Police Officers Protest Pride After Being Barred From Marching With Guns
Clusters of New York police officers stood sentry along the Pride March route on Fifth Avenue on Sunday, in full uniform and armed, watching the parade go by as they do every year.
Nearby, dozens of their colleagues gathered behind metal barricades in protest. Some wore their uniforms; others wore polo shirts and hoisted signs emblazoned with rainbows and slogans like 'Let gay cops back into Pride March' and 'Our uniform is our protest.' Behind them, a truck bore a large digital screen with the message 'We will not be erased.' The demonstration was organized by the Gay Officers Action League, an L.B.G.T.Q. police group that has been barred from marching in New York City Pride since 2021.
Starting in 1996, groups of uniformed police and corrections officers in New York marched in the parade every year. But the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement made the involvement of the police in festivities in New York and elsewhere in North America increasingly contentious.
In 2021, Heritage of Pride, which organizes Pride events in New York, barred the police from marching as a group, part of wave of similar measures that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May 2020.
Since then, officers in many cities have been allowed back into local Pride marches. But in New York, Heritage of Pride did not take action to lift the ban, which was slated to expire in 2025.
Two weeks before the parade, Brian Downey, a detective and the president of the Gay Officers Action League, known as GOAL, said Heritage leaders told him that officers could march again on one condition: that they leave their guns at home.
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