Small-Town Cop vs. 1st Amendment. (Sigh.)

Last October 18, at a No Kings protest in Fairhope, Alabama, sexagenarian grandmother Renae Gamble was arrested for wearing the outfit you see here.  In case you can’t see the image (Blogspot has been a little weird lately), she’s wearing an inflatable penis costume she bought at the local Hallowe’en supply store (it was late October, remember) and carrying a sign reading “No Dick Tator.”  That’s only mildly clever and a little vulgar even for Curmie’s taste, but it is unquestionably protected by the 1st Amendment, the same way those “Fuck Joe Biden” chants and signs were a couple years ago. 

Not according to police corporal Andrew Babb, who declared the costume “abusive” (!) and an affront to a “family town.”  The video from Babb’s body cam makes a couple of things clear.  One is that yes, there is an illegal act shown, but it isn’t anything Gamble does.  She clearly asks “Am I being detained?  If not…”  It’s a little difficult to make out the last part, as she’s turned around and is walking away, but the transcript on the YouTube page says “I’m going to go ahead and leave,” and that seems pretty accurate.  Importantly, she wouldn’t be asking if she’s being detained if he’s made it clear that she is.  And it’s not like she’s going to outrun him.  All he has to do is either say “yes” (instead of continuing to yell at her) or simply step around in front of her.  Instead, he tackles her.  That’s assault.

Shortly thereafter, Babb says that “I told her to take it off.”  That demand never appears on the video.  Perhaps he did so before starting the recording, but the simplest and indeed most probable explanation is that he’s lying about that part.  Then, of course, she has to be taken into custody.  And all of a sudden that unconscionably objectionable costume—the one Babb said he insisted Gamble take off—needs to remain on… resulting in a scene that would have fit readily into a bit starring Buster Keaton, Benny Hill, or perhaps Lucille Ball, as the cops try to maneuver Gamble into the squad car while she’s roughly seven feet tall with a waistline of 70 inches or so. 

It was hilarious… except for the whole “this actually happened” part.  Finally, they manage to remove the costume.  Noteworthy here is that she couldn’t take it off by herself, and no one else is under any obligation to help.  (Her fellow protesters would have, of course, at the end of the events, but not at the behest of some self-important cop.)

Somewhere along the line, Babb asks for her name; she replies, “Aunt Tifa.”  He then proceeds to call her that.  Is he really so stupid that he doesn’t know she was being a wise-ass, or did he just pretend so she could later be charged with giving a false name to law enforcement?  Curmie doubts that Babb is smart enough to have adopted the latter strategy, but it’s a possibility.  Gamble was later charged with that particular offense, by the way.

Anyway, after a couple of delays, one of them because a Christian College Fair was booked into the building on the original trial date (Curmie fancies himself reasonably creative, but he couldn’t make this shit up), Gamble will be headed to trial next week, charged also with disorderly conduct (what?) and resisting arrest, which the video shows never happened. 

There is literally no evidence that Gamble committed any crime, but the reactionary and pearl-clutching mayor, city attorney, and city council president seem stuck in the Victorian age, so Curmie isn’t going to try to predict what judge Haymes Snedeker is going to do with this case.  Of course, Mayor Sherry Sullivan went all-in on the straw man arguments, proclaiming that “Protests should remain peaceful and free of profanity and obscene displays.”  There can, of course, be no suggestion that anything Gamble did was anything but peaceful.  Profanity and obscenity, of course, are more in the eye of the beholder, or in the squishier realm of “community standards,” but Curmie notes the perceptive comment of Heidi Veyance on the Fairhope Police Department’s Facebook post about the incident: “Can we assume that all reports of sightings of ‘truck nutz’ will be treated with an equal amount of seriousness & dealt the same punishment?”  Touché.

The video linked about, from the Intercept YouTube page, is the one that has the more complete transcript.  But Curmie let his inner 12-year-old out for a stroll, and from that perspective, the better comments are on the PoliceActivity page: she was “Only charged with a “misdewiener”; “They couldn't get it to stand up in court”; “Her lawyer is gonna take her case pro bone-o”; “This definitely falls under some type of penal code” which “carries a stiff sentence”; that she’s likely to be acquitted by a “hung jury”…  Oh, and a direct quotation from Babb: “It’s illegal to come in the street.”  Another site suggests that “the three policemen must have been scared stiff.”  You get the idea, Gentle Reader.

So, summing up: The chances that a cop is a self-righteous idiot are already pretty high.  Make him a small-town cop, and the odds increase.  A small-town cop in the south?  We’re perilously close to ontological certitude, and Corporal Babb is pretty clearly not an exception.  Unfortunately, his apparent unfamiliarity with the Constitution isn’t the only criticism that can be lodged against him.  He’s also… well… let’s just say that Curmie agrees with the commenter who suggested that Gamble’s real crime was impersonating a police officer.