As I write this, it’s the first day of Black History Month and a funeral is being held in a snow-covered Memphis for Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was the father of a 4-year-old and an accomplished skateboarder. On January 7, 2023, five Black police officers of the Memphis Police Department severely beat Nichols during a traffic stop. Nichols was hospitalized in critical condition and died three days later.
Video of the grisly beating was released Jan. 27. The five officers have been fired and charged with second degree murder. A half-dozen other police and Fire Department personnel have also been fired, but not yet charged in the killing.
Police violence in the U.S. is at an all-time high. As Al Jazeera’s AJ+ social media account reported on January 27, “Police have killed at least 3,530 people in the U.S. since 2020. They kill Black people at disproportionate rates — nearly 300% more than white people — despite Black people being just around 14% of the U.S. population.”
The modern LGBTQ civil rights movement was born out of police harassment and brutality against a group of gay men, butch lesbians and trans women of color at the Stonewall Uprising in June 1969. Pride Month was born out of a commemoration of police violence against gay and trans people.
Stormé DeLarverie was the butch lesbian whose scuffle with police was, according to eyewitnesses and noted in many histories of the event, the spark that ignited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action. As a lesbian of color who was gender nonconforming, she said she faced police harassment often.
Trans women Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera have recently been memorialized for their role in the uprising with a statue in New York City. The statue is the “first permanent, public artwork recognizing transgender women in the world,” according to the Smithsonian. Johnson and Rivera were both arrested often, and Johnson spoke at length about her experiences with law enforcement.
The history of police violence against LGBTQ people in Philadelphia is long and ugly. Nearly every LGBTQ person I know, myself included, regardless of age or identity, has experienced it in some form. From the 1960s through the 1980s, police raids on the bars were frequent and brutal.
Several investigative series I have reported in recent years for PGN have highlighted how police treat LGBTQ people, including those in mental health crises or sex workers who have been attacked by clients. My own early experience with police as a teenager in the local gay bars and clubs around 13th and Locust was fraught with harassment and violence. As an AIDS activist in the 1980s and 1990s, I experienced abusive treatment by police on a regular basis, as did most of my fellow activists.
After I was brutally raped a few years ago by a serial rapist preying on women during his lunch hour in my neighborhood, I wrote about my shocking experience with SVU detectives for Huffington Post.
The harassment and violence against LGBTQ people by police did not stop at Stonewall. Study after study has shown that LGBTQ people — particularly gender nonconforming lesbians, trans women and queer people of color — face continued harassment and violence from law enforcement.
Gay men I have interviewed who have reported their experience with hate crime attacks have disclosed abusive and dismissive treatment by law enforcement that has ranged from insensitive remarks to outright hostility and an attitude that they brought the violence on themselves.
Stephanie Schroeder, a lesbian who has written extensively about mental health issues in the LGBTQ community, told me in a series of interviews for PGN and other publications about the layers of abuse and violence mentally ill LGBTQ people have experienced from law enforcement. And an investigative piece I did for the Stanford Social Innovation Review enumerated how mentally ill LGBTQ and people of color are warehoused in jails and prisons.
Police have a long history of targeting queer and trans people and invading LGBTQ spaces. The reckoning those of us who are racial justice activists hoped would come from the summer of 2020 protests has not materialized.
Structural racism and structural misogyny are built into policing. How else to explain that, in a country known for being carceral and with more than two million people in jails and prisons, fewer than five percent of rapists are prosecuted and only one percent are convicted, and yet one in five women — with LBT women disproportionately represented among them — is a rape victim?
The 2020 protests didn’t just detail how much violence is perpetrated by police against marginalized groups — it replicated that violence. How many Philadelphians marching for justice were pepper sprayed, tear gassed and beaten by police? How many were young queer people of all races?
The failure of law enforcement to protect LGBTQ people against violence towards the community is also a failure to police themselves. The protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder and the killing of Breonna Taylor exposed decades-long patterns of police brutality and how marginalized groups are disproportionately harmed by the criminal justice system.
Reports from the ACLU and Lambda Legal, as well as studies from HRC and the Williams Institute at UCLA all concur: LGBTQ people aren’t safe from police and experience harassment and mistreatment, including violence, from law enforcement.
Part of that violence against LGBTQ people means they are overly incarcerated, as I reported in a series in December 2021. LGBTQ people are targeted by police, and that often lands them in jail or prison. Gay and bisexual men are disproportionately represented in the prison population. More than 40 percent of women who are incarcerated identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, compared with only 5.1 percent of all US women.
The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found 2 percent of the transgender population had been to prison or jail — nearly double the share of cisgender people in the U.S.
In 2017, 20 percent of youth in juvenile justice facilities were LGB. Eighty-five percent of incarcerated LGBT and gender nonconforming youth were people of color.
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 30 percent of LGBTQ people experience sexual victimization while incarcerated, compared with only 8 percent of heterosexual people.
Transgender people who are incarcerated are five times more likely to be assaulted by correctional staff and nine times more likely to be assaulted by other incarcerated people.
James Baldwin, who wrote extensively about police and the criminal justice system, said, “Words like ‘freedom,’ ‘justice,’ ‘democracy’ are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”
That respect for LGBTQ people, for Black people, has yet to be achieved in this country, and police violence against those groups is a constant and chilling reminder of that grim and painful reality.