Before New York’s anticipated Queer Liberation March this year, organizers of the event decided to ban uniformed police officers from marching until 2025. Although the decision faced backlash, the ban was still effective last week.
And it seems like the NYPD couldn’t help but retaliate.
Although NYC Pride hired private security to significantly diminish NYPD presence from the streets, there were allegedly hundreds of them there.
And reports from the scene at Washington Square Park include police pepper spraying crowds and showing up in riot gear – culminating with eight arrests!
But Black LGBTQ+ folks, like Them. editor Michael Cuby, could have predicted this already. “These cops have been given countless chances … to tidy up their act,” Cuby wrote a month before the march.
“But instead they have used their seemingly boundless well of power to continually harm us, intimidate us, injure us, and often, kill us.”
LGBTQ+ people are “six times more likely to be stopped by police.” And 47% of Black trans women have been incarcerated. Police are clearly the problem, not the solution!
Black people were at the forefront of banning uniformed officers from Pride in the first place – deciding for themselves that the community would be safer without them. And like clockwork, the brutal police system is only proving their point.