They spoke to GOAL, and that organization announced the ban before Heritage did, putting out a release saying they were being kicked out of the parade, and that the decision made “in order to placate some of the activists in our community is shameful.”Īrboleda, vice-president at GOAL, acknowledged that some people did have negative interactions with officers, but felt that those were outweighed by people who had good experiences with law enforcement. the need for someone who’s marginalized feeling safe and welcome,” he said. The organization’s executive board had to “weigh the need for one group to wear a uniform for a couple of hours vs. “We realized that for many people in the community, that uniform is triggering, that creates a sense of being unsafe and unwelcome,” he said. GOAL members have been marching in NYC Pride in uniform since 1996, often to cheers.īut there are also those members of the LGBTQ community who are not cheering, who have a much more contentious relationship with police, Thomas said. Thomas said those discussions also involved reaching out to the Gay Officers Action League. That negative interaction led to LGBTQ community pressure on Heritage to respond forcefully to police mistreatment, Thomas said, which led to internal conversations as well as conversations with the city and the NYPD about the level of police security staffing at NYC Pride events and how that could be de-escalated. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File)Īmherst creates fund to pay reparations to Black residents Members of the New York City Police Department carry flags, including one with the rainbow colors, during New York’s Gay Pride Parade, June 30, 2013, in New York. There was no New York City Pride in-person event because of the pandemic, but Reclaim Pride did hold a march, and at the end, police arrested and pepper-sprayed some demonstrators. In New York City, an alternative to the Heritage of Pride event called the Queer Liberation March, organized by the Reclaim Pride Coalition as a rebuttal to what they consider a too-corporate, too-comfortable main parade, has never allowed a police presence since its 2019 inception.Īndre Thomas, co-chair of Heritage of Pride, the group that organizes the main New York City march, said the process that led to that ban started last year. Denver PrideFest isn’t allowing law enforcement to take part in its virtual event this year, and neither is the Capitol Hill Pride Festival, which takes place in Seattle but is separate from Seattle Pride.
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The ban is not the first for a Pride march Toronto Pride hasn’t allowed uniformed police since 2017, and Vancouver Pride started limiting their role then as well, while Capital Pride Alliance started doing so in 2018. “Is the goal diversity, or is the goal addressing fundamental power relationships in society, and inequality?” he asked. The divide over whether uniformed police have a role in Pride “goes to the heart of one of the long standing tensions in LGBT politics,” said Marc Stein, history professor at San Francisco State University. 31,1970 file photo, an NYPD officer grabs a youth by the hair as another officer clubs a young man during a confrontation in Greenwich Village after a Gay Power march in New York. There is a long history of fraught interactions between LGBTQ people and law enforcement, particularly among those who are racial minorities or transgender, and say they feel targeted and harassed by policing as a system. New York City’s streets a year ago were awash in protests over the death of George Floyd and clashes between demonstrators and officers.