Policing Is a Queer Issue

The American LGBTQ rights movement has its origins in the struggle against criminalization and police violence. While well-off queer people tended to socialize and cruise in private homes and exclusive clubs in the twentieth century, working-class queers typically only had access to public places like bars and parks, leaving them much more vulnerable to police harassment. If harassment, brutality, and humiliation weren’t punishment enough, LGBTQ people who were arrested could find their name printed in the local newspaper, a practice that often constituted a direct threat to their employment.

Pride celebrations mark the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion in New York, which is often credited with ushering in the era of LGBTQ liberation. On June 28, 1969, queer and trans people (drag queens and sex workers among them) fought back against arrests during an NYPD raid at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-run gay bar where dancing was uniquely permitted. According to historian Martin Duberman in his definitive history Stonewall, the police were paid off $2,000 a week to allow its operation, but this raid was a surprise led by a different division. Police were routed in the riot, and word soon spread, and thousands of people demonstrated outside Stonewall for a second night. The first-ever Pride march took place a year later in New York City.

The Stonewall Rebellion is not the only example of LGBTQ people collectively resisting aggressive policing. A few years before, in 1966, trans women in San Francisco also rioted against police officers who were raiding Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a restaurant that served as a popular queer gathering spot. Also in San Francisco, after Dan White (a former cop himself) assassinated the city’s gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, it was the San Francisco Police Department who fundraised for White’s “Twinkie defense” during the trial. White got off with the light conviction of manslaughter, igniting what became known as the White Night riots after protesters confronted police officers on the steps of city hall. Rioters burned cop cars, and in retaliation, officers invaded the Castro’s gay bars and beat people on the street.

These were pivotal moments in the fight for LGBTQ civil rights. But for all our advances in the decades since, LGBTQ people remain the targets of pervasive overpolicing and mass incarceration. Queer people are six times more likely than our straight counterparts to be stopped by the police in public spaces. In 2013, a survey revealed that half of respondents who had been victims of anti-LGBTQ violence reported experiencing police misconduct, including unjustified arrest, use of excessive force, and entrapment.

Transgender people endure especially harsh treatment: they’re seven times more likely than cisgender people to be physically assaulted by the police, are frequently assumed to be sex workers, and are routinely mistreated by police, from verbal harassment to persistent misgendering. An anti-loitering law in New York has been so overexploited as a pretext to profile transgender people that it has been nicknamed the “walking while trans” ban. And we must remember that LGBTQ lives have been lost at the hands of police violence. It was only days after George Floyd’s murder that Tony McDade, a black trans man with a history of mental illness, was shot by an officer who had turned off his body camera.

Prison is a miserable place for anyone, and LGBTQ people are extra likely to end up behind bars and face high rates of abuse in prison. Nearly half of black transgender people are incarcerated during their lifetimes, and roughly one in five youth in juvenile facilities identify as LGBTQ. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, “Being LGBTQ in a U.S. jail or prison often means daily humiliation, physical and sexual abuse, and the fear that it will get worse if you complain.”

In 2019, San Francisco’s Pride parade was itself a site of police violence. Peaceful demonstrators who blocked the parade in protest of police participation were descended upon by officers who shoved, dragged, and arrested demonstrators. There were zero consequences for the officers involved. It wasn’t until Chesa Boudin was elected as district attorney a year later that the charges against demonstrators were dropped.

Queer Liberation, Not Rainbow Capitalism

We can all agree that there are queer cops, and well-meaning cops, who want to use their position to actually make our communities safer. But the institution of policing encourages so much widespread abuse that it overshadows those good intentions. As Alex Vitale writes in his book The End of Policing:

Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions.

The overpolicing of LGBTQ communities is in part due to personal homophobia but also due to the fact that most queer and trans people are poor and/or working class — whether that is defined by income, job status, or education. More than a third of LGBTQ adults are struggling just to pay their bills. Young LGBTQ people, often facing rejection from their families, represent a shocking 40 percent of homeless youth. This pushes them toward “criminalized behaviors such as drug sales, theft, or survival sex, which increase their risk of arrest and detainment.”

Of course, LGBTQ people suffer the consequences of crime too. But aggressive policing is a failed strategy to resolve the social problems that drive crime in the first place — and as the recent mass shooting in Uvalde grimly illustrates, neither can police be counted on to provide the safety we expect from them. A real war on crime would be, as John Clegg and Adaner Usmani write, “equivalent to the task of building a large, redistributive welfare state that takes from the rich to give to the poor.” This means building a fighting labor movement in this country, which would necessarily be arranged against police officers who break strikes (as seen on the recent Hunts Point Teamsters picket line) and suppress union organizing drives (as seen in the arrest of Amazon organizer Chris Smalls).

The fight over whether or not to allow uniformed police into Pride parades may seem to some like a purely symbolic one. But challenging the identitarian notion that queer cops represent progress is an important part of reclaiming the radical, transformative politics of queer liberation from what too often amounts to a single-issue movement devoted to winning inclusion into the very institutions that stand in the way of real justice. We don’t need more queer cops. We need to build a whole new infrastructure of public safety that isn’t rooted in punishment and violence.