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May 21, 2007 Cops
Failed us, Say Le Bec-Fin Foie Gras 4 THEY CAME TO Le Bec-Fin to protest despicable foie gras and received despicable treatment from cops and a drunken flasher, they say. The Foie Gras 4 - Dezeray Rubinchik, Mark Fonda, Deanna Calderaio and David Lambdon - picketed the expensive, exclusive French restaurant Friday, May 11, to protest foie gras on the menu. Foie gras is French for "fatty liver." To make it, helpless male ducks are force-fed up to four pounds of grain by having tubes jammed down their throats two or three times a day for two weeks. The "feedings" stress the duck's liver, exploding it up to 10 times normal size. That's torture, the protesters say. After notifying the police's Civil Affairs Unit they would picket Le Bec-Fin, they arrived around 8 p.m. and began shouting and chanting along the curb. They can be loud. Civil Affairs had not arrived, but within a few minutes a police car pulled up. Two uniformed cops got out and observed. Problems began when a Le Bec-Fin patron - a fiftyish, big-bellied, white male, well-dressed and drunk, according to all accounts - left Le Bec-Fin and got in Rubinchik's face. "At 6-5, the man was quite intimidating as he stood so close to me, yelling in my face," says Rubinchik, 29. The two cops didn't twitch. By several accounts, the man screamed, jumped and danced around on the sidewalk, yelling, "This is what foie gras did to me." He fell, Rubinchik says, got up screaming and then fell twice more, possibly on purpose. The two cops didn't twitch. Fearing for her safety, Rubinchik asked them to detain the oaf for being drunk or disorderly. The two cops twitched. "We were then told to 'f--- off' " by Officer Chisholm, says Rubinchik, who took names - Chisholm's partner's name was Wallace - and notes. She's filed a complaint with the 9th District. The drunk then stepped inside Le Bec-Fin and "pulled out his penis for nearly 10 seconds and pushed it against the glass door at us while he snickered and jeered," says Rubinchik. He "was shaking it at us," says Calderaio, 29. That sickened her more than foie gras. When protesters asked the cops to arrest the flasher for indecent exposure, instead of service they got abuse. Chisholm "told us to 'go f--- yourselves,' " Rubinchik says. The flasher was allowed to slip away through Le Bec-Fin's back door. I left messages asking chef/owner Georges Perrier to identify the prize package, but he did not respond. Neither did the Police Department, when I called to speak to Wallace and Chisholm. However, Internal Affairs confirmed that its officers are investigating Rubinchik's complaint. So is the ACLU. Three observers confirmed the protesters' account. Philadelphia schoolteacher Diana Eberhardt, 58, saw the fracas unfold after returning a DVD to TLA Video. She says the drunk was "aggressive" and was "harassing" the Foie Gras 4. When Eberhardt asked police to step in, they refused. When she asked again, she says, Officer Wallace told her, "If you don't leave, I'll put you in the car." She stood her ground - and Wallace put the totally innocent bystander in the police car, observers told me. Rubinchik yelled for him to arrest her instead, and Chisholm "pushed me with two hands," she says. Eberhardt was released after a half-hour by a just-arriving Civil Affairs sergeant, who apologized for the bad treatment. A witness who was watching from across Walnut Street, Emily Scanlon, 24, tells me the flasher was being "drunk and obnoxious" for 20 minutes. When he loosened his pants, she thought he was going to moon the crowd, but "he pulled his genitals out and shook them." Another witness, Samantha Tramontina, 23, calls it "insulting" and says "he was trying to start a fight with the protesters." If what the observers and protesters say checks out, Chisholm and Wallace need extra training, starting with a lecture about how their badge means they are to protect citizens, not bully them. E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/byko.
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