LGBT Leaders Lend Their Voices on Stop & Frisk

Added by admin on June 6, 2012

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

[Photo: Chris Bilal, flanked by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Joo-Hyun Kang
of Communities United for Police Reform, Lambda Legal’s Kevin
Cathcart, the NAACP's Ben Jealous, HRC’s Marty Rouse, and the Reverend
Al Sharpton.]

“Today, we are going from dating on occasion to a marriage.”

Displaying his trademark skill at artful turns of phrase, the Reverend
Al Sharpton spoke to the dramatic significance of a June 5 press
conference at the Stonewall Inn that brought together leaders of
dozens of local and national LGBT groups and the organizers of a June
17 Manhattan march to protest the NYPD’s stop and frisk policies that
affect people of color in starkly disproportionate numbers.

The End Stop and Frisk Silent March Against Racial Profiling is
planned for Father’s Day, and its lead organizers include Sharpton’s
National Action Network, the NAACP, Local 1199 of the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Federation of
Teachers, and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Last year, the NYPD made nearly 685,000 stop-and-frisks, up from less
than 100,000 in 2002. Police department data demonstrate the sharp
racial and ethnic disparities in the use of the tactic –– with 53
percent of them involving African Americans and 34 percent, Latinos.

On June 5, most of the big names in LGBT advocacy –– the Human Rights
Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Empire
State Pride Agenda, the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP),
Lambda Legal, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation, the Family Equality Council, the
Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, Marriage Equality USA, the
National Black Justice Coalition, and Congregation Beit Simchat Torah
(CBST) among them –– stepped up in solidarity.

Terming the police’s stop and frisk policy “a process that is simply
broken and that, if not fixed, will only cause further division,” City
Council Speaker Christine Quinn, an out lesbian Chelsea Democrat
expected to seek the mayoralty next year, said, “The key to our safety
as a city is a positive connection between the police and the
community.”

The nearly 700,000 stops, she noted, are not distributed evenly across
the city’s neighborhoods or eight million residents but rather
“concentrated in particular subsets of New Yorkers.”

[Photo: Council Speaker Christine Quinn, with the NAACP's Ben Jealous
right behind her and 1199's George Gresham at right, speaks at the
Stop and Frisk press conference.]

The show of LGBT support for the June 17 march was organized by Stuart
Appelbaum, the out gay president of the Retail, Wholesale and
Department Store Union, who said that the beginning of Pride Month was
an appropriate time to “join” the civil rights and LGBT rights
movements. The press conference came just weeks after the NAACP went
on record in support of marriage equality and the nation’s first
African-American chief executive became the first president to do the
same while in office.

The NAACP’s national president, Ben Jealous, was on hand for the
event. It was less than two years ago when Jealous became the first
NAACP president to appear at New York’s LGBT Community Center, and,
while saying that “our movements have been coming closer together for
some time,” he mentioned Bayard Rustin as an example of LGBT
involvement throughout the history of the African-American fight for
civil rights. Rustin, an out gay man who was arrested on lewdness
charges in California and stopped and frisked in Harlem, was the lead
organizer of the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Sharon Stapel, AVP’s executive director and one of two co-chairs ––
along with longtime gay activist Jeffrey Campagna –– of the march’s
LGBT table convened by Appelbaum, focusing on the ways in which stop
and frisk affects people of color communities and LGBT people, termed
much of the practice “unacceptable state-sanctioned violence” that
represents “institutionalized racism, homophobia, and transphobia.”

A report just issued by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence
Programs (NCAVP), made up of 16 organizations nationwide including the
AVP, found that 32 percent of those who reported anti-LGBT violence
and harassment cited police misconduct as part of their experience. Of
that group, slightly more than half alleged unjustified arrest, while
about a quarter said they had been subjected to excessive force, 17
percent to entrapment, and five percent to police raids.

Some transgender NCAVP clients said they had been profiled as sex
workers and falsely arrested. Other LGBT clients complaining of police
misconduct said they were arrested for public shows of affection or
public sex either falsely or through selective enforcement. Nearly
four in ten who cited police misconduct were survivors of violence who
were themselves the ones arrested.

Among all offenders cited in the NCAVP report, police officers and
other law enforcement agents made up more than nine percent of the
total.

The report also found that transgender people of color experienced
police violence at a rate more than two times greater than the LGBT
community as a whole.

Chris Bilal, a young African-American gay man who works with
Streetwise & Safe, a group that engages youth of color to help them
navigate their encounters with police on the street, talked about
having been stopped and frisked several times, saying his experiences
have too often been “missing from the barbershop narrative” about the
issue. When he and two gay friends were dancing to Beyoncé music in a
park, he said, that apparently convinced police it gave them “probable
cause to suspect we were engaged in unlawful sexual conduct.”

The risk of stop and frisk, he added, discourages many young gay men
of color from carrying condoms for fear they will be profiled as sex
workers. George Gresham, the African-American president of SEIU 1199,
said that a common term among youth in many neighborhoods is “stop and
frisk virgin,” used to describe that rare individual who has not yet
been targeted by police.

Robert Pinter, who was falsely arrested in 2008 on prostitution
charges while leaving a Manhattan video store for a consensual sexual
encounter suggested by a much younger undercover police officer, spoke
about his ongoing activism with a group he founded, Campaign to Stop
the False Arrests. Pinter’s was one of at least 30 such arrests in
2008 in six Manhattan video stores identified by Gay City News. Law
enforcement used the prostitution arrests as evidence in civil
lawsuits aimed at closing down the video establishments.

Both Marty Rouse, HRC’s national field director, and CBST’s Rabbi
Sharon Kleinbaum took note of recent revelations that the anti-gay
National Organization for Marriage (NOM) secretly circulated memos
highlighting the group’s aim of derailing progress on marriage
equality by driving a wedge between the African-American and LGBT
communities, two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies.

“We are all connected to each other,” Kleinbaum said. “We are all
multiple identities at once. No one has the right to ask us to stand
separate and apart.”

Stirring words about coalition politics, however, could not completely
mask the potential discomfort some LGBT leaders may have felt taking
such direct aim at the conduct of a police force so strongly defended
by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a highly visible advocate in the
successful push for marriage equality in New York. Rouse declined to
respond to a Village Voice question about HRC honoring the mayor last
year with its National Ally for Equality Award, saying he was on hand
to support the June 17 event.

Through six years as Council speaker, Quinn has been faulted in some
progressive quarters for what was seen as her surprisingly close and
amicable relationship with Bloomberg. On several occasions, Pinter
told Gay City News that he valued her work on the video store arrest
issue, but unlike some elected officials who were visible and vocal at
street demonstrations, the speaker seems to have exerted much of her
influence behind the scenes –– presumably with either the mayor or
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, or both. The June 5 event may signal a
shift in her public posture on policing issues.

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