Pt. III: An Unjust Criminal Justice System

by Sara Ritsch
Staff Writer

Entering the System

LGBT youth and adults disproportionately enter the criminal justice system due to discrimination. Increased criminalization is the punishment for being a member of the LGBT community. This prejudice is unjustly put upon those who largely lack the means to defend or prepare themselves when encountered by the law – even when the crime is not committed.

In these weekly articles, we have thus far covered two factors: Discrimination and stigma push LGBT adults and youth into the criminal justice system, and discriminatory enforcement of laws criminalizes LGBT people.

Part three of Entering the System accounts for harmful policing strategies and tactics that target LGBT people, according to Unjust: How the Broken Criminal Justice System Fails LGBT People (Center for American Progress, Movement Advancement Project).

“The various aspects of people’s identity, such as race, sexual orientation, gender identity and class, can increase their chances of being subject to police surveillance,” says Unjust, due to both stereotyping and profiling. This is true particularly for LGBT people of color.

A major problem is the disparity of quality-of-life and zero-tolerance policing. This practice is based on the “broken windows theory,” which says that “cracking down on highly visible minor crimes and even non-criminal activity can prevent more serious crimes in a neighborhood and restore ‘order’,” according to Unjust. Crimes in this arena include congregating, graffiti, littering, not paying a fare or unlicensed street vending. “Zero-tolerance” works intrinsically, giving these minor crimes disproportionate consequences.

“In the Boystown neighborhood in Chicago, groups of black and Latino LGBT youth have been targeted by neighbors and the police for congregating on the street, listening to loud music, and other infractions such as drinking in public, smoking marijuana, urinating, or vandalism. The youth come from other neighborhoods to hang out and to attend programs at the LGBT community center, the Center on Halsted, but they are perceived to be the root cause of increases in robberies, assaults, and vandalism in the neighborhood.  Kloe Jones, a 23-year-old transgender woman, explains, “There’s a lot of people from the South and West Side. [Boystown] is a predominantly white neighborhood, but this is all we have. There have been muggings and robbings up here, and [white residents] look at the African Americans who come to the Center, as if somehow it’s their fault” (Working With Laverne Cox, Standing in Solidarity with Trans Women of Color n.d.).

Approximately 20 to 40 percent of homeless LGBT youth have found themselves criminalized for sleeping in public or panhandling. Other crimes, so to speak, include sitting in a playground at night and dressing “offensively”.

A study in New Orleans of LGBTQ youth shows that 87 percent of youth of color have been targeted by police, while a mere 33 percent of white youth have been sought out by officers. The disparity here is astounding.

Another problem is the policing of gender norms. Profiling and relying on judgment calls increase the prejudice used in arrests. When profiling, “they are not focusing on evidence of wrongdoing, but are instead relying on stereotypes and bias” – a practice that is rarely beneficial for LGBT people due to their common progression of gender norms (Unjust).

Aggressive enforcement of anti-prostitution statutes threatens sects of the LGBT community. Issues that we have discussed in the past weeks such as poverty, homelessness, rejection and discrimination tend to push LGBT people out of the mainstream economy. Thus, some LGBT people are pushed into sex work through coercion, trafficking or even consent.

A whopping 48 percent of transgender people who have engaged in sex work have also reported experiencing homelessness, according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. In California prisons, over 40 percent of transgender prisoners reported having used sex work to make a living. Because of this disproportionate amount of sex work, LGBT people are frequently profiled and targeted by police officers.

“‘Stop-and-frisk’ is a form of proactive or preemptive policing where an officer stops an individual on the street alleging a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. If the officer believes that the individual is armed and presents an immediate danger, the law allows the officer to perform a limited pat down of the outer clothing of the person (a ‘frisk’),” Unjust says. This is our next discriminatory problem.

Stop-and-frisk is a method that has been abused. A lot of the time, there is no sufficient legal basis for the stop; and the frisks may go far beyond the legal proceedings. (This reminds me of that stomach-turning scene in Crash. TW: Sexual assault).

Stop-and-frisk policies frequently target people of color. In NYC, 87 percent of LGBT people stopped by police are black and Latino, even though they make up only 53 percent of the city’s total LGBT population. A similar trend was found in both Los Angeles and Chicago.

In West Village, NYC, 77 percent of LGBT people stopped are black or Latino. This is especially shocking, because those demographics are only 8 percent of West Village’s total LGBT community.

Trans women in NYC have reported aggressive searches, but often to no avail.

Another problem is the discrimination and violence faced by LGBT people when seeking assistance from police. These are insensitive and incompetent responses by officers of the law because of their ‘unlawful’ discrimination against LGBT individuals. A lack of understanding reduces their chances of seeking justice against hate crimes or domestic violence.

Hate crimes consist of transphobic, homophobic and racist violence, making LGBT people of color, gay men, and LGBT youth most susceptible. LGBT youth are 2.5 times more likely to be the victims of hate crimes than other members of the LGBT community, including HIV-affected survivors of violence. In addition to that horrendous statistic, LGBT and HIV-affected people of color are 2.2 times more likely to become victims of hate crimes than their white counterparts.

When LGBT people seek assistance from law enforcement, sometimes their cries are not heard or not taken seriously. There are even documented cases of the LGBT victims receiving punishment for being involved in a hate crime, such as being accused of “gender fraud” or a crime in defense. In a lot of cases, the perpetrators are not charged, while the LGBT victims are.

Another shocking, staggering statistic: A 2014 survey found that “among hate crime survivors, transgender women were 6.1 times more likely to experience physical violence when interacting with police than other violence survivors and 5.8 times more likely to experience any police violence, including harassment, threats, bullying, or vandalism. LGBTQ and HIV-affected people of color were 2.4 times more likely to experience police violence than other violence survivors, and LGBTQ and HIV-affected young adults ages 19 to 29 were 2.2 times as likely to experience police violence” (Unjust).

When it comes to intimate partner violence and sexual assault, law enforcement frequently fails to assist LGBT people. The rates of domestic violence in couples are the same whether same-sex or opposite. But, in same-sex cases, many times the victims are likely to be convicted of violence along with their abusers. In 22 percent of all cases of intimate partner violence, police arrested the LGBT victims/survivors involved.

A significant impediment is the abuse and brutality by law enforcement. Think of the Black Lives Matter movement, and consider law enforcement’s discriminatory attitude behind the unjust murders committed by officers. LGBT youth and adults are significantly targeted, with statistics similar to that of adult men of color.

Ending our beginning segment, Entering the System, Unjust provides a series of recommendations for stopping this overwhelming amount of LGBT criminalization. These are as follows:

• Increase support for and acceptance of LGBT young people within families, schools, communities, and institutions.
• Work to eliminate discrimination against LGBT people across many areas of life, including employment, housing, public accommodation, health care, and access to accurate identity documents.
• Work to eliminate homelessness among the LGBT population and ensure that LGBT people have the ability to make choices about how to support themselves.
• Repeal, replace, and modernize HIV criminalization laws.
• End criminalization of consensual sex.
• Enact drug policy and sentencing reform.
• Reduce disparities in criminal justice legislation.
• Adopt less discriminatory policing strategies.
• Reduce profiling.
• Address hate crimes and intimate partner violence.
• Reduce abusive and excessive force by police.

This concludes “Entering the System”, and next week we will begin the second segment of Unjust: How the Broken Criminal Justice System Fails LGBT People by reviewing In the System: LGBT people are frequently incarcerated and treated harshly.

The Gayly – 3/21/2016 @ 10:04 a.m. CST