55 years after Stonewall: Police reforms fail due to symbolic gestures

Fifty-five years after a raid on a popular Greenwich Village drag bar led to the Stonewall uprising, interactions between police and queer people can look very different than they did in the 1960s. Laws that banned cross-dressing, profanity and same-sex sexual relations and allowed police to harass LGBTQ people have largely been overturned in court. Pride parades commemorating the Stonewall uprising are now often escorted by police. Many police departments have hired liaisons for the LGBTQ community, fly rainbow flags in June and issue proclamations for Transgender Day of Remembrance.

But these symbolic gestures are far from signs of progress and obscure the many ways in which sexual and gender minorities continue to be victims of harassment, profiling and violence by police. Poor, black and transgender people are often the worst affected. In our new report Making progress in policing: results from a national survey on LGBTQ+ people’s experiences with the policewe have found that routine and widespread police mistreatment continues to fuel distrust between LGBTQ people and the very law enforcement agencies that claim to protect and serve them.

Using survey data collected by NORC at the University of Chicago, the ACLU, in collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Irvine, found differences between LGBTQ people and non-LGBTQ people, as well as within the LGBTQ community, in reported experiences with police. As a group, LGBTQ people reported less favorable treatment by police than non-LGBTQ people. This is particularly pronounced among bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary people, who are more likely to experience abusive language and physical violence from police.

More than a quarter (27 percent) of transgender people report experiencing physical violence from police. Black transgender people were the most likely to experience physical violence from police of all LGBTQ people. Transgender and nonbinary respondents (45 percent and 33 percent, respectively) were significantly more likely to experience offensive language from police than LGBTQ cisgender men (15 percent).

This type of mistreatment can range from misgendering transgender people to profiling people as sex workers based on their gender expression to unnecessary physical searches and even physical and sexual violence. For example, earlier this month a transgender man won a $275,000 settlement after New York City prison officials forced him to undergo four separate and illegal genital examinations. A 2021 survey of transgender people currently incarcerated in New York City prisons found that a staggering three-quarters of them had reported at least one act of sexual violence by a correctional officer.

The ACLU has fought cases of police brutality in the LGBTQ community. In 2019, for example, the New York Civil Liberties Union settled with the NYPD on behalf of Linda Dominguez, a 45-year-old transgender Latina who was accused of “countenance falsification” for carrying an ID with her former name (or “deadname”) on it. After arresting her, officers chained her to a pipe and verbally harassed her. Two years earlier, in 2017, the ACLU of the District of Columbia settled with the Metropolitan Police Department on behalf of Lourdes Ashley Hunter, executive director and co-founder of the Trans Women of Color Collective, after police entered her home without a warrant, physically assaulted her, and inflicted numerous injuries.

Not surprisingly, our report also found widespread distrust of law enforcement among LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ community members who are most often victimized were the least willing to seek help from the police.

Only 69 percent of bisexuals and 60 percent of queers said they would be likely to call the police for help in the future, compared with 80 percent of gays and lesbians and 87 percent of heterosexual cisgender people. Less than two-thirds of Latino LGBTQ people surveyed said they would be likely to call the police for help in the future, compared with nearly three-quarters of white LGBTQ people. Less than two-thirds of transgender respondents said they would be likely to call the police for help in the future, compared with 82 percent of cisgender LGBQ men. About a quarter of nonbinary people were willing to call the police for help.

At the ACLU, our recommendations focus on the many, concrete steps communities and local governments can take to keep LGBTQ people safe from police harassment and violence. These include:

• Reducing negative encounters between police and community membersLaw enforcement must end policies and practices that require or incentivize officers to use aggressive tactics, such as quotas for citations or arrests, stop-and-frisk policies, and stopping enforcement of consensual sex work.
• Implement specific policies and practices to ensure fair and equitable treatment of LGBTQ+ peopleWe call on the police to ban the use of explicitly hateful language as well as strip searches and searches to determine a person’s gender.
• Rethinking police presence in LGBTQ+ public spaces and eventssuch as pride parades and festivals.
• Implementing strict oversight with meaningful community involvement provide transparent and accessible complaint procedures and require law enforcement authorities to take remedial action where complaints indicate a pattern of problems.
• Repeal existing laws that explicitly criminalize LGBTQ+ people and their expressionand we oppose all proposed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, including those that would criminalize necessary medical care or drag.

Many states continue to push forward legislation designed to more heavily police the lives of LGBTQ people, including efforts to censor drag performers and criminalize transgender people who use public restrooms that correspond with their gender identity. As outlined in our memo, Trump on LGBTQ rightsFormer President Donald Trump and the extremists behind Project 2025 want to go even further: They want to weaponize the federal government to criminalize gender nonconformity and order the Justice Department to repeal protections for incarcerated transgender people.

Yet many of these problems are perpetuated at the local level—often by the same cities and towns that proudly host gay pride parades or fly rainbow flags on their patrol cars. LGBTQ people and our allies should not be fooled by flashy but superficial displays of support or pompous social media statements from police departments about “inclusion.” More than half a century after Stonewall, communities have a duty to move beyond symbolism and move us closer to a future built on safety, respect, and freedom.

Emily Greytak, ACLU; Jordan Grasso, University of California, Irvine; and Stefan Volger, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign contributed to this article.