I remember the days when the police would raid gay bars and claim people were dancing together as the excuse. I remember the days when you had to hide your face. Good bye to the bad old days. Prosecute the the people who did this and sue for damages. Maybe they will think twice (if they think at all) before they make us punching bags again.

I think that is the real lesson here.. the idea that the cops thought it was the 50s/60s -- and for Texas, that is more along the line of 1850s/60s;

Back pre-stonewall, the beaten queer who didnt die in the attack would slink off quietly back to the closet..

Now, your mother will stand up in your place and call out the cops; along with your coworkers, your family, your friends, and YOU...

I was initally depressed when I heard about the texass raid... "how could this happen again, is that how far we have come?" to "Oh, yeah, that IS how far we have come..."

That's a really good piece, Dan.

so have a protest march already!

gays friends moms dads kids of gays fuck invite Al fucking Sharpton!

Thank god he appears to be doing ok - praying he stays that way. I hope those officers are fired and he gets a nice settlement from the city. I swear, sometimes it seems the only way government officials will stand up and take notice of something like this is when you start hitting them where it hurts - the bank account. Good luck to Chad.

What a great post. Stated clearly and makes a great point.

I second @3. One of your most inspired posts.

@6 Well, I'm sure that's a brain damage-worthy offense under Texas law.

Dan: I wish I could share your feeling that this event was an anachronism. Here in the midwestern heartland, I think something like this could happy in many communities with just as little provocation and just as little remorse by the cops. People don't talk like it's the 50's, but many in power still think like time has stood still.

So what's his version of the story then? It doesn't say?

Devil's advocate: was he too drunk to remember?

Head trauma affects memory. The whole evening may have been beaten out of him.

TABC will say they're "reviewing their policies" and pretend this never happened if the heat gets turned up too high. Apologies from the TABC are so full of it you can fertilize the hill country with them.

too drunk or not, it doesn't matter for any of the following reasons:

1. there are eye-witness accounts backed up by photographs

2. even if he groped, the response was an still an over-reaction

3. male police officers haven't beat a female groper in texas

Gibson didn't say *what* he was doing before the event. Which means either he's been told by a lawyer to shut it or the reporter is just bad and didn't actually ask for clarification.

The 'witness' also didn't say what happened before the choke hold. So from this story you can't even figure out what happened that *may* hav precipitated, rightly or wrongly, this.

So, basically, we have bad reporting and useless witness accounts. And a guy in the hospital who still hasn't said that he either made any movements at all toward the officer (he didn't have to 'grope', I'd imagine any officer having someone come anywhere near his gun or him is going to be trained, rightly, to avoid or take down) or doesn't remember or... what.

I don't give a shit if it was a gay bar or not. I want to know some more facts and this article doesn't give me any.

Back in the 50's, my uncle was arrested in one such raid in SF. In his prim and proper way, he was always embarrassed that he had a police record, but I saw it as a badge of honor, and, in a way, a gift to me. In a sense, Uncle Tony dealt with that shit so I wouldn't have to.

@ 14 - Nice job of blaming the victim...

now they know. that's right!

A very nice piece, Dan. Here's hoping that you will have a venue for it beyond Slog (as the points made deserve a wider audience).

What a nice treat this morning to see a post with a picture of Chad Gibson sitting up, alert, and with a report that he is speaking. A very fine thing indeed.

I wonder how many more changes will be made to the story/stories being told by the officers and their departments now that Mr. Gibson is able to be a vocal witness to their transgressions. Which further makes me wonder how much they were counting on Gibson never recovering.

No one is blaming the victim here, 16.

Blame is a pretty nasty accusation to throw around when Dan himself has been blaming authorities without any facts or testimony of the victim's behavior.

I'm not the type to always side with the police version of what happened.

Spare us the impartial bullshit when you yourself have already made up your mind about who to blame before the victim has even spoken up about what happened to him.

kthx.

Good on the other bar patrons for taking pictures. Photographing the police is dangerous but necessary.

@6, 10, 14,

He states he still doesn't remember what happened. He remembers being there, and remembers waking up in the hospital, but remembers nothing in between. Head trauma is like that. He likely never will recover those memories.

I have suffered a traumatic brain injury. I have no memory of the 30 seconds or so up prior to the injury.

good. someone needs to teach these backwards hicks that times are changing. shit they pulled 40-odd years ago isn't going to fly anymore. maybe this will teach their attitudes to evolve. evolve or go bankrupt.

@24 and that warrants a brain injury? yeah. let's go around and bash every straight guy's brains in when he gets falling down drunk. fucking trolls...i swear...

A very good piece.

I am very glad he is doing better and will stand up for himself in Texas. I am much too young to have every remembered a time where this was common and probably too naive to think why it wasn't reported.

Trolls: Yes, traumatic head injury causes memory loss.

Even if he did grope him, then just arrest him for whatever charge touching an officer brings. Don't knock his ass out.

Bad cops. Welcome to the rest of America.

@18 This story has been picked up by the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05t…

and the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/…

Much to the dismay of the FWPD, this story isn't going away any time soon.

I have the most profound feeling that all these trolls -- or a major percentage of them -- are really just one person. A person wearing a tie.

Fort Worth is Southern Baptist Central. This will need to go to Federal court, because if it is tried in a Texas court, the judge and jury will give themselves a manicure during testimony, then decide justice according to their pre-trial prejudices. That's Texas, y'all.

Does it make it easier for you to ignore dissension when imagining it is one person antagonizing you?

If all you want t o find is likemindedness, please google the phrayde

"the daily me"

You will find everything you have be confirmed by your own bias there.

YEAH! ME AND MY OPINIONS! THE DAILY ME!

GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME

@ 32,

Thank you for the links.

I, too, am glad to hear that Gibson is doing well.

Thanks for this, Dan!

I, too, am suspicious that a guy who has been in a fucking COMA for over a week doesn't remember every detail from that night.

Oh, and I'm going to conveniently forget about all the eyewitness testimony and photographs showing Gibson all bloodied up at the bottom of a fucking cop dogpile. Then I'm going to claim that my doubts are due to a desire to be objective until I receive more evidence. Then I'll probably ignore that evidence, too, and say that anyone who pays attention to real evidence that favors one side over another is being biased. See how that works?

If I always take the middle road automatically, I can be just as intellectually lazy as an extremist, but can still pretend to be thoughtful and unbiased! How convenient!

For the edification of the above trolls:

Fallacy: argument to moderation [also known as the 'gray fallacy']

What's to be mystified about? This happened in Texas = Duh.

I live in New England. Never in the 26 years I have been going out to bars, both gay and straight, have cops ever come in for a raid. This is what you do in a bar, you go out to drink, socialize, dance, laugh, perhaps find someone to pick up, either for the night, or to date, in other words, FUN. So why in the world is it okay for cops to go in there and harass people for doing what you are supposed to do in a bar? I don't get it. I see some comments on here that say he was drunk in public, etc. Well, it was a BAR for cripes sake. Does not anyone else think its ridiculous that just by going to a bar and drinking, cops can just come in and arrest you because you look a bit too drunk? How do they know how drunk you are?

I will say this, if cops could do that up here in New England, I'd never go out. Who wants to be there for cops to suddenly come in, bark questions at you, detain you, require you to show ID, and possibly arrest and assault you, all because you decided to go out to have FUN?! I don't think so. I'm surprised any of you in Texas actually go out to bars, knowing this could happen. Or do you all just have one drink, because any more and you could be publicly drunk? Yeah, that must be it, especially at all the straight bars, none of you must drink too much because the cops don't cause head injuries in straight bars.

And while I Seriously doubt any of these men groped the officers, that does not give anyone the right to cause broken bones and head injuries.

Did anyone see that rotten editorial over the weekend by the Fort Worth Newspaper? I came on here looking to see if Dan had mentioned it, it was pretty bad.

Nobody could really believe FWPD and TABC stories. Nobody who sees the photos and hears the witness accounts. Nobody would believe Tex-ass cops are just such hot pieces of ass.

That being said, they'll probably get off. It is Southern Baptist Central and juries are still 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty.

Y'know, it might be my rage talking over this, for for right now, I hope Chad owns Ft. Worth by the time this is done. I want to see Ft. Chad or Ft. Rainbow pinned on the map of Texas.

I hardly see how trying to figure out the rhetoric and scree from good eyewitness accounts and better reporting count as being trollish.

Did photos show what happened right *before* and during the moment Chad was starting to be taken down that definitively show either version of the story? No, apparently not (yet, anyway). They recorded the result. That's not the same thing unless there's a photo floating around that shows a cop slamming Chad's head into the ground when he was already effectively pinned down.

He has a brain injury and can't remember? Then he's getting his entire perspective on his injury from eyewitnesses that are hardly going to be unbiased in what they saw (if they even had a full sight line of Chad and Cop #1 just before he went down). He just doesn't know what he or that cop did.

And I'm including the cops in this, too. I haven't read any accounts by the individual officers themselves. They're probably being shut down by the Police Chief and told to zip it but it would be good to hear what they say now about what the hell where they expecting to do that night, what they thought they were going to encounter and what they saw or did (and a good reporter would push to get those statements), while this is still fresh, because it could either shed some light on why they did what they did (which doesn't make them right, thanks, you can leave the yelling over there -->) or hang them out to dry (which'll look lovely in Chad's future lawsuit). But trying to pull as many strands of facts out of all the knots in these stories, trying to eliminate some obvious faulty or just plain wrong suppositions and starting to build a coherent timeline and case is *exactly* what will be part of the invariable basis of any investigation and lawsuit. So why doesn't the media just start asking some of these questions now... to ask *everyone* before everyone gets so personally entrenched in this that they're susceptible to influences.

I'm not saying Chad's lying. I'm not saying eyewitnesses are lying. I'm not even saying the cops are lying. I'm saying an effective media (especially one who knows that this event is going to shine a dark light on Fort Worth, regardless) should be doing some investigatin' of its own at this point. Because I don't give a shit that this happened at a gay bar; a raid that ends in anyone getting injured like this is a failed raid. Period. I'd like to think the same people upset about this raid would be just as upset if the bar patrons were urban cowboys or an university/artsy crowd or any other group not traditionally associated with violence ('cept rednecks... they's trouble, man).

Where the fuck were the cops when I was legitimately fending off unwanted gropings in bars in Milwaukee? Goddamn.... I'm just sayin'.....

Even if dude did grab a piece, I don't think that warrants beating the snot out of him.

@47-we have, on the one side, a cop more or less saying "he touched my twinkie/butt" and a bloodied guy on the other saying that he doesn't remember anything other than winding up flat on his ass. Methinks someone overreacted.

Cops are supposed to be able to diffuse situations without beating the crap out of people. He could have been forceful without being violent.