Police mistreatment of transgender man during #OccupyWallStreet arrests
by Guest Contributor justin adkins, originally published at justin adkins
My name is justin adkins.
I am a transgender man who was arrested at the Occupy Wall Street Protest October 1st on theBrooklyn Bridge. This was my first arrest. This was the second weekend I participated in the Occupy Wall Street protest. I have been coming down on the weekends because I work 2 full-time jobs to make ends meet. One of those jobs is as Assistant Director of the Multicultural Center at Williams College in Massachusetts. The other is as a website developer.
I was toward the front of the march and after being trapped by the police on the bridge; I was able to watch as they arrested people one-by-one. I went peacefully when it was clear that it was my turn. My arresting officer, Officer Creer, found out I was born female when I yelled that information to the legal observer on the bridge. My arresting officer asked what I meant when I told the legal observer that I was “transgender” so I told him that I was born female. He asked what “I had down there”. Since it is a rude and embarrassing question to ask someone about his/her genitals no matter what the situation, I simply told him again “I was born female”. He asked, appropriately, if I wanted a male or female officer to pat me down. I told him it was fine if he patted me down. He then turned and asked a female officer, I believe her name is Officer Verga, to pat me down explaining to her that I am transgender. She patted me down and then preceded to refer to me as “she” even though I kept correcting her that my preferred pronoun is “he”. Luckily she disappeared after about 40 minutes, as I sat cuffed at the apex of the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of others.
Once we arrived at Precinct 90 in Brooklyn, the male officer taking everyone’s belongings asked if it was ok to search me. I said. “yes” and he proceeded to respectfully empty my pockets. I was arrested with a group of 5 other guys, and once they got us to the precinct, they initially put me in a cell with those same men. They asked if that was ok with me and I said yes. About 5 minutes after they took the cuffs off and shut the cell door an officer came back to the cell to move me. When he opened the door and looked my way, I was aware of what was happening. I knew that my transgender status would potentially be an issue once at the jail, which is why I told the legal observer that I was transgender. The officer glanced at me motioning to come out of the cell and then told me to put my hands behind my back as my fellow protestors looked on in bewilderment.
As we walked out past the other protestors waiting to have their pockets emptied, one woman looked at me with a puzzled look, we had connected on the long drive around Brooklyn as they tried to figure out where to take us. I told her that it looked like transgender people got “special treatment”. Within the first 15 minutes of being at precinct 90 I was being segregated and treated differently from the rest of the protestors arrested.
They took me away from the cellblock where they had all of the protestors locked up and brought me to a room with 2 cells and a bathroom. One small cell was empty and the large cell had about 8 men who had been arrested on charges not related
to the protest. Unlike me, these men had been arrested for a variety of crimes, some violent. When I entered the room they had me sit down in a chair on the same portion of the wall as the restroom, and then handcuffed my right wrist to a metal handrail. I thought that this was a temporary arrangement as they tried to find me a separate cell as part of some protocol regarding transgender people, which I later discovered does not exist in New York City. After about an hour I realized that they had no intention of moving me. I remained handcuffed to this bar next to the bathroom for the next 8 hours.
The cells, on the other side of the precinct where they had locked up the other 69 protestors, did not have working toilets. Every person who had to use the toilet was brought to the one next to where I had been cuffed. This was not only disgusting, but also embarrassing. The smell of urine was so strong that I, and the men locked up in the cell in the room that I was in, mentioned the odor on more than one occasion.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page