For Fort Worth Mayor, Sorry Is Hard to Say

Perhaps you saw the AP headline last week: “Fort Worth Mayor Apologizes for Gay Bar Raid.” What you might not have seen was the retraction. Turns out he didn’t apologize for the raid, just the fact that anyone got hurt. Which begs the question — why is it so hard to say ‘I’m sorry’ to for leaders to apologize?

The answer may seem obvious to some of you. An apology would be an admission of guilt and could open up the city to expensive lawsuits.

I understand that. I get it. I also disagree with it.

Several years ago, I was working with a client that operates emergency rooms nationwide. The project was an article for their corporate newsletter about physicians apologizing for medical mistakes. To boil down the research from the people I was working with, they found that doctors who apologized for medical mistakes were much less likely to be sued, even if they did so in a way that was completely neutral and in no way admitted guilt. The hoped for outcome was the injured party to feel listened to and somewhat less litigious. Mind you, these are doctors, a group of people who are more paranoid about being sued than any other occupation.

If doctors can say they’re sorry, why can’t Mayor Moncrief do the same? Why can’t he step forward and say, publicly and forcefully, “I’m sorry this happened in our city. What happened at the Rainbow Lounge isn’t the Fort Worth Way. We don’t know what happened, but we will find out. If wrongdoing was committed by members of the Fort Worth Police Department, it will be handled appropriately.”

But that isn’t what happened, even though it seems like that’s the message the city is trying to convey when it asks for federal review of the FWPD internal affairs investigation and appoints a liaison to the LGBT community in Fort Worth. Unfortunately, this isn’t the message that is being heard by the public. The message that seems to be coming out of City Hall and Police Headquarters is CYA. Furthermore, I believe the window of opportunity for an apology has passed. And what’s even worse for the Mayor, a bumbled apology is actually worse than no apology at all.

You may say that an apology is just a bunch of words, but I believe that there’s more to it than that. I’ve always seen Fort Worth as a place where being out and open was more than just tolerated, it was just no big deal. When Joel Burns was re-elected to the City Council this past May, it wasn’t because of or in spite of his sexual orientation. It was because he had such a successful first term and no opponent thought they could beat him. He did good work.

In the aftermath of the Rainbow Lounge incident, I worry that it will erode the feeling of acceptance that the LGBT community feels. I keep thinking about what a young man said to me after the East Side Community Police meeting the week after the incident. “When I see the police, I don’t feel like I can trust them to protect me as a gay man,” he said. “I feel like they are going to look at me and see someone who doesn’t count.”

I don’t believe that’s the Fort Worth we live in. But no matter how hard the citizens work to create a tolerant, inclusive community, at some point, the Mayor, the Council and the Police have to step up and make that a reality. Even if this incident plays out where the TABC takes the fall for most or all of the serious aspects of the incident (and things aren’t looking good for TABC), there is still a loss of faith from all of our citizens that the city is there to protect and serve. And that has to be said, I’m sorry to say.