December 2001

Protecting citizens

    

  

 
The Police recently received, according to the manager of Taboo (a gay bar in Singapore), a written complaint about 'man-man activities' there. See Sal's guest essay Notice of taboos up in Taboo. Acting on the complaint, they spoke to the manager and sought 'Taboo's cooperation' to enforce some restraint.

My friend Sal gave the Police good marks for being civil and professional. Through his sources, he found that it was consistent with policing policy not to curtail 'mild activities'.

Yawning Bread isn't so generous. If it was not policy to curtail 'mild activities', then why did they act on the complaint? Did they put pressure on Taboo to do something about it, like put up the notice on their front window?

In my (fortunately, very few) run-ins with the Police, I don't have a high opinion of their intellectual calibre. They don't seem to think through what they do.

Let me offer here some simple guidelines. The Police are here to do these:

  1. Enforce the law;
  2. Investigate and solve crimes;
  3. Provide a sense of security so that people may go about their lives happily and productively;
  4. Protect the rights and liberties of people, as part of upholding the law.

It is my opinion that our Police do 1, 2 and 3 well, but they hardly realise that responsibility no. 4 exists.

One of the weaknesses of Singapore is that the executive is over-powerful, and not sufficiently balanced by due consideration for individuals, civil society and opposing voices. This is reflected in the way many of our institutions, from the press to the judiciary, are sensitive to the wishes of the executive and the demands of existing policy, but cagey about giving equal concern to opposing or unorthodox views.

 
The Police are no different. To live up to responsibility no. 4 will require some courage. Our law says we have certain liberties, and the idea of an impartial Police is that we have some organisation to rely on to protect these liberties. To do so, the Police may find themselves resisting their political masters or holding back private groups that seek to infringe on the liberties of other citizens. But I have found such courage lacking.

To exercise my right of free speech, I wanted to hold an indoor forum to discuss gay issues in the context of the government's Singapore 21 blueprint. No, you can't hold such a forum, the Police told me, because homosex is illegal. Not only were impartiality and courage lacking, so was logic.

The Taboo matter sounds like a similar kind of spinelessness. 

Somebody complains that men were intimate with other men in a public bar (which means clothes couldn't have come off). Informed opinion held that it's not illegal to behave in such a manner.

Yet, how did the Police act? They visited the bar and tried to get people to stop doing what is legal to do.

They should instead have told the busybody off. They should have acted responsibly towards the bar and its patrons by protecting their liberty to hug, kiss and be social.

That's what protecting citizens means.

* * * * *

But in fact, all I've said above is a little simplistic. In real life, keeping the civil peace means balancing competing interests. In any case, the law is often vague and policies shift depending on which political wind is blowing. High principles about what the Police should or should not do may sound appealing, but aren't very useful in practice.

In Singapore, little is said about moral and behavioural zoning, but in fact, it is a crucial concept in Police work. Any modern society would be diverse. Different sections of the population have different ideas of right and wrong, proper and improper. The much touted "community standards" that guide public morality, are usually, on closer examination, full of hypocritical holes. Moreover, they often reflect the views of only the more vocal and conservative factions. It's not that the avant-garde sections of a society aren't vocal, but they don't usually demand the uniform application of community standards on everybody else. They generally demand the dismantling of such suffocating norms. 

 
What will the police do if religious zealots demonstrate against "immorality"?

Imagine, one day, some religious group organises a campaign to post their members just outside gay bars, to intimidate and expose potential patrons.

How much confidence will we have, I wonder, that the Police will act firmly against these vigilantes?

Will the police feel their role is to stop immorality, or to stop religious bigotry and restraint on trade?

If the Police act upon the demonstrators' complaints, won't they, in effect be allowing themselves to be used by such a group? 

In the light of the above incident at Taboo, this scenario can't be dismissed.

 

In a society that espouses liberalism (one day, hopefully, including Singapore) how does one reconcile the blanket application of "community standards" with the freedom to be different?

We can take the cue from real life. Look carefully at how we react to people and things around us, and it is clear that all of us react situationally. Bikini-clad women at a funeral would raise eyebrows, but not on a beach. Loud music coming out of a downtown pub after midnight might be entirely expected, but would not be acceptable blasting out from a void deck of a housing block.

Thus with standards. Applicable standards vary from place to place, and this is the essence of zoning. Sensitive policing must this into account. 

By this reckoning, it is completely ordinary for same-sex couples (or larger groups) to engage in considerable physical contact in gay bars. Even erotic stage performances with nudity should not be a problem. The test is whether the clientele who inhabit that space accept -- and perhaps expect -- such behaviour or display. If they do, then that is the standard for that space. Other people's rigid codes aren't relevant. The space is not meant for them, and nobody is forcing them to be there.

This is a more sophisticated way of policing, of keeping the civil peace. At the same time, it is consistent with liberal principles.

Yet even by this token, the Police should not have gone to Taboo. They should still have told the busy-body complainant to -- well, there's a useful expression here -- bugger off.

© Yawning Bread 

 

Zoning in a bar, room by room. 

While browsing in a bookstore, I read a chapter from a book that discussed how Canadian police dealt with issues of nudity and explicit sex in gay bars.

Apparently, they generally advised owners to section their space into a front portion and a back portion. The front portion, open to the public must meet the usual standards of public decency.

The back room, access to which the bar owners are expected to exercise some control, are treated as a different zone, with different (more lax) standards. 

Counter-top dancing, for example, is permissible in the front room, provided the dancer has at least minimal clothing, e.g. g-string.

In the back room, the dancer can be nude. The rationale is that the customer would only be entering this restricted space in the full (and eager) knowledge that he would be confronted with nudity.

Sounds very sensible to me.

 

Footnotes

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Addenda

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