"cops are not on our side. Their first duty, their first and most fervent loyalty is to protect and serve themselves and their fellow officers."

I got taught a really hard lesson in this cold reality last week. The day after the Uvalde massacre, I wrote a column for Medium and the Los Angeles Blade about a 17-year-old homeless trans girl in El Paso who got caught up in false rumors claiming the shooter was a transgender undocumented immigrant.

I interviewed her and wrote about her experiences being harassed and assaulted outside a public library in El Paso, about her attackers accusing her trans "sister" of having killed all those children.

I wrote to ask people to please stop bullying transgender folks, especially kids. I included two short lines about the El Paso Police department not taking an assault report from the girl or later that evening from her counselor.

The article went viral in the Blade and Vice picked it up too. Soon I had El Paso Police and news reporters all over me. The pressured to know the girl's identity, they pushed to know more details about how she contacted the police, about how the counselor contacted the police.

Not a single one of those people, not a cop and not a reporter, wanted to know how the girl was doing. It was all about defending the honor of cops. "Of course we would never refuse to take an assault report, that's why we exist!"

And that's what all the local reporting in El Paso centered on for 2 days.

It became a story about the cops and not a story about a bullied, harassed, assaulted girl.

The girl, by the way, as you might expect, is terrified.