Police Step up Harassment of Gays

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Gay RightsPOLiCE HARRSSMEN Torr Pickets and defendants outside Bow St. Magistrates Court, August 1980. The protest was in support of those arrested by the police when they broke up the 1980 Gay Pride March in London. At this picket several more gay people were LAST TIME we wrote about the more obvious. forms of police attacks on lesbians and gay men, illustrated by extracts from The Report of the Working Party on Community/Police Relations in Lambeth. Because many of the things that heterosexual couples ordinarily do to express sexual desire or affection - holding hands or kissing in public, for example - are effectively if not specifically illegal for gay people, and because of other legal bars on male gay sexual behaviour (age of consent, etc), attention has been focused in the past exclusively on the reform of discriminatory laws.

Criminalise

The liberal argument is that the police are only doing their job: give gay men equality with heterosexuals and the police will leave us alone. Merely to do this, however, would leave other aspects of male gay sexual behaviour such as public cruising and cottaging (having sex in toilets) as illegal as they are now. Ultra-liberals therefore extend the reforms to allow consensual sex which may only be illegal if a member of the public, not the police, complains.

Reforms in these laws will certainly change the tactics of the police, but just as the changes in the sus law have not stopped the police attack on black people, so I believe that the simple reform in criminal sex law will not prevent the police attack on gays.

The form of their Contact:

Campaign Rights, Bloom ter, M1 arrested by the police , for Gay c/o 61A St., Manches3LY.

approach is different from the way the police normally and more openly attack blacks, the working class, ploy trade unionists and, often less openly, women (see the Lambeth Report for analysis). It does however have a great deal in common with their approach to left-wing political groups.

Usually the object of the strategy with black people is to criminalise them and to tacitly encourage racist attacks. If all else fails, the police aim to keep blacks off the streets. Similarly, the police have reacted violently when women END acting together have taken the struggle against male dominance onto the streets: they have attacked the National Lesbian Conference, the Reclaim the Night demonstrators, and the NAC women's parliamentary lobby with greater physical force per person than most male demonstrators have ever encountered.

But they cannot adopt these tactics so easily in the case of gays and political activists, because on the streets and even in the SLEE WELL OF COURSE, THAT WAS ALL PRE-BOMB SCIENCE YOU MNOW! or stressed weeks at a home they cannot be visually identified as being part of these groups.

Suspicion

The police therefore have to rely heavily on gathering what information they can about sexual orientation or political activities. And here the similarity ends. For all too often gay people are not politically active, not even self-organised. For many, only their sexuality is subversive.

But that apparently is children and men (one result is the increase in smoking by women).

Sustained unpleasant feelings lead to anxiety, depression, and . . . heart disease.

Some humans have behaviour patterns which encourage CHD. American doctors are helping people like this who have had heart attacks to change their behaviour patterns and reduce their adrenalin levels (so they don't have another attack).

That's all right for middle class Americans, but what about working class people?

Nuclear Bum Warning.

Radioactive bird droppings have been found near the Windscale nuclear power plant with up to 8 times the natural level of radioactivity. If you're walking in that area, take a brolly! In Ca ue week's cr int ign for Ga of sufficient for the police to reach for their computer consoles.

What they want to know is if a person is 'queer' Once they form their opinion - or suspicion -then it is recorded and as far as we know it is never deleted, regardless even of its accuracy.

The Home Office has confirmed that the records of those prosecuted for gay 'offences' are not erased from Police National Computer Bureau records even if individuals are found not guilty, regardless of how long ago the case occurred or how flimsy the evidence So that is one way of gathering information.

'Eliminate'

A second way is to use a reasonably serious crime -the police particularly favour murder for this purpose - as a pretext for 'fishing expedition'. The police approach is to connect the crime with gay sexuality in some way and get gay people to 'eliminate' themselves _ either by coming forward voluntarily to assist the police by catching the person concerned or by the police rounding up gay people, getting them to make statements, and recording the contents of address books.

Thus recently the police descended - for one night only, apparently on Putney Towpath (a latenight open-air venue in pleasant riverside surroundings where men meet to have sex with each other) in order, they said, to question people about Vishal Helvota, the eight year old boy who went missing in July.

Immunity

Now there has been absolutely no suggestion anywhere that Vishal may have been abducted for sexual motives. Much more important is that if the police seriously thought this a possibility, then their response has been unbelievably superficial and slapdash las of course it was in the case of the 'Yorkshire Ripper') in failing to seek the willing cooperation of the gay community.

A single raid - exciting as it may have been for the police involved - is unlikely to turn up anything to do with the case. It is much more likely that they used it as an excuse to build up their dossiers of 'known homosexuals' You may think this fear is exaggerated. But our THE LEON TROTSKY 30p from Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8 ibution fron i the Labour Rights, Chris Beer contingays and the police. experience has been that wherever the police can compile any evidence to convict anyone of a gay 'offence' then they will do so. There is no immunity.

Notorious police adventures of this type have taken place for example in Cornwall and a number of cities. For this reason all gay organisations now advise all lesbians and gay men not to go direct to the police but to contact an intermediary such as Gay Switchboard or Gay Legal Advice who will convey the relevant information without revealing the individual's identity.

The third way the police gather information is simply by taking down the numberplate details of cars parked outside gay pubs or other meeting places. In one case the Thames Valley police compiled details of those attending the Windsor group of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality - hardly the most radical organisation in the country. A quick check with the Department of Transport's computer at Swansea would give further names to their list of gays (even if - as the computer lists only owners -they are inaccurate).

Preparation?

So there seems no doubt that the police are gathering a good deal of information on those they think are gay. It is difficult to think of any legitimate reason for this. It could be that an intensified form of the current criminalising attempts is planned - a 'known homosexual' (i.e. someone who had been to a gay pub once) must have been looking for sex in a public toilet, mustn't he?

Or is there a connection with the views of the senior Lambeth policeman who told one of the Enquiry's witnesses that they were biding their time until the revolution - the rightwing revolution?

Gay people were second only to Jews in the number of victims of the Nazi holocaust. Our history has taught us to suspect the kind of activities the police forces of England, Wales and Scotland now carry out, every day, week in and week out.

Is this just the police keeping their conviction rate as high as possible by picking off easy victims? Or is it a preparation for a massive assault on gay men and lesbians?

* This article does not necessarily represent the views of LCGR].

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