I went to the gay pride parade on Sunday. It was fun. For those unfamiliar, there are two events in West Hollywood every year where the streets are blocked off for extremely gay celebrations – Pride and Halloween. When this happens, the city employees a squadron of West Hollywood Sheriffs roughly twice the population of the entire city to stand around or sit around on motorcycles and make sure that there aren’t any blowjob related accidents I guess. The fact that this many officers are even employed by the city is in and of itself frightening.
Anyone who has interacted with a typical West Hollywood Sheriff when being pulled over to have money stolen from them probably doesn’t find them to be especially useful or congenial individuals, but all of this changes on these two days every year. During Pride, the Sheriffs sit around smiling and invite passers by to take pictures with them – a P.R. campaign to make themselves visible on the most foot trafficked days of the year, a nice little gesture to allow citizens to meet the folks who will inevitably be financially raping them at a later date. This is where I took this photo:
Look how friendly the nice police officer is! He clearly has my best interest at heart, right? Except, here’s how this conversation would go down any of the other 363 days of the year:
Me: Hey man, do you mind if I get a picture with you?
Pig: Step away from the motorcycle. Have you been drinking? Let me see your driver’s license. Where are you headed? Do you take any prescription drugs…
Clearly the department has instructed these men that they need to make a good impression on the public on these days when they are so visible. Tens of thousands of people will be rubbing elbows with them on these special occasions, and to display their normally hostile demeanors wouldn’t reflect well on them, in fact it might even discourage people from coming back to town in the coming weeks to receive jaywalking or parking tickets.
Even though the officers ostensibly seemed harmless with their plastered smiles, they certainly didn’t waste the opportunity to display a few fascist shows of force, subliminally reminding our citizens that they reserve the ability to detain you at the drop of one of their dumb fucking hats. I saw several of these mobile prisons littering the street:
Are these idiots aware that they are overseeing a Gay Pride Parade and not a Nazi Soccer Hooligan Rally? In true fashion, the Department is shaking hands under the pretense of actual benevolence towards its citizens, while at the same time, in the words of George Carlin, reminding you that they can fuck with you any time they want.
I would almost think it was genius if not for the subjects involved.
And, as long as we’re on the subject, fuck you Officer Teufel.