The DC Metro Police have released statistics from last year showing that citywide crimes in general and crimes against transgender individuals decreased by 11 percent in 2017 while the number of crimes involving gay and lesbian victims has increased over 25%
At a news conference on Tuesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser joined the director of the city’s Department of Forensic Sciences, which operates a high tech crime lab, in announcing what they called optimistic crime data in the city for 2017.
“Throughout 2017, crime continued to decease in Washington, D.C., with a 22 percent reduction in violent crime, a 9 percent reduction in property crime, and an 11 percent decrease in total crime,” a statement released by the mayor’s office says.
According to DC’s Metropolitan Police Department’s Lt. Brett Parson preliminary figures for 2017 through the end of November show an increase of over 25% based on gay and lesbian sexual orientation – from 38 in 2016 to 51 as of the end of November 2017 and shows a decrease in the number of hate crimes targeting transgender people from 18 in 2016 to 13 as of the end of November 2017.
Parson didn’t provide specific figures showing the number of LGBT-related crime incidents investigated or recorded by the LGBT Liaison Unit.
New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (above) is the hardest working Congressmen pushing for LGBT rights in Washington today.
One of only seven openly gay members of Congress on Thursday, he responded to the tragic Orlando massacre of 49 LGBT clubgoers by introducing a bill that would mandate federal reporting on the deaths of LGBT Americans for the first time.
The PRIDE Act (Providing a Requirement to Improve Data Collection Efforts) would fill a glaring gap in law enforcement data collection. Currently, a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity are not systematically reported at the time of their death.
According to a March 2015 study in the journal LGBT Health, race, marital status, age, occupation, and military service are recorded when a person dies—just not whether they were gay or transgender, for example.
“After last month’s terrorist attack targeting our LGBT community,” said Maloney in a statement on Thursday, “I was shocked to learn that the lives lost in Orlando will not be counted as anti-LGBT murders because our country’s data collection on violence against LGBT Americans and LGBT suicides is offensively inadequate.”
That kind of gap in data causes massive problems for researchers and LGBT advocacy groups—who struggle to calculate suicide or violent homicides in the community—down the line.
“After last month’s terrorist attack targeting our LGBT community,” said Maloney in a statement on Thursday, “I was shocked to learn that the lives lost in Orlando will not be counted as anti-LGBT murders because our country’s data collection on violence against LGBT Americans and LGBT suicides is offensively inadequate.”
If Maloney and others were shocked to learn that the Orlando victims would not be categorized as queer or trans in federal death data, it came as no surprise to New York’s Anti-Violence Project (AVP).
“We get asked all the time how many violent deaths of LGBTQ people have happened in the course of a year, but the truth is we don’t know, because there is no standardized system collecting this information,” said Emily Waters, of the AVP.
Basically, there’s never been a way to officially and accurately track any data about LGBT people on the national level.
The PRIDE Act would authorize $25 million towards expanding the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) to all 50 states and mandating that sexual orientation and gender identity be included in the system. Currently, three of the largest states in the nation—Florida, Texas, and California—do not report death data to the federal system at all, much less track LGBT deaths. That means about a third of the U.S. population is missing from federal death statistics.
“LGBT people matter, we count,” said Maloney in the statement. “We’re doing everything we can to understand where, how, and why violence against the LGBT community and LGBT suicides are happening. This bill could save lives.”
