‘Took my money, called me a guy, and made me sleep in jail overnight’: police procedural failings when interacting with trans folx

ABSTRACT

Poor interactions between police and trans folx have been well documented in academic literature and non-profit reports. However, most of these focus on the most egregious of offenses, when police insult and assault trans folx as a result of their identity; yet, there is more nuance to these interactions. Trans folx are more likely to interact with police who are not outwardly violent towards them yet can be misidentified and misgendered. While these interactions can be rooted in a difference between the person in front of the officer and the picture, name, and gender marker on identifying documents, police have a duty to use facts (proper name and pronouns) to facilitate respectful interactions. This article seeks to explore this dynamic between officers who fail to identify trans folx properly as a policy and procedural issue, use participant narratives, as well as provide substantive considerations for training and policy recommendations.

KEYWORDS:

• Trans; transgender; police; police procedure; police failings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A variation on the word folks, folx is meant to be a gender-neutral way to refer to members of or signal identity in the LGBTQ+ community (Peters 2017).

2 A cultural frame where people view the law as illegitimate, unresponsive, or ill equipped to protect the public (Kirk and Papachristos 2011).

3 Cases that are compared to the typical findings in a qualitative work that are used to solidify points of comparison (Hanson 2017).

4 Latine is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino/Latina, but is more integrated to the Spanish language than Latinx (LATV Media 2021).

5 AAPI: Asian American, Pacific Islander

6 In terms of the extremely high rate of homelessness here, this could be due to a number of factors, which include the rising cost of living which was occurring in the area before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the area where this study was conducted, limited availability of employment opportunities, as well as some of the social networks overlapped with a trans homeless advocacy group.

7 This officer chose kindness and understanding to help Joanie and her friend, which is negative in the sense that it is against the norm of the officers in this study, but her actions still provide valuable information about how police treat trans folx.

8 Kate Kaine uses they/them pronouns

9 Content warning for self-harm.

10 Reveal Bridgett’s gender identity.

11 See Israel 2014

12 Asian American Pacific Islander

13 This was a self-identifying term used by the participant.