These police mugshots bear witness to a different time, when black trans women were arrested for ‘cross-dressing’ or ‘female impersonation’.
They were taken between 1970 and 1979 in Philadelphia when police were the jurisdiction of Police Commissioner (and later Democrat Mayor of Philadelphia) Frank Rizzo (October 23, 1920 – July 16, 1991), the self-proclaimed “toughest cop in America”.
Police would regularly raid spaces where trans women, typically black trans women, gathered and charge patrons with ‘lewdness’ for failing to adhere to strict gender-based clothing laws.
The patterns of police brutality were documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning Philadelphia Inquirer series by William K. Marimow and Jon Neuman in 1977
Neumann was a new court reporter for the Inquirer in 1976 when he noticed that when murder suspects testified that they had been beaten by police, the officials were never investigated. When native New Yorker Neumann asked an editor what was going on, he was told: “Welcome to Philadelphia.”
Neumann joined forces with Marimow, a native Philadelphian. Their reports were ripe with examples of beatings and harassment by the police of suspects, their friends and relatives. Often the victims had to be hospitalised for injuries sustained during interrogation at the Roundhouse, Philadelphia’s futuristic police headquarters.
Under Rizzo’s administration, there were raids on gay bars. According to Jackie Marcusa, a lesbian who frequented Philadelphia’s clubs in the 1960s and 1970s: “The cops would take you to the back of the bar and try and force a blow job by threatening to contact your job […] It was all about humiliating the butches — they wanted us to literally kneel to them. It was disgusting. It was brutal because they’d hold your head down. A lot of us who had to choose [between their job and sexual assault] will never forget it. Now we know that stuff was criminal. But then, we were just young and scared and did what we were told.”
Via: Time, Anthony Green, @stiffvintage
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