From News Nation:
“NYC Pride says police banned
from participating in Pride March through 2025”
Organizers of New York City’s
Pride events said Saturday they are banning police and other law enforcement
from marching in their huge annual parade until at least 2025 and will also
seek to keep on-duty officers a block away from the celebration of LGBTQ people
and history. In their statement, NYC Pride urged members of law enforcement to
“acknowledge their harm and to correct course moving forward.” “The sense of
safety that law enforcement is meant to provide can instead be threatening, and
at times dangerous, to those in our community who are most often targeted with
excessive force and/or without reason,” the group said. It will also increase
the event’s security budget to boost the presence of community-based security
and first responders while reducing the police department’s presence. Police
will provide first response and security “only when absolutely necessary as
mandated by city officials,” the group said, adding it hoped to keep police
officers at least one city block away from event perimeter areas where
possible.
Word of the ban came out Friday
when the Gay Officers Action League said in a release it was disheartened by
the decision. The group called the ban an “abrupt about-face” and said the
decision “to placate some of the activists in our community is shameful.”
The parade is scheduled for June
after the coronavirus prevented many Pride events worldwide last year,
including in New York which instead hosted virtual performances in front of
masked participants and honored front-line workers in the pandemic crisis. The
disruptions frustrated activists who had hoped to collectively mark the 50th
anniversary of the first Gay Pride parades and marches in Chicago, Los Angeles,
New York and San Francisco in 1970. Those marches came a year after the 1969
uprising outside Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, in response to a police
raid. The uprising is largely credited with fueling the modern LGBTQ rights
movement. Pride season occurs this year amid activism inspired by the response
to racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death
last year at the hands of police in Minneapolis. Pride NYC’s announcement
Saturday follows a division among organizers in recent years in planning for
celebrations of LGBTQ pride in New York City. In 2019, there were two marches
in Manhattan after some in the community concluded that the annual parade had
become too commercialized. The Queer Liberation March aimed for a protest vibe,
saying the main Pride march was too heavily policed by the same department that
raided Stonewall a half century earlier. The New York Police Department
commissioner apologized for the raid during a briefing in 2019, calling it
“wrong, plain and simple.”
Detective Sophia Mason, a spokesperson for the
New York Police Department, said on Saturday the department’s “annual work to
ensure a safe, enjoyable Pride season has been increasingly embraced by its
participants.” She added: “The idea of officers being excluded is disheartening
and runs counter to our shared values of inclusion and tolerance. That said,
we’ll still be there to ensure traffic safety and good order during this huge, complex
event.”
^ Sadly, those who were once
officially and openly discriminated against for being Gay are now the ones who
are officially and openly discriminating against the Police for being the
Police.. ^
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