Envy Man Magazine Online

The brightest of days can be ruined in an instant with a simple word. One “faggot,” or one “homo,” and your whole day goes straight to hell.

It’s hard enough to deal with these words from ordinary ignorant people, but what about when the very people who are meant to protect us are the ones victimizing us? What happens when a police officer is the one doing the harassing?

I’ll freely admit that I’m not the world’s greatest driver. I haven’t had an accident in over a year, and I’ve never run anyone over, so I figure in the grand scheme of things, I’m ahead of the game. I’m usually pretty mindful of the major traffic rules, so when I saw the police headlights late one night in my rearview mirror, I was surprised. I was nervous before the police even arrived at my car. I had dropped a friend off after work in a rather dangerous area, and I was alone on a poorly lit, low traffic street. I calmed myself by thinking that nothing could happen to me with the police right behind me. Really, who would be foolish enough to try to attack me with the police watching, right?

Two young police officers, both muscular men with shaved heads, stood on either side of my car. I handed the first one my license and registration with a polite smile. He threw them in my face and told me I was a shitty driver. Further verbal abuse followed. The other police officer laughed loudly.

Getting nervous, I asked them what I was being pulled over for. His reply? “We haven’t decided yet.”

The first officer roughly removed me from my car and pushed me into the side so that the second one could quite aggressively physically search me. They told me that I was clearly on drugs. When I denied it, they continued to verbally abuse me and explained that I either admit to them then and there that I was high, or they would take me to the station and force me to confess to “something.”

They searched my entire car from top to bottom with my face directly in front of their head lights so that I couldn’t see anything. It was blinding. I had already been pushed around by these men, and now I couldn’t see what they were going to do next. There were absolutely no other cars or people around. I was alone with two angry men that had guns, pepper spray, and handcuffs.

That was when he said it. “Let’s just take this faggot in.”

What a helpless feeling! What do you do when the people attacking you are the ones that should be helping you?

I was relatively lucky. With a few more nasty comments, and a little more pushing around, the officers grew tired of toying with me and let me go with a ticket for turning left on a red light. Others haven’t been as lucky.

August 29th, 2000. Jesse Ousley, 17, was walking with his boyfriend and had a near miss with an off-duty police officer’s unmarked vehicle. Ousley hit the hood of the car in frustration, and the officer “reportedly” retaliated by hitting Jesse. After his boyfriend pulled the off-duty officer off of him, Ousley walked away with two black eyes, a bloody nose, bruises, and marks on his neck where the officer tried to choke him. As they were walking away, Ousley said that he loved his boyfriend, and the officer “reportedly” attacked him again.

July, 2000. Kentin Waits is attacked by police while in their custody, and is called a “fucking faggot” and a “gay motherfucker.” November, 2000. Jeffrey Lyons, heterosexual, is attacked by off-duty police officers when he hugged a male friend. One officer yelled, “Get this through your head: You faggots will never win!” Lyons fractured his cheekbone, broke his nose, and suffered neurological damage in the attack.

March 7th, 2004. Andrew Marconi is attacked by three police officers for urinating outside of a gay club. The man was forced to kneel down in his own urine. His head was then “reportedly” smashed into the wall and then his hair was used to clean the urine off of the wall. His shirt was removed and thrown in the urine. One of the officers, Sgt. Jason Fox, said reportedly, “You peeing on my streets? Do you think we want your AIDS-infected pee on our streets?” The abuse stopped when one of Marconi’s friends, an off-duty officer, showed his badge. The other officers left quickly after.

July 30th, 2006. Jacob Dewees celebrates his birthday with friends at a gay club. After the party, he decided to get something to eat. Pulled over for a burned out headlight in the parking lot of the restaurant, the police issued a breathalyzer test, which Dewees failed. At the station was where the problems began. One of his friends had put a pin on him as a joke. It read, “Birthday Girl.” Noticing the pin and a provocative male picture on his cell phone, the police began to loudly make nasty remarks, calling Dewees a “sissy boy” and cautioned other police at the station that, “she’s a fragile one.”

While registering him into the system and in his holding cell, Dewees was repeatedly questioned and harassed about his sexuality. One of the officers warned him that a fight could break out at any moment, and that they couldn’t protect him from getting raped. At one point, while his hands were restrained behind his back, an officer threw a magazine at him telling him loudly that it should suit his interests. On the cover? “Lance Bass is gay.” “Because of my incident,” Dewees says, “I can’t even look at cops with respect anymore. I’ve lost all respect and admiration for the police department. I mean, if Latoya Jackson can go on TV and be a cop and go through the same training ... what an insult to your profession. It’s pathetic.”

After the arrest, Dewees got a lawyer to help deal with his charges. His lawyer’s advice about the harassment? “He says it’s just my word against theirs ... and I didn’t have any badge numbers. Not that I could have written them down being handcuffed and all. But, he said it could hurt my case bringing it up. The judge favors the cops anyways, and if I bring something like this up it might be perceived as a desperate attempt to get out of the D.U.I.”

These cases are really just the tip of a very large glacier of police brutality and harassment. Many more cases have been reported, but go unnoticed because they are not properly followed up, or worse yet, many individuals are too embarrassed to file an official complaint. Amnesty International, a Nobel Prize-winning organization founded in 1961, focused its attention on the growing complaints about police brutality toward the LGBT community in the late 1990s. Surveys were sent to the police departments in the largest city of each of the fifty states across the country. Twenty-nine police departments responded to Amnesty International’s questions. The result is Stonewalled: Police abuse and misconduct against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the US.

The Stonewalled report is a 156-page document that is equally fascinating as it is horrifying. It yields an in-depth look at police stations around the country, and how they handle LGBT related crimes and cases. The most disturbing part of the report isn’t the specific incidents like the ones mentioned above. It’s the clear pattern of undereducated police who litter our country that truly frightens me.

While 69 percent of the police departments said that they do provide training on issues relating to LGBT individuals, fewer than half train officers on how to properly search transgendered individuals, have an LGBT liaison officer, make complaints against individual officers publicly available, or have an affirmative action hiring practice for individual officers.

I spoke with numerous police officers about potentially giving me a quote about police brutality. Most of them were game until they found out the nature of the magazine and the article’s specific focus. I finally settled to take a quote from an officer I agreed to leave anonymous. Very comforting.

“No matter where you look, you will find good and bad people. I know that it’s hard to see it when you’re looking for the bad, but keep in mind that there are good police officers that are out there working for you.” He continues to say, “Some of us believe in what we are doing, and justice doesn’t care about race or sexuality.”

He refused to comment directly about any of the above stories, even anonymously, but suggests that we keep in mind that many times an officer who has a problem goes unnoticed because no one ever reports it. People are intimidated by the actions of the officer and fear further abuse if they report the incident. He assures me that there are good police working and that, “Some of us want to do what’s right.”

Just some of you?

There is one more important example of police brutality and harassment toward homosexuals that bears mentioning. June 28th, 1969. Police raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village shortly after one in the morning. Eight officers, only one in uniform, entered the bar, explaining that they were only arresting those without ID, those wearing clothing of the opposite gender, and some or all of the employees.

It is not certain how the riot started. Various stories all tell how it started slightly differently, but it comes to the same conclusion. The officers got rough with one of the patrons, and the homosexual community was tired of taking it. They attacked the police, grabbing what they could to attack the officers. People at near-by gay clubs and bars heard about the riot, and rallied to the scene.

Through the night, over 2,000 people gathered and attacked the approximately 400 police that were called to the scene. This event revolutionized the gay rights movement, and still defines us as a united front today.

Does this mean that we should form a giant mob of angry homosexuals and attack the police again in order to demand change? No. We live in different times, and we have evolved as a society since 1969.

However, people behave as they have been conditioned to. How many of us have suffered at the hands of a power-hungry police officer and have let it go unchecked as a result from fear of humiliation? How many police have abused someone and have been allowed to get away with it because that person thought, “What difference can I make?”

If we all sit back and think that way, then we will be right. We cannot make a difference if we do not try.

If you have been harassed by a police officer in your area, report it. If you cannot report it in person, do so anonymously. Web pages such as www.policeabuse.org, www.policeabuse.com, or www. policewatch.us will gladly hear your complaint and assist you in contacting the proper parties.

The worst thing we can possibly do is sit back and do nothing.

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