Support Provided by LGBTI Police Liaison Services: An Analysis of a Survey of LGBTIQ People in Australia

• Author: Matthew Ball,Murray Lee,Thomas Crofts,Christine E. W. Bond,Angela Dwyer
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111211038048
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Support Provided by

LGBTI Police Liaison

Services: An Analysis of

a Survey of LGBTIQ

People in Australia

Angela Dwyer

1

,

Christine E. W. Bond

2

,

Matthew Ball

3

, Murray Lee

4

, and

Thomas Crofts

5

Abstract

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) police liaison programs

were established around Australia from the late 1980s onwards to ameliorate dis-

criminatory relationships between LGBTIQ people and police. With specialized

training to better understand LGBTIQ issues, police liaison officers can provide

support to LGBTIQ people as victims, offenders, or witnesses. Interestingly, very

few LGBTIQ people seek support from these officers, even though many know they

exist. This paper reports the results of a survey of a sample of LGBTIQ community

members across two Australian states (Queensland and New South Wales) that

explored why LGBTIQ people seek support from LGBTI police liaison officers. An

online questionnaire asked LGBTIQ people about their perceptions of, and experi-

ences with, police generally, and LGBTI police liaison officers specifically. Similar to

past research, our analysis primarily found high levels of awareness of liaison officers,

1

Policing and Emergency Management, School of Social Sciences, Universityof Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

2

Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Australia

3

School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

4

University of Sydney Law School, Sydney, Australia

5

School of Law and Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong

Kong

Corresponding Author:

Matthew Ball, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD 4001, Australia.

Email: mj.ball@qut.edu.au

Police Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211038048

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2022, Vol. 25(1) 33 –58

34 Police Quarterly 25(1)

but very few participants accessed them. Further, and concerningly, the participants

were generally reluctant to seek them out for support. Key implications of our

findings for policy and practice development in police and LGBTIQ community

services are discussed.

Keywords

police, liaison programs, LGBTI, LGBTIQ, support, awareness

For some time now, evidence-based policing research has focused on the front-

line interactions that police have with vulnerable communities. This research has

frequently highlighted how racial profiling influences police contact with

African American communities in the United States (Starr, 2016). Less of this

work has focused on the lives of LGBTIQ people around the world. Research

tells us that police profile transgender people in specific ways (Carpenter &

Marshall, 2017). More than half of 6,450 transgender people in the United

States reported contact with police, and one fifth of them reported experiencing

police bias (Grant et al., 2011). This research shows policing of transgender

people is highly problematic, but we are yet to understand this statistically

when compared with the general American population, and we are yet to do

this internationally. Similarly, police activities seeking to counterbalance these

negative police interactions and attitudes have been less visible in evidence-based

policing research, including service enhancement programs like LGBTI

1

police

liaison programs. The absence of evidence-based policing research about

LGBTIQ people and policing is interesting given these programs were set up

to build relationships and address gaps in service.

The research discussed in this paper seeks preliminarily to address this gap in

evidence-based policing research with a focus on LGBTI police liaison pro-

grams. These programs were established as a form of service enhancement pro-

cess to better support LGBTIQ people to seek support from police organisations

(Pickles, 2020). They were developed to ameliorate a contentious historical con-

text where police officers perpetrated violence and discrimination against

LGBTIQ people (Dwyer et al., 2017; Dwyer, 2019). Police enforced laws regu-

lating LGBTIQ people as sexual and gender deviants (Woods, 2017), giving

them unofficial license to perpetrate violence and discrimination directly against

LGBTIQ people, and to harass them when they reported crime to police. These

experiences are not historical relics – contemporary studies also note violence

and discrimination in LGBTIQ-police interactions (Dwyer, 2011; Grant et al.,

2Police Quarterly 0(0)