Not Fine, But Fined

by Nina Alberti TWtions of sexual harrassment and sexual assault/rape, violence

Two feet on the ground. Someone is grabbing onto my shoulder. I’m holding my friend’s wrist with one hand, keeping the other free to balance myself. They push us forward. Now I’m on my toes. One foot danyet I’m not stately, nor elegant, and I’mnitely not calm. I’m having a full-on panic attack in the middle of the Thursday night Tivoli queue.

We never got into Tivoli that night. We had survived two hours of dense crowds shoving and pulling only to arrive at a closed door. Two horrible hours of trying to stand upright and get air. And all that under the in- thought I wanted to discuss crowd control. drowning in a sea of people. My mind goes back to King’s night, where I was involuntarily absorbed in a current of concert-goers, or Lowlands, where A$AP Rocky presented his ‘mosh pit: how-to’ video, creating a rather violent crowd.

In both cases I thought I was dying. Security fences closing in, people jumping over me, irritated girls saying “on three we push.” But in the Tivoli line my frustration lay not with the crowd, but with those cowardly onlookers who refused to intervene.

When asking the police why they hadn’t stepped in, they said it wasn’t their job. Our safety, standing on a pavement mere metres away from them, was not their concern.

“It’s Tivoli’s responsibility,” one policeman responded.

But then what is their job, if not guarding the public’s safety and order, or providing help to those who need it? One night last winter, a friend of mine was pulled over and asked to follow a police car to a dark parking lot next to the highway. Three policemen with her if she was drunk. She said she wasn’t, which was true, but they continued saying that they didn’t believe her.

"Maybe our safety is just not does such biased police behaviour come? "

Eventually, they made her take a breathalysif you’ve been a good girl.” She passed the test yet the police lingered around the car, were all people of colour. “It felt as if they that just wasn’t there.”

Another friend of ours has had similar experiences with the police. Even when he’s cycling in a crowd the police always pick him out to ask him for his bicycle reference number. A number that most white people won’t even know exists, but that people of colour need daily to prove that they didn’t steal their own bikes.

He has been stopped and searched by police on numerous occasions. One time, late at night, the police asked to see the contents simply warned him that he shouldn’t be out this late.

Besides the sexist behaviour and the racial prejudice that characterise these encounters, policemen often seem to focus on things that may generate an income of some sort, be it contrary to popular belief, the police are le- enough. But at what cost does such biased police behaviour come? While the police have time to unjustly harass my friend in a dark parking lot, they weren’t there when she was being followed home at night by a strange man.

While the police have time to check my friend’s bike reference number anytime he goes cycling, they weren’t there when he was knifed in his own neighbourhood.

And while the police has time to send six men to check bicycle lights in Wilhelmina another girl was sexually harassed for forty minutes on a train, and yet another girl was shot by her stalker, whom she had already reported.

This all happened. And things like these will continue to happen if police priorities don’t change. I would like to add that I’m not accusing every policeman of being sexist or a racist. That would be reductive. But I do think that there is something structurally wrong with the police system and that it needs to be reformed in order protect us. All of us.