Whose Streets? Cops' Streets!

One woman is raped and another is murdered in Brownstone Brooklyn, where
female victims with the right demographic profile (white, young, middle-
to upper-class) are usually front-page attractions in the tabloids. And
yet two weeks go by before detectives release a description of the
assailant, months before a composite sketch is drawn, and almost that long
before any of the daily papers report the story. Why? The victims are
lesbians, and they are women of color. While there's no firm indication
that the women attacked in Boerum Hill in July were targeted for that
reason, the cops' subsequent handling of the crime reeks of bias. 

When it comes to violence against lesbians and women of color, Brooklyn's
Finest have a cynical routine that's become as familiar as it is
infuriating: put the investigation on the far back burner and/or slander
the survivor. In April 1994, police leaked to the press that a woman raped
in Prospect Park was a lesbian, and thus her story worthy of doubt. Daily
News columnist Mike McAlary swiftly called her a liar who faked the rape
to promote an upcoming anti-violence rally. (He is now facing a libel
lawsuit.) This summer, when the weekly community papers called up for
quotes on the July murder and rape, Brooklyn North Homicide's Deputy
Inspector Martin Johnson gave his unlikely take on the crime: that the
dead woman was murdered either by her lover in a domestic dispute or by a
third woman who has fled the state. Johnson told one paper that the
lesbian community would "be very surprised and angry . . . when we get the
right person"--this while the investigation was still only beginning.

This indifference feeds the climate of hatred and intimidation that we'd
often like to think doesn't exist in these relatively pastoral
neighborhoods: Soon after Johnson's remarks were published, Park Slope's
queer bookstore, A Room of Our Own, received several phone calls from men
threatening "to start killing lesbians. You're going to have bodies on the
stoop." Fighting these threats, and violence against women in general, has
been left to anti-violence activists. 

Which is why many of us have been disturbed by the tone of some of the
organizing. When some 200 lesbians and supporters marched through Boerum
Hill and the Slope in late July, much of the chanting was merely for "safe
streets" amd "more arrests"--the very rhetoric of crime victimhood that
has been used to promote the police state that we now have. Equal
protection under the law is a laudable goal, but that alone won't stop the
violence that flourishes in other neighborhoods under the eye of (or
perpetrated by) the police, nor will it do anything to break down the rape
culture that cultivates these crimes in the first place. 

In the wake of horrific crimes such as these, it's always tempting to use
whatever leverage one can to see that justice is done. But life isn't like
Cops: Not everything can be solved by more aggressively hunting down
perps. Ultimately, it's not more arrests we need, it's less violence
against women.
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