The LGBTQ community’s long history with law enforcement is so problematic and violent that organizers of a few of the recent Pride parades decided to ban the police from marching within the parade.
During the twentieth century The police frequently raided gay barsarrested guests and put them in prison. Sometimes the names and photos of those arrested were published in newspapers – with potentially dire social and economic consequences.
Police departments across the country have taken steps lately to enhance relations with the LGBTQ community. Creation of LGBTQ liaison officer positions and mandatory awareness training. Nevertheless, raids proceed to occur sporadically. In January 2024 Police entered 4 gay bars in Seattle unannounced, photos of consumers were allegedly taken, and no less than one bartender was cited for exposing a nipple, a violation of city ordinance.
And that's not the one reason why relations between police and LGBTQ people remain strained.
Offensive language and abuse
I’m a Sociologist who studies gender and sexualityTo understand LGBTQ people’s experiences and attitudes towards the police, I recently conducted a Study on the connection between LGBTQ and the police next to Professor Valerie Jennessmy colleague on the University of California, Irvine.
This first-of-its-kind national survey of LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people drew on a nationally representative sample of 1,598 people—a gold standard for sociological survey research—followed by in-depth interviews with 59 LGBTQ survey respondents.
The results, a few of which were recently published in a report written jointly with the American Civil Liberties Union were eye-opening.
Our study found that LGBTQ people still experience more police abuse than non-LGBTQ people and have less trust within the police. Perhaps not surprisingly, also they are significantly less willing to call the police for help.
At the broadest level, we found that LGBTQ persons are more prone to be stopped, searched, arrested, and detained than non-LGBTQ people. Just under 15% of non-LGBTQ respondents had experienced such police-initiated contact up to now yr, in comparison with 21% of LGBTQ people and 33% of transgender respondents.
These interactions with police are sometimes uglier for LGBTQ people than for non-LGBTQ people, especially bisexual, transgender, non-binary people and queer people – those that don’t discover with the normal labels of “gay” and “lesbian.” About 1 / 4 of all bisexual and queer survey participants had been the victim of offensive language during an interaction with the police.
For transgender and nonbinary people, those numbers were even higher — 45% and 33%, respectively. For example, one transgender woman we interviewed described how cops intentionally misgendered her, asked her “what” she was, and used anti-LGBTQ slurs.
Black transgender people were most definitely to be victims of police violence. Fifty-three percent of respondents reported being hit, punched, shoved or otherwise physically assaulted by police, in comparison with 25 percent of white transgender people. In contrast, only 8 percent of white cisgender men reported being victims of police brutality.
These data provide a striking illustration of how gender, sexual identity and race influence one another and the way they’re treated by the police.
Afraid to call the police
Given these findings, it is probably not surprising that LGBTQ people, on average, rated the fairness of their interactions with police about 12% lower than their non-LGBTQ counterparts.
Here too, bisexual and queer people reported feeling less fair of their interactions with the police than gay and lesbian people. Transgender and nonbinary people reported even worse feelings of fairness than cisgender LGBQ people.
Consequently, LGBTQ people also expressed lower levels of trust within the police than their non-LGBTQ counterparts, with significant differences across race.
Black and Hispanic LGBTQ people, for instance, rated their trust within the police at 2.9 on a 5-point scale; white LGBTQ people rated it at 3.3, a statistically significant difference. Asians reported having the best perception of police legitimacy amongst LGBTQ people, with a rating of three.6.
Finally, once we asked survey respondents whether or not they would call the police for help if a criminal offense occurred, we found that LGBTQ people were less prone to answer “yes” to this query than non-LGBTQ people: 71% versus 87%.
But there have been also significant differences amongst LGBTQ people. About 80 percent of gays and lesbians said they’d report their victims to the police, while only 69 percent of bisexuals, 61 percent of transgender people and 60 percent of queer people did so.
Interestingly, amongst LGBTQ people, black respondents were most definitely to say they’d call the police for help (77%), followed by 74% of whites and Asians. Hispanics reported the bottom level of agreement at 58%.
Police “more enemy than friend”
In summary, LGBTQ persons are significantly more prone to say They see the police as an enemy relatively than a friend than non-LGBTQ people.
But this general finding obscures essential subtle differences in the info. Some members of the LGBTQ community report having roughly the identical experiences with police as their non-LGBTQ counterparts, and so they have similarly positive perceptions of law enforcement.
White gays and lesbians, for instance, are almost as prone to call the police for help as non-LGBTQ people. Black, poor, or otherwise marginalized LGBTQ people, then again, have more problematic relationships with the police than their more privileged peers in almost every category.
Likewise, LGBTQ people of all races fare worse in almost every way than their non-LGBTQ counterparts of the identical race. Even white lesbians and gay men proceed to face significant mistreatment by the hands of police.
Our study highlights that gender and sexuality are extremely essential considerations in national discussions about policing.
The LGBTQ community has won essential legal rights over the past 30 years, but official violence and oppression proceed. And with More and more anti-LGBTQ bills are popping up across the countryFrom laws banning gender-affirming care to those prohibiting teachers from discussing LGBTQ issues, it's no wonder LGBTQ people remain distrustful of the police.
“When the police are called upon to enforce a law and that law is fundamentally directed against you as a person,” One of our interviewees told us“They will not support the police.”
image credit : theconversation.com