony and goodwill marching alongside the grotesque drag queens and caricatures of nuns that figure so largely in such events.

That happy camaraderie continued for 22 years, until Melbourne rainbows decided to throw inclusion and respect out the window and rounded on their erstwhile allies.

The police response was as much in disappointment as in anger.Chief Commissioner Shane Patton, sounding like a headmaster rebuking the school, reproached the “conduct” of the protestors. Warming to his theme, he called them an “ugly rabble” for whom he had “nothing but contempt”. Fortunately no one was tactless enough to point out to him that the violence to which the police were subjected was not all that very different in intensity to the way Victoria Police were recently quite happy to treat lockdown protestors and anyone else – people sitting in the park, old ladies out for a walk – who didn’t go along with the government’s restrictions on daily life during the pandemic.

As is common in these matters there is a story within the story. Not all (self-defined) “queers” have bought into the line about the police being their friend. Memories rankle of days when the police were less amicable. The Midsumma protesters, who were partly from a group calling itself “No Police at Pride”, pointed out, in the words of one of them, that the gay marches, far from being a love-in with the police, were first organised in the 1970s as a protest against police “brutality” allegedly prevalent at the time. For these activists time has stood still; the leopard, they believe, has not changed its spots.

Rejected and misunderstood, their wooing wasted, a policeman’s lot, as Gilbert and Sullivan observed, is not a happy one.