Las Vegas Officers Get Special Instructions on Handling Gays
The Las Vegas Tax Authority is a division of law enforcement, so questions of how the agency deals with the public are a matter of public concern. Indeed, some are concerned at the revelation that the agency's officers' handbook contains instructions regarding communicable diseases that lump gays with prostitutes and drug users as a class of people that are defined as "high risk" for carrying disease.
A March 2 article at Las Vegas Now.com reported that the policy manual used by TA employees instructs officers to use special care and protective equipment such as protective gloves when dealing with gays and others in the "high risk" category.
The Website, which is affiliated with local news station and CBS affiliate Channel 8, said that some of the agency's own people find the categorization of gays as disease carriers likened to drug users and prostitutes to be offensive.
"It took my breath away to read that," said Scott Lewis, a onetime TA officer. "It lumps in homosexuals and gays with drug users and prostitutes. Drug users and prostitutes as we know are criminals." Added Lewis, "My question is, what is a homosexual? How can you tell? Would you ask them, 'Are you homosexual?' and then stop, as it says, for your personal protective equipment," said Lewis.
The story notes the irony of the policy manual's categorization of gays in light of outreach by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority draw GLBT vacationers to Las Vegas.
"It is medically, politically and socially unacceptable now," said Lee Plotkinhe, who serves as the Nevada Equal Rights Commissioner. "Does this mean Siegfried and Roy couldn't have gotten a cab to the Mirage? Does this mean Elton John couldn't get a cab to Caesars Palace? It's just ridiculous."
The story reported that all the other law enforcement agencies in the state have either scrubbed such references to gays, or are in the process of doing so. The TA claimed to Channel 8 that it, too, had updated its policy manual and removed the anti-gay language, but the story reported that the amended manual was is use among administrative personnel, with officers on the street still using the unchanged version.
An unnamed officer currently with the Taxi Authority indicated that GLBTs aren't the only ones that the TA views with institutional bias. "You've had investigators calling drivers rag heads, sand n----rs," he told Channel 8. "The environment in the TA is awful. It's been brought to the chief investigators desk, and the administrator, and nothing has been done. Nothing."
As noted in a recent two-part EDGE article on police LGBT liaison units, the GLBT community still tends to regard the police with distrust. Though many departments have liaison units, they may come into existence in response to a situation such as the raid that Fort Worth law enforcement carried out against a gay bar on the thirtieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and be viewed as a public relations afterthought. In departments with well-established liaison units, there may be little training--or training of dubious effectiveness--on diversity issues outside of the unit's officers.
In terms of taxi services and gays, one story that caught media attention late last year was an incident in which a New York cabbie threw two gay men out his cab. The cabbie said that the men were engaged in sexual activity in the back seat, and that he had asked them to stop before finally ordering them out. The passengers, 27-year-old Paul Bruno and his boyfriend, said that they were merely hugging, and denied that any overtly sexual activity was taking place that would have distracted the driver.
So-called "service refusals" can be costly, because cabbies can be fined for denying rides to passengers. A third strike can even result in the loss of a cabbie's license.
A similar incident took place in Minneapolis in 2005 when a cabbie, who was thought to be Muslim, ordered a trio of gay men out of his cab after he saw one man give one of the others a kiss. At that point, one of the men said, the driver lashed out at them verbally, "making statements like he can't be surrounded by people like us--it was against his religion," and told the men to "'Burn in hell,' 'Go to hell.'"