POLICE ABUSE AND MISCONDUCT AGAINST LESBIAN, GAY,
BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER PEOPLE IN THE U.S.
"When officers are working in areas where people have sex in their cars, if it’s a man and a woman or even two women, the officers usually check to make sure there is not a serious crime occurring (such as rape) and then send them on their way. The parties are told to take it to a hotel or take it home. However, if there are two men consensually involved in the car, officers arrest them more often than not. This is discriminatory enforcement."
— AI interview with LASD Sergeant Don Mueller


Identity-based Discrimination

The report’s findings strongly indicate that police abuse and the forms it takes often are specific to different aspects of the victim’s identity, such as sexual orientation, race, gender, or gender identity, age or economic status. Stonewalled highlights the treatment of LGBT individuals in the hands of police within the larger framework of identity-based discrimination, and demonstrates how the interplay between different forms of discrimination—racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia—make certain populations within the LGBT community more likely to be targeted for abuse.

Much of Amnesty’s research has clearly demonstrated that discrimination, the systematic denial of rights to certain people, is a grave human rights abuse and can often lead to further human rights abuses. Institutionalized discrimination dehumanizes its victim, who is deemed as someone who can be treated inhumanely. Institutionalized discrimination feeds impunity, denies justice and can incite violence against targeted people or groups. Discriminatory practices and policies have tremendous consequences for targeted groups not only in terms of the nature of their ill-treatment by government agents or society at large, but also in terms of their access to redress and equal protection under the law. Discrimination also often leads to a lack of official action, such as investigations into alleged abuses, which further reinforces impunity.

Stonewalled confirms that in the U.S., LGBT people continue to be targeted for human rights abuses by the police based on their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Police abuse and misconduct is part of a broad spectrum of violence against LGBT people that includes violence in the community and family. These abuses are linked to ongoing problems of discrimination and must be addressed within the larger context of the need for the recognition and protection of the full human rights of LGBT people, including their economic, social and cultural rights. For example, studies have shown that nearly 70 per cent of transsexual people in some cities in the US are unemployed or underemployed, and that a significant proportion of the transgender community is homeless, particularly transgender people of color and immigrants. Faced with life on the streets, many transgender individuals experience heightened risk as targets for human rights abuses. Like many other countries, the U.S. has a long history of both criminalizing homosexual conduct and failing to protect LGBT people from discrimination. It is a legacy that, finally, tells us not only how far we have come but also how much farther we have to go.

In Stonewalled, Amnesty International highlights a critical and often invisible human rights issue and provides concrete recommendations to bring an end to an enduring problem faced by LGBT people in the U.S.

Download the full report. »