A video of a homophobic man verbally harassing a lesbian couple has made its way around the Internet. What’s not caught on camera, though, is a police officer refusing to document the incident.
Trudy and Wendy Dragoon are married and living in Oregon. The women were trying to reunite a lost dog with its owner when they encountered a man who raced toward them in his vehicle.
“Hit the gas and sped towards us. We got up on the sidewalk and he turned around right here, yelling homophobic slurs at us,” Wendy told KATU 2.
Warning: Video contains graphic language.
“Act like a f*cking man, get hit like one, c*nt. Gay pride a** b*tch,” said the man, who has not been identified by name.
“Come on, you’re a f*cking woman. I’ll f*cking knock you on your f*cking a**. You fat cow,” he says.
“You should be really embarrassed of yourself right now,” one of the women tells him.
“I should be so embarrassed of a f*cking lesbian on my property Look at you.”
“You f*cking embarrass America. You’re a cow.”
According to Trudy, a Portland cop told the couple to “ignore” the hateful man.
“I was like ‘you need to, you need to do something — he’s harassing us.’ And he told us ‘just ignore them and walk away.’ And I was like ‘no this is hate crime and you need to take care of this right now,'” she told KATU 2.
“He actually said, ‘Being mean to you isn’t against the law,'” Wendy told the Portland Mercury.
Portland Police Sgt. Chris Burley said the officer is now writing a report, but the cop “cannot necessarily take somebody into custody” based off hate speech alone, he told KATU 2.
The man in the video seems to have threatened the women based on their perceived sexual orientation — a misdemeanor in Oregon.
The community came together for the women, though. Supporters showed up at the homophobe’s house and drew rainbows and wrote positive messages in chalk outside his home. Another man present at the home called the police to report it as graffiti, and one of the responding officers was the same one who arrived during the initial incident.
Only then, days after the encounter, did the officer take statements from the women. Wendy asked why he hadn’t done so from the start.
“He told me ‘it was a judgment call’ and there were ‘more pressing calls’ to attend to,” she said to the Mercury.
