"Police first protect and serve themselves."

Amen and amen. If I could illustrate just a little, I wrote an article for Medium and the Los Angeles Blade shortly after the Uvalde shooting, on the subject of a 17-year-old homeless transgender girl in El Paso who got caught up in the untrue rumors that the shooter was a transgender undocumented immigrant. Before she even heard those rumors, she got harassed and assaulted outside a public library.

The article went viral in the Blade, and Vice picked it up too. My whole point was to ask people to stop picking on trans folks and stop spreading ridiculous rumors out of some sort of ideological crusade.

But that's not how the fallout turned out. I included two lines in the article about the El Paso Police not taking an assault report from the girl in question or from her counselor later that evening.

Wow, did the shit ever hit the fan. Before I knew it, I had El Paso police calling me, and several local news agencies in El Paso reaching out.

All their questions, every single one, had to do with defending police "honor."

The girl in question ended up scared to death, feeling harassed by police and local news media. She's already vulnerable, and being in her position she's scared of cops.

But nobody seems to be thinking about that. All they want to do is defend cops, no matter how she feels about it.

In fact, I've still got reporters reaching out to me for comment, and not a single one of them wants to know how the girl is doing. Not one reporter has asked one question about the girl and her mental or physical health.

All they can focus on is, did I treat the cops unfairly in the story. Sigh.