Thursday, August 29, 2019

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

Police chief apologizes to LGBTQ community

by David-Elijah Nahmod
Tuesday Aug 27, 2019

At an August 26 meeting at Glide Memorial Church, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott apologizes directly to Joanne Chadwick, left, for abusive treatment by the police department against the LGBTQ community. Chadwick attended the New Year's Eve party in 1965 at California Hall that was raided by the police and led to widespread criticism of the police department. Photo: Rick Gerharter
At an August 26 meeting at Glide Memorial Church, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott apologizes directly to Joanne Chadwick, left, for abusive treatment by the police department against the LGBTQ community. Chadwick attended the New Year's Eve party in 1965 at California Hall that was raided by the police and led to widespread criticism of the police department. Photo: Rick Gerharter  
San Francisco Police Chief William Scott apologized to the LGBTQ community at a reflection and reconciliation session Monday.
The meeting was held in the sanctuary of Glide Memorial Church to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the Compton's Cafeteria riot. The Compton's riot, which preceded the Stonewall riots by three years, was "the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in U.S. history," according to transgender historian Susan Stryker, who co-directed the Emmy Award-winning 2005 documentary "Screaming Queens" about the incident.
Scott apologized on behalf of the department.
"I and the men and women of this police department are truly sorry," the chief said to the crowd of about 100 people. "We're sorry for what happened and we're sorry for our role in it and we're sorry for the harm that it caused. Some here tonight may ask, why now? Why are we doing this now? And for those of you that might wonder why, I say it's because we are listening. We hear you. And because it's time."
But not everyone in the room was buying it.
"If you want to truly apologize for something, you have to stop what you're doing," said one activist, as he referenced the police sweeps of homeless people.
The meeting was the first in a series between the police and community members. Scott said that he hopes these meetings will build bridges between the SFPD and the LGBTQ community.
While some thanked the chief for reaching out, others expressed trepidation, pointing to the protesters at June's San Francisco Pride parade who held up the march for 50 minutes with a list of demands that included keeping the police and corporations out of Pride. One of the protesters was allegedly slammed into the pavement and dragged across the street, according to organizers.
"I showed up at the first Pride board meeting after the parade because I was devastated by the way the police violently removed peaceful protesters at our own parade," said Cheryl Rosenthal, a 58-year-old lesbian. "For me it was a call to action that our community needs to mobilize to make sure we're safe in our own city and prepare for how we are currently being targeted."
Longtime gay activist Tre Allen suggested that there be two Pride marches, one in which the police take part and another without the police for those who do not feel safe in the police's presence.
Attendees described other examples of mistreatment by police.
"I've been homeless on both coasts and submitted to domestic violence at the hand of my ex-husband," said one woman. "I got slammed to the ground by the cops at Ocean Beach. People were filming it and egging the police on. The bullying must stop."
Scott listened attentively to all the speakers, assuring everyone that the safety of all parties involved was his top priority.
"You all police us," said the chief. "Our department is set up where we have the civilian oversight board. And we have the Department of Police Accountability, which is separate from the police department. Any complaint that comes from a resident or a member of this community goes to the Department of Police Accountability. It's not investigated by the San Francisco Police Department. As the police chief I can impose discipline up to a 10-day suspension. Anything above that goes to the police commission, which is the civilian oversight board."
Breanna, a transgender woman who said that she's bipolar and declined to give her last name, expressed concern for how the police handle calls in which someone was in a mental health crisis.
"We spend a lot of time to get better at that and we've been doing that for a number of years," Scott said. "Our department has invested a lot in training to deal with those types of issues, and we've made a lot of progress. In the past year we've had over 50,000 of those types of calls and there is less than half a percent of those calls which resulted in any kind of force being used. It's not perfect, but I want to emphasize how much work we put into that issue. We still have some more work to do. We have more officers that need to be trained, but everyone who comes into this department today gets that training."
One African American woman who did not give her name pointed out that blacks are treated differently by the police. She also called on the police to take inventory of the police sweeps against homeless people.
The public comment section of the meeting lasted about 75 minutes, with many people thanking the police chief for his apology and for organizing the meeting.
The evening included a history lesson in which the Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer, a trans person who is a volunteer chaplain with SFPD, spoke of the harassment and criminalization faced by LGBTQ people in the past. Rohrer also showed two videos in which people who lived through those times recalled and shared their experiences.
Scott told the Bay Area Reporter that he was pleased with the way the meeting turned out.
"I feel good about it," he said. "The fact that we were allowed by members of the LGBT community to listen, to hear them, and to be heard. This moment is overdue," he said. "This is a starting point to get to those difficult conversations. We need to continue to hear, to reconcile our past and to address the present."
Members of Scott's command staff were also at the meeting.
"It's a start to a larger conversation," said Commander Teresa Ewins, a lesbian who used to oversee the station in the Tenderloin. "I felt that there was a lot of positive things being said. It's important for the command staff and other members to hear the community and understand the pain they have. Their experiences and viewpoint are very important to us."
Those who attended generally gave the police department credit for addressing the community.
"It's good to see the dialogue on how the police are interested in holding themselves accountable," said William Walker, a 40-year-old gay man. "I think that putting everyone's safety first is key but police have to keep in mind that they are always in a more powerful position."
"I feel less afraid of the police," said Attakai Yazzie, a 22-year-old gay man. "I think the night was productive. I saw a young peer of mine voice his opinion and I saw police of color listen to him and I'm glad to see this interaction. I'm extremely grateful to live in a period where it's OK to be queer."
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Monday, August 26, 2019

In the News: SF Examiner


SF police chief apologizes for ‘past actions’ against transgender community

‘We will atone for our past,’ Scott says

Closure may have finally come for those scarred by police abuse during one of the first riots by the transgender and gay communities in U.S. history.
More than five decades after officers clashed with members of the transgender community during the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in the Tenderloin, Police Chief Bill Scott apologized Monday for the department’s history.
“We the members of the San Francisco Police Department are here to reflect and apologize for our past actions against the LGBTQ community,” Scott said during a meeting with LGBTQ community members at Glide Memorial.
“We want to listen to you and want to truly hear you,” the chief added. “We will atone for our past.”
There was exuberant applause from the room after Scott’s apology.
Scott agreed to meet with the LGBTQ community after tensions flared over arrests at a Pride Parade protest in June. Police and the community had already been meeting to discuss reconciliation.
At the evening event, which was facilitated by Glide Memorial and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the department heard stories of decades of discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender and queer people.
The conversation centered around the 1966 riot that erupted in the Gene Compton’s cafeteria, in the Tenderloin neighborhood, after police targeted and arrested a transgender woman.
People sat in the church pews under stained glass windows, listening to stories told in the open where confession is usually heard in private.
Though some were grateful for the apology for the past, others pushed Scott to acknowledge what they called the wrongs of today.
Anubis Daugherty, 25, said he is a member of the LGTBQ community who was homeless for six years.
Daugherty told Scott that LGBTQ people are disproportionately caught up in sweeps of homeless communities in The City.
“I was born here, I was raised here,” Daugherty said. “If you want to truly apologize for something you have to stop what you’re doing.”
Jo Chadwick, who for decades has advocated for the LGTBQ community as a straight ally from the Lutheran church, was among the more than 100 people in attendance.
“I especially want to apologize to you,” Scott told Chadwick.
“For 50 years you’ve been fighting and fighting for what’s right,” the chief added.
Chadwick told the crowd that many who died in the AIDS crisis had faced police discrimination and should be honored following the apology.
“I’ll go home tonight and I have names, I’ll remember those names in my prayers,” Chadwick said.
In comment cards read by event organizers, one community member asked if SFPD would voluntarily agree not to march in the Pride Parade because some LGBTQ people may be triggered by the presence of officers.
But Cmdr. Teresa Ewins, an out lesbian member of the department, said it is important to celebrate wins for LGBTQ representation within SFPD.
It is important “for kids to see us,” she said. “Many of us joined to make a difference. It’s a special day for me as well as everyone in the department who is LGBT.”
Aria Sa’id, executive director of the Compton’s Transgender Cultural District, said she wasn’t moved by the apology.
“I think there needs to be more than just an apology.,” Sa’id told the San Francisco Examiner.
Fifty years after the riot, Sa’id said the ways in which police discriminate against transgender people, and other people in the LGBTQ spectrum, have changed.
With high portions of San Francisco’s homeless community and impoverished Tenderloin neighbors being gay, queer or transgender, Sa’id said homeless sweeps homeless are in fact an action against the LGBTQ community.
“We’re often criminalized for being poor in the Tenderloin,” Sa’id said. “The mayor has increased patrols. There has to be more than an apology.”
San Francisco LGBTQ groups have previously called on SFPD to apologize for its historic discriminatory actions.
The Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, a local progressive group that traces its roots back to the fiery gay rights trailblazer, called on SFPD to apologize for the Compton’s Cafeteria riots and for the department’s handling of the Pride protest in July.
Those protesters blocked the parade to call for police to be barred from it. One person who identified as transgender was injured during the arrests and hospitalized. An officer was also injured in the scuffle, according to SFPD.
“The irony of SFPD committing acts of brutality against peaceful protesters of the Resistance Contingent at the San Francisco Pride Parade on the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall is not lost on us,” the Milk Club wrote at the time. “It warrants outrage and swift recourse.”
The 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot predated the infamous Stonewall Riots in New York City. At present, both are credited with kick starting calls for LGBTQ civil rights.
The SFPD was also notorious for beating gay men, and sometimes women, who frequented gay bars in the Castro.
Officers would require they show identification far more frequently than people drinking in straight bars.
The White Night riots, also, pitted the local gay community against a violent SFPD following the light sentencing of Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor and former SFPD officer who assassinated Milk and Mayor George Moscone.
At the meeting Monday, a transgender woman who goes by the name “The Supergirl of San Francisco” told Scott in a teary testimonial that she was wrongly beaten by a hospital security guard.
When she came to SFPD for help, she said she was not listened to.
“My body was dragged and pulled up a hill,” she said. “You didn’t believe the victim. You didn’t believe me. You’re supposed to help people here, not engage in transphobia.”
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Saturday, August 24, 2019

In the News: SF Examiner

SFPD to hold LGTBQ ‘reconciliation and recognition’ night at Glide Memorial

Police hope to acknowledge hateful history, build trust
Change isn’t easy — but the San Francisco Police Department is ready to give it a try.
Monday night, roughly 53 years after San Francisco police transphobia and violence spurred the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, SF police command staff will sit in front of members if the LGBTQ community at Glide Memorial with a single goal.
To listen.
Billed as a “reflection and reconciliation” session, San Francisco police hope it will be a first step in rebuilding trust with marginalized communities.
“We have to start somewhere,” said Alex U. Inn, a drag king and musical performer who has been at the forefront of the resistance in San Francisco’s Pride Parade, and a frequent police critic.
U. Inn even hotly critiqued police just this year, for their arrest of LGBTQ activists which many described as overly violent. Flipping the script, U. Inn starred in a short video promoting the reconciliation event in a hope to jump-start a conversation.
“We are not going to resolve the disdain that people have for the SFPD and especially in light of what happened at this year’s Pride” right away, U. Inn said. “So it’s a start.”
Even the video U. Inn stars in acknowledges this disdain, with members of the LGBTQ community pointing out San Francisco police history of raiding gay bars and harassing transgender people for wearing dresses, which used to be against San Francisco law.
Two of the event’s organizers, Commander Teresa Ewins, who is the highest-ranking member of the LGTBQ community in SFPD, and Pastor Megan Rohrer, a trailblazing transgender Lutheran pastor and SFPD chaplain, acknowledged this history.
Friday, they told me they don’t want the community to hold back.
“It’s bringing a community together that needs to be heard. There’s a lot of mistrust of law enforcement and there are definite reasons why. Monday is a start of hopefully a new relationship,” Ewins said. “I don’t shy away from the conversation.”
That’s true even in her own department.
To ready for Monday’s real talk, I asked Ewins to speak frankly about her own experiences in SFPD. While the department isn’t busting windows of gay bars indiscriminately, as they did decades ago, there’s still some fumbling in the dark.
Rising through the ranks as an out lesbian, she fields questions from her comrades in blue often. “Some officers’ children just came out. Or they’re asking, ‘why is a person gay?’ How did those feelings shape my life, where it is today?”
The racist and homophobic text messages exchanged by San Francisco police that were revealed in 2015 also uncovered an ugliness that she had to contend with.
“That was difficult,” she told me. The department has since instituted technology to review officers texts and has “many ways” it can detect that type of behavior. “It was a rather big surprise for me, when I found out about it, to be honest with you. The thing that came to mind was, how does this happen?”
Ewins has also learned a lot from Pastor Rohrer, who has studied the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, among other similar incidents in San Francisco’s LGBTQ history.
Conversation is important, Rohrer said, because it can steer history.
“People don’t know that some of the laws that effected the Compton Cafeteria riot changed very quickly after because people didn’t take those as stopping points,” Rohrer said. “They continued the conversation.”
That doesn’t mean the police won’t stumble in trying to initiate that conversation.
Aria Sa’id, executive director of the Compton’s Transgender Cultural District, isn’t too happy with the police rollout of the reconciliation event. There were some crossed wires, with the police claiming they reached out to members of the district, and Sa’id saying they never reached out to her personally — a particularly egregious oversight considering they’re tying their event to the Compton’s Cafeteria riot anniversary.
Whatever happened, it isn’t a good first step, she said. And besides the stumble, she feels “listening” is moot at this point; SFPD needs to act.
“I have some words,” she started.
Firstly, police should reduce their presence at the SF Pride parade, and apologize for their handling of protests this year. “We weren’t just resisting, we were resisting the police” themselves, she said.
She also thinks talk about SFPD’s homophobic past being in, well, the past, is premature.
Many of San Francisco’s homeless youth are kids fleeing far-flung homes where they were rejected for their LGTBQ identities, Sa’id said, and many impoverished homeless people in the Tenderloin are transgender or gay.
“Trans people are affected by the criminalization of poverty,” Sa’id said. “Police tell people in tents to pack up and go. Sit and lie is still a law.”
So sure, the police aren’t beating wealthy gay people in bars anymore, she said — instead, they’re catching up homeless LGTBQ people in sidewalk tent sweeps.
James Lin, senior director of mission and spirituality at Glide, agreed with some of Sa’id’s points.
“The police were doing sweeps in the sixties and they’re doing sweeps now, in San Francisco,” Lin said. “I’m from a generation that can still remember going to establishments that had windows all boarded up because they operated in an environment where things like holding hands in a same-sex couple were punishable.”
It’s not that far back. It’s not history. It’s living memory.
But after Compton’s Cafeteria riots, Glide Memorial played a leading role in moving the community forward. Glide’s leaders helped form Vanguard, a queer youth organization whose youth members were rioters in Compton’s.
So that anger? Lin understands it. And embraces it.
Hard feelings are welcome on Monday night. In fact, that’s pretty much the point of it.
“Bring it all. Bring the anger. But bring the love. Bring the love you have for your people, and the people you know need you at this moment,” Lin said. “It would not be a good event if it were an easy night. It can only be a good event if there was enough difficulty for us to work through something.”
Lin had a point.
“If it’s easy, then, why do it?”
The reconciliation event will be held Monday, August 26, 2019 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at GLIDE’s Sanctuary room (2nd floor) at 330 Ellis Street (please use the Taylor Street entrance).
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