What does Pride month have to do with police reform?

From Stonewall to 'defund the police'

• Joseph Darius Jaafari
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  Joseph Darius Jaafari was a staff writer for the PA Post. His work covering crime, the military and LGBTQ issues has been featured in The Marshall Project, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a graduate of the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced for VICE and The New York Post. He is a native Arizonan and infamous for his love of tacos.

On June 28, 1969, police walked into a bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and told everyone to line up against the wall. Typically, the police would ask for identification. Female officers would take people who looked like women to the bathroom and order them to show “proof” of their gender. (You can guess how bar patrons had to do this.)

The preceding 12 months had already seen violent protests and riots in many of the nation’s big cities, particularly in the wake of the April 4, 1968, assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King’s death prompted Congress to pass the last of the 1960s-era civil rights laws: The Civil Rights Act of 1968 is often thought of only as a fair housing law, but it also extended federal protections for civil rights activists who organized against laws and practices directly aimed at suppressing Black Americans.

But for gay men, lesbian women and trans people – transvestites as they called themselves back then – there hadn’t been a similar reckoning. In fact, just months before the events in Manhattan, a man named Howard Efland was stomped to death by Los Angeles Police Officers after being caught having sex in a hotel room with another man and resisted arrest.

Instead of the people in the Greenwich Village bar that summer night offering up their identification, they took over the bar and threw the police out, barricaded the doors and started a two-day riot outside the Stonewall Inn. It was the birth of a decades-long, worldwide Pride movement that seeks to this day to liberate LGBTQ people from police violence, homophobic or transphobic laws and social denigration.

The Supreme Court’s landmark 6-3 ruling yesterday gave LGBTQ people the same workplace rights as their straight coworkers, and it came amid the backdrop of the George Floyd civil rights protests.

As a cub reporter I reported heavily on the overpolicing of queer communities in terms of raids on bars and clubs, and underpolicing when men and women were attacked or went missing.

But there has been great progress in how law enforcement approaches LGBTQ communities. And experts, LGBTQ historians and police reform advocates agree that the pace of change in this regard sped up in response to the 2016 Pulse Nightclub Massacre, where Omar Matin killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

After the shooting, the gay community and police had to come to terms with each other: How could a community that has historically been brutalized by police possibly ask for help from them, and how could a police culture that has a history of disrespect now earn respect to solve violent crimes?

In Seattle, the police department took up a new approach: actively hiring and promoting LGBTQ officers, and then partnering with local businesses and organizations that would act as community liaisons to help promote reporting violent crimes.

The project, called Safe Place, is an offshoot of a law enforcement approach called “community policing.” The aim of community policing is to make police integral to the community by partnering with community advocates, leaders, the media and local businesses. Today, communities across the rural-urban spectrum have dedicated LGBTQ liaisons in their police departments who work with the gay community to help celebrate pride events or act as the community’s go-to for problems.

Community policing is the bedrock of a law enforcement revolution in Camden, New Jersey. The city took on the model, and then saw crime reduce dramatically. Many cities are now looking at similar models and, perhaps more significantly, seriously listening to protesters’ demands to defund police departments. Those demands aren’t about eliminating police; instead, they are a call to reassess the militarization of police budgets with an eye toward shifting some money to education or other social programs that address poverty, which is the primary driver of crime in all communities.

But just because it worked in Camden, will it work across the country?

The short answer is: Maybe, but only if there’s accountability. As I and others have reported in the past, even in cities where there are community-policing initiatives (for LGBTQ communities, specifically), there are still examples of anti-LGBTQ policing.

All of this to say that we can expect police reform – if it does happen – to be an evolution, rather than an immediate about-face, just as it took decades to get from Stonewall to gay marriage (in 2015) and Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on employment discrimination. –Joseph Darius Jaafari

Related Reads: 

• them.: 51 Years After Stonewall, Police Raided Two Gay Bars Aiding Protestors

• Advocate: Ash Stevens | Reclaim Pride by Defunding the Police

• OUT: 40,000 Demand Justice for Black Trans Lives at Protests

• KPBS San Diego: San Diego Pride Requests Police Reform Before Allowing LEAs In Pride Parade

• The Atlantic: The Three-Letter Word That Triggered a Revolution

• WESA: Today’s Protests Remind Some Pittsburghers Of The Riots After MLK’s 1968 Assassination

• Philadelphia Inquirer: What Black Lives Matter protests in Pennsylvania’s ‘Trump Country’ mean for 2020

Best of the rest

• Police reform and body cams: Legislation approved by a Pa. House committee on Monday would create a database on police misconduct . However, the legislation falls short of making that information readily available to the public through the state’s Right to Know Law. Related: That open records law also applies to police body cameras; current law requires citizens to make an argument as to why video footage should be made public. But that could be changed, Spotlight PA reports, if the legislature can agree on amending Act 22, which deals with the use of body cameras and surveillance by law enforcement.

• A kick, followed by a slap on the wrist: The police officer who kicked an Erie woman who was sitting on the ground during a recent protest will only face three days of unpaid suspension and have to take a sensitivity class, reports Ed Mahon. The attorney for the victim said he thinks the city’s actions amount to protecting the officer at the expense of accountability. One result of the incident: It could prompt the creation of a citizen review board that would investigate allegations of police misconduct.

• Prisons and COVID-19: From the top of this story by STAT News. “The outbreak at [California Institution for Men] — described by several current inmates to STAT — illustrates how a slow and piecemeal response to the novel coronavirus put the prison’s standard operating procedures ahead of the demands of a public health emergency. That approach, combined with existing overcrowding, has fueled the spread of the virus.”

Other statewide reads:

• The Morning Call: A second wave of the coronavirus is coming, health officials say. But when?

• LNP:  Born right after 9/11, school-bound during Great Recession, graduating in midst of pandemic: Meet the county’s class of 2020

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Abuse hotlines light up after region’s move to green phase

• Reading Eagle: Pennsylvania Supreme Court issues order to reinstate Northern Berks Regional police officer terminated in 2016

• PennLive: ‘We believe there’s a clear and present danger’: Three Mile Island decommissioning in question

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