OUR VOICE IS OUR POWER: In 2022, Lambda Legal, in partnership with Black and Pink National, launched the Protected and Served? community survey. With this project, we aimed to learn more about the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) people and people living with HIV with the criminal legal system, to assess these communities’ levels of trust in government institutions, and to create a new resource for community members, advocates, policymakers, and researchers.
In 2012, Lambda Legal published Protected and Served?, a groundbreaking report that explored government misconduct and harm by police, prisons, school security, and courts against LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV in the United States. The survey found low trust in institutions and high rates of government misconduct against LGBTQ+ people, especially people of color and transgender people, in the criminal legal system.
Executive Summary
Since that original survey, awareness of the ways that the criminal legal system harms Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQ+ people, and others who experience marginalization has grown significantly, thanks in no small part to the 2020 racial uprisings against police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis Police Department officer. LGBTQ+ people and organizations have been at the forefront of protests against police violence and the push to address the systemic violence against marginalized communities by the criminal legal system in this country.
Recognizing that our communities continue to face discrimination and abuse by government entities, we must be equipped with facts and data to bring about urgent and necessary change. Our hope is that this Protected and Served? report will support new research, advocacy, litigation, and policy efforts to address discrimination, bias, harassment, and violence against LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV by the criminal legal system and hold government entities accountable. Additionally, we hope that this project will contribute to conversations about abolition and reform, two important movements seeking an end to systemic oppression and violence against marginalized communities in the name of the “law.”
