The following speech was given to the Pride in Protest-organised protest on International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 29.
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Earlier this month, only days after Mardi Gras, was the 17th anniversary of Veronica Baxter’s death. She was a Blak trans woman who had been living in Redfern and had been out as a woman for years.
Police raided her home for drug-related offenses and brought her to an all-male prison. There, she was denied access to hormone replacement therapy and calls from her cell were ignored.
On March 10, 2009, she died in custody. There has since been no justice for her or her family and community and no officers have faced consequences for her death.
The same police force was responsible for the highest recorded number of Aboriginal deaths in custody in NSW last year. Police are not “improving” or “working toward reconciliation” or any other progressive claims they frequently make about their supposed inclusivity, to get more funding while sweeping their abuses under the rug.
Police brutality at the protest against the genocidal Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s visit on February 9 was intense. Police violence against protesters has continued as they raid the homes of protestors, arresting one woman as she was sleeping.
Multiple ‘78ers have recounted that the police violence at February 9 reminds them of the violence against the first Mardi Gras in 1978 that brought about the protest protection system we are now seeing repealed.
Among other abuses on that day, NSW Police arrested a trans person, whom they misgendered and held in the wrong-gender area, used homophobic slurs against protesters and passers-by and targeted a group of trans women to kettle and pepper spray them.
There were many other incidents of physical violence against individual queer attendees.
I also witnessed the police attack several people at the Mardi Gras parade last month, ripping a Palestinian flag away from one attendee, choking another, dragging another person by their hair and throwing them against the fence.
Myself and 13 other people were thrown out of the parade; no one who bothered to ask if we had valid tickets and wristbands (which we did). No one bothered to take any nonviolent action a reasonable person might take if they had concerns about parade attendees, however unfounded.
We had the brutal the riot police, whose only tool is violence, move us away. This is the police that Mardi Gras pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to surveil their events and parade with sniffer dogs, that get it wrong 75% of the time.
Mardi Gras pays the NSW Police to conduct humiliating and traumatising strip searches on attendees, some of which have recently been found illegal.
Mardi Gras pays for the NSW Police to choke, drag and shove drag kings out of the parade. The Mardi Gras leadership has endorsed this violence by saying the police were working to keep the community safe and claiming the arrests were justified and legitimate over “unauthorised entry”.
Police violence is never justified nor legitimate.
Yet, despite all of this, Chris Minns’ Labor government continues pouring money and resources into the police and sends them as the supposed “solution” to everything.
When queer people face bigotry and violence, such as the recently reported on-camera gay-bashings of young queer men, does Minns offer support to the queer community?
Does Minns institute programs like the former Safer Schools program to deradicalise youth and counter societal queerphobia?
Does Minns pass laws that would strengthen anti-discrimination protections for queer workers and students that would allow them more recourse in queerphobic situations earlier on in their development?
Does he do anything at all that will reduce queerphobic violence at its source? No. What does Minns do? He extends the length of prison sentences for hate crimes and equips the NSW Police Hate Crimes unit with more resources. We apparently fight hate crimes with hate crimes.
Queer and trans people do not need more police for our safety.
Police have only ever made our community less safe. No instance of police violence is an isolated one, and no amount of sensitivity training or officers with little rainbow triangle patches on their uniforms marching in the Mardi Gras parade will bring back to life anyone killed by police, undo the trauma of queer people brutalised by police, or change the colonial racism and queerphobia that the institution is built upon.
We need justice for victims of police violence now. We need appropriate, accessible and competent services instead of police deployed for protests, mental health calls, and hate crimes.
We need pride events and community spaces built by and for our community, without police, where we keep each other safe as we know how.
We need laws that address homophobia and transphobia rather than simply strengthening criminalisation. We need cops out of our pride and cops out of our community now!
[Wendy Thompson is the Sydney University SCR Queer Officer.]