busy busy before leaving, but it feels too important to let it slip by. the Dakota story, part one and two. time to go to the Santa Cruz Police Department. i actually dress up a little (which is immediately overdressing here…), as i plan to play to the decent citizen, well resident, i mean, alien non-resident, you know.
“i want to speak to a police officer concerning a possible case of discrimination.” my request is treated with a seriousness that somewhat wears off into slight scepticism when i’m asked for the context – admission to a bar. i’m in for a long wait in the lobby of the SCPD. obviously not an emergency. i phone the dispatching three times to check on my officer, and each time i have to explain the situation again. each time i get a different kind of dismissal of the case. this promises to be frustrating.
then comes the officer. he invites me into one of the interrogation rooms. i explain both evenings in some detail, although i consider that the “this is a stupid American rule…” detail might best be skipped over. i mention the different IDs we had (turkish passport, german drivers licence, british student card, belgian passport, belgian drivers licence, iranian passport). the question: is that book the bouncer showed us (with north american IDs) indeed a legal base for accepting or refusing ID cards?
the officer grimaces, hesitates, shifts his weight (of which he has a lot) on his chair. yes and no. strictly speaking, the book the bouncer showed us has no legal value. but. she does have a legal obligation to check IDs. and the book helps her in distinguising valid IDs. for all other kind of IDs, she must feel confident on her judgement whether it is a valid ID or not. if she feels she can’t make that judgement, she can refuse. cause if someone is caught with a false or non-valid ID, the bar will be held responsible. so yes, if she doesn’t feel comfortable judging foreign IDs, she does have the right to refuse. then he gives a smart example. say she doesn’t feel comfortable judging the validity of an iranian passport, say she can’t read it properly, then she can refuse.
i want to get across that this is a structural exclusion and discrimination, but the framework is too different. when i try to bring it back to discrimination, he gets interested in what she said. “was she verbal abusive?” “well yes, the first time i did find her abusive.” “did she say, for example (oh the guy is smart in this examples…), dirty iranian go home?” “no she didn’t say that.” but whether she said stuff like that or not, we soon ended up home anyway. “hm, cause that would have been out of line. mind you, we do have freedom of speech in this country”.
this, of course, was not my point in raising discrimination. i try again. “but you have to understand,” he says, “that a bar is privately owned” oh god, here we go again… the white house is private, bars are private… once more i resist. they might not be fully public (argh… as if the english word Pub came falling out of the blue….) but they can’t be compared to a private house. he conceedes a tiny bit. okay, but they do control admission. “you must understand,” he insists, “that the Dakota is a special place. it caters to a diverse community.” ah, so that’s police talk here for a lesbian bar. “and so they follow the rules very strickly in order not to get into trouble. and they don’t cause trouble. take Blue Lagoon, they were shut down last year, lost their permit for a while, and had to pay a lot of money to get it back. and if they lose it one more time they won’t get it back. every weekend we’re called out for a stabbing or shooting. they are trouble. the Dakota doesn’t cause us any trouble, because they have a strict door policy.”
sigh. i try again to raise the issue of discrimination. how come one perfectly valid ID apparently doesn’t equal another. his respons takes off in yet a different direction. “but after they treated you like that, why would you even want to go there?” and he gets consumed by the maths of it. “so wait, 4 of you the first time, 4 the second and 5 more that would have joined you, that makes 17 people, imagine if everybody has two drinks of 5 dollars, and that’s not a lot for one evening, that makes 170 dollars, plus cover charge, we’re talking about more than 200 dollars here. do you want to give your money to a place that treats you like that? no, you’d want to take your money to a place where they treat you better.”
in between a total privatization of the place and a proposal for a economic boycott of it, the ground to argue about discrimination in terms of a structural measures that regulate access to a space was shrinking away… although my private (?) tutorial session with a representative of US law and order enforcement (a session that was filled with “in this country…”, “US laws say…”) did confirm that the sidewalk in front of the Dakota is public space. aha, it exists! not much, but something to begin with…