Thread: Rainbow Lounge Raid Oopsy

State liquor chief apologizes for raid on Fort Worth gay bar

02:45 PM CDT on Friday, July 17, 2009

By SCOTT FARWELL / The Dallas Morning News


The head of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said two agents violated policy by raiding a Fort Worth gay bar on June 28, and that their supervisor has announced his retirement. “I don’t think we have to dig very deep to figure out that TABC has violated some of their policies,” Commissioner Alan Steen said in an interview with The Dallas Voice, a newspaper that focuses on matters of particular interest to gay readers. “We know that and I apologize for that.” Steen reaffirmed his comments to The Dallas Morning News this morning.

He said state agents did not have justification for the inspection and rough arrests at the Rainbow Lounge. The raid resulted in one man's being hospitalized with a blood clot in his brain. “You can read that policy and figure out really quickly, TABC shouldn’t have even been there,” Steen told The Voice. “If our guys would have followed the damn policy, we wouldn’t have even been there. ... We have these conversations all the time, and we don’t participate in those kinds of inspections when there’s not probable cause or reasonable suspicion or some public safety measure to be inspected.” He declined to identify the supervisor, a sergeant in the agency's Fort Worth district office, who had retired.

The TABC officers involved in the raid have been placed on desk duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation, Steen said. The Fort Worth Police Department, which also participated in the raid, has two separate inquiries into whether its officers acted appropriately during the bar inspection.

The raid prompted local and national outrage, in part because it was conducted on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riot in New York City — regarded as the birth of the modern gay rights movement.