Jonathan Sriranganathan, Councillor for The Gabba was assaulted last week and is recovering at home. We’re all thinking of you Jonno and hope you’re feeling better soon <3 Even during this painful, stressful experience, Jonno has approached it as he does all things - with thoughtfulness and kindness - and an analysis on what causes violence, how we can help stop it and why more police and prisons aren't the answer. More from Jonno: On Friday evening I was punched in the face by a stranger on Vulture Street in West End, and had to go to hospital overnight.
I have a couple of chipped teeth (if only the Australian government would introduce free dental care!), a cut near my eye and a broken nose that a specialist will have to reset in a couple of days once the swelling goes down. My nose is WAY off-centre. It’s painful and tender, and I don't think I'll be able to breathe clearly through it until it's reset. Having to cancel a bunch of meetings and events is also pretty inconvenient, but it could’ve been a lot worse if they’d also fractured my eye sockets or whatever, so I suppose I’m lucky in that respect. It wasn’t a targeted attack or anything like that. I was down at Bunyapa Park, having a delicious meal cooked up by the Food Not Bombs crew from dumpster-dived ingredients, and I heard yelling from across the road. A guy who seemed very drunk and angry was threatening and lunging at people on the footpath, lashing out randomly. It looked like someone could get hurt pretty badly. He threw a glass bottle at one person’s head without any provocation or warning, and I was also worried for his safety cos he was staggering around on the road and liable to get hit by a car. Anyway, when he started chasing a couple of other young people on the footpath, I tried to intervene and de-escalate (which I’ve done on similar occasions in the past and managed to calm things down). Without warning, he rushed forward and punched me hard on the nose. It’s easy in retrospect to say that I should have kept a few more metres between him and me, and perhaps paused to observe a bit more before jumping in, but I think it was probably still a good thing on balance to get in between him and the other people he was attacking… hard to say. I don’t know what happened to him after that. My nose was gushing blood, and the lovely patrons and staff at the Jungle Bar came over to get me, sat me down, helped me stuff my nose full of tissues, got me some ice, and took care of me until the ambulance showed up. Thanks so much guys! The paramedics and staff at the hospital were all really lovely (I acknowledge that this certainly isn’t a universal experience of hospitals), although as you can imagine, the emergency ward was pretty damn busy on a Friday evening, so it was several hours before a doctor could even see me, and I ended up staying there overnight. As I was sitting with my head held back, waiting for the bleeding to slow, one woman who’d witnessed the attack (and seemed pretty shaken up as a result) kept making comments along the lines of “where are the police when you need them? There should be more police on the street!” and later I found myself reflecting on that sentiment as I lay waiting for hours on the hospital bed… See, there are already heaps of police around West End. There’s a new police station just 150 metres up the road from where I was punched, and another police station 850 metres away at South Brisbane. Geographically speaking, there are probably more police per square kilometre on the ground around the 4101 postcode than almost anywhere else in the state, except perhaps for Fortitude Valley or the Gold Coast’s main nightlife precinct. West End has way more cops than 99% of suburbs and towns in Queensland. But that didn’t stop me getting assaulted. There’s also heaps of surveillance cameras all over that part of Vulture Street/Boundary Street – the cameras also didn’t stop me getting assaulted. We have stronger criminal penalties and tighter bail conditions for violent offences than we did in past generations – they didn’t stop me getting assaulted. And Australia is holding way more people in prison today than at pretty much any point in the nation’s history – locking up more and more people didn’t stop me getting assaulted either. What I reflected on as I lay waiting for my CT scans was that the person who broke my nose was in a really bad state on Friday night. Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a chronic alcohol addiction and a lot of trauma that he hasn’t had enough help to deal with. He needs wraparound support services. He needs society to value him as a human being and treat him with dignity. If you take the time to talk to serving cops, they’ll tell you themselves that they really aren’t equipped to resolve situations like this, and how frustrated they are about it all. Often, it seems like the police are essentially the only number you can call, and we’re encouraged to call them AFTER things have already escalated into an ‘emergency’ and gotten out of hand, at which point all they’re really doing is choosing which person will experience violence/unwanted force (and too often it’s the most vulnerable/oppressed person who is chosen). But where are the early intervention services we can call so that violent force is avoided entirely? The fact that this situation got to a point where someone was randomly attacking strangers on the main street is an indictment upon our entire society. Why aren’t people in these situations getting the help they need? Do they need housing? Do they need counselling? Have they been on the receiving end of other kinds of oppression and structural violence that fuel their anger? People aren’t born violent. You could almost say that they contract it – that violence is contagious, kinda like a virus. Violence generally flows downhill, in that people who are on the receiving end of state violence learn certain ways of behaving, which they then enact on others around them. Calling for more cops and more surveillance is an easy, simplistic, knee-jerk response, but it doesn’t address the underlying issues.
Sometimes commentators talk about ‘breaking the cycle of violence,’ but focus primarily upon violence of the kind that I experienced last night. They don’t talk about the deep violence of evicting someone into homelessness… or the lasting violence of making kids think they’re worthless because they struggle to learn things in the very specific one-size-fits-all way that mainstream schools expect them to learn… or the long-range violence of designing armed drones and remote targeting software to kill people on the other side of the world just because they didn’t want to sell you their oil at a discounted rate… or the subtle violence of moving on certain kinds of people and excluding them from a community together. I don’t think we’ll be breaking any cycles until we recognise that all those different kinds of violence are connected. Anyway, if anyone knows what ended up happening to the guy who punched me, flick me an email (no need to post publicly). I’m hoping he gets the help he needs. I’m going back to bed now… probably gonna take a few days off… If you want to help me relax and recover, the best way you can help is to convince anyone you know who is still working for (or taking contracts from) fossil fuel companies to quit their jobs and switch to an industry that isn’t directly destroying our entire biosphere. I’ll catch ya when my nose is back in the centre of my face! 
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