Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club Criminal Group Database Testimony

 
 


Good morning, Chairs Salaam and members of the Public Safety Committee.

My name is David Siffert, and I am a Board Member of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club. The Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club formed to provide the New York LGBTQIA+ community with a progressive citywide Democratic Club. Our mandate is to see to it that the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community are protected and advanced.

The Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club supports Intro 798-2024 to abolish the NYPD criminal group database, also known as the gang database.

Nationwide, LGBTQIA+ individuals are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated that our straight, cisgender peers. This begins with youth, where queer youth are over twice as likely to be in the juvenile justice system. 1 As adults, LGBTQIA+ community members are still over twice as likely to be arrested and are over three-times more likely to be incarcerated. 2

In New York City specifically, there is a long history of police abuse of the LGBTQIA+ population. From the regular raids on gay establishments in the 1960s, culminating in the Stonewall riots of 1969, NYPD has treated the queer community with unwarranted suspicion and targeted queer New Yorkers with violence on the basis of their sexual orientations and identities. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, NYPD engaged in a program to surveil the queer community. 3

This surveillance and harassment continues. In 2013, the New York Times wrote an article about NYPD harassment of LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers in Queens. 4 In 2017, NYPD arrested a transgender woman for giving false identification when she presented them with both her legal name and her previous and current legal names. 5 In 2020, NYPD attacked NYC’s Queer Liberation March, assaulting marchers with batons. 6

It wasn’t until 2021 that New York repealed its “Walking While Trans” law – the crime of “loitering for the purposes of prostitution,” used by NYPD to round up transgender women indiscriminately. 7

In short, LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers have been at increased risk of law enforcement surveillance, stop & frisk, arrest, and incarceration for decades. Unsurprisingly, these risks are only compounded for queer Black and Brown New Yorkers.

NYPD’s criminal group database gives NYPD free reign arbitrarily to pick out New Yorkers for increased surveillance. We have already heard how 99% of the database is Black or Brown. While there is no data as to the percentage of the database that is queer, the existence of this category of database to increase surveillance and harassment of New Yorkers is precisely the type of tool that has historically been used against New York’s LGBTQIA+ community.

Right now, transgender youth and adults are under assault by our federal government and many state governments. New York has held itself out as a refuge, passing shield laws to protect the provision of gender-affirming care within the state. However, despite these laws, and despite New York City and State civil rights laws that ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity, hospitals across New York City are now barring transgender youth from the same health care treatments that they provide to cisgender youth. 8 Meanwhile, there have been years of attacks against drag story hour, 9 and anti-LGBTQIA+ bigots attacked Councilmember Bottcher’s office and home. 10 Earlier this month, a transgender man was tortured for a month and murdered upstate. 11

All this is to say, queer New Yorkers are under attack from every direction. We have laws in place – from shield laws to civil rights laws – to protect us. However, for decades, those enforcing the laws seem more interested in criminalizing us than protecting us.

For the LGBTQIA+ community, it is more important than ever to remove tools of discriminatory policing. Right now, the gang database is one of NYPD’s most potent tools to surveil and harass New Yorkers based on arbitrary criteria. For the safety of the queer community, we must erase the database.


releaseJim Owles Liberal Democratic Club