National Post (National Edition)
Vancouver LGBT activists say no to rejecting police
Black Lives Matter asked for pride-parade ban
Arguing that the “policing institution is an instrument of state violence and oppression,” Black Lives Matter has set out to make Vancouver the third Canadian city to exclude police from its annual pride parade.
In response, an ad-hoc coalition of some of the city’s most seasoned LGBT activists have begun organizing to stop them.
“Absolutely no banning of the police in Vancouver Pride,” said Métis trans activist Sandy-Leo Laframboise, a 46-year veteran of LGBT organizing.
“Banning the police from the pride parade will undermine our commitment to diversity and inclusion and all the work we’ve done,” said Sandy-Leo. “They want to remove an entity that we’ve been working with for over 40 years.”
Sandy-Leo is one of four who launched “Our Pride Includes Our Police,” a petition resisting a request by Black Lives Matter to remove uniformed police from the Vancouver Pride Parade.
The petition’s co-creators are sex-worker rights advocate Velvet Steele; Kevin Dale McKeown, the city’s first openly gay columnist; and Gordon Hardy, who co-founded the Vancouver Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s.
Earlier this month, Black Lives Matter organizers were successful in prompting police forces in both Toronto and Halifax to withdraw from their cities’ respective pride parades.
Gordon Hardy told Postmedia that Black Lives Matter can join the Vancouver parade and protest as much as they like.
“What we object to is that they come along and start telling the rest of us in the community who can and cannot be in the parade,” he said.
In a petition launched earlier this month, Black Lives Matter Vancouver called on the Vancouver Pride Society to end “any and all presence of uniformed police officers.”
“The police can of course be present to do their jobs and show support but being in the parade is not appropriate,” it read.
The petition makes few grievances specific to the Vancouver Police Department.
However, past statements by the group have pegged police forces in general as “fundamental to the perpetuation of structural violence against Black and brown bodies in North America.”
However, the counter-petition argues that it is wrong to paint Vancouver Police with the same brush as law enforcement in the United States or Eastern Canada.
The counter-petition acknowledges what it calls the “historic and ongoing injustices against the black communities in major American and Eastern Canadian cities,” but adds “they do not reflect relationships between Vancouver’s LGBTQ communities with local law enforcement.”
When Toronto Police were still raiding bathhouses in 1981, Vancouver had already started a police liaison committee with the gay and lesbian community. The department, as well as the RCMP, has had uniformed officers in the pride parade since 2002.
Velvet Steele, who has worked with the police on trans outreach, told the Georgia Straight this week that the Vancouver Police were “one of the most progressive police forces in the country.”
As a gay and trans sex worker in Toronto and Ottawa during the 1970s, Sandy-Leo was frequently chased and beaten by police officers during raids, and mocked in custody for having male genitalia.
“I’ve had my fair share of injustices that we’re speaking about, but I also think that we’ve evolved from that,” Sandy-Leo said.
This is the second year that Black Lives Matter Vancouver has sought to exclude uniformed officers from Vancouver Pride.
In 2016, the Vancouver Police scheduled a meeting with Black Lives Matter and Vancouver Pride, and reached a compromise where officers would appear in the parade without their armoured rescue vehicle.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the pro-police counter-petition had garnered 1,937 signatures compared with the 734 collected by Black Lives Matter Vancouver.
OUR PRIDE INCLUDES OUR POLICE.