{"id":182087,"date":"2019-05-14T06:54:48","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T20:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/starobserver.com.au\/?p=182087"},"modified":"2019-05-14T11:16:01","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T01:16:01","slug":"this-is-not-a-one-off-hares-and-hyenas-police-raid-shows-reality-of-violent-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.starobserver.com.au\/news\/national-news\/victoria-news\/this-is-not-a-one-off-hares-and-hyenas-police-raid-shows-reality-of-violent-policing\/182087","title":{"rendered":"‘This is not a one-off’: Hares & Hyenas police raid shows the reality of violent policing"},"content":{"rendered":"
At 2am on Saturday morning, police raided the home<\/a> of two queer community members, Rowland Thomson and Crusader Hillis.<\/span><\/p>\n They live above Hares & Hyenas, the bookshop and community space they also run. <\/span><\/p>\n Thinking it was a gang of homophobes, one of their friends \u2013 Nik Dimopoulos \u2013 ran outside and was so violently set upon that he may not be able to use his left arm again. The police claimed they were there looking for an <\/span>\u201carmed Lebanese gang member\u201d<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n The first questions that came out across social media was if this was a homophobic attack. <\/span><\/p>\n As a community, it is still a daily reality that the police, or others, could enact violence on us. <\/span>We still carry the weight of our history, where the state legally sanctioned violence with impunity against us. The Tasty raid<\/a>, after all, was only in 1994. <\/span><\/p>\n We can barely imagine the terror Nik felt as he thought he was going to die on the street outside Hares & Hyenas, or the terror Rowland and Crusader endured in the dark. <\/span><\/p>\n As the dust settled we learned that it was not an attack against LGBTQIA+ people in particular, but for many the fear was still palpable. <\/span><\/p>\n For communities who face sustained racial targeting by police, especially Indigenous communities who remain at the ground zero of deaths in custody and hyper-criminalisation, this is an ongoing reality. <\/span><\/p>\n Whilst some LGBTQIA+ people may be able to successfully access support from the police, other members of our community cannot. <\/span><\/p>\n That the police specified the ethnicity of this supposed gang member speaks to the realities of who is targeted by police. <\/span><\/p>\n This was not a \u201cstuff up\u201d, <\/span>as claimed by Luke Cornelius, Assistant Commissioner of the Northwest Metro Command<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n Nik was detained outside of Hares & Hyenas because his appearance fit a racialised description. He was not the person police were hunting for, but this violence should not be tolerated against anyone. <\/span><\/p>\n While the identity of the target person was mistaken, its execution is par for the course of a police institution that uses brutal force. <\/span><\/p>\n The reality for many people in Victoria, particularly Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC), is that the risk of being targeted by violent policing is ever present, and when it occurs, is unlikely to spark a throng of media and an apology from police.<\/span><\/p>\n This violence is the reality of a police force that continues to target young people of colour, one that will not release data on racial profiling, and where \u2013 despite a <\/span>Parliamentary Committee report calling for independent investigations of police <\/span><\/a>\u2013 the overwhelming number of complaints are returned to the force for self-investigation. <\/span><\/p>\n