The long, troubled history of police and transgender communities
On a hot Saturday night at a bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, police officers attacked and handcuffed Stormé DeLarverie. One hit her head with his baton.
Altercations like these were common at the time. Bars and restaurants were often raided and shut down for serving gay patrons, and transgender people were hauled in for "masquerading" as another gender. On any other night, the encounter might have been forgotten as just another police raid. At any other bar, this moment may not have made history.
But this wasn't just any night, and it wasn't just any bar. When undercover officers arrived at the Stonewall Inn and began arresting people in the early-morning hours of June 28, 1969, things would end differently.
The police had arrested DeLarverie, a butch lesbian, for cross-dressing. She had repeatedly escaped from the police before officers finally heaved her into a squad car. "Do something!" she urged the crowd. Led by transgender women of color, they did.
Sylvia Rivera threw coins at the police, and the crowd followed with bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy recalled spitting in an officer's face as she resisted arrest. Marsha P. Johnson was among the increasingly fed-up protesters, chanting as they flipped over cars. Young people stumbled through the crowd with blood running down their faces. Thirteen participants ended up in jail.
Though the crowd eventually dispersed, the revolution did not. Stonewall sparked demonstrations throughout the city over the next six nights. An uprising led by transgender and gender-nonconforming people had ignited a gay-rights movement in the United States — a movement that would forever be linked with police brutality.
The community eventually received an apology for the New York City Police Department's actions, but it took a half a century.
In the intervening years, police departments across the country sought to mend the distrust by appointing LGBTQ liaisons, assigned to maintain connections with the community. But it wasn't until 2000 when the first formal LGBT liaison unit was formed, initiated by two lesbian officers at the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC.
Such efforts have yielded only halting progress, particularly for transgender people of color. In 2015, 61% of Black respondents to the 2015 US Transgender Survey who'd had encounters with police in the past year reported experiencing some form of mistreatment, including verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. A third of Black transgender women who'd had police encounters said an officer had assumed they were sex workers, and 22% of those who'd been arrested believed they had been targeted for being transgender.
One study based on the survey found that 6% of those who'd had encounters with police in the past year reported being assaulted, and that many transgender sex workers reported performing forced sex acts to avoid arrest. A 2013 study of the policing of low-income transgender Latinas in Los Angeles County found that two-thirds who'd been stopped by police reported being called male.
Insider's five-year database of transgender homicides shows evidence of the still-broken relationship between transgender people and law enforcement. Nearly two-thirds of all transgender homicide victims from 2017 to 2021 were misgendered or misnamed by the police. Among these cases was that of Amia Tyrae Berryman, 28, a sex worker killed in 2018 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was misgendered, misnamed, and referred to as a "transvestite" in police records. Brandi Seals, 26, killed in 2017 in Houston, was described by a homicide detective as "a man in women's clothing." And though Tierramarie Lewis, 36, had legally changed her name — a difficult hurdle in 27 states — the Cleveland police repeatedly misgendered her in their reports after she was killed last year.
Insider's database also includes several people who were killed by police officers or died while in custody. Roxsana Hernández was brutally beaten before her death; police officers shot Sean Hake and Kiwi Herring after someone present called 911 for a mental-health emergency and a violent dispute, respectively.
'They hated me'
In 1962, an officer named Elliott Blackstone was assigned to mediate relations between the San Francisco Police Department and the "homophile" community, as it was then known. He's the first example of an LGBTQ liaison that Insider uncovered. A straight cis man, he soon emerged as an ally of LGBTQ communities, working to change the department's policy regarding bar raids and entrapment of gay men in public restrooms. In that role, Blackstone would face the West Coast's own trans-led rebellion — three years before Stonewall.
It took place one morning in August 1966, when an officer grabbed a drag queen at Compton's, an all-night cafeteria in the heart of the Tenderloin. For hustlers, drag queens, and transgender women, the cafeteria was a social hub, but managers tended to call the police on their patrons. That night, everyone had had enough. The drag queen, whose name was never recorded, threw her coffee in the officer's face and an uprising ensued. Purses, high heels, and cutlery sailed through the air and windows were shattered. San Francisco's transgender rights movement had begun.
After Compton's, Blackstone began to train his fellow officers on transgender rights. In 1968, he launched the first transgender-services agency in the country, with financial support from a leading transgender philanthropist, Reed Erickson. During this period, he also collected church donations to help transgender women afford hormone therapy. None of this received enthusiastic support from the SFPD.
"They hated me. They thought it was wrong for a policeman to associate with these 'faggots,'" Blackstone, who died in 2006, once recalled. In 1973, SFPD officers raided the counseling unit's offices and planted narcotics in his desk, according to Suzan Cooke, then a counselor in the unit. He was eventually removed from his liaison role and spent his remaining years on the force as a patrol officer.
As recently as the 1990s, it was still common for liaisons to be straight cis men. Sgt. Natalie Stone became the first openly gay LGBTQ liaison at the San Diego Police Department in 1998. All five of her predecessors had been straight men. One of them, Matt Weathersby, thought it was a joke when the chief appointed him in 1990. The appointment was "out of the blue," he told Insider, and he still says he has no idea why he was chosen for the role. "Like most people growing up in the '50s, '60s, '70s, I had my own biases about gay people that I had to deal with," he said.
It wasn't until March 2015 — more than four decades after Stonewall — that Sgt. Jessica Hawkins of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington became possibly the country's first openly transgender LGBTQ liaison.
Extra work without extra pay
Insider spoke with liaisons in several departments across the country and found the role to be mainly diplomatic; many officers spend their time attending community events, appearing at press conferences, and consulting with community advisory councils. Other common duties include assisting on field calls involving LGBTQ victims and linking community members with social services. The New Orleans liaison, for instance, partners with Crescent Care, a local clinic, to help LGBTQ people receive quality healthcare.
Cpl. Dani Woods, the liaison in Detroit, works closely with the Fair Michigan Justice Project, whose mandate is to investigate and prosecute crimes against LGBTQ victims. Through this partnership with the police, the Justice Project also provides legal aid, helping transgender people obtain legal name changes and advocating that their chosen names be respected in court. Julisa Abad, the Justice Project's transgender outreach and advocacy director, joins Woods on the police department's LGBT advisory board to improve dynamics between her community and law enforcement.
Such institutional resources are a rarity. Officer Kristin Healy told Insider she created a liaison role at the Brookline Police Department in Massachusetts after responding to a family-disturbance call involving a suicidal teen whose family didn't accept her sexual orientation. She left the encounter feeling that she lacked the proper tools to make a difference. But once she became Brookline's liaison, the work was simply piled on top of her already heavy caseload. Her position is not full time, nor does she receive extra pay for the extra duties. The new title, she said, has done nothing to provide her with the resources to properly assist LGBTQ children in mental-health crises.
This uncompensated, shoestring approach isn't uncommon. In Milwaukee, for instance, one liaison, Juliana Nailen, is a patrol officer, while the other, Sgt. Guadalupe Velasquez, heads up the License Investigation Unit. Officers Lisa Hartman and Akilah Coston, currently San Diego's LGBTQ liaisons, refer to their liaison work as "collateral duty." Velasquez calls them little more than "as needed" part-time roles in which she and Nailen "address concerns as they come up."
Basic trainings
The most substantive changes to police culture in the years since Stonewall are efforts to institute sensitivity training, boost hate-crime reporting, and create clear guidance on how officers should interface with transgender people. Yet transgender advocates say each of these attempts came late and many have fallen short.
It wasn't until 1989, for instance, that the San Diego Police Department declared that it would end harassment of LGBTQ people and establishments by the department and instituted an anti-bias policy. Only in recent years have police departments begun to adopt trans-specific policies. Insider has reviewed several, which typically begin by defining basic terms such as "gender expression" and "gender identity" and go on to advise officers to address transgender people by their chosen name and pronouns.
These policies are often accompanied by trainings on sexual orientation and gender identity, which have been required by law since 2019 in California and New Jersey. Greg Miraglia, the founder and president of Out To Protect, said his organization had offered many of these trainings, exposing thousands of officers to the use of proper terminology to describe sexual orientation and gender, the history of LGBTQ civil rights, and how to handle hate crimes involving LGBTQ victims.
But Miraglia, who helped to draft the California legislation, told Insider that most law-enforcement agencies in California hadn't yet complied with those state mandates. Efforts in other states are even more scattershot. Robert Salcido, Jr., executive director of Pride Center San Antonio in Texas, told Insider the center had facilitated trainings with the San Antonio Police Department for 11 years. But Salcido said the department discontinued the sessions during the early coronavirus pandemic and had yet to resume them, despite several attempts on his part. (An SAPD spokesperson said that "much, if not all" of its pre-pandemic trainings have resumed and "the Department remains committed to serving all of our residents with fairness and respect.")
Jaelynn Scott, a transgender advocate in Seattle, said most police policies were "extremely elementary and outdated." Policies often include the terms "female-to-male" and "male-to-female," she noted, which are no longer best practice within the transgender community. Some guidance documents require officers to stick with a transgender person's legal name on paperwork, as indicated on their government-issued identification. Chosen names get reduced to an "alias" or an "AKA."
Scott also criticized many policies and training for failing to be sensitive to the impacts of trauma.
Audacia Ray, the director of community organizing and public advocacy at the Anti-Violence Project, an LGBTQ advocacy organization in New York, said this meant putting the needs of the survivor first and focusing on what they need to heal from their trauma — something she hasn't seen the police achieve.
In Ray's view, the liaisons, anti-bias trainings, and guidelines have done little to change day-to-day interactions in the field. In New York, for instance, police officers are required to make an arrest whenever they respond to a domestic violence call. Ray has found that police officers often rely on stereotypes when assessing who the primary aggressor is — tending to target those they perceive as masculine. This can prove especially dangerous for Black transgender women, who are often stereotyped as masculine and aggressive, one study found.
Perhaps the most substantial effort to transform dynamics between police and the transgender community emerged eight years ago, in Seattle. Jim Ritter recalled that when he joined the force at the Seattle Police Department in the 1980s, many LGBTQ victims of hate crimes didn't file police reports because "they didn't think we cared." Years later, as an openly gay liaison officer, he set out to change their minds.
With support from the department, in 2014, Ritter implemented the Safe Place Program, which sought to "eliminate distrust" toward the local police. It depends upon a network of business owners who agree to display a rainbow decal on their window and train their employees in Safe Place protocols. Anyone experiencing harassment can duck into a business with the decal, trusting it is a "safe place" to seek help. According to the protocols, they will be invited into a private space while an employee comforts them and calls 911. The victim is welcome to remain at the business until the police arrive to write up a report.
The idea gained traction. As of 2021, nearly 300 police departments across the country and internationally had replicated the program. After the program launched in Seattle, an officer told the South Seattle Emerald, the department saw a roughly 60% increase in hate-crime reports.
But some transgender advocates are skeptical of any safety program that requires police involvement.
For Eli Dru Berry-St. John, a representative for the Transgender, Gender-Variant, Intersex Project in San Francisco, LGBTQ liaison officers are an oxymoron. Berry-St. John describes his organization as "Black, trans, feminist, abolitionist," and says its work on the mistreatment of transgender people behind bars has led its members to see "police to be in opposition of transgender people."
He sees the liaison model as "a form of neocolonialism," with liaisons placed in a position of false solidarity with the community where their work "does not directly impact the community in a positive way."
When it comes to preventing transgender homicides, he said, "They're doing exactly what we expect them to do, which is nothing."
As executive director of Black Trans Women Inc., Diamond Stylz, an advisor on Insider's "Deaths in the Family" project, is often tapped as a consultant for police-sensitivity trainings. She has come to see liaisons as "nothing but reactive," addressing anti-trans violence only after the fact. "Anti-violence is a multifaceted problem," she said, "so you have to have a multifaceted solution."
In the wake of George Floyd's killing and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that followed, these tensions between the police and LGBTQ communities burst into public view. Across the country, LGBTQ groups called for the removal of the police from Pride. Pride event organizers in San Diego, for instance, announced in June 2020 a two-year ban on uniformed officers participating in the parade.
A community-based approach
Instead of partnering with the police, several trans-led organizations are investing in their own community-response networks. Like the Safe Place Program, these networks involve forming relationships with neighbors and local businesses to identify people in advance of a crisis who would be safe to depend on — but without law-enforcement involvement.
"It's really vital to the survival of queer and trans Black and brown communities that people can rely on each other, whether that's for a ride to the hospital or a cup of sugar," Ray said.
The multifaceted approach to anti-violence work that Stylz and others are beginning to build starts with a recognition of the constraints under which transgender people operate. Many transgender people are shut out of formal employment, forced into informal, criminalized economies — and that makes them more vulnerable to violence.
Black transgender women are likely to experience homelessness, with 51% of respondents in the 2015 US Transgender Survey saying they'd faced housing insecurity at some point in their lives. Similarly, by one estimate LGBTQ youth have double the risk of their straight peers of becoming homeless.
One in five Black respondents to the survey reported that they had done sex work for money, and more than a quarter said they had participated in sex work in exchange for other necessities, such as food or shelter.
These vulnerabilities are reflected in Insider's database. Insider identified at least 20 homicides over the past five years in which transgender people were killed while on the job as sex workers, and at least 17 additional cases in which the victims had been homeless.
Jaida Peterson, 29, and Remy Fennell, 28, for instance, were killed 11 days apart in different hotels in Charlotte, North Carolina, by clients. CoCo Chanel Wortham, 44, was fatally shot in a homeless encampment, according to Dallas Police Department records.
In 2020, Black Transwomen Inc. paid for homeless transgender women's Airbnbs, hotels, and first month's rent and started a pantry from which they shipped food to transgender women in need across the country. Organizations such as the Lavender Rights Project in Seattle and My Sistah's House in Memphis now provide housing for queer and transgender people. New York's Glits Inc. provides housing and hormone-therapy assistance, while Chicago's Brave Space Alliance and New Orleans' House of Tulip provide free closets of gender-affirming clothing and hygiene items. From housing to food to gender-affirming care, these organizations recognize that economic stability and safe housing can provide a path away from staying with abusive partners, participating in survival sex work, and living on the streets — and in this way lessen the risk for exposure to violence.
"There are economic conditions that can make you more vulnerable to more violence," Catherine Shugrue dos Santos, deputy executive director of the Anti-Violence Project, told Insider. "When you are in a mode of survival, you are often having to make choices and decisions that can put you in harm's way. If you had more stability economically, you could take more steps that would work for your safety." When it comes to violence prevention, she said, "economic peace cannot be undersold."
"We imagine alternatives," Eli Berry-St. John said. "We know that courts and cops and cages and surveillance are tools of the state and meant to control and dehumanize and isolate and repress us, not keep us safe. So we continue to imagine ways that we can contribute to the safety of Black trans women, Black trans people in our communities as a whole, without depending on the prison-industrial context."