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P E R S P E C T I V E : L e t t e r F r o m t h e E d i t o r
Why NYC Pride’s Ban on
Cops Is Not Surprising
Police contingents will be barred from HOP’s march until at least 2025.
BY MATT TRACY
When Heritage of Pride
(HOP) announced a
new ban on police contingents
through at
least 2025, the response was expectedly
divided — but the decision was not
surprising.
HOP has been engulfed in criticism,
most notably for the police and
corporate presence at their annual
march, and that pressure served as a
critical factor in this announcement.
But the ousting of police offi cers from
Pride festivities goes beyond HOP
and the Gay Offi cers Action League
(GOAL), which is barred from HOP’s
march until at least 2025.
The ban on police contingents
should be viewed in the context of
recent developments pertaining to
both law enforcement and the LGBTQ
community. In the last several years,
the pressure mounted from different
angles and culminated in a tipping
point: Protests targeting police
brutality reached new heights, queer
people of color died at the hands of law
enforcement, and the Reclaim Pride
Coalition drew tens of thousands of
people in consecutive years to their alternative
Queer Liberation March.
In 2018, the Reclaim Pride Coalition
outlined a series of demands to HOP
that included a ban on uniformed police
offi cers from Pride, though that
did not translate into the change activists
sought. By 2019 — the year of
Stonewall 50 and WorldPride — HOP’s
inaction contributed to the formation
of the Queer Liberation March,
which set out to return to the roots of
Pride with an annual march barring
police, politicians, and corporations.
REUTERS/ REUTERS/BRENDAN MCDERMID
That march has become a mainstay,
and for some, this debate over cops at
Pride means little because they said
goodbye to HOP two years ago.
The year 2019 proved to be a pivotal
one on a number of fronts — and not
just because of the inaugural Queer
Liberation March. While the NYPD
fi nally apologized for their role at the
Stonewall Uprising, it was also the
year when police offi cers killed Kawaski
Trawick, a queer Black man, at
his home in the Bronx. Months later,
Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco,
an Afro-Latinx trans woman, was
neglected by guards at Rikers and
died after suffering a medical emergency.
The two offi cers involved in
Trawick’s case were not punished and
the guards in Polanco’s case kept their
jobs, though they were suspended.
That year also marked the beginning
of the DecrimNY coalition, which
would be led by transgender sex workers
pushing to comprehensively decriminalize
sex work. Those advocates
gained considerable infl uence in New
York City politics as they conveyed the
need to end the policing of consensual
sex work and shared stories about police
offi cers targeting them, harassing
them, and even sexually assaulting
them. Working with lawmakers, they
prodded the state to repeal a loitering
law known as a ban on “walking while
trans” and called out the NYPD’s Vice
Squad, which purports to combat human
traffi cking but has been slammed
for corruption and targeting trams sex
workers as well as gay men.
By 2020, the converging coronavirus
pandemic and racial justice movement
precipitated an acceleration of
the conditions leading to where we
are now. HOP went virtual last year
due to the pandemic and Reclaim
Pride fi lled that gap with their second
annual in-person march, which
stole the spotlight on a day when New
Yorkers would have otherwise had
two Pride Marches to choose from.
In yet another sign of the times, last
year’s Queer Liberation March ended
with cops pepper-spraying marchers.
Just weeks before that, during the
early days of Pride month, LGBTQ individuals
who marched through the
streets of Manhattan from Stonewall
were beaten by police offi cers, leaving
activists with arm and head injuries.
Most recently, footage from a weekly
trans-led march last monthshowed offi
cers shoving protesters with batons
and throwing them to the ground.
Activists are not the only ones demanding
change. HOP has also faced
heat from elected offi cials, including
out gay State Senator Brad Hoylman
of Manhattan, who said in a
June 1 letter that HOP should “cancel
conventional Pride celebrations
and return to the radical roots of the
modern LGBTQ movement: a protest
against bigotry, racism, homophobia,
transphobia, and police brutality.”
GOAL has made strides in reforming
the NYPD while facing adversity
from inside the department over the
course of nearly four decades of existence.
GOAL was lauded for preparing
the streets for a 2016 vigil following the
Pulse massacre and the group carried
out charity work during the pandemic.
Following HOP’s announcement,
some have warned that a march centered
on inclusion should not wade
into the waters of exclusion.
However, this is less about GOAL
and more about policing as a whole
— especially at an annual event commemorating
the anniversary of a response
to a police raid of a gay bar.
The contemporary political and cultural
climate refl ects an atmosphere
of undeniable frustration towards
law enforcement — whether those
cops are queer or not — and victims
of police violence have voiced valid
reasons why they do not feel safe
around cops. Recent nationwide data
from the Williams Institute of UCLA
found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual
people are six times more likely to be
stopped by police in public.
HOP apparently concluded that jettisoning
GOAL would stanch its reputation’s
bleeding on issues of policing and
the parade’s corporate bloat. But the
chances that this symbolic act would
do that, in a year when there’s not even
going to be a march, seem slim.
May 20 - June 2,18 2021 | GayCityNews.com
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