LGBTQ+ community advocates challenge L.A. County efforts on hate crime reporting

L.A. County’s Commission on Human Relations and the San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol newspaper co-hosted a LGBTQ+ hate crime forum on June 20, where six panelists from the Los Angeles County offices and community members provided insight on how the crime reporting process works, as well as received feedback and answered questions from community members. 

Detective Orlando Martinez, the Los Angeles Police Department Hate Crimes Coordinator, was one of the panelists for the forum at the San Fernando Library. He spoke about the ways the police department is working to rectify what he called, “the sins of our past.” 

“I started 30 years ago. All of my training officers were Vietnam vets and we acted like we were an occupying army,” Martinez said. “Everybody hates us now because of what we did. And we've slowly been changing the course of this ship.” 

Of the methods for creating change in the police department, Martinez said he teaches cultural competency classes for their police academy recruits, with the same classes taught to training officers, senior leads, supervisors and commanders. Martinez also mentioned the department meets with two working groups of community members to create more sensitive department policy. 

“That's how we got our transgender booking policy, our policy on searching transgenders [sic], how we got our cultural competency classes and asking volunteers of the community to make videos so that we can show our recruits the different experiences that people have,” Martinez said. 

But nonprofit leaders in the audience were skeptical of county and police reform efforts. TransLatin@ Coalition Outreach Coordinator Rita Garcia said while the panel was “cute,” the panelists’ explanations for how a report is classified and how each agency navigates their limitations was not reflective of her or her clients’ experiences. 

“I know they [LAPD officers] take training to provide services, and that really sounds really pretty,” Garcia said. “But in reality, when we go back to the clients that we serve and the data that we're collecting, the narrative that is being shared, it doesn’t go with what you guys are sharing. Because we have other challenges and other barriers.” 

Garcia said LAPD should use regular follow-up surveys to keep track of how well their officers are retaining and applying what they are taught in cultural competency training. 

“We want to make sure that these trainings that we're providing is really creating an impact, so that when we tap into providing services to our community, we don't get our community misgendered or re-traumatized by this process,” Garcia said. 

Panelist Kevin Al Perez, President of Somos Familia Valle, spoke about being harassed as an organization for being the first center in the San Fernando Valley to support LGBTQ+ people. The center opened for the first time three weeks ago, according to Perez, who said while he would like to collaborate with the police department on creating accountability, he doesn’t see a desire for that from the community he serves. 

“I'm still iffy on if I want to talk, or create a relationship with the police department,” Perez said. “I understand it's needed for our community. But some things that I hear from my members of my community is like, ‘they [the police] don't do anything. We're tired. I don't want to go through them, let's just work together.’” 

Perez also said that despite ongoing efforts from LAPD, the tension in the relationship between LGBT community members and police is one based in history. 

“I do see the county really switching up in the last couple of years of, how do we address hate and how do we talk about LGBT issues,” Al Perez said. “But one of the things with our community, in the LGBT community, we know the historical issues that have happened to us. Which includes a lot of violence. Pride was a riot between police. There’s a relationship there that has no trust.”