Bravo Dallas Morning News!

I am very happy to see that the Dallas Morning News is taking this seriously and the issue will be watched.

Fort Worth police better start clarifying gay bar 'check'
12:00 AM CDT on Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Fort Worth Police Department still has some explaining to do about what happened early Sunday at a southside gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge.

Or some clarifying or some illuminating or some supplementary detailing – anything to mitigate the apparently self-administered public-relations shot-to-the-foot it suffered after what it keeps calling a routine "bar check."

'Cause – Problem No. 1 – bar patrons who were there say it wasn't a "check," it was a "raid." Problem No. 2, this particular "check" ended with a kid in the intensive-care unit with a head injury.

Problem No. 3, in what I can only hope is a spectacularly infelicitous coincidence, all this took place on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Raid.

The landmark date marks a 1969 clash between New York City police and club patrons, widely viewed as the catalyst for the modern American gay-rights movement.

The short version is this: About 1 a.m. Sunday, two Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents and six FWPD cops showed up at the club for an inspection.

These checks, which have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years, target bars in search of patrons who are obviously intoxicated.

Well, I'm certainly willing to believe it is possible to find a drunk in a bar at 1 a.m. The TABC carries these out with an eye to curbing public intoxication and drunken driving, as well as reminding bartenders that it is illegal to serve somebody who is already loaded.

At this point, however, accounts between patrons and police diverge.

Police Chief Jeff Halstead has said only that there will be a thorough investigation.

But in an earlier official statement, police said they encountered hostile, argumentative drunks, some of whom "made sexually explicit movements" (my imagination runs wild) toward the officers. One young patron allegedly "assaulted [a] TABC agent by grabbing the TABC agent's groin."

OK, hold on. First, witnesses say the officers showed up ready to make arrests, their fists full of plastic zip-cuffs.

"They were hyped up. They were loaded for bear," said Todd Camp, a veteran journalist who was there celebrating his birthday with friends. "They were just randomly grabbing people, telling them they were drunk."

Camp told me he has been in bars during TABC/police "checks" before, "and it was never anything like this." Usually, he said, officers discreetly walk through, looking for anybody who has had too much. This was different.

"They were shoving patrons," Camp said, "asking, 'How much have you had to drink?' "

Maybe you can call that a difference in perception, a disagreement over the degree of aggressiveness on both sides.

But there are flat contradictions about how Chad Gibson was injured. The Dallas Voice reported Monday that Gibson is hospitalized with bleeding around his brain.

"He was taken down hard," said Camp, with "four or five" officers wrestling him to the floor inside the club.

Cellphone photos shot by patrons and posted to blogs show a person being held facedown by officers in a short hallway inside the club, then show a dent in the wall where his head was apparently banged.

But a Fort Worth police spokesman told me Gibson was injured outside, when he fell and struck his head because he was so drunk.

"He was the one that groped the TABC agent," said Sgt. Pedro Criado. "He was injured by falling and hitting his head."

When I asked Sgt. Criado how he identified Gibson as the "groper," he said he was reading from a police report filed by cops on the scene. I asked for further details, but he said I'd have to file a Freedom of Information request.

"The truth will come out. We don't want to make any assumptions," he said. "We got to gather all the facts."

What Camp says, and what other people who claim to have been there say in comments posted to news stories, is that they were scared.

"I hate to say I was afraid of my own police department, but I was," Camp said.

His description of frightened, distraught patrons just does not seem to square with police accounts of being subjected to a drunken, groin-grabbing gantlet during a routine "bar inspection."

Fort Worth is a fine and tolerant city. The police officers I personally know over there are decent, stand-up people. But today, in the Twitter-and-blog-enabled process of rapid dissemination, they're getting an ugly reputation.

And the flames of indiscriminate opinion about Texas being a stagnant backwater of vicious, insular, hate-crazed xenophobes dance higher.

So, Fort Worth, we need some answers, please, and quickly.

This is no time to stonewall.