Those training to become law enforcement officers and public safety dispatchers in California will soon learn about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in the academy under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year.
Assembly Bill 2504, which was authored by Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Cupertino), also ensures optional LGBTQ-specific educational training for officers already on the job. The law went into effect Jan.1.
Members of the LGBTQ community “want to be accepted and feel accepted in the communities in which they live and they want to know when they call for law enforcement, they will be helped and not judged,” said Rosanne Richeal, basic course coordinator for The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST).
POST, which sets minimum selection and training standards for law enforcement in the state, is developing this course of training for officers and dispatchers on issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity. A committee of subject matter experts, including LGBTQ members of law enforcement, will convene in mid-January to develop the curriculum.
While some police academies already have instruction on these topics, the curriculum POST will develop is expected to “be more in-depth and more expansive,” Richeal said.
There’s still “a lot of homophobia and transphobia” throughout the profession but that’s starting to change, noted Greg Miraglia, Napa Valley College’s LGBT Studies program coordinator and a former deputy police chief who helped draft the bill.
There’s increasing interest in providing training to combat mythology and stereotypes that fuel behaviors that result in workplace harassment and discrimination, the mistreatment of LGBTQ citizens and even missing investigative cues around detecting hate crimes or domestic violence, he said.
“And absent training, absent some correction of that bad information, then law enforcement ends up providing really terrible service for the community,” Miraglia, who is on the POST committee, said.
While many major cities worked to remedy problems with how they deal with transgender individuals, most smaller agencies don’t have the resources or will to do so, said Samuel Garrett-Pate, a spokesman for Equality California, a statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization that sponsored the bill.
Transgender women, particularly those of color, are often the victims of brutal hate crimes, for example, and law enforcement officers who respond don’t always have the tools and training they need, he said. Thus, they can end up “sort of doubly impacting or hurting these women because they don’t know how to refer to them in a police report by correct names and pronouns.” That information can then be sent out to the media.
The executive board of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file officers, said in a statement that increasing such training is essential to ensure they are best equipped “to protect and better connect with our LGBTQ residents.”
“As California law enforcement agencies struggle with a statewide staffing crisis that strains our ability to pull officers off the street to attend training, we urge the California Legislature to provide the necessary funding to implement this and other much-needed training for each jurisdiction throughout the state,” the board stated.
Richeal noted that the LGBTQ course for trainees – the cost of which is being shouldered by POST – will be integrated into the curriculum that’s now taught in the state’s 41 law enforcement academies.
Meanwhile, the optional training for officers already on the job would result in travel, tuition, and overtime costs for participating agencies, according to POST.
Law enforcement training on this topic, including the right way to address transgender people, search them and house them in custody, is as important or more than having a clear policy in place, Miraglia said.
It’s a chance to deconstruct incorrect and extreme stereotypes such as “people choose to be transgender, that people do it exclusively for sexual gratification…(or that) somehow people who identify as transgender don’t deserve the same level of respect as people who do not,” he said.