Let’s Finally Get the Police Out of Pride
▻https://truthout.org/articles/lets-finally-get-the-police-out-of-pride
In many cities, especially in recent years, police departments marching in Pride parades have encountered protesters demanding that police be excluded from Pride. As the movement for Black Lives and against police violence grows, more police departments are simultaneously investing in messaging that they are “pro-gay,” and more and more queer and trans organizers are rejecting this messaging.
Hundreds of cities have adopted the police-initiated “Safe Place” campaign since it was invented in 2014 by Officer Jim Ritter at the East Precinct of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), the very precinct now abandoned by police in the face of recent anti-police protests. Ritter created the pro-SPD propaganda campaign four years after Seattle erupted in protests over the police killing of Native woodcarver John T. Williams, and three years after the Department of Justice launched an investigation of the SPD that found “the use of excessive force” and bias.
The Safe Place campaign encourages businesses to put a rainbow police shield sticker in their windows to let anyone fleeing anti-LGBT attacks know that if they come inside the business will call the cops for them. The Safe Place campaign takes a symbol from the queer and trans liberation movement, the rainbow flag, and puts it on a police badge to declare that the police are our protectors. Critics of the campaign rightly argue that police are leading perpetrators of violence against queer and trans people, not our protectors, and that the “Safe Place” campaign is about police PR, not about the well-being of queer and trans people.