Atlanta Police Raid Gay Bar, Arrest 8

[Simply Madeline]

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/atla...ay-136646.html

The owners of an Atlanta gay bar say their establishment was unfairly targeted by police conducting a raid Thursday evening.

Several customers at Atlanta Eagle say they were harassed without prompting. They were forced to the ground and frisked, according to several witnesses.

"Our problem is with the way our customers were treated," said one of the Eagle's owners, Richard Ramey.

Eight employees of the bar were arrested around 11:30 p.m., charged with providing adult entertainment without a city permit.

Nine complaints were filed against the Atlanta PD.

NSFW Language masked.

One man said officers grabbed patrons who didn't immediately lie down by the neck and forced them to the ground. The man said he was kicked in the ribs while lying down. "Then I heard laughing and giggling and saying this is more fun than raiding n*****rs with crack. They also told us to shut the f**k up unless we were spoken too [sic]." The man said he heard one person told that if he spoke again he would be hit by a chair. He also reported that one officer "said to everyone in general that all you all do is flash your asses and show your c**ks."

[AnglRdr]

Eight employees of the bar were arrested around 11:30 p.m., charged with providing adult entertainment without a city permit.

1. Is that an arrestable offense?
2. And, if it is, why wouldn't they arrest the business owner?
3. I suspect there is much more to the story than the AJC article lets on.

[fitz1980]

Police released records stating that undercover officers saw sex acts taking place at the bar during two visits prior to last Thursday's raid. During the raid, eight employees were arrested on business violations, including some for providing adult entertainment without a license by dancing in their underwear, but no one was arrested on sex or drug charges.

How is dancing in your underwear a crime? I'm pretty sure that adult entertainment is a strip club, and in Atlanta strip clubs are full nude. At Coyote Ugly the girls dance on the bar wearing corsets & bra tops and nobody makes them get an adult entertainment license or has them arrested.

That's tax dollars at work here in ATL, making sure that a bunch of homos don't do anything to offend community standards in a gay bar.

Check out one of the comments from the article:

If enough citizens care about cleaning up midtown and making it suitable for suburbanites to move back, look at the difference a complaint can make. We only need to look at the pretty condo high rise where two gay clubs used to tarnish and blight the midtown neighborhood. Imagine a pretty shiny new little condo high rise on Ponce, property values might improve a little along with a sense of Christian morality.

That's what it's really about. Force the gays and their "debauched lifestyle" to go somewhere else so that big developers can come in and put in crappy shoddily constructed town homes that they can sell to yuppies for $400,000 a pop.

[BringTheNoise]

Well the gays are soooo icky! Can't be living near them![/bigoted nonsense]

[Simply Madeline]

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/g...nt?oid=1065294

McLendon was among the 62 patrons at Midtown’s Atlanta Eagle gay bar on Sept. 10, the night of a now-notorious commando-style raid by a dozen members of the police department’s Red Dog squad — which usually combats gang activity — and nine undercover members of the APD’s intelligence and organized crime unit.

“Nothing was ever explained to us by the officers,” McLendon recalls. “When I asked if I could move away from the broken glass, I was told, ‘Shut the **** up or you’ll be handcuffed.’ The police were laughing and joking while we were lying there and at different times, I heard them say, ‘You people make me sick’ and ‘I hate fags.’ One of them said, ‘This is fun; we should do this every week.’”

In the days since then, McLendon has closely followed news coverage of the raid, read the police reports and listened to last week’s police news conference in which embattled Chief Richard Pennington seemed to half-defend, half-apologize for the incident. But like many metro Atlanta residents, he’s left with a number of nagging questions: Why did police feel they needed to take down the club with the kind of force usually reserved for busting meth labs? Why did officers seem to act so unprofessionally toward the Eagle’s customers, none of whom was arrested? And, was the whole thing really just about sex?